Middle-class minutiae
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`Moving on moves us in unexpected ways'.
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SHASHI DESHPANDE'S novels are often a case of familiarity at first breeding (unfairly) contempt, and then (gradually) comfort. Never awe, never amazement — but comfort, respect, empathy. Her typically in-your-face reaction to the "feminist" label has been: "Is literature a public toilet that we need to have signboards saying `Men' and `Women'?" But the fact is, her best-etched characters are feminine (Raja here is a happy exception), her palette unapologetically domestic. She is the mistress of the well-rounded novel rooted in middle-class minutiae. With Deshpande, we know what we are getting — believable situations, fully-fleshed characters we care for, lives ordinary but very real, a story well told.
Of course, the windows look out on the same view, the cracked mosaic is well-worn from the same feet. So in a sense, Moving On appears to have not moved on. The plot-pegs don't vary — Jiji's return to the ancestral home is like Indu's in Roots and Shadows, her growing apart from her sister Malu recalls that other sister Premi in A Matter Of Time, her discovery of her Baba through his diary recalls Urmi reading her dead mom-in-law's poetry in The Binding Vine, the haunting nature of troubled relations and memories and learning truths recall That Long Silence, and so on. Deshpande Déjà vu could well have set in here too. Bucking at what-will-the-neighbours-say traditions. Long-held family spats and secrets unravelled. Trapped women standing their ground. It could have set in. But it doesn't.
A bearing on our lives
And why is that? Because there is a larger statement embedded in the everyday that manages to quietly convince. (She has once, if I remember rightly, even been described as "Chekhovian".) There is one other thing that works in her favour. Deshpande often speaks of English being an "Indian language". By writing books that have a more direct bearing on our lives than her famous contemporaries, she actually makes this true. There is nothing stunningly new in her style, self-confessedly ever wary of the "florid flourish". But there is crispness in her refusal to strike any experimental post-modern pose, or even a post-colonial one to woo the west.
We meet prematurely widowed Manjari/ Jiji when she is remembering her dead family (Baba-Mai-Malu-Tai) and Shyam (perfect lover, imperfect husband) in her old home. Her devoted cousin Raja is all she has left. She decides to work, to take lessons, to find out things from her Baba's diary. Slowly she learns to drive her car, and drive out the ghosts of her past. Jiji's back aches while exercising in a park with Raja. Not yet 40, she tells him of her "anger at the suspicion that my body is betraying me". Her body betrays her in other respects, in its need to be fed through jobs that don't satisfy, in passions that sate only too well. And it is to this that the book returns — while describing the anatomist Baba's fascination for "Mr Bones", or Jiji's vulnerable sister Malu's painful discovery of her body (via puberty, asthma, and unwed pregnancy). Gayatri and RK, Jiji and Shyam share Baba's ease with their bodies. This is quite unlike Jiji's mother Mai (as impeccable as she is implacable in her refusal of sex) who carefully conceals her personal life in her happily-ever-after novels.
Dramatic and plausible
But Jiji, battling anonymous phone calls by the property mafia (who recall her own gangster uncle Laxman Mama), has had enough of concealment. Disclosure arrives soon enough. The source of separate calls — threatening calls and the call of the body that Jiji guiltily answers — stand revealed as uncannily connected. This belies readers' expectations of her shy tenant Raman completely. Somehow it manages to be both dramatic and perfectly plausible.
The only letdown is in the end, where her grief over her sister Malu's and Shyam's separate suicides are tied in rather too patly. We much prefer the literal skeleton in the closet (Jiji's father's `Mr Bones') to this unnecessary figurative one. The only other fly in the ointment is the philosophising. Condensation is, sadly, an underestimated virtue here.
There is an interesting story here — in fact, the only story of Mai that isn't make-believe. Entitled Blackout, it describes a battered wife's revenge. The twist in the end also tells a larger story of communal violence by Hindus as a corrective to domestic violence by a Muslim, and its openness to misinterpretation by readers. This is often how Deshpande makes unobtrusive her social critique. It is in the incidentals — BK and his wife, Laxman's uncouth but goodhearted wife, or Jiji's servant who stays overnight to help but also to prove a point to her husband, or Ba and Neeraben who pretend to take her help in catering to make Jiji get by — that she excels.
Moving On thus moves us in unexpected ways.
Moving On, Shashi Deshpande, Penguin India, p.360, Rs. 450.
NANDINI LAL
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