Things Left Unsaid | Lifestyle News, The Indian Express

Things Left Unsaid | Lifestyle News, The Indian Express

Updated: January 5, 2019 2:17:08 am

Things Left Unsaid

Shashi Deshpande’s memoir is an eloquent account, but if only it plumbed the depths more.

Girish Karnad, Mahasweta Devi, Chandrashekhara Kambara, MT Vasudevan Nair, Vaikom Muhammad Basheer and many more were on stage well before Salman Rushdie made a spectacular entry.

Written by Kavery Nambisan

Listen to Me
By Shashi Deshpande
Context
380 pages; Rs 699

It was the early 1980s when, along with Anita Desai, Kamala Das and Nayantara Sahgal, Shashi Deshpande began to establish herself as an Indian woman writing in English. I first heard of her in the late Eighties when That Long Silence was published in England by Virago Press. Fiction writing in India — in English and other languages — was robust and getting better nourished by the year. Girish Karnad, Mahasweta Devi, Chandrashekhara Kambara, MT Vasudevan Nair, Vaikom Muhammad Basheer and many more were on stage well before Salman Rushdie made a spectacular entry. The best among those writers have lasted the decades. I had begun dreaming of writing a novel myself. How fertile a soil I was digging and how much deeper I could go hunting for treasures! Courageous, comic, irreverent, mystical or heartbreakingly grounded, a wide range of fiction summated the Indian sensibilities of the times. Deshpande’s work must be viewed in the context of the milieu which made her, a law graduate and mother of two young boys, put ink to paper and write stories.

She wrote novels, children’s books, murder mysteries and essays; she won the Sahitya Akademi award and was published abroad. The earnest courage of her voice, particularly in her essays and lectures, is significant. She was undaunted by the dazzling talents of her peers, or the fact that her own life experiences might fail to ignite her muse. She decided to try her hand at writing, while managing a house and family. A balancing act, as she calls it: “It helped that writing crept slowly into my life, millimetre by millimetre, making space for itself in my day, space that it never gave up, space that it would not share with anyone or anything. Deviously, insidiously, it inserted itself into whatever gaps it could find in my day, stretching its allotted hours, whenever possible… Now I needed only self-discipline, all the self-discipline I was capable of. Strictly dividing time between writing and household chores, giving up all else, writing at regular times, at regular hours, sitting at my table even if I could not write a word — this was a battle I won.”

In her descriptions of childhood, Deshpande brings alive her life as a little girl born into a middle-class family in the town of Dharwad, Karnataka. It is filled with the sketches and observations of a child, some amusing, others grim. During her adolescence, her father, who was in the teaching profession, suffered a series of setbacks at work. The family withstood hardships for years. A financial decline during one’s teen years can be painful. Deshpande writes with unsentimental directness about her father being unable to pay the school fees of his three children; the clothes passed on by relatives anxious to help; the scene of her father being shouted at by the landlord for not paying the rent. And she remembers the acute distress of her father, as much as her own.