In Namita Gokhale’s ‘Life on Mars’, short stories raise big questions, cast long shadows

We make literature to give shape to our chaos. Writing receives its life from the ability to hold the chaos, which gives to writing its mystery and deeper music. “My quarrel with the short story is precisely that it imposes a false order and symmetry on events…” the narrator in ‘Omens I’ reflects. Namita Gokhale, the queen of exquisite endings, writes with the burden of such knowledge. The reader can see why her stories, despite their remarkable endings, feel strangely inexhaustible.

Quite often, the stories tell themselves as stories. There are frame stories, mirror stories, and floating fragments of reflexivity in which the event of storytelling is kind of staged. In ‘Grand Hotel I’, three sensibilities coexist: a mother’s, the little daughter’s, and the late Nehru’s. In ‘Love’s Mausoleum’, prejudice functions as narrative devices even as it marks the narrator’s personality. Myth and reality evolve into each other and time dissolves the distinction of periods in ‘Hamsadhvani’. Sub-narratives, all with their own narrators (including a stone), run parallel in ‘The Inner Life of Things’, revealing reality’s shapeability as much as unknowability. Yet Gokhale’s formal experimentation doesn’t interfere with a story’s flow. Such is her acquired ease, a virtue that comes only to those who have resolved the complexities of art into an inimitable simplicity.

Subtle humour, sheer hilarity, mordant satire, tragedy — Gokhale plays the full range. And she never loses sight of proportion and balance. Nothing overdone, nothing unfinished. Tone, voice and register change with the inner inevitability of the seasons. The first-person narrator, which can be a mere mask for an incautious writer, becomes a theatre for the play of other subjectivities. Love, loneliness, friendship, loss, grief, regret, remembrance — the lived intensities of experience refract through emotion and intellect. Drawing them all, like an underwater spirit, is the will to unravel the self’s mysteries. The short stories thus raise big questions that cast long shadows, the reader glimpsing time’s entanglements with eternity.

Vatsala, in ‘Omens I’, stumbles upon the constitutive enigma of all mortals in Rishikesh, the city of the god of the senses. The errors of sight yield insight. Sex, Sanskrit and translation waltz in and out of ‘Whatever is Found in the World’, the story that houses the guardian spirit of the book and frames in a way its second section.

Gokhale’s sentences have the lean invisible musculature of ballet dancers’ bodies. The sleek enchantments of austere syntax in ‘Grand Hotel III’ come to nest in the reader’s memory like lightning flashes remembered: “Left behind, he feels left behind.” Elsewhere, you read: “Perhaps, the hungers of the gods cast no shadows.” And: “The dead man’s feet were uncovered, they looked incredibly fragile and mortal.” And this: “A corpse was burning merrily.” The last word as if resurrects the dead person and makes him the amused witness of his once-own body.

When Gokhale recasts the stories from the ‘Mahabharata’, she writes in a style that has the dignity of the classical without a slaving imperial translator’s cliche. The main story in ‘Hamsadhvani’ is told by a female swan. The language has the grace and visionary sweep of a swan in flight. ‘Kunti’ illuminates the regret brooding in Kunti’s heart, that she has betrayed the sun-god. She has failed Durvasa too, the writer quietly hints. The sage had asked Kunti to “carry her courage as proudly as her beauty”. She now realises she was weak and “chose but the empty compulsion of duty”.

Nearly all these stories are told in the first person. Nearly all the narrators are women. None is lost, everyone has agency. Many are bewildered, but that is because they are on a quest. And some have arrived, like Vatsala, Hamsika, Kunti of the ‘Mahabharata’, and Kunti of ‘Whatever is Found in the World’, whose translation project mutates into a “private Mahabharata”. The guilt-laden Kunti of the epic finds deliverance in her modern namesake, who publicly owns her love for Shashank whom the pandemic has cheated of life and love.

Namita Gokhale debuted four decades ago with the unforgettable ‘Paro’. Her new book shows that the light of the inner fire by which she reads life’s obscure scripts has become only clearer and brighter with time.

— The writer is former Professor of English at Punjabi University, Patiala