Why poor remain the wretched
Indian Development: Selected Regional Perspectives edited by Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen. Oxford University Press, Delhi. Pp. XX+420. Rs 595.

Love and rejection of the Raj
Indian Ink by Tom Stoppard, Faber & Faber, London. £ 4.95.

A lonely POI in abandoned land, society
Cereus Blooms At Night by Shani Mootoo. Penguin, Delhi. Pp. 249. Rs. 250.

Why poor remain the wretched

Indian Development: Selected Regional Perspectives edited by Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen. Oxford University Press, Delhi. Pp. XX+420. Rs 595.

WHAT is development? Development, more often than not, has been taken as synonymous with economic growth which, in turn, is measured by indicators like GDP, GNP, per capita income, foreign exchange reserves, fiscal deficit, and a plethora of cold statistics beyond the comprehension of a common man. In the process the human dimension of the phenomenon has disappeared. It goes to the credit of a handful of economic thinkers in the modern era to restore to the debate this human dimension. And Prof Amartya Sen is, undoubtedly, one of the tallest in the galaxy of such thinkers and was recently awarded the Nobel Prize for his seminal contribution in this field.

Prof Sen has consistently emphasised that the expansion of human capabilities should be the goal of development. It is man and not Mammon who should be at the centre of things. The Human Development Report (HDR), an annual publication of the UNDP, too stresses this aspect. Mahbub-ul-Haq, a Pakistani economist, was an important motivating force behind the evolution of HDR, and Prof Sen has made a significant contribution to the input in HDR by shaping the concept of development and its measurement. Mahbub-ul-Haq’s recent death is a big loss in the battle of gearing development to the welfare of the common man.

Expansion of human development presupposes the enlargement of social opportunities for the mass of people and this is possible only if the state, actively assisted by the media, NGOs, social action groups and such other institutions, effectively intervenes in the spheres of basic education, health care, land reforms, social security, etc. to improve the quality of life of the people at large. Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze have been consistently emphasising this for more than a decade. The book under review, jointly edited by them, is an outcome of this effort.

Sen, alongwith Mahbub-ul-Haq, brought about a paradigmatic shift in the concept of development. Indicators like life expectancy at birth, child mortality rate, fertility rate, literacy, male-female ratio in population and related things constitute the yardstick to measure development.

In his introductory essay in the volume under review, Sen makes it clear that he is not opposed to economic reforms per se. His complaint is that they are basically inadequate and unbalanced. He emphasises that expansion of social opportunities to the people is the central issue in economic development and this requires much more than "freeing of markets". "We have to go well beyond liberalisation to get somewhere," Sen concludes.

How social action is important in making development meaningful for the masses is made clear through case studies of three states, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal and Kerala. UP presents a pathetic case, marked by high-levels of mortality, fertility, morbidity, undernutrition, illiteracy, social inequality and a slow pace of poverty decline. UP is worse than most other parts of India in the matter of gender relations.

Jean Dreze and Haris Gazdar, authors of the section on UP, are keen to draw the reader’s attention to the fact that poverty is not the decisive cause of mass misery as is commonly thought. UP and Kerala had similar levels of poverty in 1987-88, but were poles apart in the scales of literacy and mortality indicators. Western UP is more prosperous than the eastern part but fares no better in the matter of social well-being. In 1981, western UP had a higher child mortality rate and considerably higher fertility level than eastern UP. It is no better in the field of literacy and education and its record in gender ratio is much worse.

The cause of the UP malaise is the utter failure of the state to act as an agent of social change. Equally important, as correctly emphasised by the authors, is the failure of civil society to challenge the oppressive pattern of caste, class and gender relations. UP in their view shows that the roots of endemic deprivation in India are much deeper and the requirements of real reform go much beyond economic liberalisation.

The study of Sunil Sengupta and Haris Gazdar on West Bengal brings out that this state has had better health and educational conditions in the rural areas than many other states, in spite of a very low level of private income. But the real achievement of the West Bengal government under the Left Front is in the field of agrarian reforms. Land ceiling laws were in operation in the state since zamindari abolition in 1953 but they were never implemented seriously before the Left assumed power.

There was virtual anarchy in land relations and Operation Barga — a momentous action launched by the Left Front government for land reforms — restored order to a great extent. Tenancy was made hereditary and crop shares were fixed; 1.44 million share croppers were recorded. Over half of the beneficiaries were from the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. The West Bengal experiment has proved that the poor, if organised, do not suffer silently and can fight for their rights.

Kerala is a state marked by a poor growth rate in agriculture and industry, and the highest rate of unemployment in the country. It is way behind several Indian states like Punjab, Haryana and Maharashtra in per capita income. But Kerala has the highest level of literacy and health care and the lowest birth and death rates. It is tops in gender relations and its record in radical land reforms is impressive.

It can be compared favourably with several developed countries in those indicators which are the true measure of development, according to thinkers like Sen. As compared with the all-India average, Kerala’s life expectancy at birth is 68.8 years as against 59, birth rate 18.5 per thousand against 29.5, death rate 6.1 per thousand as against 9.8, infant mortality rate 17 as against 79 and sex ratio 1040 women per 1000 men as against 927. A high level of quality of life with low economic growth. How to explain this paradox?

V.K. Ramachandran in his scintillating essay on Kerala, unravels this paradox. Kerala provides a lesson that well-being of the people can be improved and their social, political and cultural conditions transformed even with low levels of income if there is appropriate public action with the active participation of the people at grass-roots level. The roots of this pioneering action in Kerala lie in missionary activity, especially in the former princely states, social reform movements, the success of the Communist Party in organising the weaker sections and the active role of the enlightened elements in Kerala society. "In the conditions of contemporary India," concludes Ramachandran, "it is worth remembering that public action, and not policies of globalisation and liberalisation, was the locomotive of Kerala’s progress."

Soon after he was declared a Nobel laureate, Sen said in a press interview that he was not against globalisation. But he has been an ardent votary of powerful state intervention in the matter of expanding social opportunities. Elsewhere he has stated that an important cause of remarkable economic growth of some East Asian countries, popularly known as Asian Tigers, lies in the heavy investment they made in the spheres of basic education and health care. How far the lesson of these small states is relevant to solve the problems of a vast country like India is a moot point.

Moreover, has not the bubble of rapid growth of these Asian Tigers burst, landing their economy in a mess? Is this a permanent setback or a temporary phenomenon? The structural logic of the system is bound to operate, some Marxists would argue. The debate is still far from being conclusive.

Sen’s contribution is a milestone in this debate. The book under review is compulsory reading for those who wish to understand the nuances of this debate.

— D.R. Chaudhry

Love and rejection of the Raj

Indian Ink by Tom Stoppard, Faber & Faber, London. £ 4.95.

TOM STOPPARD’S new play "Indian Ink", is dedicated to the memory of Laura Kendal, Felicity Kendal’s mother and known to Indians as a talented actress from Shakespeare Wallah, a drama company that once toured India staging plays in many public schools. The plays left an indelible impression on my mind in the late sixties when I was studying in Shimla where they used to perform in the Gaiety Theatre. Felicity has also acted in Stoppard’s "Jumpers", "The Real Thing" and "Arcadia". It almost seems that stoppard has been writing his last few plays for Felicity Kendal and that her Indian antecedents have been the inspiration behind them though he strongly denies it.

Directed by Peter Wood, the play takes us back and forth between the 1930s and the mid-80s in India and England, exploring the nature of truth and time, the difference between the colonial and the post-colonial temperament and the disruptive influence of sexual encounters. The play records marvellously the atmosphere both of the old scene and the new. With Stoppard’s breadth of thinking and sparkling humour, it is a monument to the creation of parallel histories. The past is continuously being rewritten, reviewed and edited, correcting locations and chronology. Stoppard’s overall approach is impeccably non-judgmental, his political and cultural comments always appropriate.

In our post-modern world of sophisticated literary theory, the historian has begun to continuously come under attack by literary scholars who have challenged and undermined the traditional historian’s absolutist pretensions. The problematical relationship between literature and history focuses attention on the intervening of history and literature in historical writing itself, showing how literary narratives and politics are inextricably bound up in texts like "Indian Ink".

Though historians are becoming more and more defensive — and probably the reason for this is their largely untheorised stance of history writing — Stoppard considers not this disjunction between the two disciplines but tries to discover new ways in which each can assist the other. He also addresses the twin problem of the place of narrative in historiography and the alleged incommensurability of historical narratives. Although the narrative is borrowed from oral and written testimonies and historical narratives, it is essentially literary and rhetorical.

Like his "Arcadia" which is one of the finest theatre productions to appear on the British stage in the past few years, and has won Stoppard both the Olivier and the Critics Awards, "Indian Ink" reflects the full range of Stoppard’s gifts as well as his craftsmanship and versatility. The alternation of place and period makes for a rich and moving exploration of intimate lives set against one of the great shifts of history, the emergence of the Indian subcontinent from the grip of imperialism. The dramatic power of this production is not simply the province of skilful acting and direction; there is something in the work itself which is in tune with the clash of cultures.

Flora Crewe (played by Felicity Kendal), a young poet travelling in India in 1930, has her portrait painted by a local artist. More than 50 years later, the artist’s son visits Flora’s sister in London while her would-be biographer is following a cold trail in India. What is striking about the play is that the stage is not demarcated between India and England, between past and present, and yet the sense of history is evoked with remarkable clarity — the railway station at Jummapur, the dak bungalow where Flora Crewe stays for a few days, the electric fan, the punkah "which is like a pelmet worked by a punkah-wallah who sits outside and flaps the thing by a system of rope and pulleys," an image that is reminiscent of the punkahwalla in the court scene in Forster’s "A Passage to India".

Flora, a writer in the thirties England moves to India in order to recuperate from an illness. There she meets Nirad Das (played by Art Malik), the Indian painter who knows his London A to Z backwards without having once visited England. When Flora mentions that she lives in Chelsea, Das excitedly responds:"I hope to visit London one of these days. The Chelsea of Turner and the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood! — Rossetti lived in Cheen Walk! Holman Hunt lived in Old Church Street! ‘the Hireling Shepherd’ was painted in Old Church Street! What an inspiration it would be to visit Chelsea!"

The Bloomsbury worshipping Nirad Das is of course typical of the intelligentsia of the thirties, extremely nationalist yet obsessed with English culture and manners. And when Flora is lying nude on her bed after her tubercular fit, she tells Das, who is still embarrassed after being asked to pour cold water on her naked body, that she fails to understand why he should like everything English: "You’re enthralled. Chelsea, Bloomsbury, Oliver Twist, Goldflake cigarettes, Windsor and Newton... even painting in oils, that’s not Indian. You’re trying to paint me from my point of view instead of yours, what you think is my point of view. You deserve the bloody Empire!" She has hit the nail on the head.

When the mystery of Flora’s missing portrait is solved, it becomes rather clear that Nirad has painted an Indian landscape with Flora as its centre represented in the European style. Stoppard gives the impression that he approves of it — all very civilised, separate, but equal — though it stands to reason that Flora succeeds in converting Nirad into what she desires him to be, without Nirad being given a chance to objectify her.

Was this not true of many who were swept off their feet by anything English, trying to mirror a society in a way that was paradoxically both pleasurable and demeaning? Such are the results of domination and submission in which cultures are trampled underfoot and institutions undermined, with the indigenous man turned into a complex hybrid. But Nirad is convincing as an intelligent human being, intolerably torn between his Indianness and his European-educated mind. He will only be liberated into himself after having slept with her.

Nirad finally paints Flora in the nude, as she had once been painted by Modigliani, her lover in the past. It is clear that he and Flora have had a physical relationship, but they seem an improbable couple divided by attitudes and culture. Nevertheless, she succeeds in putting "the rasa of erotic love called shringara" into her poem after an implied night of erotic love. Nirad puts it quite succinctly: "Its God is Vishnu, and its colour is shyama, which is blue-black. Vishvanata in his book on poetics tells us: shringara requires naturally a lover and his loved one, who may be a courtesan if she is sincerely enamoured, and it is aroused by, for example, the moon, the scent of sandalwood, or being in an empty house. Shringara goes harmoniously with all other rasas and their complementary emotions, with the exception of fear, cruelty, disgust and sloth." The title of the play is apparently derived from this theory of rasa. The introduction of romance makes Nirad’s psychological dilemma even more complex, but it does not blunt the play’s social and political concerns in the areas of gender and race.

Flora finally leaves Jummapur and three months later dies somewhere in the hills. Juxtaposed with this action are the scenes of Das’s son Anish, the impressionist painter now living in England, discussing his father’s relationship with Flora’s ageing sister. Eldon Pike is the writer who is researching on the life of Flora and busy compiling the "Collected Letters of Flora Crewe". these characters in the 80s have their faces turned towards the past, to awaken the dead, and make whole that which is no more. They enter the colonial space in which the native is hemmed in but at the same time is being encouraged to be himself and not remain in slouching subservience to the coloniser. The play is a celebration of parallel history, the colonial and the hybrid state that follows it, enabling us to change our transcultural understanding. Multiple time and space give rise to a hybrid history that is India of the colonial and the post-colonial eras.

Gradually and very skilfully, the play lays bare the whole life of Flora Crewe and her brief, but moving encounter with Das. Rehearsing the space-time logic, it moves forward in space, as when Anish Das, the son of the artist, becomes the enlightened hybrid, verbally conscious of his freedom and identity, and yet, in time paradoxically moving backwards, as is obvious from his English mannerisms. Deeply aware of his history he hits back at Mrs Swan:

"Mrs Swan, you are a very wicked woman. You advance a preposterous argument and try to fill my mouth with cake so I cannot answer you. I will resist you and your cake. We were the Romans! We were uptodate when you were a backward nation. The foreigners who invaded you found a third-world country! Even when you discovered India in the age of Shakespeare, we already had our Shakespeares. And our science — architecture — our literature and art, we had a culture older and more splendid, we were rich! After all that’s why you came."

And the annoyed retort that Mrs Swan gives him leaves Anish a little ruffled: "We made you a proper country! And when we left you fell straight to pieces like Humpty Dumpty! Look at the map! You should feel nothing but shame!" Here lies the colonial discourse in all its transparency and an endeavour by the Indian speaker to write himself back into history. Though the play pretends to deal with the two cultures as equals, it arouses laughter at the jokes made on the natives, especially their petty thievery.

Nevertheless there is an endeavour to replace the imperial idea of liner history by a more multi-dimensional, syncretic movement. Multiple points of view of both the English and Indian characters throw ample light on the colonial culture, but seen from the present perspective, it seems there is no past about colonialism, as emphasising the pastness runs the risk of obscuring the countinuities and discontinuities of colonial and imperial influence. It is this history and the writing of it that has given rise to recent exchanges between the foundationalists and the post-foundationalists, the modernists and the post-modernists. And behind these debate I see the struggle to reformulate shifting identities and precarious polities.

If it were possible to know about the past once and for all, there would be no need to write history. It should be clear to historians in the wake of Hayden White’s writings that recovering the totality of the past is virtually impossible. Traditional practices of writing of history fail to question the conditions of their own making and therefore, retard any development of a democratising critical intelligence. They raise before us the spectre of the real past, an objective past about which their accounts are held to be accurate and even true. History’s epistemological fragility and the tentativeness of all readings is completely ignored here. The creation of fictional accounts of the past, as in Tom Stoppard’s play, throws ample light on this fragility of documented histories, and thereby, takes us closer to the "reality". This is most certainly a significant development in the philosophy of history and literature which endeavours to privilege literary discourse that is self-reflexive and knows that the only "truth" it knows is fiction.

— Shelley Walia

After the brutal rape attack

Aruna’s Story: The True Account of a Rape and its Aftermath by Pinki Virani. Viking, Penguin Books, New Delhi. Pp. 256. Rs 295.

"ONE man. Plus a savage twist of one chain. And the thirty seconds for his sperm to release. Equals one broken woman. With brain damage so irreversible that it does not even register images. And perfectly healthy pupils but blind for life."

"Aruna’s Story" is a real account of how a young nurse was raped in the most horrific way and left in a condition far worse than death. A condition she has been in for the past 25 years now. The average person would rightly look at the jacket of the book and on reading the blurb put the book down primarily because of the theme.

Rape, a four-letter word that is difficult to say and even more difficult to live with, particularly for those who have endured it. A subject that is taboo in a society such as ours and where the blame is more often than not heaped on the victim rather than on the perpetrator. Rape is something that exists around us but we choose to ignore it and close our eyes to what it can do to the person at the receiving end.

Pinki Virani, a journalist, took on the tough job of writing a book on Aruna Shanbaug’s life, before and after the rape. It was a tough job, first because the time that had elapsed between the crime and the time of writing the book was a long 25 years. Second, how can one write a book on a rape — something that took just some minutes and manage to fill 256 pages with relevant matter? Third and most important, writing on a topic such as this it is very difficult to remain objective and narrate events as they happened and yet make it interesting to read.

In "Aruna’s Story", the writer has managed to talk to Aruna’s family, ex-fiancé and many of her co-workers to try to breathe life and reality into her depiction of Aruna as a person, as well as piece together the events that happened before, during and after the rape. Apart from this, the story has been put across extremely well making all 256 pages of it difficult to leave once you start.

The relevance of writing about an event that took place so long ago was the fact that on June 1, 1998, Aruna Shanbaug turned 50, and for 25 years of these 50 years she has existed in "a twilight zone, brain dead for sight, speech and movement. Yet hopelessly alive to pain, hunger, and terror from that evening in November, 1973, when she was attacked with a dog chain and brutally raped in the hospital where she was a staff nurse."

Young, pretty and vivacious, Aruna left her small village in Karnataka to make her life in the bustling city of Bombay. She became a staff nurse at the King Edward Memorial Hospital (KEM) and was engaged to be married to a doctor from the same hospital.She had complained about a sweeper, Sohanlal, stealing milk and mutton meant for the dogs in the experimental laboratory, to which she was assigned.

On November 27, 1973, sometime between 4.50 and 5.50 p.m., deep in the hospital basement, sweeper Sohanlal raped Aruna while he twisted a dog chain around her neck, cutting the blood supply to her brain. Aruna lay undetected in the hospital basement till the early hours of the next morning when the morning shift started.

"Aruna Shanbaug’s spirit has kept her injured body conscious through a long, cold, pain-wracked night, all by itself. A full fifteen and half-hours of strong will.

"Now, just when she needs it the most, her flesh is turning weak, letting her down.

"Her God let her down yesterday."

Aruna was diagnosed with brain stem contusion injury with associated cervical cord injury. Over the next many months while the doctors struggled to try to make Aruna recover, her family abandoned her without even a visit. Her fiancé Sundeep Sardesai stayed by her side till 1977, when family pressure forced him into getting married. As for the sweeper Sohanlal he was sentenced to seven years which taking into account the days he had spent in custody during the trial came to six years, one month and 26 days in prison.

The reason for the short sentence awarded to Sohanlal by the court was that the hospital registered the charges of "attack on nurse with intention to rob" and not one of rape. Yes, Dr Sardesai is aware that the sweeper did not get his sentence for the rape. "What can I offer as my answer? At that point in time it was not an area I was capable of handling at all. I was too far gone, there was too much that was terrible happening all at once. I was having a very bad time coping with as much as I could. It was important for me to try to act normal with myself, stick to my schedules and not give in to my pain, because I had to conserve my energies for my final exams and her treatment. When she opened her eyes, when she swallowed, hope flooded my being. I kept hoping against hope..." This is the doctor’s version.

For the first month Aruna Shanbaug, the pretty vivacious nurse, showed some improvement but after that there was no improvement. "30 December, 1973. Staff nurse Aruna Shanbaug, still in a semi-comatose state, starts laughing.

"A long spell of laughter.

"Then she screams.

"Then she laughs again.

"There is no registration of any of these emotions on her face."

Today, 25 years since Aruna was raped, not much has changed in her life or condition. She is still there alone and forsaken by her family, in a room with barred windows and padlocked door in KEM hospital where she worked one day.

With the advancements in medical science today doctors feel a magnetic resonance imaging or MRI might help; that it would show the extent of damage to the brain. Dr Rajesh Parikh feels, "We may accordingly be able to reduce some areas of her suffering. The chances of her walking again are non-existent. I doubt very much if she will ever see again or regain her speech. But she might just live like this for a very, very long time so we can ensure that she is made more comfortable."

The MRI test has not been performed on Aruna as yet as there is no such facility at the KEM hospital. To take Aruna to another hospital that does have a MRI machine would mean her leaving the hospital and the room she has not left for 21 years. "How will she react when she feels the sun on her face and then the movement of an ambulance; when she hears the strange voices of male attendants and the incessant roar of traffic as the vehicle takes her from Parel to Pedder Road and back; when she feels the touch of male doctors and an alien environment; when her sense of smell tells her... can she smell."

Aruna was told by a pujari that she had a rare horoscope, she would be a success and live long and go abroad. Today years after the pujari’s prophecy, it is obvious that Aruna does have a rare horoscope, so much suffering and indifference is rarely endured by many.

"There is no flight for Aruna, no fight in her frail body anyway. The undamaged part of her brain can still react though, and she can scream, and yell, and weep, and laugh since it is all the same to one part of her brain now. She could get convulsions in the ambulance. She could even die of fright right there under the MRI machine, her broken heart could just stop beating."

Would that be such a bad thing, or a good thing to happen?

This book will not only give you a true insight into how horrific rape and its after-effects can be but also help Aruna Shanbaug. "Half the royalties from the sale of the book is going towards making Aruna Shanbaug’s remaining life as comfortable as possible. When she dies, the cheques will be sent in her name to a charitable women’s organisation which educates young girls in nursing."

— Harkiran Sodhi

A lonely POI in abandoned land, society

Cereus Blooms At Night by Shani Mootoo. Penguin, Delhi. Pp. 249. Rs. 250.

THIS haunting tale takes you through the secrets of a settler family in the small Caribbean town of Paradise, the warm nights of the Caribbean and the numerous mysteries that lie therein.

There was a private hell in Paradise of which everyone knew. But none cared to do anything about it because the one to burn in this hell was a small child, Mala lovingly known as Pohpoh. This is her story and of those close to her.

In her luminous telling of the tale, Mootoo takes us through a murder mystery, the pains of being a black native working for the white colonial master, the magic moments of growing up and discovering the details about one’s parents, the search for love and a lover, the madness which descends upon the heroine when she tries to break the bonds of oppression and her capacity to survive cruelty and despair.

The story begins with the entry of a middle aged Mala Ramachandin into the house for the poor, mad and the destitute. Judge Bissey had sent her there when the police accused her of murder. Mala, in his judgement, was poor, old and perhaps mad. But since there was no dead body, no one missing, no complaints against her, and no witnesses, it was difficult to accuse her of any murder. That was as far as official judgement was concerned. The truth was that she had murdered her father, the entire town except the younger generation (like us, the reader), knew about it; and they all agreed that she was welcome to it.

Our narrator is a young gay male nurse who prefers to cross dress. Mala finds it most amusing and begins to open up to him and the story of Chandin Ramachandin and his family begins to unfold. In the process, the son of her lover too gets to fulfil his curiosity about Miss Mala and finds a lover for himself in the nurse.

Chandin Ramachandin was an Indian boy taken in by a white Christian missionary family. He craves for their daughter, the beautiful Lavinia, but is stopped short by the father. Lavinia on her part wishes to have nothing to do with Chandin. Chandin then marries a mutual acquaintance, Sarah. Sarah herself has difficulty giving up her coolie-background and coolie language. She bears two daughters for Chandin when Lavinia comes back into the life of the Ramachandin family bringing a turmoil in their lives.

Aunt Lavinia, as she is known to the Ramachandin girls, Mala and Asha, has a special but inexplicable (to them) relationship with their mother. They hold hands, touch each other, express tender sounds and keep away from Chandin. Then one day the two elope.

Chandin is furious but can do little. The Ramachandin family becomes the gossip of the town. More so because Chandin turns into the town drunk, whose impotent rage becomes the prime entertainment for the people of Paradise. Then one day Chandin lays his hands on his daughters. The elder, Mala, makes efforts to protect her little sister, Asha, but there is only this much and not more than a mere child can do.

The girls have to suffer their father, and the taunts of their peers. No one in the small town considers it fit to intervene in the affairs of the Ramachandin family. Shunned by all the kids, avoided by the grown-ups, Mala has only Ambrose Mohanty as a friend. And then Ambrose too goes away to England for his studies. Many years later Asha runs away; first to England and then to Canada leaving Mala to deal with the demands of their father.

A lonely and forlorn Mala waits for some news from her sister. The postman in Paradise on his side decides that he need not go up to the evil Ramachandin house to deliver any letters. After writing many letters to Mala and sending her much money, Asha gives up on being able to contact her sister.

A while later Ambrose returns with the hope of wooing Mala and starting a business with her as his life partner. Ambrose is, well, Ambrose. He could never protect Mala when he was a child, he cannot now when he is grown up. During one of his assignations with Mala Chandin returns and begins to rage around the house. Thinking that he is the target, Ambrose flees. The drunk Chandin is knocked down.

The only love that Mala had ever known had fled and her tormentor was lying before her. Mala goes mad and beats in her father’s head. She, however, is not sure whether Chandin has died or not. So she puts him on his bed, boards the windows, makes herself a recluse and grows old waiting for Chandin to rise from his stupor and attack her once again.

Ambrose goes on to marry Elsie, opens a shop and has a son. His one and only love had gone mad. Elsie knows this because for her Ambrose remains a once-a-month man. His basic interest in life becomes providing the now reclusive Mala with her weekly food et cetera requirements.

As Tyler gets to know Miss Mala better, he begins to tell her story in the hope that somewhere Asha would read it and come back to meet her sister. That is the only way that Mala would be able to regain her composure.

– Kavita Soni-Sharma