In the Country of Deceit By Shashi Deshpande,
Viking, Rs 399

One ends In the Country of Deceit with a sense of loss — for the trees that have been felled to make the paper on which such inanities have come to be inscribed. It is a shame that 259 pages have been wasted on a novel which says nothing more than what is contained in its gist given on the inside flap of the dust jacket. As such, the dust jacket might as well have served the purpose of the entire novel.

Since the readers are promised a tour of the country of deceit in the very title, the novel, predictably, has an adulterous affair at its centre. It is set in a town called Rajnur in Karnataka. The protagonist, Devayani Mudhol, falls for a married man, the district superintendent of Rajnur, Ashok Chinappa. But the affair is so tentative and short-lived that it is doubtful whether anybody is really deceived by it.

No sooner has Devayani committed the ‘sin’ that she starts chastising herself severely, so much so that it seems that she chose a married man as her lover simply to have the pleasure of self-flagellation. While she alternates between participation and withdrawal, Ashok remains a shadowy figure. Nothing is told about how the affair affects him in spite of the fact that it is he, and not Devayani, who already has a spouse. It can be argued that as a man he is not expected to shoulder the burden of societal shame in an adulterous relationship. But shame is not quite the issue that troubles Devayani as well. Her clamouring relatives are more concerned than she is about the dangers of such an affair for a young woman like her, living alone, as she does, in a small town. If anything bothers Devayani, it is guilt. Careful not to hurt either Ashok’s family or her own, she ensures that the affair reaches its predictable end before long.

Of course, Devayani has a ‘history’, which might justify her primness. As an adolescent, she was almost abused by a man in a deserted grove while returning from school with her classmates. She escaped, but one of her friends, who was left behind in the grove while Devayani and the others fled, was not so lucky. That story of desertion haunts her, and makes her hyper-sensitive towards the feelings of others. She loves Ashok, but must also make the necessary sacrifice in order to redeem herself. Evidently, Shashi Deshpande’s emphasis is on ‘family values’, which must win over the claims of the individual in the battle for priority. She makes Devayani listen patiently to her aunts and uncles and cousins and sister and take the inevitable decision in favour of the elusive concept called family.

The novel incorporates voices other than that of Devayani through the letters sent to her by her relatives. But all the voices sound the same, united as they are by the thread of conventional morality. Sindhu, Devayani’s aunt, stresses the importance of a physical relationship. But her outrage after Devayani’s confession of the affair proves that in her scheme of things, physical enjoyment is acceptable only if it is sanctioned by marriage. Rani, a former actress who befriends Devayani, is the latter’s antithesis in her amorality. Not surprisingly, Rani has to land up in a hospital at the end of the novel — her ribs broken, much like her hopes of reviving her filmi career. It seems that Deshpande lost interest in this novel the moment she started writing it. So all the characters, motifs and episodes remain half-baked, and the author seeks to make up for the weakness by covering everything with a generous icing of morality. The result is something so insipid that it would make Rip van Winkles of even diehard insomniacs.