Relentlessly honest

LEAD REVIEW

Gauri Deshpande’s formidable reputation precedes her — poet, essayist, translator, short story writer in Marathi and in English, with an equal facility in both languages, a writer whose honesty and outspokenness cut through every veneer of social hypocrisy; so much so that she was often accused of writing ‘like a man’.

In Deliverance, translated by Shashi Deshpande from the Marathi original titled Nirgathi, we see the (sometimes self-flagellating) clarity of Gauri Deshpande’s vision and her skills as a storyteller in the contrivances of craft that she adopts to suit the pacy form of the novella. 

The stuff of Deliverance is the ragged sparring of life most families are familiar with — the narrator’s chafing ties with her unruly daughters, and to complicate matters, theirs with her husband, who is step-father to her elder daughter. With the younger Shami, it is an endless litany of  “Come on, get up! Brush your teeth. Have your bath. Comb your hair.

Wear your uniform. Pack your bag. Don’t forget your lunch. So late! Go to bed. My God! I’m fed up of hearing my own voice. When will this end? Will it ever end?”, and with the older adolescent Mimi, it is the more cruel: “The moment I have a book in my hand, she wants her cocoa or something to eat. She calls me fat at least once a day, tells me I’m an old woman, calls me greedy.”

But unlike with most other families, the sparring does not settle down; the narrator acknowledges that she is “lacking in motherliness” (a family trait perhaps, since her grandmother too had declared that when that particular quality was being distributed, she was in the toilet!), rages against the toll this thankless job takes on her time and energy and finally realises that “to protect us from each other — we need to be apart”.

She sends her daughters away (not before the older, in a fit of pique, accuses her step-father of sexual misconduct) and yet they keep coming back and Mimi’s letters begin, ‘My darling Mother’.

All does not right itself once the girls leave and the narrator and her husband find the time to travel, make friends abroad, and then return to settle down in a house and a farm of their own; Gauri Deshpande’s relentless honesty does not allow it. She sees the struggle for what it is; that despite the vision of beauty that one has of one’s life, or the nobility of one’s ambitions, the compromises that one has to make everywhere, “because there wasn’t enough money or enough time… were not persistent enough, or couldn’t take enough trouble” hollows life out. The narrator declares wryly, “…by the age of 50, a person realises how worthless he or she is — or at least, they should; living then becomes possible only if you ignore your own worthlessness…”  When a group of schoolboys visits their farm and hesitantly asks the couple, now old and no longer bohemian but just ‘odd’, what lessons they have learnt in life, the narrator, in order not to disappoint them says, “If you keep going, one step after another, you are sure to reach somewhere, in time” and then realises that “…This is not a bad philosophy for life: keep walking and the road will come to an end.”

And yet, this is not a bleak book — apart from the robustness of Gauri Deshpande’s vision, the structure and format of the book — short sections in a combination of dialogue, letters and first person narration — impart a briskness and vigour to it. Further, the book is remarkably well served by Shashi Deshpande’s seamless translation.

The autobiographical element of Deliverance and of much of Gauri Deshpande’s writing have often been remarked upon. The ‘sources’ of a writer’s fiction, even when avowedly autobiographical, are always a matter of speculation and are best not raked up, but in this case, the novella is appended with an afterword by Shashi Deshpande (where Gauri Deshpande’s daughter acknowledges that she and her sister were the difficult daughters in Nirgathi, and later, she went on to write her own novel, possibly as a counterpoint to her mother’s) and an interview with Gauri Deshpande where she discusses the circumstances of her unconventional life.

Moreover, Gauri Deshpande belonged to a family that from the early 20th century was at the heart of the women’s emancipation movement — her grandfather was Maharshi Karve, a forerunner in the education of girls and widow remarriage, and Raghunath Karve, an early proponent of family planning, was her uncle; the family had several accomplished women — Gauri’s mother was the famed anthropologist Iravati Karve, whose interpretation of the Mahabharata opened up a new way of studying its women characters.

That Gauri and her daughter led unconventional lives is the least of it — the burden of tradition and expectation, even when it is ‘progressive,’ is difficult to bear and fiction, as they must have discovered, is one way of easing it.

Deliverance —
A novella
Gauri Deshpande, translated by Shashi Deshpande
Women Unlimited
2010, pp 134
Rs 225