Alternative Realities In Post-millennial India

What happens when words begin to constitute worlds that are far more desirable than the ones that we find ourselves in everyday? When the overwhelming presence of social media and digital platforms virtually threatens to create an alternative reality that seems both promising as well as indisputable? These are some of the most pressing issues of post-millennial India, that plague the teenage character of Nasira Sharma’s latest novel, Shabd Pakheru (Winged Words). The narrative explores the theme of cyber crime that the relatively younger, inexperienced, and therefore gullible members of a family may become a victim of. It describes the daily hardships of Suryakant, a middle-class government employee, his ailing wife Sadhna, and their two daughters, Manisha and Shailja. The focal point of action is Delhi the capital city even though one of the most palpable narrative crises is precipitated by the fact that the paterfamilias is transferred to Jaipur.

The author rightly describes these four characters as people struggling to climb out of the dark well that their home is symptomatic of. Suryakant is filled with despair for the major part of the novel since in his persistent efforts to take care of his wife and be dutiful toward her, he literally stops loving her. Consequently, Sadhna’s will to live deserts her every now and then; a predicament that is made worse by the fact she cannot speak anymore. The sense of silence that characterizes the everyday conversations of the family is quite deafening and pervasive. The elder daughter Manisha is an IAS aspirant while the younger one is a born rebel. She simply does not relate intimately with any of her family members even though she calls her father her ‘best friend’. For an ‘Internet Baby’ like her, ‘Google’ becomes ‘Grandpa’ while the virtual world appears much more convincing and preferable when compared with the isolated lives that people around her are immersed in.

Things however take a dramatic turn, when Shailja starts flirting with an older man Frank John on Facebook. After his melodramatic enunciations of his feelings toward her (something that Shailja almost finds nauseatingly Keatsian), Frank wants Shailja to rescue him from the Mumbai airport since he has been unfortunately detained and his two suitcases that are full of dollars and pounds have also been taken into custody. Seeing the situation spiral out of control, Shailja goes silent and withdraws into herself. However, her fascination with Facebook friends is so pronounced and excessive that she soon starts envisioning a bright future for herself as the future wife of Chris Allen, a so-called American soldier who first reveals that he is serving in Afghanistan but is now to be transferred to Pakistan. And yet, when push comes to shove, he invites her to the Kuala Lumpur airport in order to give her the various gifts that he had promised her. It is only when her friend’s uncle Naim chacha decisively intervenes that Shailja gets a reality check, and the situation is successfully diffused.