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by Shashi Deshpande Published in Viking by Penguin
Books India 2000 |
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"As if we believe that there is, in truth, someone up there - or wherever that mythical being we dignify with capital letters lives - listening to us. Ready to strike us down when we get too cocky. Waiting to trip us up for our bravado. Nemesis. The Lord with his chakra spinning on his finger, prepared to send it towards us, to slice off our heads. And so the Ganesha in niches, the decorated thresholds, the mango leaf torans, the Oms, the Swastikas, the charms and amulets - all to keep disaster at bay, to stave off the nemesis of a jealous god. It doesn't help; nothing does. It's always a losing battle. Such small remedies, these, to counter the terrible disease of being human, of being mortal and vulnerable ..." So thinks Madhu, the protagonist in Shashi Deshpande's master piece, 'Small Remedies', a novel, published just this month by Viking/Penguin India. 'Small Remedies' is the story of Madhu, a lonely daughter, a sensitive and capable woman, a very vulnerable wife and mother. It is the story of Madhu, who, faced with the terrible vacuum caused by the death of Adit, her only son, sets out on a long and lonely journey in her attempt to come to terms with her loss. Madhu's healing process occurs when she is confronted with the lives of two other women, both brave in their own ways. One is, Savitribai Indorekar, a star singer of the Gwalior gharana, a singer who wrote headlines not only through her music but also through the way she lived her life. The other one is Leela, Madhu's aunt, with whom she had spent her youth and adulthood. Accepting the offer made by Chandru, a family friend, Madhu takes a brave step out of her desperate situation, and comes to Bhavanipur to write the biography of Savitribai. In talking to Savitribai, she hopes to forget her despair and anguish. She knew Savitribai from her childhood, when the musician had moved into the house next door, with her lover and tablaji, Ghulam Saab, and their only daughter, Munni. Savitribai, a daughter-in-law from a respected and conservative brahmin family, had given up that life to learn music, to devote herself to this art. That Munni rejects the name given to her by her parents, and calls herself Meenakshi is just symptomatic of her rejection of the life led by her parents, and her yearning for respectability. Madhu and Munni becomes friends. Munni enchants and rules Madhu. Later Munni succeeds in breaking the umbilical card, returns to her grand parents' family, and finally gets a new identity as Shailaja Joshi. Much later when Madhu meets Munni in Bombay, in a bus, Munni does not want to recognise her, and does not want to be recognised as Munni. She had obviously tried to make a sterile and clean break from her past. Madhu is perplexed when she is confronted with the fact that it was not just the daughter who denies the mother, the mother too has forgotten about her only daughter, at least apparently. Listening to Bai, Madhu, who wonders, how one can reject one's own child, and one's own mother, realises that "Bai lost her daughter, but her life moved on. Even today, sick, old, dying, childless, when everything seems to have ended for her, she's not wholly bereft." Madhu is made aware of the special sort of woman her aunt Leela was, on listening to Hari with whom and Lata, Hari's wife, she is staying with in Bhavanipur. Madhu knows that Leela was the black sheep of the family. A widow who remarried. And, what was worse, infinitely worse, married a Christian man, Joe. But she thinks of Leela mainly as a kind and loving aunt, "who took me into her home (after my father died) and was always with me after that." Hari (whose grand mother was one of Leela's sisters) thinks of Leela as an extraordinary woman, as a woman who participated in the '42 Quit India movement, who went underground, who was responsible for many daring deeds. Now Madhu understands that both Savitribai Indorekar, and Leela had tried to break out of the shackles, but they paid the price for their attempts to break out. It is trying to unravel the mystery of who the real Savitribai Indirekar is - is she just the star musician, is she the brave brahmin woman who dared to leave her traditional home and go after her dreams, is she the unfortunate mother who rejected her own daughter and was rejected by the same - that Madhu understands that truth is something beyond the words by which one tries to portray it. Her attempt at writing the biography tells her how little the idea of truth is connected with words, how much of it lies in our connections to the unseen world which, and that whether we know it or not, we are always conscious of. It is then that she understands how wrong it was of her to tell Som, her husband, what had happened to her as a fifteen year old girl, when an uncontrollable impulse had made her body respond to the comforting hug of a friend of her father. Sharing the memory of this one incidence in which she had sex with a man who was old enough to be her father, an incidence which drove the man to hang himself, Madhu realises what a blow she had given to Som's image of her as a chaste and untouched person. And she sees her loving, generous and kind husband turn into a savage, haunted and haunting one. It was one such endless scene between them when Som was punishing her (or was it Madhu herself who was punishing herself) that Adit walks into the room trying to find out what was happening between his parents. On being told, "Go away, Adit", he goes away, never to return. It was the time in which Bombay was rocked with religious violence. A bomb placed in a bus blows up Adit and Munni to smithereens. The pages describing the uncertainty of where her son is, the waiting for him through the violence ridden days, Madhu's search for him on the crowded streets of the city even when Som tries to tell her that Adit is dead, and her final acceptance of the inevitable truth are some of the most poignant ones in Indian literature. Madhu's wound starts healing finally, when she meets a young family celebrating a upanayanam ceremony in a very simple manner in the Bhavani temple in Bhavanipur, and later when in the same temple she listens to a all night music performance by Hasina. On being asked by the mother to bless the small boy, Madhu thinks: "What do I say? Ayushman bhava? Chirayu bhava? May you live long. But what blessing can contend against our mortality? Mustard seeds to protect us from evil, blessings to confer long life - nothing works. And yet we go on. Simple remedies? No, they're desperate remedies and we go on with them because, in truth, there is nothing else. 'Sukhi bhava'", she says, finally, to the child. It is as if she realises that all the remedies one thinks of using are too tiny, minutely small, when confronted with the enormous size of the diseases they are supposed to cure, to heal. The healing process is accentuated when Hasina, the grand daughter of Ghulam Saab, who was also Bai's student for the past fifteen years and her lone companion, gives a concert in the temple in Bhavanipur. This concert would launch Hasina on her musical career. Listening to her sing perfectly 'I saw a dream, I saw a dream', a vachana by Akka Mahadevi, Madhu feels that it's not the dead poet's dream alone that Hasina is singing of, but her own as well..., of my dreams too, so many of them, all woven about Adit. And Som's dreams for his son. It's all over now, there are no more dreams left for me, for either of us... Returning home after the concert Madhu finds a letter from Som waiting for her. Som has said, "Come home. We need to be together at this time." Madhu knows that this is how it should be. That she should be with Som, that they have to recreate their son, to invoke his presence and make his existence real. Because, it's not just living children who need to be free, the dead clamour for release as well. Madhu then understands that memory, capricious and unreliable though it is, ultimately carries its own truth within it. That as long as there is memory, there's always the possibility of retrieval, as long as there is memory, loss is never total. It is a great and definite step towards the healing process. It is not only in these details, in these meditative moments which heal, that 'Small Remedies' carries the unmistakable stamp of being the work of Shashi Deshpande. Like Indu in 'Roots and Shadows', Jaya in 'That Long Silence', and Saru 'The Dark holds no Terrors', Madhu also leaves the home in which she has lived since her marriage, and tries to solve her problems on her own. Similar to the earlier novels 'Roots and Shadows' and 'The Dark holds no Terrors', here also it is death that draws the final stroke, that reveals the vulnerability of human existence, of human relationships. That final blow comes in a sense as a release from a cosy and foggy existence, and sets Madhu on the search for answers to her eternal questions. The first step out of the familiar surroundings is also the first step towards discovering one's true self, of recognising the truth that sets the tune to one's existence. It is also the first step towards realising that any healing process has to start within one's own self, that no keeping of Ganeshas in niches, no waving of clenched fists holding mustard seeds, no muttering of incantations can help to heal the wound, to ward off the evil. Madhu who finally understands this has taken a step towards the path paved by the seers of the Rigveda who asked, "Ka? To which God shall we offer our worship?", words that are in fact chosen by Deshpande as the epigraph of the book. The speciality of Deshpande's philosophy is that though each individual has to solve his problems on his own, it does not mean that he has to reject all relationships in life. Her protagonists need to be on their own to come to terms with life, but once they have achieved that, they return to their normal life, fortified by their newly found wisdom. Madhu also returns at the end to her husband, Som. There is also a tension in the book, the kind to which one is accustomed to when reading Deshpande. The plot is never revealed at once, and more questions are posed than answered. This lends such a tautness to the story line that one can hardly put down the book without finishing it, neither can one read it at a stretch as there is so much to understand, to digest, to savour. If I say that ' Small Remedies' is perhaps the best novel Shashi Deshpande has written since 'That Long Silence' for which she won the Sahitya Akademi award in 1988, I am not trying to belittle her other novels. Each of her novels is special and offer food for thought on human relationships and emotions. Deshpande is a master writer in the way she articulates human emotions, the fears and feelings experienced by humans, by women. Reading her books is like peeping into the hidden corners of one's own mind. Recognising oneself in her characters, one does not feel lonely in the world anymore. Reading her novels and stories is thus an immensely satisfying experience, as reading becomes a healing process. Having said all this, there is one thing I wish were different with 'Small Remedies'. I wish that Viking/Penguin India had come out with a better and a more befitting cover for this gem of a book instead of the drab one it presents. Copyright: Chandra Holm / 2000 |