Namita Gokhale’s The Blind Matriarch mimics the uncertainties of our chaotic lives

Most of us have spent the last two years almost entirely at home (those of us lucky enough to have homes, that is), and we relate to the dimensions of this withdrawal instantly. As the extended family, locked in situ, copes with the crisis and with each other, the unity-of-place premise provides the sort of contained dramatic depth that only a highly accomplished novelist like Gokhale can navigate. And finally, the blindness of the eponymous matriarch, which has kept her limited to the family home for a few decades now, allows the house to become a portal to other times, other seasons, in a deeply organic fashion, allowing the theme of second sight that suffuses the novel to bloom gently.

House number 100, in the C block of what could be any of the leafy colonies of south Delhi, was designed by an architect trained by the famous Lawrence Wilfred Baker, and “mimicked his distinctive style.”

Here, Matangi-Ma, the blind matriarch, occupies the top floor, looked after by her competent maid, Lali. One floor below, her youngest son Satish lives with his wife Ritika and their nine-year-old son Rahul, the boy who Matangi can never say no to.

The floor below is the domain of Matangi’s beloved firstborn Suryaveer, who lives with his adopted son Sameer, now in college, and their dog Dollar. In the words of his sister, Shanta, resident of the ground floor, Surya has, like several other intellectuals of our times, traversed the continuum from “left-wing commitment” to “right-wing obfuscation”, via Marxist-Leninist ideology, vegetarianism, Gandhian thought and anarchy, veering from “conviction to conviction in a sequence of seemingly reasoned responses.” Surya and Sameer’s home is a world apart from Satish and Ritika’s. But the pandemic brings them to a truth that neither has confronted all these years.

Shanta, meanwhile, is single, sensible, and socially conscious. She balances her NGO work with looking after her cat Trump and playing Goddess Annapurna to the entire clan, sending customised goodies to each floor with the help of Munni, her maid. If her manic quarantine cooking – baked gujiyas with organic flour and suji and covered with silver virk – reveals a deep loneliness, Shanta is self-aware enough to recognise it.

Except for the most radical of readers, who reject verisimilitude altogether, most of us who love the novel, invariably turn to it for its lifelikeness. I don’t mean that the novelist’s art is imitative – in fact, the opposite. Not all of us may confess to it; but the pleasure of a well-told story arises from the admittedly counter-intuitive fact that it is, in fact, the perfect if upside-down stand-in for life, which is messy, and therefore impossible to tell (or live) “well”. It is the internal logic that flows within the pages of a novel that teaches us to impose a narrative logic upon the tumult of life, that thing we essentially experience in scraps and shreds and puzzle-pieces. All this to say: the pandemic is still unfolding, and we are still coping – individually, socially, globally, economically, philosophically – with the debris left in the wake of the surges. While extraordinary reporting from all over the world has kept us in news, it is fiction we must turn to for sense.

But even within that space, The Blind Matriarch is a rare book. When we readers suspend our disbelief willingly and enter a fictive space, we don’t entirely forget the provenance of our pleasure. We ask ourselves every now and then: “Oh, is that an autobiographical element from the author’s life?” In that moment, we dismantle our own illusion by highlighting the fictiveness of it all – writers borrow from their own life, even when they are inventing the rest of it. Somehow though, when I began reading Matriarch, all the self-aware meta-questions I have been trained to ask, completely slipped out of my head, and I committed to the novel’s world in a way I hadn’t in a long time. It was almost as though The Blind Matriarch had arrived into this world fully formed, its lambent sentences and insightful characterisation all secondary to the unique force of the author’s raison d’etre: the telling of stories and the need for them to be told.

(Devapriya Roy is a Delhi-based author, most recently of Friends from College.)