Shanta Gokhale's women write their own rules

Basant can’t bring himself to ask his mother this question, but it pricks his conscience like a thorn. Finally, when Prof. Sawant, a friend’s father, hears about Basant’s dilemma, he tells him, by way of consolation, that “There are silences in every family. It is like a pact…. The silence sets everybody free except the victim."

This statement, at once familiar and devastating in societies around the world, especially in India, sums up the moral compass of the 12 stories in this volume. Gokhale makes the reader privy to words and actions, beliefs and suspicions, that change lives, shatter illusions, and shift the balance of power between individuals. Silences hover above their lives like weapons, threatening to shatter the fragile semblance of normality in which they have carefully cocooned themselves.

If this summary makes the stories sound heavy, nothing could be further from the truth. Even though Gokhale writes about serious subjects—old age, illness and death are recurrent themes—she does it with a lightness that sometimes dissolves into cynical laughter and, at other times, hardens into an unshakeable resilience.

If, with one eye, the author observes the tragic core of the human condition, her other eye twinkles with amused wonder at humanity’s stubborn instinct for survival, even in the face of betrayal and heartbreak. There are flickers of hope even in the messiest of marriages and relationships, without any feel-good optimism. There is always a sobering acknowledgement of being alive in the stories, or at least having once experienced some fleeting moments of happiness, no matter how messily things may end, or have ended.

In The Swimming Pool, the first-person narrator, a young woman, gets talking to a fellow bus passenger during her journey from Mumbai to Pune—a chance encounter that makes her question the peculiar compromises women make in their lives, including herself. As the stranger on the bus puts it, bemoaning her short-lived career as a swimmer, “My friend became the national champion. And I became the national housewife."

She is wry but not resigned. In the autumn of her life, she has enough spark left to make a weekly trip to Pune to access a swimming pool, since the one near her home in Mumbai is out of her reach for a series of banal logistical reasons. The story doesn’t end well for the narrator, or for her boyfriend, but it leaves her with clarity and a resolve to do better for her own sake.

In her Marathi novels, Rita Welinkar (published in 1995, and translated into English by Gokhale) and Tya Varshi (2010, also translated by her as Crowfall), Gokhale has written about women’s lives with a rare acuity, gleaned through feminist rage, pathos and dignity, to create an emotional register that is sombre, yet full of promise. The characters in these stories embody this sentiment, too, leaving the reader grappling with their reactions, unable to make up their mind about right or wrong, love or hate.

If gender is one of Gokhale’s primary levers, the other is caste. In The Quilt (the title seems to allude to Urdu writer Ismat Chughtai’s innuendo-filled story Lihaaf), Mughda is jilted by her lover Vijay because he doesn’t want to oppose his mother’s casteist beliefs. He surrenders to an arranged marriage, only to find himself unable to reconcile with the demands of his new wife, Avantika.

Gokhale gives Mugdha and Avantika agency to be themselves fully, not just because she wants to vindicate men like Vijay of their cowardice, but because she knows women have a superior sense of self-preservation, pragmatism and survival compared to men. Sometimes it takes one woman to ignite the dying ember of courage in another.

The politics of caste, gender and power also plays out masterfully in Silences.

Girija, a Brahmin woman, marries a lower-caste man, Sharad, but her mother-in-law ends up being her fervent supporter. The outcome of their socially risky union assumes a risqué overtone as Sharad proves to be sexually immature, but his Ai, Girija’s mother-in-law, takes charge, fixing the problem in the best way she knows. The solution she comes up with is far from perfect, in fact society will condemn it as perverse, but the outcome fixes the imbalances in the marriage in whatever wobbly way it can.

It takes a certain degree of worldly wisdom and lived experiences, not just bookish knowledge, to write about sensitive matters like caste. In Ears Apart, Gokhale reveals herself as a droll commentator as she offers an elaborate disclaimer for choosing to leave out the surname of her protagonist, Chandrakant—“since a surname is an instant indicator of caste and caste is trouble for someone who has already declared that she does not like the character."

Her dislike, as she clarifies, is of the person and not the social order to which he belongs. Indeed, by the end of the story, Chandrakant cuts a sorry figure as a cis-het man, with all the baggage of patriarchy on his shoulder, struggling to find validation in the devotion of his wife in a world where men like him are fast becoming irrelevant.

The changing norms of masculinity—especially what it means to be a man in a society where women across generations are increasingly making their own choices, silently or vocally—is a theme Gokhale revisits with several variations.

In She Came to Stay, the ironically named heroine Savitri proves to be the obverse of the faithful wife from the epics who followed her husband unto death. The life she creates for herself, and her baby, with her neighbour Ram becomes a paradigm of unconventionality, not easy to step into, but once entered, built on a covenant of trust stronger than any other.

Perhaps the most striking example of this recalibration of marital norms happens in the last story. In The Way Home, Shrikant is an elderly doctor, whose wife of many decades, Usha, is fading away due to dementia. In the last days of her life, Shrikant decides to retire from his practice to spend all his time with her.

Wondering if reminiscing about the past may jog her dwindling memory, he begins to talk of her years as student at Sorbonne, her thesis on Gustave Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary, a romantic entanglement she had with a Russian fellow student, and her eventual return to him, Shrikant, in India.

Has he lived in mute submission like Charles Bovary to Usha’s flamboyant Emma Bovary, Shrikant wonders? Or does all the hurt and anguish get cleansed by a lifetime’s habit of love and devotion? Gokhale’s beautiful ending will stay with the reader long after they have finished this story.