Devangi Bhatt’s ‘The Many Lives of Pauloma Chattopadhyay’: Transcending the ordinariness of being, and how

Devangi Bhatt’s tenth novel, ‘Vasansi Jirnani’, translated into English as ‘The Many Lives of Pauloma Chattopadhyay’ by Mudra Joshi, is a chant for awakening the collective feminine unconscious with its layered storytelling and feminist introspection.

Pauloma Chattopadhyay is a prototypical middle-aged Bengali housewife, who has everything another woman of her time and place could ask for — a lively home, caring husband, and children — a life characterised by household chores and familial duties. But her audacious desire to transcend this ordinariness turns her life upside down.

This yearning manifests when Pauloma finds herself become a ‘vessel’ of memories, getting transported into the lives of three distinct women across different times and geographies: Aurora Miller, the wife of a Nazi officer in Germany; Princess Rabiya Abdi in the mid-20th-century Egypt; and Monghi, a radical woman in post-Independence rural Gujarat. These four women from different decades of the 1900s, including Pauloma, never cross paths, but their lives are intertwined and their destinies overlapped.

Aurora, a true German patriot, lives the horrors of World War-II first-hand, but is definitely not at the receiving end. Her tale leaves one wide-eyed. Rabiya lives a life of luxury as the second wife of a rich heir in Egypt, but luxury always costs a fortune. Rabiya learns it the hard way as she inspiringly strives for an individual identity. Monghi is a rural Gujarati housewife with a radical spirit. But how much radicality is enough for her to confront her own desires? Who sets the limit?

The questions facing these three women resonate with Pauloma’s own, as she explores facets of herself that her current life has suppressed.

One feels like they’re reading four novels at once, all in less than 200 pages. Character-driven and yet philosophically rich, this novel seems to be set in the world of the female collective unconscious. Bhatt’s use of magical realism gives intersectional feminism a whole new meaning. The solid climax could get you to realise answers to your preconceived questions related to female agency, or make you pursue them even further. Either way, realisations are layered yet profound.