It is like setting a tanpura, you know, before a concert begins. The orchestra goes on strumming, tuning up, while you wonder what it’s all about—to you all sounds are the same. And ultimately they nod their heads, and you know they’ve got it, the correct note ... it’s like that. Suddenly you know that this is exactly right for your needs.13
In addition to having the speaking voice, Gopal is unusual in other respects, too. In a significant departure from her earlier novels, Deshpande invests him with the qualities usually reserved for her female protagonists: reflection and introspection. Jaya in That Long Silence, Deshpande says, is the most autobiographical of her characters; Mira, the poet in The Binding Vine, is the one she’s closest to; but Gopal has all her sympathy. It is he who feels the pain of living most acutely, who puzzles over the possible meaning of all those stories and aphorisms from ancient Hindu texts. His gentleness and humility cannot fail to register. “I wanted to see if I could use a male voice again,” Deshpande told me, “but not as I used to earlier [in her short stories]. It was really something of a challenge.” It is true that Gopal is the most fully realized of all her men. Mohan in That Long Silence, Urmila’s husband, Kishore, in Binding Vine, and Manu in The Dark Holds No Terrors, as well as Shripati in A Matter of Time are insubstantial creatures, a foil for the women who propel the story. But Gopal sets the story in motion, and literally speaking, it begins and ends with him. His absent presence in the book is like a magnet for his daughters, especially Aru, and he is drawn back into the story in a movement almost parallel to Sumi’s moving out of it. In the end, it is she who exits the frame. This is most unexpected. Moreover, with Sumi’s death, it is entirely possible that Gopal will once again take up residence in the Big House—another cyclic return.
The novel begins with the Big House, opening with an epigraph drawn from the Brhad-aranyaka Upanishad: “‘Maitreyi,’ said Yajnavalkya, ‘verily I am about to go forth from this state (of householder)’” (1). The reference is to the third stage of a man’s life according to the Ancients (the first two being that of child and student), a householder, who in the course of the third quarter of his life leaves his household and enters the fourth and final stage of his life: that of renouncer. Here it refers obviously to Gopal’s decision to withdraw from the responsibilities of house-holding, but it also alerts us to what we will soon discover—that Shripati, too, relinquished his role as a householder many, many years ago, thus contributing to the strange history of the Big House. Although such a departure is enjoined by the Ancients, both Gopal and his father-in-law renounced householding much before the prescribed time, and what’s more, before they had fulfilled their duties. And so the household reverts to the women.
The ancestral house, even more than the town or city, is central to Deshpande’s novels, because it is to this that the women return. Saru in The Dark Holds No Terrors, Jaya in That Long Silence, and Sumi in A Matter of Time make a womblike retreat to the natal home, and it is always here that past and present meet and some kind of reckoning takes place.
For me it’s essential—almost as essential as it is for a movie director—to have the shape of the house clear. I know all the houses in my novels ... as an architect does, all the rooms, even if I may not use them. If I have that clear then the rest of it can happen, because it is there that it is going to happen.14
The house is most powerfully evoked in A Matter of Time, almost as if it were another character. Deshpande describes in detail who built it, and how, who lived in it, and how—and what it is today.
Inside, the house seems to echo the schizophrenic character of its exterior. A long passage running along the length of the house bisects it with an almost mathematical accuracy, marking out clearly the two parts of its divided personality. The rooms on the left, uninhabited for years, are dark, brooding and cavernous. The rooms on the right where the family lives ... have a lived-in look, with the constant disorder of living.... The small hall into which the front door opens is no man’s land, belonging to neither zone.... There is, to the fanciful at least, a sense of expectancy about the house, as if it were holding its breath, waiting for something. (5)
The major events of all Deshpande’s novels (with the exception of The Binding Vine) actually take place after the heroine returns to her natal home. In The Dark Holds No Terrors, Sara’s own home is the abode of marital violence, but we know little of it except the nightly enactment of abuse in the bedroom. Her father’s home, on the other hand, comes alive with details of family use, memories of childhood, estrangement, tragedy. It is a home she inhabits once again, just as Jaya in That Long Silence comfortably settles into her own apartment in Dadar, refusing even to let her husband unlock the front door. She lovingly notes the familiar trail of garbage on the soiled cement stairs, cigarette butts, squirts of betel-stained spit on the wall, bits of vegetable peel. Mohan, revolted by the sight, sees only dirt and ugliness; to him it is a place he has been forced to turn to, a temporary refuge. For Jaya, it is a safe haven, the place where she learns to write and break the long silence of her married life, where she finally comes into her own. Similarly, the Big House in A Matter of Time, waiting for something to happen, does not wait in vain. Its air of decrepitude and abandonment—“cobwebs, hanging in a canopy over the huge front door,” “a star-shaped sunken pond ... now only a pit harbouring all the trash blown in by the wind” (3)—is disturbed when Sumi and her girls arrive in a flurry of bags and bedding rolls. And it is not long before the drama of their lives is added to the rich history of family misfortune that the house has seen for four generations.
The essentially familial scope of Deshpande’s novels imbues the domestic space with a greater charge than may otherwise be the case. The playing out of family tensions, rivalries and hostilities, and even happiness, takes place against a backdrop of earlier joy and sorrow, so that nothing that the houses witness now is without its echo from the past. In A Matter of Time this echo stretches as far back as three generations, and none of its occupants has been immune to its reverberations. But the Big House exerts its power in other ways, too. Sumi, searching for a suitable place to live with her daughters, finds herself sketching the Big House over and over again for the estate agent. It is as if her very imagination has been colonized, as if there was a “tracing of this house already on the paper, on any paper ... and the lines she draws have no choice but to follow that unseen tracing” (78). In its turn the Big House rearranges itself around the presence or absence of its inhabitants. On the night of Sumi and Shripati’s death, Kalyani, in tearing grief, calls out the name of the man who was her husband:
crying at last for him, as if only by going back to her childhood, to her earlier relationship with him, can she mourn him. Goda holds her close ... While the two women lie awake in the dark, there is a strange sound, as if the house has exhaled its breath and shaken itself before settling down into a different rhythm of breathing. (236)
III
What have I achieved by this writing? The thought occurs to me again as I look at the neat pile of papers. Well, I’ve achieved this. I’m not afraid anymore ... If I have to plug that “hole in the heart” I will have to speak, to listen, I will have to erase the silence between us. (That Long Silence, 191–92)
The metaphor of silence is the single most powerfully recurring feature in Deshpande’s novels. It is most shockingly realized in the story of Mohan’s mother in That Long Silence, a woman whose mute resignation is trumpeted as courage by her totally obtuse son, Jaya’s husband. Jaya, recounting a story he told her, says:
He saw strength in the woman sitting silently in front of the fire, but I saw despair. I saw despair so great that it would not voice itself. I saw a struggle so bitter that silence was the only weapon. Silence and surrender. (36)
The silence that Jaya herself harbors for much of her married life is partially broken in That Long Silence, but it is a very private break. She writes, she conducts an intense interior monologue, and as her conversation with he
rself gathers momentum, her communication with her husband practically ceases. When, at the end of the novel, Mohan (who had been living under suspicion of financial misdemeanor) cables her to say “All’s well,” and they can come out of hiding, Jaya wonders, “Does he mean that we will go back to being ‘as we were’? to our original positions?” And answers, “It is no longer possible for me” (192).
The silence in Deshpande’s next novel, The Binding Vine, is of two kinds, both located outside its heroine, Urmila, but encompassing her as well: the comatose silence of Kalpana, brutally raped by her stepfather and lying like a living corpse in the hospital; and the silence of Urmila’s mother-in-law, Mira, who died in childbirth and sublimated her unhappiness in elliptical poetry, which Urmila chances upon by accident. Urmila almost simultaneously finds herself pursuing Kalpana’s story and Mira’s poetry—two rapes separated by time and social class, two lives that intersect with Urmila’s, binding the three women together, as if they were one.
It is in A Matter of Time that the silence of women is finally and conclusively broken but with a dreadful corollary: the death of Sumi; and a cruel irony: the willful silence of Shripati, as punishment for his wife. How then is it broken? The Big House, after Sumi and her daughters return to it, is a more or less cheerful community of women, affected by the vagaries of their men but not unhinged by them. Kalyani is quite reconciled to Shripati’s rejection of her, and finds a happy, sparring companionship in Goda. Sumi is calm in the face of Gopal’s sudden desertion, refusing to let it disturb her equilibrium. The speed with which she dismantles their home is almost ruthless, and in no time it has been stripped bare—a swift dismemberment. After an initial period of strangeness and adjustment in the Big House, Sumi actually begins to spread her wings, and her slow wonderment at her own prowess is exquisitely presented. The girls find their voices, too: Aru through her encounter with Surekha and women’s legal rights, Charu through medicine. Emotionally and otherwise, they form a self-sufficient three-generational family with one major difference: it is a family of women living in their natal home. There’s no one to silence them.
So why does Sumi die? There are several possible explanations, though none is entirely satisfying. If, however, one places Gopal at the center of the novel—and one might in another reading of the story—then Sumi’s dying is inevitable, the cataclysmic end of happiness that Gopal has anticipated all along, the death wish fulfilled. Runamukta, he thinks, “free of all human debts.” And yet, and yet, such piercing regret.
Yes, Sumi is free, but at the cost of her body, of life itself. Is this freedom? ... If I could believe that Sumi has gone to a region of everlasting peace and happiness, if I could think—maudlin thought—that we will meet again sometime .... No, I can’t; there is only this nothingness, this blankness. (237)
Is this the moral of the story, then, that the wages of speech is death? One can’t be sure because the novel is ambivalent on this score. Sumi’s death comes just as she begins to develop her own career, embrace her independence, find her own voice. Deshpande would not be the first woman writer to suggest that for women, the wages of consciousness—and of speech—is sometimes death. (Think of the protagonists of Western feminist classics like Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, driven to suicide, or Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wall-Paper, driven to madness.) But it is important to remember that the accident that kills Sumi also destroys Shripati. And it would be impossible to miss the significance of exactly when and how the accident takes place: remembering Madhav, the lost son, the missing piece of the puzzle of Sumi’s parents’ lives. It is the only time in the novel that father and daughter utter his name, and both die with it on their lips. A chapter closed. We should remember, too, that the future lies with Aru and that the novel ends not with Sumi’s death but with Aru’s life. “‘Yes, Papa, you go,’” she says to her father as he leaves, “‘we’ll be quite all right, don’t worry about us’” (246).
IV
Most of my writing comes out of my own intense and long suppressed feelings about what it is to be a woman in our society; it comes out of the experience of the difficulty of playing the different roles enjoined upon me by society, out of the knowledge that I am something more and something different from the sum total of these roles. My writing comes out of my consciousness of the conflict between my idea of myself as a human being and the idea that society has of me as a woman.”15
Of all the women writers writing in English in India today, Deshpande has been the most consistent in her exploration of women’s condition. She has dealt with practically every issue raised by the women’s movement in India regarding the subordination of women: rape, child abuse, single motherhood, son-preference, denial of self-expression, deep inequality and deep-seated prejudice, violence, resourcelessness, low self-esteem, and the binds (and bonds) of domesticity. In a way this exploration has corresponded to her own development as a writer and, in her own words, helped her to find her “true voice.” The turning point, she says, came with a story entitled “The Intrusion,” written as early as 1970 or 1971, which was published in the collection The Intrusion and Other Stories.
The consciousness of one’s own voice is a very important development for a writer; until then most writers are groping, feeling their way, imitating other writers. After “The Intrusion” this would not happen to me. The stories I wrote then and the novels that followed, were all centered round women and had a distinctive woman’s voice. It marked me out very definitely as a “woman writer”... a woman who wrote about women.16
“The Intrusion” is a story about a honeymooning couple, “not friends, not acquaintances even, only a husband and wife,” and the unwelcome consummation of their marriage. “The cry I gave,” says its unnamed protagonist when her husband forces himself on her, “was not for the physical pain but for the intrusion into my privacy, the violation of my right to myself” (41). This story laid the groundwork for Deshpande’s first novel, The Dark Holds No Terrors, one of the most lacerating novels ever written on marital rape. Although Deshpande has said that of all her novels, The Dark Holds No Terrors most successfully realizes its potential, it was That Long Silence that finally “put the seal” on her style and subject matter.
More than anything else I had written till then [it] was about the world of women, almost claustrophobically so ... Through the articulation of a lifetime’s experiences, thoughts and introspection, through the lives of the women I had created, I had done something so that I could never see myself or my writing in the same way again.17
The circumstances of women’s lives and the choicelessness that characterizes their situation are highlighted through a microscopic—but not unsympathetic—examination of the familial and domestic, the so-called natural domain of women. Reacting sharply to the charge that her canvas is limited because she focuses on these aspects, Deshpande declares that nothing could be more universal than the family unit and no relationships more fundamental than those between the members of a family. Person to person and “person to society relationships,” as she calls them, are all prefigured in the domestic arena “where everything begins.”18 Human relationships are the most mystifying, hence the most exciting for a novelist; within these relationships it is a woman’s place that is of greatest concern to Deshpande because of the “abysmal difference” that women experience in relation to men. Her novels and her later short stories dwell on the daily slights and humiliations that women suffer, mostly in silence. By the simple device of describing the reality of many middle-class women in India, Deshpande lays bare the social discrimination and hypocrisy that underlie society’s treatment of them; by the same token, she is also able to acknowledge the power that women manage to wield despite their disadvantaged status, especially within the family. Manorama in A Matter of Time is a shining example.
Yet Deshpande cannot in any way be said to have a propagandist or sexist perspective—to present her readers with “bad bad men and good good women.”19 Nor does she ackn
owledge either a deliberate or unconscious connection with the women’s movement or with feminist writers. Writing at more or less the same time as Kate Millet, Susan Brownmiller, Germaine Greer, and others, she says she came to these writers much later in her writing, too late to be influenced by them directly.20 As if in support of this, she admits readily to her early fear of being called sentimental, soft, insubstantial—a woman whose stories were destined to be read only by other women. Speaking about her use of the male voice in most of her short stories, she asks:
Why did I have the male “I”? Did I do it to distance myself from the subject? Or ... because I, too, felt there was something trivial about women’s concerns, something very limited about their interests and experiences? Had I, without my knowledge, been so brainwashed that I had begun regarding women’s experiences as second-rate? Did having a male narrator help me to pare down the emotions, intellectualize [my writing]? But the fact was that both the intellect and the emotions were mine ... Yet the fact remains that I was trying to use an equivalent of the male pseudonym which so many women employed to conceal their identities. In other words, the writer in me was rejecting her femininity. Perhaps I felt that to be taken seriously as a writer I had to get out of my woman’s skin.21
And so she struggled with the separation of emotion and intellect, masculine and feminine, until she understood that both were “hers” and she was able to write “The Intrusion,” in which she found her “true voice.” Henceforth, and until the appearance of Gopal in A Matter of Time, the “I” was reserved for her female protagonists, and she never again wrote a short story. Her women had come out of the wings and now occupied center stage; her own confidence in representing their lives and giving them a speaking voice grew with each novel and, in a curious way, she grew with them, too, as a writer.
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