Reclaiming Tranquility

Githa Hariharan’s latest novel is her most compellingly simple book, says AAMER HUSSEIN

Photo: AP

MALA AND Sara are mother and daughter, both progressive, secular, modern Indian women. But between them there's a dividing line — Sara’s surname, which she inherited from her late father Asif Zaidi, along with a political legacy she seems to find harder and harder to carry in an India where just being Indian is increasingly problematic.

In her father’s family, where cultural belonging is perceived as a mere series of disposable gestures, Sara has received no sense of otherness to bind her to an imagined community. Her friends and her partner are impervious to religious ties, but that, the narrative implies, is easier when you don't belong to a ‘difficult’ minority. In contrast, Sara’s brother Samar has opted out of the family drama by choosing a Muslim persona to match his name, in the belief that he will always be seen as a Muslim because Indianness is selective, anyway.

While Mala retreats further into memories — of her conservative Tamil Brahmin family, her larger-than-life liberated Muslim in-laws, and above all her idealistic painter husband, Sara struggles with notions of commitment, until she is exposed to the stories of the women who were victims of rape, loss and violence in Gujarat. She is particularly drawn to Yasmin, a young, brave and highly intelligent young woman who also happens to be a devout Muslim. The women become friends, and it’s in assuring a secure future for her young protegee that Sara might reconcile her conflicts and escape moral stasis.

FUGITIVE HISTORIES Githa Hariharan Penguin Books 256 pp; Rs 450

To Githa Hariharan’s great credit, she looks unflinchingly into the ugliness of sectarian destructiveness and strife with an almost photographically realistic lens, but always remains within earshot of her protagonists’ small, personal voices; Yasmin’s traumas are observed rather than directly experienced, as she is one of the survivors, and though there are harrowing scenes in the book, Hariharan scrupulously avoids both polemic and voyeurism.

Fugitive Histories is as subtly constructed as a Chinese box, concealing narratives within narratives and yet remaining blindingly clear in its exposition of public and private realities. Perceptive about loss and mourning — dead dreams, as well as people, haunt all its major characters — it is also sensuous, particularly in its depiction of women in their partners’ arms or alone with their needs and deprivation. Hariharan draws on an array of images from the ouevre of Mala's artist husband to add emotional texture. She is excellent at portraying many shades of difference, not only between communities — her observations of liberal Muslims at home, struggling with taboos, are affectionately funny — but in shades of belief (or its absence).

Like all Hariharan’s novels, this one, too, works on many levels, but the familiar dimension of myth and fable is absent, as if the certainty of traditional narrative structures has receded from us along with the idealism of youth. Complex though it is, Fugitive Histories is Hariharan’s most compellingly simple book, and her most interior, signalling that only in the syntax of memory can tranquillity’s vocabulary be reclaimed, and that unconditional love, free of the torments of desire, is our sole bastion against the grating discourse of sectarian political cant and its constant deployment of a nihilistic present tense. While the young — Sara and Yasmin — move into the beleaguered future with their very different armours of ideals, it is left to Mala to let go of the past, encapsulated in her husband's paintbrush, in an epiphanic scene by a laburnum and a pond that is possibly the most beautiful Hariharan has ever written:

“...it’s dark, she’s among the shadows of a commonplace park in an ugly DDA colony. But the stars shine on Mala as if they still have enough to say.”