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Filling in the gaps

Photo: Bhagya Prakash K.

Time and tide Usha’s narrative shows a keen eye for details

Whoever said truth is absolute? If at all the elusive thing exists, it is made of imperfections, blotches and blemishes. And therefore, even in a historical novel –where history provides the backdrop for an ongoing negotiation with truth – ; truth is still largely what one chooses to see.

Historical novel that it is, Usha K.R.’s “A Girl and a River”, is about the protagonist’s search for her roots, in the pre-Independence times, in Karnataka. “Even as I longed to get away, on the reverse was the need to see things in black and white, to establish cause and effect, to which I also attribute my love of whodunits, those with a clear plot and structure and characters whose motives are unambiguous. As meticulously as I planned my career and groomed my plans for the future, I launched on the search, which didn’t get very far, I stumbled on most things by chance.” The psychological, historical aspirations and hence the back and forth, circular engagement with time of the novel is clearly echoed in these lines by the protagonist, bearing in them a droning of what T.S. Eliot said: “The past lives in the present”. In that sense, history is something that can hardly be escaped, even if you look upon it with indifference. Read this: “This is the first lap of my three-month stay and already I am irritated by the old unchanging things, fretting to get away. I would rather be elsewhere, getting on with my life and leave them to theirs. But there are things that I must settle, gaps I must fill. Both for their sake and mine.”

“Past is part of fiction,” observed author Shashi Deshpande, in a panel discussion on the book, “Weaving history into fiction” at the Oxford Bookstore. In her opinion, Usha’s narrative was a “good mingling” of personal and national history – an exploration of the turbulences of individuals, juxtaposed with that of the nation itself. Usha’s work was very Georgette Heyerish in its mode, for it brilliantly hid the meticulous research that had gone into it. For Shashi, this is the hallmark of good research: facts foregrounded by a fine recreation.

Take for instance, the character of Rukmini in the novel. Much as she is a woman charged with the spirit of the freedom struggle and passionately involved in its activities, it also is for her the means to her self-discovery. These lines are telling: “That night, as Rukmini lay by her husband’s side, her mind travelled back 15 years, to the horoscopes that had gone astray. She knew it was stupid and fruitless and she had pushed such thoughts out of her mind several times in these few weeks, but again and again it came back to her that she and Narayana Rao were crossed by destiny.”

For a literature that is constantly grappling with the “unsaid” of today, the unstated, the gaps, the silences of a past makes the reading of history interesting, remarked writer Jayant Kaikini in Kannada that charmingly broke the rather deodorized English hegemony of the bookstore. “It is the job of a historian to work with the dormant truths, but a fiction writer uses existing facts to give history a human face,” he said. Economist Narendra Pani however, felt that history and fiction were two sides of the same coin and that one couldn’t do without the other.

Usha’s narrative is an unhurried one, with a keen eye for details. She writes in an engaging style that shuns the “public school properness”, bearing in it a distinct flavour of the local language. So much so, that in a Raja Rao like experimentation with language, she weaves in Kannada words – words that seem like she can’t part with – and most often doesn’t even choose to explain them. For instance, the Chikka-Gidda-Kulla sir, Chapdi Kal, or the tuttus of mosaranna. Moving away from the tradition of Indian English writing that often assumes a pan-Indian situation, Usha’s novel speaks of her immediate locality and reality; just her own backyard. Usha’s felicity with the English language, her sparkling nuanced observations are quite a delight, but they also do work as hindrances in achieving powerful characterisation. The structure of the novel is a very conscious one and at times, it does seem difficult to juggle through the different time frames.

At the end of the novel, many questions are left unanswered. But then one wonders if it is part of a wilful scheme as mouthed by the protagonist: “It struck me then that I might never find what I was looking for, that I would be dogged forever with those niggling feelings of uncertainty...”

DEEPA GANESH

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