Hearing the silence in the cracks...

Much like the young girl in Alice Sebold’s book ‘The Lovely Bones’ who observes her family after she passes, the mother in this book does the same. On her untimely death, she leaves behind her husband and two daughters, yet she is very much around — an unseen, unfelt presence. The nature of loss and grief and how it impacts people in different ways is the emotion explored here but the unsentimental tone and the elements of satire present in the telling prevent it from getting too heavy.

The mother now resides in the storeroom, where the detritus of her past is stored — silk sarees, albums, old letters, baby clothes and lots more. Surrounded by the objects of her past, she keeps an eye on the goings-on in the present, especially on her daughters, called only by their nicknames Wailer and Toon throughout.

The book is structured so that it alternates between giving us the mother’s perspective in the first person and that of her elder daughter’s, in the third. When we see things from the mother’s point of view, we are privy to a whole lot of her memories. Nostalgia is invoked as she reminisces about her life in the Delhi of the seventies and eighties; a cup of Assam tea sipped on her verandah; the night-blooming jasmine in the garden; foods eaten; places visited. This mosaic of memories gives shape to the contours of the past. In the present, she can only contemplate the difficult dynamics playing out between her girls without being able to interfere in any way.

The Wailer’s part of the story has a lot to do with her workplace. She is one of the oldest employees at the advertising agency where she works, struggling to adapt to a different work environment. The author casts a droll eye on the working conditions of an advertising agency in these sections, though at times an info dump appears here and there.

The loss of her mother at 15 has turned the Wailer into a withdrawn young woman, a lonely figure with no real friends or a boyfriend. Her way of processing her grief has her weeping copious tears in the storeroom while being inordinately attached to the remnants of her mother’s past that lie in that room.

This is the Delhi of 2020, a more febrile place than the mother’s warm recollections of it. Protests over the Citizenship Bill have broken out. Events play out in such a way that the Wailer gets swept into things and is impacted by another loss. However, life goes on and the Wailer turns out to be more resilient than before.

This story is astute in its delineation of the kind of distances that can grow between family members. The author skilfully portrays how a small crack in a relationship can widen into a chasm that seems impossible to bridge. The silence that crops up between the sisters becomes deafening. The mother observes and rails, but her death has created a void that only serves to accentuate the divide between the siblings.

One wishes though, that the character of Toon was fleshed out a bit more. With the Wailer, we get to know both her emotional state and the way she thinks. Not so with Toon. She is drawn as a bright student and smart career woman. We see what is happening in her life, like her wanting to marry the boss of the start-up she is working for, but we don’t get the full picture, of why she wants to get married or how her strained relationship with her sister is affecting her. Or even her change of heart at the end.

This is a minor quibble though, for a book that is both thought-provoking and entertaining. The story ends with a ray of hope for both the Wailer in her personal life and the relationship between the sisters. Which only affirms the adage that 'this too shall pass'. Even if the 'this' is the death of a loved one.