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by Anjana Appachana Random House, New York, N.Y., 1998 |
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Her earlier book Incantations and Other Stories was marked by understatement and a laconic humour . In Listening Now Anjana Appachana experiments with exactly the opposite quality : excess. The sustained emotional intensity of this 500-page novel and the profusion of dramatic moments sweep the reader off her feet by their very abundance. The number of narrators who unfold the story are as many as six ( The Home and the World had three narrators; so did The Sound and the Fury ) , each person bringing a different perspective on the core events that span some sixteen years and about which each one has only partial knowledge. The narrators are all women - mothers, daughters, sisters, friends - who have listened to each other carefully , shared laughter, swapped memories and fears, who can sense even the colours of each other's darkest secrets. " So were stories born. Untold, so did stories die " , thinks one of them, except that not all untold stories die , some fester and rot . " Guilt stains our thoughts like sweat under the arms." Although essentially it is a love story , men, even the best of them , are out of this magic circle , because their ways of listening - rather, not listening - are singularly different. While trying to come to grips with Padma's story each narrator also reveals a complex world of her own , permeated with desires, adjustments and a quiet despair. After peeling off all the layers when we reach the kernel we find it is familiar enough to be the stuff of a popular film : young love blighted by parental disapproval . In fact the novelist constantly plays with as well as mocks at the filmi cliches : the hero and the heroine separated by cruel society, the trauma and trial of unwed motherhood , the co-incidences and mistaken identities on which hinge the twists in the plot. In one climactic moment the protagonist Padma realises how she sounds like the heroine of a movie and nearly bursts into hysterical laughter. We do not get to the story of Padma and Karan until we are half-way through the novel. Till then the narrative circles around it , suggesting and foreshadowing . Padma's precocious pre-teen daughter invests her mother's past with the aura of a romantic fantasy even though in saner moments she knew : " Alas, no stories in the lives of our mothers . So much more juice in the stories we invented." The novel begins with her version - high strung , colourful , the boundary between the real and the fictive smudged , followed by the matter-of -fact versions of two average middle-class Delhi housewives - Padma's neighbours and friends , who have nothing exciting in their lives, yet their accounts are the most moving and consummate sections in the novel. |