There is something deceptively ordinary about the world that Shanta Gokhale creates. People marry, separate, grow old, fall ill, remember their parents, carry family secrets, sit beside dying spouses, meet strangers and sometimes discover rather late what they have been doing with their lives. None of these stories claim to be extraordinary. And yet, by the time one finishes these twelve stories, one realizes how much Gokhale has managed to uncover from within the everyday.
People and families in these stories provide affection and companionship. But their relationships also carry caste, patriarchy, expectations (often gendered ones), compromises and silences. They hurt one another too often. Not always because they are cruel but because they lack courage, are slaves of convention, or simply because they understand too late. For instance, in ‘The Quilt’, Mugdha is betrayed by her Brahmin lover, Vijay, who gives in to his caste-conscious mother and marries Avantika, the woman she has chosen. Heartbroken, Mugdha still attends their wedding reception and gifts them a handmade quilt—the one she had stitched for her own imagined wedding night with Vijay. Vijay discovers that Avantika has another man in her life. For Avantika, their marriage can simply provide a respectable cover under which both can continue with their parallel lives. A shaken Vijay returns to Mugdha, hoping to revive their relationship, only to find that she has moved on. Gokhale avoids easy heroes and villains, but there is a mischievous sense of justice here.
‘Silences’ explores family secrets, a pact between a matriarch and her daughter-in-law, and the emotional cost of truths left unspoken. At its centre is a marriage that is never consummated. When no child is born, the matriarch arranges for another man to father a son with her daughter-in-law. The secret remains buried within the family. The title is noteworthy. We, especially the academics, are accustomed to treating silence as something that must be broken. Gokhale is less certain. Families often survive because certain things are never spoken about. The story therefore leaves us with a difficult question: is speaking always liberating, and is silence always cowardice? Gokhale wisely refuses an answer.
Some of the finest moments in the collection occur when Gokhale places two people together and simply allows them to talk. ‘The Swimming Pool’ works through such an encounter. Two women meet on a Mumbai-Pune bus. One talks about her life and, in listening to her, the other begins to see her own life differently. It is a wonderfully simple premise. There are no grand revelations. Gokhale reminds us that sometimes a stranger encountered during a journey can make us see things which those closest to us have never been able to say. In ‘Daybreak Over the Gandaki’, the protagonist, unable to cope with the death of his wife, attempts to take his own life by jumping from the Sea Link. An unknown Muslim cab driver intervenes, and what begins as a chance encounter slowly grows into an unlikely friendship. To reiterate, this is the world Gokhale makes us encounter throughout the anthology: ordinary people caught in difficult situations, trying to make sense of themselves and of one another. Caste and gender remain present, as do desire, power and the pressures of contemporary life. The stories deal with difficult subjects—shame, illness, ageing, abandonment and death. But they are never weighed down by them. Humour and tenderness keep breaking through, as does Gokhale’s sympathy for the contradictions that make people behave as they do.
The title story, ‘The Way Home’, is perhaps where many of these concerns come together most movingly. Shrikant, a doctor, cares for his wife Usha as she gradually loses her memory and approaches death. As her connection with the present fades, Shrikant begins having one-sided conversations with her, travelling through their shared past. He remembers their life together, their marriage, and the person Usha once was. Yet his tenderness in the present cannot erase the history of their marriage. The story forces the reader to ponder that care may be genuine and still arrive late, and that love may survive even where attentiveness has failed. The long marital life, the story suggests, is sustained not by love alone, but also by the strange persistence of two people who have spent a lifetime together without ever fully understanding each other.
What exactly is ‘home’? In these stories, home may be a marriage, a family, a memory, another person, or even a long-kept secret. Returning home, therefore, does not always mean returning to comfort. Sometimes one must return to an old wound; sometimes one must recognize a truth that has been waiting for years. For many of Gokhale’s characters, it is indeed a long way home: they arrive, often very late, at an understanding of themselves and of those others with whom they have shared their lives. In other words, Gokhale lays bare the untidy business of living. Perhaps that is why ‘home’ is such an appropriate word for this collection. Home is where most of these complications begin. But reaching it can take a lifetime. The way home, Gokhale quietly reminds us, is often the longest journey we make.
Gokhale’s prose suits this world perfectly. It is remarkably uncluttered. This refusal to distribute moral certificates is one of the collection’s strengths. If there is a difficulty with The Way Home, it comes from the very quality that makes these stories beautiful. These are quiet stories. Readers accustomed to strong plots and dramatic endings may occasionally wonder where the stories have taken them.
Umesh Kumar teaches English at Banaras Hindu University, Uttar Pradesh. He is currently a Visiting Scholar (Translation Studies) at the University of Edinburgh.