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Fallout Usha Ananda Ramaswamy was a practicing architect before she moved to full-time writing. Fallout is her second novel, 14 years after A Turbulent Passage disappeared without creating a ripple. But Fallout is not going to disappear. It is path breaking in terms of structure, chapter-breaks, language and narrative style. It appears to run similar to many contemporary creative fictions by women writers whose narratives are largely embedded in memory and who generally place a woman as the protagonist around whom the incidents, characters and their interactions revolve and evolve. But the similarity ends there.
Usha takes her time to unravel the different layers of Kavery’s life, love and relationships, till, in the end, the reader is either shocked, or stunned, or both. Kavery’s apparent ordinariness is suddenly shaken when she is surprised with her first novel winning an international literary award. For her novel, she chooses to open the metaphorical family cupboard to allow the proverbial skeletons to topple out, not one by one, but at random, much to the shock and dismay of her parents, Mani and Meenakshi, and the extended family. Usha picks the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique with a difference; the first person narrative from Kavery’s perspective and the third person author-account are woven together within the same passage. A clutter of men and women of all ages, that appear to be one too many at times, in the first chapter Overture, introduces the reader to the principal characters. It then moves backwards and forwards through time and place, following, escorting, tracing the footsteps and the growth of Kavery with such minute attention to physical detail that they often carry emotional and nostalgic resonances for the characters within, and for the reader without.
The opening passage of each of the six chapters is rich either in visually rich description, or, intriguing in the questions it raises. If the opening chapter begins with the mysterious death of a family member, then the second chapter opens like this:
Is Fallout a
psychological thriller? Is it about the vacillating nature of human
relationships within an extended Indian family? Is it about the
essential loneliness, the feelings of alienation experienced by Kavery,
who topples the balance of an otherwise ‘stable’ Bangalore-based
family by suddenly winning a big prize for her Fallout is one novel that defies categorisation into a specific genre because it could very well lend itself to a love story, taking the word ‘love’ in its widest, wildest connotations. At best, one could perhaps call it a psychological thriller and still leave it wanting. The one question that keeps raising its ugly head as one savours the unpredictability of the events that are spaced out very well, is, why has Usha painted Kavery as a merciless cynic about everyone she encounters in life except her parents? She appears to be ‘looking down’ on all and sundry, perhaps to hide her own emotional vulnerability and lack of self-esteem. Why? You get to know the reason for the author’s cynicism as revealed from her protagonist’s perspective only when you are close to the end.
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Kavery
is not a straightforward, slogan-raising, cause-fighting or crusading
feminist. Nor is she a submissive doormat to parents or husband. She is
not a victim and is not willing to succumb to martyrdom. Usha paints her
in shades of grey often moving more towards the black than to the white.
The
overriding emotions are in two extremes, like the protagonist Kavery
herself. On one side we discover her intense love for her parents and
her lover while on the other, her pen is virtually dripping with acid,
with biting sarcasm, sometimes placed in parenthesis, and hate towards
the other members of the extended family, her publisher, the foreign
literary agent, and so on.