Matters of heart

Lead review

The women in Nandita Bose’s books — Tread Softly, The Perfume of Promise, If Walls Could Weep and the absolutely latest Shadow and Soul — give themselves, body and soul, over to love. They may be matched by men who are equally loving and discerning, but it is the purity of their own passion that propels the plot.

These are women who take their men seriously. And in return ask to be taken as seriously, striving for equality in the most private place of all, the heart, rather than the bigger and  more clichéd corridors of power. Since this, true love, is the purpose of their life — to love, to be loved and to surround themselves with all the positive benefits reaped from unions all around, and not just the romantic ones — they meet halfway every hurdle in their path, every nay said to their face, triumphing over all odds with mere honesty of feelings. It is this ultimate strength and spine of the seemingly weaker sex that imbues Shadow and Soul with the kind of muscle and brawn a realistic take on relationships requires.

The inherent advantage accorded to the male is undermined by every dialogue, every compromise and willing adjustment by the female, by her very goodness. He is initially confused by this generosity of spirit; “He chose to quibble. It was quixotic but that stupid cerebration of everything, of dissection, of lingering in minutiae, trapped me like a fearful bird.”

In Bose’s books, romance rarely comes packaged in heart-shaped bows, rather they mirror current milieu and display an innate irritation with social taboos. “Don’t you realise, for this moment at least there’s just you and me and that night outside? Everything else does not exist. Not even concepts of possibilities and impossibilities,” says a character in Shadow and Soul, weary of appeasing the social gods, of doing the right thing.

Transgressions look wrong only from the outside, but to get under the covers, to get under the skin of those caught in these situations — extra-marital, pre-marital and even marital — and transcribe sorrows, frustrations and ultimately the throwing to the winds of every caution brings us, the readers, up close and personal with what we are used to brushing aside as idle gossip, about a life far away, a life we could earlier dismiss and are now compelled to understand.

The narrative is languid and subtle, with no unnecessary pyrotechnics or loud colours. Bose chooses to linger on what really matters, the smaller pleasures, the fleeting sights; “The pages of the book flew backwards. It was a series on dragonflies, a peculiar homage to these creatures that evoke summers I’d long forgotten. There were some aloft, poised against the sun, hovering over a meadow against hints of wildflowers. Some lost in profuse swarms, just their asymmetric spaces creating patterns of togetherness. I spotted one pair in deep turquoise and scarlet lingering over a tiny pool of water. And all of them were breathtaking.”

It is an uncomfortable love story, the illicit variety, with disparate ages, backgrounds, the urban-rural divide... She, married with a teenage son. He, a young bachelor and guest in their house. Devika is the quintessential everywoman who tries to do the done thing and do it well, until Fate throws at her the realisation that she is human, with human flaws she must accept. There arises, from her dilemma — whether to stay the course in a dull, dull marriage to a prosperous but pompous doctor, or elope with this boy who has suddenly captured her imagination in a way she never thought possible — the question of ownership of a woman’s body.

Whom does the female form belong to? Her so-called protectors and benefactors or herself? The metaphor of Meera Mansion is not lost on the reader. Whom does this house belong to: the one who paid for it or the one who turned it home? As Devika grapples with Dr Gautam and Shaurjyo’s expectations, she must choose between growth and stagnation — deemed unrespectable and respectable, respectively.

The choice of a rural setting seems deliberate, providing a physical image of the isolation and sense of being cut off from the past, her comfort zone, as far as Devika is concerned. She is the kind of housewife we see daily but find unremarkable in every way until we are drawn into her world and see that level of exhaustion and sense of futility so as to appreciate her final courage and the beauty of that courage.
“No one speaks to me the way you do.”

“With you, I hardly say anything.”
“Isn’t it remarkable then how much you say in your silences?”
Bose is a writer impelled to examine the far fringes of acceptable love. In her tiptoe approach to the central context, she echoes the silence of her main characters, saying more with what she doesn’t say.

Shadow and Soul
Nandita Bose
Amaryllis
2015, pp 220, Rs 225