Insights on life

This novel of Shashi Deshpande’s is a kind of sequel to A Matter of Time, which she wrote 10 years ago. Many of the characters make their reappearance to “reveal their future,” as Shashi mentions in her acknowledgements.

In Shadow Play, as in her earlier novels, Deshpande delves into the emotions of each of her characters, as she gradually goes into the complexities of daily living. The story covers the entire gamut of familial relationships, the misunderstandings, marriage, career ambitions; the frustrations of bringing up children and also that of not being able to have them.

Interestingly, the author brings in the male perspective, as some of the chapters are narrated by Gopal, the father of Aru and her two sisters. Gopal’s abandonment of his family at crucial junctures is the cause of much heartache. But the author’s decision to give him a voice helps to convey his point of view and perhaps redeems him to the readers and eventually his daughters. Gopal speaks of “Paschatap and prayaschitta: remorse and atonement,” wonders if they go together and speculates, “…maybe they are two faces of the same coin; neither is complete without the other.”

Deshpande sensitively touches upon the issue of childlessness and the agony of a woman who says, “Yes, I want a baby of my own. I want to feel it kicking, moving; impatient to be born… I want to play my allotted role in the world… linked to the future by my child, as I am linked to the past through my mother.” From here on, the author gently moves onto the topic of adoption and its possibilities.

Terrorism rears its ugly head in this novel with a bomb explosion and death that shatters Aru’s peace and those of the people she is connected to. Deshpande uses this novel to make political observations about the underworld, shooting encounters and wonders whether terrorists “are also trained to lose their humanity the way they are trained to make explosives?”

The author’s clear understanding of life in its many manifestations shine throughout the book, as when she speaks of a profession like modelling where faith is reposed on “something as impermanent, as evanescent as the body, a body which ages each day, so many cells dying each minute.” Shashi uses Aru, the lawyer, as the lens, to reflect on feminism.

Aru, in the course of her work, has seen so much injustice meted out to women that her “convictions about the exploitation of women remains. She has always hated the falseness, the tall claims of ads, the seducing of women into having an unreal image of themselves which the advertising world promotes”.

The author’s views on love, in the words of Gopal, are worth noting, “There is a better self inside us, that the need to love is an intrinsic part of us so that we can care even about strangers…An invisible cord connects us to all of humanity.”

The sub-plots in the novel dwell on issues like living together, the possibilities of finding love in one’s sunset years and the complications that can derive from a Hindu-Christian marriage, especially with regard to the religion of the child of such a union. At times, there is a feeling that some threads have been left hanging because of the crowding of characters and sub-plots.

It is after all Deshpande’s story and her characters have the right to choose the way that they view the word “rape” and its impact on their personal lives. The word makes it appearance early on in the novel, when Aru watches a TV programme and waits for a minister to apologise over an insensitive comment that he has made towards a victim of rape. As a result, there is a sense of being let down over the way the issue is handled in the novel. One keeps wondering where the story is leading up to, and is almost taken by surprise when the rape actually occurs and is summarily dealt with. The indirect involvement of a family member seems too tame a reason to not want to see justice done. Aru is a professed feminist, and yet she agrees to go along with the raped victim’s desire to put the whole incident behind her. Result — the rapists go scot-free.

But for this, Shadow Play is a story told in Deshpande’s inimitable style and definitely worth reading for the many deep insights about life in its myriad avatars. Perhaps another sequel will follow where all that has been left unresolved in this novel will find completion to the satisfaction of the author, her characters and her readers.