Early in Shashi Deshpande’s new novel Strangers to Ourselves, two women meet for the first time at a music concert. One is a doctor, the daughter of a renowned playwright. The other is her boss’s wife, a fan of her father’s plays, who had acted in one of them in college. She tells the doctor: “I loved theatre, but when I got married I had to let everything go.”
This is an odd thing for a woman to say to someone she has just met. In today’s world it would probably be considered oversharing: a naked admission of loss, a private vulnerability to be shared only after years of friendship if at all.
Soon after this conversation, Aparna Dandekar, the doctor and protagonist of the novel, leaves the event. Outside, she wonders how she will get home. Not knowing the bus routes in the area, she hopes for a taxi. At this point Hari Pandit, the vocalist who performed at the event, sees her. This is a wealthy neighbourhood, he says, which means few buses ply here. He offers to drop her home in his car.
In a different mode In a different novel, in a Bollywood version of opt-out feminism, the woman would probably drive her own car or use an app to summon a taxi. Deshpande’s characters, bless them, usually walk, take rickshaws or use other public transport.
If Deshpande’s fiction reflects some of the gains of Indian feminism, it also dwells on the realities of what is still a patriarchal society. One woman has had to give up the stage after marriage. Another, a single woman and independent professional, depends upon public transport that can be uncertain. It is no accident that the creative individuals who achieve a measure of success in the novel — the playwright and the classical singer — are men. The stories of creative sacrifice — the woman who gives up her love of theatre once she marries, the cousin who has given up dance in order to care for her ailing husband — are of women.
In Aparna’s introspective narrative, her parents remain a presence in her life though they have passed on. If Gajanan “Gavi” Dandekar was the great playwright, his wife Sulu was the one who had supported him throughout. In a vivid reflection, Aparna describes how her mother had literally created for her father a room of his own, buying the furniture with her money as a bank employee, laboriously copying out his plays in her own handwriting at night, rushing to perform all her household chores every morning before dropping her daughter to school and then proceeding to work on her scooter. How much of creative work should be credited to the inspiration of an artist, we wonder, and how much to the unfailing support and care provided by such a partner? More importantly, how much of what is regarded as ‘productive’ and remunerative labour would even be possible without the unpaid care work performed by women?
An enduring theme of Deshpande’s fiction is the emotional labour performed by women: reaching out, compassion, reconciliation. In a patriarchal society, these become the women’s strategies for resistance and coping: in love, of course; but also in rebellion; in strength and caring; in sisterhood; in long and enduring friendships; in reflective journals; and in creative expression. In the affirming world of her novels, women support each other in finding whatever it is that gives joy and meaning to their lives — including the act of turning away from oppression. And that is how they manage to have what they have, by way of love and friendship and solidarity, even in an unequal world.
The pram in the hallway A key preoccupation of Deshpande’s fiction is the problem of motherhood and art, which Cyril Connolly described as the pram in the hallway. While the experience of being a mother opens up a whole new dimension of emotional experience, it also involves time, monotony and distraction — all of which are at variance with the long hours of solitude needed for creative expression. Deshpande herself has spoken in interviews about how she started writing seriously only when her children were older. Her first novel was published in 1980. On top of it all, women writers who articulate these all-too-real concerns invite dismissive comments like Naipaul’s, charging them with banality.
Deshpande’s fiction reflects both the achievements and the limitations of the practical, get-on-with-it feminism of our mothers’ generation. While today stay-at-home motherhood is dismissed easily as ‘all about choices’, her nonjudgmental, attentive gaze includes the possibility that such a ‘choice’ could be stifling to some and empowering to others.
And yet, in the interesting but insular little upper middle-class world of private baithaks and privilege in which this new novel is set, much is taken for granted. One would have liked to see some of the diversity of Mumbai outside the boundaries of this world. One would also have liked to know more about the inner lives of the women at the margins and intersections of this upper-class milieu. I think of Kusum, the cook who had made it possible for Anandi, Aparna’s aunt Taimavshi, to focus on serious issues ‘beyond recipes’ in her radio show. Saguna, the domestic helper and carer to Aparna’s dying patient Jyoti. The unnamed part-time helpers Saguna arranges for Aparna in her new house: the girl who cleans, the woman who cooks four times a week. It is the low-paid, part-time, often precarious labour of these women that makes it possible for privileged women to ‘have it all’ or indeed any of it at all. Theirs is also care work, and deserving of care.
Uma Mahadevan Dasgupta is an IAS officer and is currently based in Bengaluru.
