Paro: Dreams of Passion — Namita Gokhale’s daring debut still burns, still bristles, still bewitches

Her résumé sparkles with national honours:

– Sahitya Akademi Award (2021)

– First Centenary National Award for Literature (2017)

– Nilimarani Sahitya Samman (2023)

And the distinction of having built, alongside William Dalrymple, the literary behemoth that is the Jaipur Literature Festival.

But those of us who have sat with her under Maldivian skies — watching waves soften into starlight, listening to her laugh at the small wonders others overlook — know that Namita’s brilliance is quiet, almost shy. She carries her intelligence lightly, her influence humbly, her heart wide open.

That quietness is the perfect camouflage for the thunder she unleashed in Paro.

A novel ahead of its time

Paro: Dreams of Passion begins not with Paro herself, but with Priya — the dutiful, self-effacing narrator whose life blooms and breaks in the shadow of the incandescent Paro.

The book opens with a jolt — a benediction from the cremation ground, no less:

“And with that benediction from the stranger’s pyre, I end this book.”

It is a novel already aware of its own ending: tragic, absurd, inevitable.

From there unfolds a tale of lust, longing, social climbing, sexual power plays, political entanglements, marital breakdowns, emotional betrayals, and urban Indian hypocrisies rendered with a razor dipped in rosewater.

When Paro first sweeps into Priya’s office — “tall, glittering, balancing on the highest stiletto heels I had ever seen” — she is not an object of admiration but an object of obsession. Her diamond-encrusted presence overwhelms the typing pool. Her confidence scorches the room. She walks through the corridors of middle-class morality like a goddess unaware of the gossip that follows her.

Or perhaps too aware, and indifferent.

What Namita dared to do

Namita Gokhale has just come out with her 25th book Life on Mars: Collected Stories. (Express Photo)

In 1984, Indian English fiction had not produced a book like this. A woman writing candidly — even comically — about:

• desire and dissatisfaction

• masturbation, adultery, and fantasy

• the politics of beauty

• the barter economy of sex

• patriarchal hypocrisy packaged as virtue

• and the theatre of Indian society, where everything is permitted and nothing is admitted

Through Priya’s feigned innocence and Paro’s ferocious self-possession, Gokhale created a dual portrait of the Indian feminine psyche — one repressed, the other reckless; one moralised, the other mythologised; both ultimately punished.

And she wrote it with such comic precision, such narrative audacity, such emotional intelligence, that the novel still feels fresh, still feels dangerous.

Here is a pull-quote any editor would highlight:

“Gokhale wrote what Indian society preferred to hide, and she wrote it with laughter — the sharpest weapon a woman can wield.”

The language of laughter and laceration

Gokhale’s prose in Paro is both satirical and sorrowful. It prances and pierces. It mocks and mourns. The sentences move with a dancer’s grace and a surgeon’s accuracy.

Take this moment, when Paro casually destabilises Priya:

“Aren’t you the girl who wore the red flower in her hair that day?”

A single line, and Priya is undone. A class barrier is erected. A social hierarchy is enforced. A friendship is foreclosed before it begins.

Or this, from Priya’s own confession:

“I was possessed. I became Paro.”

The novel understands something essential: many Indian women live two lives — the one they perform, and the one they dream.

A gallery of men — all exposed

Men in this novel come off spectacularly badly — and rightly so.

B.R., the boss-turned-libertine, dripping with cologne and charm.

Suresh, the bumbling husband who oscillates between cruelty and compromise.

Lenin, the pseudo-intellectual Marxist lover, perpetually drunk on ideology and desire.

Bucky, the princely cricketer with protruding teeth and an overfed ego.

Mishra, the sinister minister who strokes Paro’s hand as if he owns her soul.

But Gokhale’s gift is this: none of them is merely villainous. They are weak, needy, insecure — men terrified of women who see them clearly.

This, too, is a pull-quote worth framing:

“In Gokhale’s world, men are never monsters — they are mirrors reflecting a society that fears female freedom.”

Priya and Paro: A Feminine Dyad for the Ages

Priya is the dutiful Indian woman:

• secretarial, sacrificial, striving

• wanting to belong

• wanting to be wanted

• wanting, above all, not to be left behind

Paro is her opposite:

• lavish, lawless, luminous

• a woman who treats marriage as a suggestion, not a sentence

• who collects lovers as casually as others collect sarees

• who refuses to apologise for her body or her ambition

Together, they form a single psyche split in two — the shadow self and the social self, the rebel and the conformist, the woman India fears and the woman India forces.

Their relationship is the heartbeat of the book: love disguised as envy, envy disguised as worship.

The tragicomedy of Indian modernity

What makes Paro remarkable is not its sex — though its sexual candour was revolutionary — but its sociology.

Gokhale paints 1970s and ’80s Bombay and Delhi with wicked affection:

the cocktail parties, the khadi-clad hypocrites, the wives who smoked Virginia Slims and whispered scandals behind chiffon pallavs, the bureaucrats lusting behind Gandhi topis, the journalists quoting Marx while fantasising about models.

It is no surprise that Namita would go on to become one of India’s great cultural curators. Her eye for human theatre was already fully formed in this debut.

The ending still shocks

Even knowing it is coming, the end lands with a thud — brutal, sudden, absurdly poetic. Paro dies not as a goddess but as a woman undone by the world that fed on her. Priya’s sari catching fire from a stray ember at the cremation ground — a detail from the final page — is a stroke of genius.

It collapses identity.

It merges destinies.

It marks Priya forever.

As the final sentences declare:

“With that benediction from the stranger’s pyre, I end this book.”

A benediction.

A burning.

A beginning masquerading as an ending.

Why Paro Still Matters — Especially Now

Because women’s autonomy is still policed.

Because the moral police have only changed costumes, not convictions.

Because sexuality remains a battlefield.

Because class mobility still comes at a cost.

Because audacity still belongs to the few.

Because literature still needs women who write without flinching.

Today, when Indian fiction often chooses safety or softness, Paro feels like a challenge — a reminder that art must disturb in order to endure.

Here is my final pull-quote:

“Forty years later, Paro remains what most novels never become — a cult, a caution, a confession, and a classic.”

The aftertaste

Reading Paro again after four decades feels like returning to a party where the laughter has not dimmed, the lipstick still gleams, and the heartache lingers like spilled perfume.

What Namita Gokhale achieved at barely 28 — with wit sharp as kohl, with insight deep as a wound — is extraordinary.

She cracked open a door through which countless writers now walk freely.

Paro is not just a novel; it is a landmark.

A rebellion bound in paper.

A womanhood unmasked.

A mirror we are still learning to face.

And as India’s literary landscape celebrates the living legend that is Namita Gokhale — her awards, her anthologies, her festivals, her Himalayan meditations — it is fitting that we return to the book that started it all.

A book that still burns.

A book that still breathes.

A book that still dares.