Moving On , livre ebook

Shashi Deshpande

MOVING ON
Contents
About the Author
Also Available in Penguin by Shashi Deshpande
Praise for Moving On
Part 1
Baba s Diary
Mr Bones
Family Stories
Baba s Diary
A Happy Utopia
Following Our Destinies
Baba s Diary
My Mother was a Writer
Property Matters
The Ampersand
In Control
Love and Marriage
Part 2
Baba s Diary
New Directions
Baba s Diary
The Dream
The Sea
Revelations
Baba s Diary
Good Fairies and Bad
The Flowering
Baba s Diary
The Right Word
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
Copyright
PENGUIN BOOKS
MOVING ON
Shashi Deshpande is the author of several novels, most notably The Dark Holds No Terrors ; That Long Silence , which won the Sahitya Akademi award; Small Remedies, Moving On and In the Country of Deceit . She also has four books for children, a collection of essays and several volumes of short stories to her credit. In addition, Deshpande has translated the memoirs of her father, the renowned dramatist and scholar, Shriranga, from Kannada into English, and has just completed translating a contemporary Marathi novel.
Shashi Deshpande and her husband live in Bangalore.
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[Shashi Deshpande s] novels are extraordinary attempts at exploring the essential aloneness of an individual while simultaneously celebrating the amorphous entity called family, which can, by turns be claustrophobic and supportive her special value lies in an uncompromising toughness, in her attempts to do what has never been attempted in English, her insistence on being read on her own terms and a refusal to be packaged according to the demands of the market -Meenakshi Mukherjee in The Hindu
Also Available in Penguin by Shashi Deshpande
In the Country of Deceit
In the Country of Deceit is a subtle, many-layered exploration of the consequences of betrayal on people s lives and relationships.
Devayani chooses to live alone in the small town of Rajnur after her parents death, ignoring the gently voiced disapproval of her family and friends. Teaching English, creating a garden and making friends with Rani, a former actress who settles in the town with her husband and three children, Devayani s life is tranquil, imbued with a hard-won independence. Then she meets Ashok Chinappa, Rajnur s new District Superintendent of Police, and they fall in love despite the fact that Ashok is much older, married, and-as both painfully acknowledge from the very beginning-it is a relationship without a future.
Deshpande s unflinching gaze tracks the suffering, evasions and lies that overtake those caught in the web of subterfuge. There ace no hostages taken in the country of deceit; no victors; only scarred lives. This understated yet compassionate examination of the nature of love, loyalty and deception establishes yet again Deshpande s position as one of India s most formidable writers of fiction.
Praise for Moving On
Riveting ... does not shirk from the big questions ... forces us to accept life in all its stifling details and magnificent unpredictability - India Today
Moving On moves us in unexpected ways - The Hindu
Complex, turbulent, engrossing a saga that traces the epic dimensions of the human mind - Hindustan Times
Part 1
All the stories that have ever been told are the stories of families from Adam and of Eve onward.
Erica Jong, Inventing Mamory
Baba s Diary
1 January 1997
T he first day of the year seems a good day to begin what I have had in my mind for some time. Yet, it is over half an hour since I sat down, pen in hand, notebook before me, and I have only written the date. What is it that inhibits me? I have written before, and with a fair amount of ease. Though, of course, the writing I have done until now has been different; it was always writing for a purpose-papers for journals, a chapter for a textbook, letters, official memos. And what is my purpose now? Merely a need to scribble my thoughts. No, it is more than a need, it is an urge to do something about the chaotic jumble of thoughts and memories that have been troubling me so greatly. Such a vague purpose-if it is a purpose at all. But a sense of limited time urges me on. The awareness that my life is coming to a close makes me want to speak, to share my thoughts with someone. I imagine that this is a normal human emotion, for even my father, an otherwise inarticulate man, made me a confidant in his last days. Unlike my father, I have no one I can talk to. Therefore this book. A poor substitute for a human ear, but then, was I any more responsive than a blank sheet of paper?
I paid little attention to what my father was saying, I let the things he was saying slide over me, leaving me untouched.
So I thought. Now the things he said are coming back to me, they throng my mind and compel me to see my father differently. I thought him a quiet, sedate man; no, let me be honest, I thought him rather dull. But when I recollect his words, when I connect them to other, almost forgotten aspects of him, I see a man who was something of a rebel. He was also, what is even more rare, a man whose actions scrupulously followed his convictions. He was one of the many children of an orthodox and wealthy landed man-wealthy, that is, according to the standards of the time and the place they lived in. His father, like many others of his kind, identified himself as a landlord , as if it was a profession, when what it really meant was living a life of lordly inactivity. The family had enough land to enable them to live a life of ease, to marry their daughters into well-to-do families and to bring home daughters-in-law who came from equally wealthy, if not wealthier families.
My father, however, never fitted in. Even as a boy he was different from his siblings and cousins. The fact that he was the first in the family-and the village-to venture out for his school and college education tells its own story. Perhaps my grandfather (it seems strange to use the word for a man I had never heard of until I was nearly eighteen) imagined that my father s degree, if and when he got one, would enhance the family s prestige and status; he may also have hoped that it would increase the amount of dowry they could expect from a future father-in-law. However, my father returned with not just a BA degree, but something else that threw all the family plans into complete disarray: he came back a Gandhian. Those were the early days of Gandhiji s new movement. Today, it is easy to imagine that its influence was immediate and all-pervasive. But an event-whether a war, a natural disaster, or a change of rulers-means nothing to people unless it touches their lives, even if only tangentially. And for my father s village, isolated like so many were then, Gandhiji and the freedom movement were, I now surmise, only strange and distant cries. Suddenly, here it came into the family, touching their lives, not tangentially, but head on. Impacting on them catastrophically. For, not only had this son of a Brahmin family joined the movement, he had even gone to jail. At that time, and in that place, going to jail was not considered a badge of honour of patriotism. And to his father, his son s going to jail was not only an ignominy, it was treachery. How could he, the son of a man who had been created a Rao Bahadur by the British, go against them! For his mother, there was the additional horror of her son having lived in jail in close contact with people of all castes; she heard there had even been some Muslims among his cell mates! And so, a puja was performed to purify him; in fact, to purify the entire family. My father went through it mainly so as not to displease his mother. Perhaps his acquiescence lulled the family into complacency; the little rebellion, they must have thought, was over. Time to go on to the next thing, the inevitable solution for wayward sons: marriage. Once married, a young man would settle down and forget about his youthful escapades. So would my father, they thought. His involvement with the freedom struggle was, they were sure, only a brief fling. Little did they know. It was not just the freedom struggle that my father had aligned himself with; he had imbibed the entire Gandhian philosophy. What this meant they had no idea until my father made his announcement: yes, he would get married, but it would be to a girl he had chosen himself. This was bad enough, but what came next was infinitely worse; to them it was like the end of the world. For the girl he had chosen was a Harijan girl, an orphan who had been brought up as a daughter by his guru, the man who had initiated him into Gandhism.
Harijan. When he spoke to me, my father used the word coined by Gandhiji. But his father, who had a foul tongue even at the best of times (my father said that abuses slid off his tongue as comfortably as the Vishnu stotra or the Gayatri mantra did), used other words for the girl. My father did not specify the words, but I imagine the angry old man used the most abusive and derogatory ones he could find. Which only strengthened my father s resolve. His father threatened, his mother wept, the family was in turmoil, but my father remained firm. He walked out on them and in a few days he got married. His father then did the only thing he could do-he disowned his son ritually, he disinherited him legally. There was a complete severance between my father and his family; not even his mother could find any excuse for what he had done. My father too excised his past. He not only gave up his family, he even cast off his family name.
When, much later, he spoke of this to me, he said that he gave me the name Badri Narayan, a double-barrelled first name, so that the second part could function as a surname. He had come to know the difficulty of not having one in a place like Bombay. Like I said, I did not pay much attention to the story of his past. I was young, intent on my studies, concentrating on getting admission to a medi