A Girl and a River is the third novel of Usha K R that explores the lost identity of Kaveri in the recess of history.

Kaveri is the grandmother of the protagonist whose name is also Kaveri. Though the protagonist tells us the story, her own identity is subdued and her role in the entire storyline is deliberately marginalised by the author.

It is definitely a new style in narrative structure that makes the novel psychological albeit her search for oblivious facts from a hushed up family past is essential for Kaveri, the storyteller, to complete her selfhood.

Due to this stylistic shift, the novel becomes more historical and sociological in nature in which the Independence movement in the princely town of Mysore becomes a backdrop and issues of patriarchy, gender, marriage and caste become integral to the narrative where the household of Mylaraiah, an affluent advocate, becomes centre-stage. 

The story starts with an intriguing finding of a half-torn photo of ‘Fearless Nadia’ as Kaveri discovers, a letter— without any trace of the writer and the person to whom it was addressed— and two old novels with notes of an adolescent girl on the margin. The old lady in a mental asylum whom her mother visited when Kaveri was young is also puzzling to her. The silence of her parents and oblique remarks of her uncle make Kaveri more curious to know her family history, particularly her grandmother, who was an educated, liberal lady.

Her grandmother’s life becomes a jigsaw puzzle with fragments of information and memory. Kaveri, the protagonist, is a young student in an American University. She was schooled in Ooty to keep her away from family affairs though she is the only child.

Thwarted ambitions

Her father is a frustrated, cold man who aspired to go to Oxford to study mathematics, but family obligations made him run a factory in Mysore. He is married to his own sister’s daughter as done in traditional Brahmin families.

Kaveri’s mother is named after a lost river whose origin is unknown. It is allegorical as her mother’s existence is deliberately wiped out from the family history to the extent that there is no photograph nor any reminiscences of her.

Finally, she discovers that Kaveri, her grandmother, was an educated lady with progressive ideas who was dumped in a mental asylum by her own brother and daughter. More painfully, her parents, an incestuous pair, are ‘perfect conspirators’ and they are part of ‘the grand conspiracy of silence’.

This conspiracy, in fact, is rooted in the patriarchy and gender-discrimination where women, regardless of their talent and strength, are compelled to fall in line; to conform to the rules set by men. The silence of subjugation, the whispered aspirations and echoes of the silent cries of these women reverberate throughout the novel that moves back and forth between the most tumultuous decades of pre-independent India and covers the happenings in Mysore.                                                        

Through the finer graphic details, Usha K R recreates the events and situations vividly. Interspersed with anecdotes and historical facts, the meta-story of freedom movement and the central story of Kaveri are intertwined beautifully. She correctly writes,” …few books of history or annals of accounts would ever recount how Gandhi’s legacy…the political fortunes of the Congress were played out in Mylaraiah’s  backyard.”

The novel reminds of the subaltern historical accounts of the freedom movement but the beauty of the novel lies in how these historical facts impinge upon the lives of its characters and how they interpret these events.

Through this dialogical and dialectical process, the story of Kaveri is told. At the end there is a pathos, a void and a silence as the picture is not complete and the protagonist concludes, “ For grief to swell and grow and then abate, it needs solitude; solitude for the cycle of memories… an empty stretch of time to unburden your heart bit by bit and lighten the load.”

The cycle of memories symbolised by the perennial river Kaveri makes the novel metaphysical. A Girl and a River is certainly one of the best novels from India published this year.   

A Girl and a River
Author: Usha K. R.
Genre: Fiction
Penguin Books
Price: Rs. 295
Pages: 324
Year:2007