Such a Short Silence

Shashi Deshpande began, three decades ago, as a writer of short stories. From her earliest writing, to the complex and exceptionally fine Small Remedies, her latest novel, it is interesting to see how she has evolved as a writer.

These stories, written at different points of time, are not uniform in their quality. The best, like “The Day Bapu Died” and “Independence Day”, have a slanting loveliness, and a sense of a world throbbing in there within the pages — qualities that come from the many threads that they draw into the tale. My favourite in this collection, “The Stone Women”, which Deshpande tells us took over a decade to write, is as polished and perfected as the stone architecture that it describes. In these stories, feelings are uppermost, and the writer is not afraid to make demands on her readers as she loops her story around in time and space, in memory, with ellipsis and elegance.

In other stories, like “Can You Hear Silence?” and “The Awakening”, one gets the feeling that there is a far more nuanced tale waiting inside there to be told.

Is Deshpande a feminist writer, a third world writer? How tidily the phrases come to mind! It is true that there are certain motifs, and some characters who appear and reappear in these stories, in one form or the other: the gentle, unassertive father; the tough, unlikeable, unhappy mother; the straitened circumstances; the claustrophobias of marriage; the unthinking self-absorption of husbands. The pulls of passion; the many needs of women, and the many demands on them. The cry — the many cries — of men and women, for freedom. The sense of opportunities lost.

But these motifs and themes are not the domain only of the third world writer, or the Indian woman writer. For Deshpande is writing about the ways in which marriages happen, families are built, and childhoods are lived. The generation she writes of, longing and yearning for things they cannot have, may seem to be a generation that has had its day. But it is also a generation that has left its troubles and yearnings with us. We, too, long for the same things — love, and meaning, and space to grow. This is called the human condition.

A few things remain. A welcome collection, but could these stories not have been dated, with their publication details? We are told that they have appeared in publications as varied as Eve’s Weekly, The Illustrated Weekly, The Telegraph, J.S., and the Statesman Festival issues. One is curious: which story has appeared where, and when?

Finally, does the collection remind us that Deshpande is as much a writer of short stories as of the novel? Yes and no. She is a writer who has written several short stories, some of them excellent. Yet, I think, her real gift is for the novel. She needs space and pages to stretch her story, bring out its music, like the exposition of a raga in all its loveliness. And so I am waiting for her next novel. I hope there will be one soon.