The Illusion of   Home
Raji Narasimhan
Promilla and Co:                   
2007, pp 184, Rs 200.

The book’s blurb says it has seventeen stories about “women driven to the edge of society”. Some of them drove me to the edge too— some in despair, some in pure puzzlement.
Take for instance the very first story. ‘Nobody’s Child’ is about a depressed mother who wants to run away to the Himalayan foothills to escape her cloistered room, her overpowering landlady and her rude daughter. It is not known whether she really escapes or it is all in the mind. Obviously, she is nobody’s child and the story feels as hopeless as this child-mother.
She comes back, after a while, to the same cloistered room and the same rude daughter. And when you somehow plod to the supposedly punchy end, you realise that the author might be talking about ‘reality’. (Don’t miss the quotes). Is reality nobody’s child? Nobody knows.
‘The Pilgrimage’ is on similar lines— it is about a woman, who is described as “shrunk and waned”. She feels she has to go on a pilgrimage to find some semblance of balance in her ‘womanhood’. And then she makes the trip in a rattletrap of a bus to Hrishikesh to realise that in that holy place too, “the world is too much with her”. She is mocked at for her singlehood, refused rooms… the works. Barely stopping herself from falling into the rapids, she returns to her room with the realisation deep in her heart that it was a pilgrimage of familiarity after all.
Several stories have a similar vein… a woman either terribly lonely, or terribly depressed or terribly introspective doing things she feels would change her life only to know in the end that things remain the same. That’s the ‘Illusion of home’ for you. One thing about these women— they are resilient and they do reflect a lot. The problem is that the reflections seem laboured, false and all wrong. It feels as if the author has decided that in the midst of every story, she will allocate some paragraphs to show her writing skills and these paras will be reflections of her heroines. No, that never does work.
The prose does not flow easily and though some stories generate a real spark of interest, it is lost in the maze of words. How I wish the Illusion of Home was not wholly an illusion!