Longing, belonging in ‘Unpartitioned Time — A Daughter’s Story’ by Malavika Rajkotia

Geetu Vaid

Be in the present moment, says everyone and everything I have read. But how does one disconnect the present from the moments that lead to it? How does one separate one drop from the infinite drops in the ocean, swirling and churning as crests and troughs?

The connection of the present with the past and the role of the past in creating our present and in making all of us who we are is the undercurrent of Malavika Rajkotia’s ‘Unpartitioned Time...’ Recounting her family’s journey from Rajkot in Pakistan to Karnal after the Partition, the author weaves a multi-coloured tapestry with despair, hope, fate, human emotions, family ties and political events in its warp and weft.
Her father Jitinder Singh aka Jindo’s struggle to resettle emotionally and physically in his new home in Karnal, her mother and grandmother’s unrelenting efforts to cling on to the lifestyle that was so brutally wretched away from them and the hopes and aspirations of the next gen daughters handed down a “foreign” legacy are the cornerstones of Malavika’s ‘memoir’.
Karnal, too, is a key protagonist. The languorous, non-glamorous town is a metaphor for “taken-for-granted” home that ambitious kids find too boring to return to and yet too precious to let go of. She takes the reader down the memory lane wherein one sees how a little girl’s impressions of Rajkot House in Karnal, grandmother, father, mother and an extended family crisscross with a mature woman’s assessment of life and existential questions.
The writer, however, loses grip often. Memories do have a way of flashing through mind in a disjointed and random way, and it is an onerous task to pen these down in a coherent as well as an engrossing manner. It is in this that the author slips in this ‘memoir’. Her father is painted as a whimsical, fragile, aloof character. She has done a good job of not hiding his flaws, but falls short in building the soft, genuine, sincere side of his character. So, one ends up reading about Jindo and his pain under a veil of dispassion that the author spins, stopping one from getting attached to this handsome, swashbuckling patriarch. Her efforts to include the communal tensions of the 1980s do not blend in smoothly. At times, the story fails to get the desired lift from the language. Rather than a natural flow of narrative, there are splashes and splutters.
Malavika paints a colourful picture of her family and its tryst with destiny and Independence. Whether that picture has a soul or not is a question the answer to which the readers will have to find on their own.