Capturing the intensity of emotions
Reviewed by Harbans Singh

Days of Longing 
by Nirmal Verma. Translated by Krishna Baldev Vaid
Penguin Books. 
Pages 224  Rs 299. 

Along with Rajendra Yadav, Kamleshwar and Mohan Rakesh, Nirmal Verma pioneered a new style of writing stories that came to be known by the generic term Nai Kahani in Hindi literature. This style ushered in a period of hectic literary activity where the authors explored their inner self and saw life without the pretensions of judging characters as good or bad or searching for a plot that moved towards a denouement and an ending. Days of Longing by Nirmal Verma is a representative specimen of that genre even though there is very little that is Indian in this short novel. In addition, one can endlessly argue if the book is a novel or a long story.

Days of Longing was written in Hindi by the author on his return from Prague after the Spring Revolution that had swept across not only Czechoslovakia but much of Europe in 1968. The author had spent a number of years in Prague as a student and the book narrates not only the life of a few foreign students stuck in Prague during the cold Christmas period but also the encounter of the protagonist with love, longing and separation with an Austrian tourist who arrives in the city to probably allay a few demons of her past.

A motley group of foreign students, including Franz from East Germany, who is trying endlessly to complete his education in cinematography and Than Thun, TT, to his friends, from the then Burma, create the life of those students who are always short of money and hence resorting to commune like usage of the little resources at their command. Constantly drinking to keep them selves warm, the author has depicted their life as it was lived during the cruelty of a moneyless winter. In this struggle to survive, there is the story of Maria, in love with Franz but unable to leave the country with him since the rules do not permit a visa unless a woman gets married to a foreigner. On the other hand, exasperated by the teaching, or the lack of it, that he is getting, Franz, though in love, is yet not willing to marry her lest marriage is interpreted as a tool to get a visa. The parting is not too far on the horizon.

Almost parallel to this emerges the brief, intense and complex love of the protagonist for Raina Ramon, the married Austrian woman from Vienna who arrives in Prague in that winter not in search of good skiing facilities but to revisit places that she had seen earlier in the company of her husband. It is this relationship that leaves a number of disturbing issues for the reader to ponder. The struggle to survive in Budapest and then Cologne during the World War II has continued to dog Raina, even after her marriage to her companion of that uncertain period and the birth of her son Meeta. It raises the question of how people seek the warmth and assurance of companionship in the face of imminent threat to life and how when that threat disappears one realises that companionship does not necessarily mean love. Raina is one such character who is trying to come to terms with her life lived under the shadow of insecurity, persecution and death and her desire to explore her life anew. It is hard to say which of the two partings is more poignant, Franz and Maria's or Rania's and the Indy, as our protagonist is called by his friends. The partings notwithstanding, the brief encounter is both intense as well as tender. Readers can argue that the book is just the portrayal of Prague and the life of the foreign students, only from the communist and the non-aligned countries having socialist leanings, and has little to do with an Indian experience. It is true that the only reference to the protagonist's Indian connection is a letter that he gets from home and does not find time to read it but this is more than compensated by the universal emotion of love that occasionally enriches even transient relationships.

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