A Matter of Time

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by Shashi Deshpande


  Like many educated Indians Deshpande is fluent in at least three languages and comfortable in four or five. Her parents’ “mixed marriage” meant she spoke both their languages, Kannada and Marathi; she learned Sanskrit because it was her father’s specialization; and her English-language education ensured that she was exposed to the best that English had to offer. This trilingualism worked in a most complicated way. As children, Shashi and her sister spoke to their mother and each other in what was literally their mother tongue, Marathi, and to their father and brother in Kannada. It was when they were much older that all three children adopted English as their language, and it is only now, years later, that Deshpande herself has been able to reconcile her Kannada and Marathi heritage.

  Despite the unconventional decision to send their daughters to a missionary school rather than a local school, Deshpande’s parents’ household was by no means a Westernized one. Sanskrit classics and the Kannada greats were as much an influence as Ibsen and Shaw, and, she recalls, “if in school we did Wordsworth and Tennyson, at home we had to learn the Amarkosa by heart.”6 Nevertheless, English prevailed, and it is in English that she thinks and writes. Because she never studied in any of the other languages she speaks, she never used them as “working tools”; to try to write creatively in them, then, would be to presume too much.

  The question of the language in which a writer chooses to write in a multilingual culture like India is fraught with contradiction, and it would be impossible to address it in all its complexity within the scope of this afterword. But it lies at the heart of every debate on indigenous versus alien, authentic versus fake, Westernized versus “Indian,” even traditional versus modern. The much greater visibility of writers writing in English, now a world language with worldwide readership, lends an even sharper edge to the discussion. At the same time, it places the writers themselves in a bittersweet relationship with other writers in their own country.

  Consider the ironies: India has twenty-two officially recognized languages—each of which has an old and venerable literary and critical tradition, and a history of sophisticated scholarship and publishing. Colonial rule implemented English-language education in the nineteenth century, a fact which has made for an unalterable—albeit poignant—reality: although it is equally foreign to every single Indian, English nevertheless functions as a link-language for all. It is the language of higher education, science and technology, and commerce. Increasingly, it has also become a literary language in its own right, elbowing its way into the literary pantheon in India.

  Only 2 percent of Indians read and write English, but its importance in the cultural life of the country has grown steadily. Its much greater international access and exposure places it in an asymmetrical relationship with all other Indian languages, so that the decision to use it creatively is a much more overtly political act than choosing a regional language would be. Writers contend with issues of representation, of using the colonizer’s language, of cultural baggage, of the translatability of the local and native, and, lastly, with the question of voice.

  Especially over the last ten or fifteen years, young Indians writing in English have flashed across the world literary horizon and, in a way, have intensified the spotlight on these questions. Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Bharati Mukherjee, Githa Hariharan, Upamanyu Chatterjee, Amitav Ghosh, Rohinton Mistry, Manjula Padmanabhan, Vikram Seth, Anjana Appachana, Allan Sealy, and Shashi Deshpande, among others, have forced literary and commercial establishments to reckon with what is sometimes called Indo-Anglican writing. The fact that these writers have won literary acclaim and have been commercially successful has, in turn, resulted in a somewhat unfortunate and unhappy comparison with writing in other Indian languages. The old question of who represents whom—and what and how—has become both acrimonious and troubled. None of the writers mentioned (and none of the many others not listed here) has ever admitted to being seriously disadvantaged because he or she writes in English—although Deshpande has said that she “regrets enormously that I was cut off from my own languages and literature.”7 And most of these writers would concur with Deshpande’s statement that “English writing in this country is part of our literatures.” The fact that an unmistakable cachet is attached to it goes without saying. The international notice and exposure writers gain by publishing in English adds enormously to their visibility and marketability. Being published in literary magazines like Granta or The New Yorker, or by literary presses like Faber & Faber, Cape, Bloomsbury, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, or Random House immediately guarantees a readership that runs into tens of thousands, and often has literary agents knocking at their doors. All this is in addition to the obvious financial gains. What also follows, however, is that choice of language to some extent determines the subject matter to some extent: most contemporary Indian writing in English is preoccupied with the life and times of the urban middle class and, willy-nilly, the label “Westernized” manages to stick.

  Deshpande is quite clear that, for her, finding her own voice meant not just a woman’s voice but a literary voice of her own: no magic realism, no concessions to “marketability,” no themes or situations that pander to a so-called Western audience, no adapting her style to what a target readership might prefer. One will not find in her novels any element of the “exotic,” a National Geographic-land-and-its-people kind of treatment of the unfamiliar. Rather than serve up a dish that experiments with the spices of the Orient, Deshpande assumes her readers’ familiarity with the everyday ingredients of her offerings, relying upon their fresh, home-cooked flavor to have readers asking for more. Her writing style is marked by an absence of flamboyance or literary flourish. Nor does she beguile us with a Merchant Ivory–like gloss on “Indian culture.” So, she has never, for example, felt any disjunction between her social self and her literary self, of the kind that critics have noted in other Indian women writers writing in English.8 Part of the reason for this, she thinks, is her small-town origins. Growing up in Dharwar, where she lived until she was fourteen years old, made the difference. “A city shapes you differently,” she maintains. “A small town never leaves you.” Thus, locale has a very definite function and meaning in all her novels, and although no specific place may be named, its evocation can quite clearly be traced back to her childhood homes. So Saptagiri and the flat in Dadar (Bombay) in That Long Silence, Bangalore in A Matter of Time, and the ancestral villages that figure so prominently in The Dark Holds No Terrors and A Matter of Time are not just any geographical locations. They are the matrix from which her characters, particularly her female characters, spring, and they form an essential part of “the kind of people they are.” And, indeed, the kind of people they are is the kind one would easily find in any medium-sized town in India: “ordinary people,” Deshpande says, “people like you and me going about their daily business.” Teachers, lawyers, doctors, an occasional accountant or banker, they are modest and unassuming—far removed from the flash of MTV and designer shoes. In a sense, they are the heart of middle India.

  Another reason for Deshpande’s distance from the glittering metropolis, so to speak, is the fact that she is such a solitary writer. Speaking of her early forays into writing, she recalls how she wrote in almost total isolation. A young mother cloistered at home with two small children, she had no one she could share her writing with or get feedback from, and she suffered terribly from low self-esteem. Like many women writers before and since, she never found the time to write “at a stretch. It was always in bits and pieces, in between chores, when the children were asleep or at school. And even these tiny bits were subject to constant interruption.”9 No longer preoccupied with household responsibilities, she is still a most private person and almost never discusses work-in-progress with anyone. The intense interiority of her early novels—The Dark Holds No Terrors and That Long Silence—and her use of the first person for her female protagonists weave a web of intimacy around the reader, an effect that is enhanced by her near total focus on t
he domestic—the almost mundane. “I was born,” says Jaya in That Long Silence. “My father died when I was fifteen. I got married to Mohan. I have two children and I did not let a third live. Maybe this is enough to start off with” (2). This is an almost eerie echo of her creator’s sentiments, and indeed Jaya is the character who Deshpande feels corresponds most closely to herself. “A lifetime of introspection went into this novel,” Deshpande writes, “the most autobiographical of all my writing, not in the personal details, but in the thinking and ideas.”10 Later in the novel, Jaya comments directly on the writing process:

  Perhaps it is wrong to write from the inside. Perhaps what I have to do is see myself, us, from a distance. This has happened to me before; there have been times when I’ve had this queer sensation of being detached and distant from my own self. Times when I’ve been able to separate two distinct strands, my experience and my awareness of that experience. (2)

  This twinning of “myself” with “us,” of being “inside” with “being detached and distant from my own self,” this alternating of the first person with the third, simultaneously allows Deshpande never to leave the homeground on which she is most comfortable, and creates the double perspective that is a characteristic of all her novels.

  II

  Each of Shashi Deshpande’s novels—The Dark Holds No Terrors, That Long Silence, The Binding Vine, and A Matter of Time—may be read individually and also as part of an oeuvre that deals with different aspects of women’s lives. One can see a development of perspective and purpose, a deeper exploration, a finer characterization from her earliest to her most recent novel; one might even say that her female characters are just different facets of the same person.

  The Dark Holds No Terrors was one of the earliest novels in English to deal with wife battering, a bold subject for a first novel by any reckoning. Saru, its heroine, is a successful doctor—more successful than her husband, a teacher. Slowly and terribly, his insecurity begins to manifest as physical violence—an old story. Saru is neither able to come to terms with it, nor speak of it to anyone. She flees the false normality of their waking lives as well as the blissful ignorance of her children, but her lips remain sealed.

  Jaya in That Long Silence is the antithesis of Saru. She is a homemaker, homebound and, as far as one can tell, likely to live her life according to prescribed norms. But then, an unexpected calamity befalls her husband, Mohan, and they are forced to leave their home and flee to her apartment in a remote suburb of Bombay. Equally unexpectedly, Jaya finds release in this enforced confinement, and begins to write the script of her life for herself. By the end of the novel, she has sloughed off her old skin and made a quiet but decisive break with the past.

  That Long Silence is almost eerily calm after the tumult of The Dark Holds No Terrors, and between it and Deshpande’s next novel, The Binding Vine, there was a long lapse of time. “Silence condensed everything I wanted to say,” she told me, “and after that I moved away from the personal, the internal, to the outward.” In The Binding Vine, Urmila, the protagonist, is in the shadow, as it were, and it is the other women and their problems that are in focus—Urmila’s mother-in-law and one of her friends, both victims of violence, silenced by their experiences. Very much a woman-centered writer, Deshpande presents us with ever more complex relationships between the women in her novels—sisters, mothers and daughters, mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law, women friends, and women in communities of women, bridging time and class—between women and society, and between women and the men with whom they live. The space the women occupy is primarily domestic (as is the case with most women writers);”11 it is in the elaboration of the changing equations within the private domain, consequent upon a change in the women’s consciousness, that Shashi Deshpande is most adept. In their slow awakening to realization—and action—lies the transformation of the domestic space and all relationships contained therein.

  Both Jaya in That Long Silence and Mira in The Binding Vine write their destinies in secret, breaking the silence imposed on them by societal norms. Although Mira’s poems and diaries are discovered by her daughter-in-law Urmila after her death, these writings “speak” of the injustice Mira had to suffer and become the inspiration for Urmila in her fight against similar injustices. Having stumbled upon self-knowledge, neither Jaya nor Urmila will be the same again. Implicitly we know it is the men in their lives who will have to accommodate the changed reality because the women have now crossed what Malashri Lal calls the “threshold,”12 metaphorically speaking. They need never leave the home or make a dramatic transition from private to public, but they have forever changed the space they inhabit.

  Technically, Deshpande uses an alternating first person/third person voice to present what she calls a “double perspective”: the past and present in continuous interplay and overlap. This device recurs in all her novels, a striking illustration of the Kierkegaardian axiom: ‘Life must be lived forwards, but it can only be understood backwards’ (paraphrased in A Matter of Time, 98). This juxtaposition, these backward glances, this excavation of the past is the key to the women’s realization of self, and Deshpande’s use of it in fiction is the clearest example of the feminist project of recovery at its most enabling—and sobering. Of all her novels, it is A Matter of Time that most fully explores the simultaneity of past and present, thematically and structurally. Four generations of women—the heroine, Sumi, her mother, Kalyani, grandmother Manorama, and Sumi’s daughter Aru—are the axis around which the author spins her story. Once Sumi returns with her daughters to her mother’s house following the desertion of her husband, Gopal, these four generations of women are more or less jointly present all the time, now physically brought together under one roof, and under Manorama’s gaze as she looks down at them from her portrait. Despite the fact that the novel’s span is a hundred years, a quality of timelessness lingers around it, a feeling of time standing still as the characters’ stories unfold. Sumi remembers telling Gopal in the early days of their togetherness about her mother’s and her aunt Goda’s marriages, and laughing at his remark that it was never possible to disclaim the past. In her mother’s house again now, face to face with what she had only hazily understood as a young girl, she thinks, “Gopal was right. Kalyani’s past, which she has contained within herself, careful never to let it spill out, has nevertheless entered into us ... it has stained our bones” (75).

  As their past is unravelled through a series of events and rememberances—Goda and Kalyani recounting their early lives to Aru, quarrelling about relationships, holding up an incident here, an anecdote there, to the light—its imprint on the present becomes agonizingly clear. Kalyani, abandoned by her husband, Shripati, cries out in disbelief when, years later, Sumi is more or less abandoned by Gopal. Although it is clear that Gopal’s desertion is of a quite different order from Shripati’s, a woman abandoned is a woman abandoned. For Kalyani and Sumi, it can mean social stigma and avoidance at worst; barely concealed pity and condescension at best. Mother and daughter return to Vithalrao and Manorama’s “Big House”—Kalyani with her two daughters, Sumi with her three—and prepare to inhabit their natal home almost as if they had never left it. Just as Shripati removes himself from the scene, so too does Gopal; both are present yet absent, and neither Sumi nor Kalyani question their withdrawal. Time, it seems, has come full circle. With Sumi’s untimely death there appears to be a break in the cycle, but it is only temporary, and the torch passes to Aru—who bears an uncanny resemblance to Manorama. As with Kalyani and Sumi, is it only a matter of time before Aru succumbs to its inexorable passage? Was it only a matter of time before Gopal saw, with blinding clarity, the utter futility, the fleeting quality of the happiness he had known with Sumi? And is it only a matter of time before they all, like Kalyani, learn to embrace their destinies?

  In Deshpande’s scheme, it is Kalyani and Aru who are at the core of the family’s fortunes; they are the fixed points around whom the fluidity of Sumi and Gopal’s relationshi
p finally resolves itself. Grandmother and granddaughter embody the past and future; the present, represented by Gopal and Sumi, has already splintered. With Sumi’s death, Aru becomes both mother and daughter to Kalyani, desperately reassuring her, “‘Amma, I’m here, I’m your daughter, Amma, I’m your son, I’m here with you’” (233). In the end, as Gopal leaves the ambit of the Big House with Sumi’s ashes, Kalyani and Aru see him off, and “it is this picture of the two women that will be with him wherever he goes” (246). Even Gopal, with his foreknowledge of sorrow, could not have anticipated this cessation; and it is only Aru who will know the profound and terrible meaning of life lived forwards but understood backwards.

  A linear unfolding of lives, in Shashi Deshpande’s view, is an impossibility. People don’t live that way, and she would be foolhardy as a writer to tell their stories as if there were a straight progression from start to finish. Nor can there be only one voice. In each of her novels, the past is presented in the first person (usually by the heroine), the present in the third. This alternating voice not only makes for the double perspective mentioned earlier, it enables the author to tell her story in hindsight, as it were. The effectiveness of this device is best demonstrated in A Matter of Time, where, in a decisive break, the first person voice is not the woman’s, but a man’s. It is Gopal who speaks of past and present, his and Sumi’s (separate and together), in a way that renders these experiences far more complex than simple flashback could. Understanding life backwards demands hindsight, the perspective of distance and experience, even perhaps moving out of the frame of the narrative, as Gopal does, temporarily, and Sumi, permanently, on her death. Making the switch in voice took her a long time, says Deshpande, and for a while, she tried to do away with the first person voice altogether: “I wanted to try another way,” she said, but it didn’t work, and it was then that she hit upon the idea of Gopal speaking in this mode. This entailed a reconsideration of her technique, “something I have to worry a lot and think about.”

 

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