A MATTER OF TIME
By SHASHI DESHPANDE
New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1999. 269 pages, $21.95
Nirmala Bhat
This inexplicable act sets in motion a process of change, a fulfilment of destiny, and an unraveling of age-old secrets harbored by the extended family. Sumi returns to the Big House with her three daughters, just as her mother, Kalyani, had done with her own daughters years before. The Big House, the only enduring witness of the ever-turning wheel of karma, is always ready to enfold the "victims" in its cavernous bosom. In its gardens, the bougainvillaea clings "passionately to its neighbour, the akash mallige" plant, and the branches of mango trees are so tangled they appear to "have closed ranks to protect the walls of the house."
Although Deshpande's description of the gardens of the Big House is sensuous, she shies away from letting her characters examine their intimate relationships with each other. They are more comfortable solving psychological conundrums than unraveling the sexual tensions that lurk, underscoring the taboo nature of the subjects of sex and the sensuous in modern Indian society.
A Matter of Time, instead, dwells on the seeming vagaries of destiny, or time. Melodrama often interrupts the commonplace, and Deshpande's heroines find ways to support each other in the shifting sands of pain and pleasure, and to reestablish their dominance over domestic terrain. They don't remain victims, despite their unquestioning acceptance of male flight from the family. And the men are transformed betrayers into objects of self-pity, trapped in a morass of human flaws and psychic distress.
Most of Deshpande's heroines, even as they overcome familial obstacles, rarely stray out of the domestic arena. For a while, Sumi seems to be succeeding in gaining a small degree of personal independence. She starts teaching, writes a play that earns plaudits, and even learns to drive a scooter, in a land where few women are seen in the driver's seat. But how far will Sumi's destiny allow her to go? And is it just a matter of time before another generation of women repeats the family history?
Deshpande, one of India's critically acclaimed, award-winning writers, deftly lets her characters alternate between the first-person voice when delineating the present, to the third-person narrative when outlining the past. The story is enriched by mythological analogies and words and idioms from the Indian languages of Kannada and Marathi.
Women's lives in India, their problems, and the domestic sphere have been consuming themes of most of Deshpande's oeuvre, which consists of three other novels, five collections of short stories, and four children's books. A Matter of Time, first published in India in 1996, reemphasizes Deshpande's passion for these issues as she weaves a simple, ingenuous tale of the contradictions of male ambivalence and cruelty, female stoicism and shame, and human desire and desertion.
Nirmala Bhat,formerly a freelance writer in Bombay, is a copy desk editor at the Seattle Times.