Book: THE WAY HOME
Author: Shanta Gokhale
Published by: Speaking Tiger
Price: Rs 499
Shanta Gokhale’s anthology of short fiction unfolds lucidly, drawing its power from a quiet ability to observe everyday lives confronted with such conflicts as love, truth, belonging, loyalty and so on. Gokhale, who has donned many hats in her illustrious career — writer, translator, journalist and critic — humanises her protagonists, ordinary men and mostly women, broken yet hopeful, wronged or adored, ailing and healing, irreverent or reticent — across 12 stories as her authorial gaze observes them intimately, without judging, as they navigate the curveballs of life to take charge of their destinies.
The stories revolve around familiar spaces — living rooms, state buses, hospital corridors, old age homes — with the city of Mumbai serving as the principal backdrop. Gokhale is fascinated by moments when ordinary people confront extraordinary truths. “The Swimming Pool”, for instance, portrays a woman on a bus ride from Mumbai to Pune whose chance conversation with a younger woman rejuvenates her love for swimming while helping the latter extricate herself from a meaningless relationship.
The stories are mostly told by an omniscient narrator, except in a few instances where Gokhale trusts her protagonists to drive the narrative from their own perspectives. “Ears Apart”, the story where Gokhale experiments with the narrative technique the most, is also the most personal. It begins with an internal debate that a writer has — whether or not to furnish full details about her characters to make them realistic. The story, which chronicles the meek Chandrakanth having an encounter with his unrequited love years later, sees Gokhale breaking the wall between reader and writer to enquire, rhetorically, whether the author ought to sympathise with her protagonist (“But how can I leave a character for whom I have already confessed a lack of whole-hearted sympathy.”).
What is especially commendable is Gokhale’s refusal to moralise or to offer tidy closure. Power dynamics pertaining to gender, caste and class surface — as in “The Quilt”, where caste pressure shapes the future of a relationship — and are examined but they are treated with nuance, as part of a lived life rather than as prickly grievances. The writing is nimble: sombre themes — old age, illness, death, memory loss — are handled with empathy, avoiding overt sentimentalism.
One of Gokhale’s strengths lies in her understanding of silence. Her characters are rarely verbose. In “Silences”, for example, a dying father entrusts his son with solving the mystery of why his wife left. The son, unable to find the answer, reconciles with her mother’s cruel but justified silence on the matter. “There are silences in every family” — the words spoken by his friend’s father become the subterranean theme guiding the narrative.
The titular story, where an older husband cares for his wife as she slips into dementia, “Daybreak Over the Gandaki”, where two people confront their shattered selves after losing their loved ones, and “Silences” can also be read as powerful examinations of grief. If there is any limitation to the collection, it is that its subtlety may elude the impatient reader.