|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
This search for even the basic facts about Kaveri, "the Number Four," always associated with an uncanny smell of floor-wash, is not at all easy. There are only a few clues like a letter, the picture of a woman with a mask, two books that are found in an attic, some half-expressions that escape the lips of elders in unguarded moments and a martyrs' monument in the obscure Kannada script. Gradually, different threads are picked up and we come to know that Kaveri grew up along with her brother Setu in a town of Mysore. She was blessed with a kind of cultured sophistication and was adored by her mother Rukmini who was in the forefront of the task of mobilising the local women for participation in the nationalist activities. Later, Kaveri fell in love with an eloquent and irrepressible revolutionary, joined the Quit India demonstrations and was ultimately bundled out unceremoniously as a married woman to the life of obscurity by her father K. Mylaraiah, a prominent lawyer. There is a strong sense of disillusionment running in the novel. Narayana Rao loses his deposit in the post-Independence elections, as people can't be expected to remember freedom struggle sacrifices forever. Gandhi could stir up only the dust in the alleys of the town. Shyam is killed by the treachery of his own compatriots. Dr King who served the Indian patients in the flickering "light of a paraffin lamp, in a barn filled with sacks" feels unwanted in the emerging India. A long succession of women in the family from Rukmini down to the narrator herself also shares this abject frustration. The narrator fails to obtain a rounded picture of Kaveri and she has to conclude that her parents ("this incestuous pair") are a "part of the grand conspiracy of silence" and wonders what she would inherit from Kaveri, her grandmother. She finds it difficult to wash her hands of the family-perpetrated guilt. It is a carefully constructed novel. Though a reader might find it difficult to follow the quick shifts in the narrative between the different years—1938, 1939, 1940, 1947, 1955 and 1987—one is impressed with the syntax and the tight semantic contents of the sentences. Dialogue making comes easy to the novelist. Usha K.R. has a very fine eye for details which she can express well in appropriate, graphic and culturally alive phrases, albeit, this very faculty sometimes acts as a bar to the fluidity of the plot. That the focus should shift so completely from freedom struggle to the resolution of personal dilemmas may appear to be a bit incongruous to many. Prashanth Nair's cover photo in muted monotones leaves a pleasing impact.
|
.jpg)
It is a tradition in my
family to name its girls after rivers. My mother is named after a lost
river, of which no traces can be found now, the narrator tells us in the
novel. In the world of men, where the women lead an anonymous, at the
most, a secondary existence, the narrator refuses to take the things for
granted. She is a modern educated girl and she must clearly know more
about her pre-independence ancestral roots; particularly, about her
versatile grandmother, Kaveri. This knowledge is crucially needed for
filling the gaps in her own psychic life.