There comes a time when you are confronted with all the moments when you were made and unmade by love and its various forces. Love is essential for the true liberation of the soul, but there’s also a fear of being buried under its crushing weight. There is always a risk of love inflating itself to such horrendous proportions that you can no longer recognise it as the same creature you had once nurtured. The beast swallows everything in its path.
Namita Gokhale’s new book of short stories, Life of Mars, imagines love as an unrestrainable creature and examines its afterlife. The sixteen stories in the book have been divided into two sections. The first section, “Love and Other Derangements” features mostly middle-aged women who have been knocked around quite mercilessly by love. The second section, “The Mirror of the Mahabharata”, straddles the present and the formidable epic from a few thousand years ago. Here, the fates of the Mahabharata’s women are reflected in the plight of modern femininity.
In fact, myths and epics make routine appearances in the collection. In the first story, “Savithri and the Squirrel”, a middle-aged woman who claims to be married dutifully feeds squirrels in anticipation of being liberated from her misery one day. The misery? Her husband has never been a real husband to her. Like the panchkanyas, she’s waiting for a divine force to reward her for her kindness to the animals. Everyone knows Ram is especially fond of squirrels. Perhaps he’ll answer her prayers.
Love gained and lost
In these stories, the husband (or a male partner) is an unwelcome presence in a woman’s romantic life. It is rare to find true love in formal institutions but as relationships form, sour, and ultimately, end, a great deal of life and love has already been wasted. The wrong people are married to each other, couples do not speak, infidelity is a byproduct of marriage, and sometimes, the children are unbelievably cruel too. Gokhale’s story is concerned with the female experience, so what the reader usually witnesses is the woman who was left behind. Buried under the stifling expectations of marriage and motherhood, there is a great desire to run away. However, there is no greater god than fate. “Life on Mars” is a particularly affecting story of motherhood. A health scare of a widow reminds her yet again how lonely she is, despite the three sons she has raised and who have gone away to different parts of the world. A friendship with a much younger man brings some solace but it will not very last. In “Habit of Love”, a mother takes a vacation to the Himalayas with her daughters after the death of her husband. She’s still fairly young so, obviously, are her daughters. Their youthful chatter drives her up the wall but this is what life looks like now – there is grief, but there will also be new faces of love. Love and death are intertwined in these stories.
This dreadful feeling of knowing that those you love will one day die, that love itself will die, is heightened in the times of the Covid-19 pandemic. Gokhale’s 2021 novel The Blind Matriarch is her definitive work on this theme, but she revisits its wreckage in this book too. My favourite story “Whatever is Found in the World,” reminds the reader of the painful days of isolation and uncertainty. In the middle of everything apocalyptic, two middle-aged people something something akin to love. They meet at an online alopecia support group and form a friendship devoid of any pretences. After all, they’re both balding – what’s the point of putting up an act? Like the pandemic years, when everything was such a haze, their relationship is compressed to a length of a few days. As we now know, the mad disease will cut another dream short.
The stories also consider the effect of the deaths of those we love but do not really know. Celebrities, for example. “Grand Hotel I” and (more straightforwardly) “The Day Princess Diana Died” are two terrific stories on these parasocial relationships. In the first, a child reacts to Chacha Nehru’s death as she slowly starts to make sense of her parents' hushed, grieving conversations about the event. In the second, Princess Diana’s charm is defiled by her unhappy marriage. The photo of Diana sitting alone on the lovers’ bench at the Taj Mahal will immortalise this happiness and resonate with many lonely wives around the world.
“GIGALIBB” drives forth at a mad speed as it swerves from being a story of youthful love, the finality of death, and the ruthlessness of fate. We meet the narrator as a child and leave her as a middle-aged woman who has been bruised by gallant displays of love and has also witnessed gentle affections bloom in darkness. “God is great and love is bloody blind,” Kaka Kohli’s wisdom is for the ages.
Lessons on love
The second section, The Mirror of the Mahabharata, has three stories. Narrated from the perspectives of the seldom-heard voices of the Mahabharata, the stories turn on their heads the grand tales of sacrifice and valour. The first story, “Chronicles of Self-Exile” is told by Qandhari’s (Gandhari) maid Zara. A princess of unmatched beauty, her vow of wilful blindness and being the mother to a hundred hot-blooded sons will change the course of humanity. Zara watches as her beloved mistress of immense warmth and grace self immolates from the burdens of her grief. The second story, “Hamsadhwani: The Song of the Swans” is a swan’s retelling of the Nala-Damayanti story. Their time together in exile appears even more dreadful as the reader learns of Nala’s many betrayals of Damayanti. The swans preach lessons of monogamy and eternal love, but they’ll quickly learn that for humans, grief comes hand-in-hand with love. The final story “Kunti”, looks at – what many consider is – the most timeless story of a complicated mother-son relationship. Born of a strange father and abandoned in childhood, Karna grows up to be hostile to his mother. She did what she had to do under the circumstances but guilt eats away at her. In the battle of Kurukshetra, where her two beloved sons Arjuna and Karna will fight to death, Kunti will pay another terrible price for being a less-than-perfect mother.
The stories in Life on Mars are heavy with grief. There’s a constant fear of being discovered by it when you have finally settled in when you have just tasted happiness. These happy moments are fleeting. Love arrives only to leave stealthily soon after. Mothers and daughters bicker but stay, mothers and sons bicker and drift apart. The less said of the husbands, the better. Yet in the currents of such terrifying transcience, there is a sure hold of love – of families that infuriate and protect you, beloved stories and books that remind you you are not alone, and the mountains and the river that stand strong against every fury.
Life on Mars: Collected Stories, Namita Gokhale, Speaking Tiger Books.
