The Fine Art of Living Alone

Familiar Deshpande landscape perhaps, but there is something alluring in the story-telling. Just like Small Remedies (2000). “Without words there can be no ideas, no emotions. We need words not only to speak, but live out our lives as well. Wordless, we are blank. Vacant.”

Moving On is all about words — sometimes a little overwhelming — ideas, emotions. The story: Manjari’s father is a bone collector. He teaches anatomy and he brings home bones in his pockets which turn up in odd places. He also puts down his existential thoughts in a diary: “How do we live knowing the fact of total extinction? Knowing the randomness of our existence, of its finiteness?” Her mother is a homemaker and writer of women’s stories. Losing battles at home, winning wars on magazine pages. Taking everything unbearable in her life and making it over into something entirely different. It’s left to Manjari, the errant one, to unravel the past and make sense of it.

But like in Small Remedies, there’s a biography within a biography. So, as we learn of Manjari’s parents and sister and cousins, we also live the agony and ecstacy of being Manjari. Being a rebel without a pause: leaving home for a lover and then losing him at 21; gaining another at 40, leading to more heartbreak. We hear her voice as she finds out the “need to know our parents”. We feel a twinge when she comes to the conclusion that it’s not only children who break parents’ hearts, parents do too, with the most devastating effect.

Through it all, if there’s one unifying strand, it’s the essential loneliness of being, like in many of Deshpande’s past novels. As Manjari reconstructs the past, she realises that her parents, seemingly happy, didn’t live in bliss ever after. She shivers as she reads her father’s words: “It seems to me that we humans are fated to be strangers to one another.” And yet, she gets used to being alone. After the death of her lover, her mother, her father, her sister. “Living alone is an art that one learns finally to appreciate.” The girl who needed everybody’s approval suddenly finds herself surrounded by emptiness: “What happens when all the people whose approval you wanted are no longer there?”

Deshpande is almost always bracketed as a women’s writer, irking her no end. She has often defended her writing, saying she happens to write about human beings who happen to be women. If you prod her further, she will tell you, “I am my best reader,” as if it almost doesn’t matter if her novels are soliloquies. But in Moving On, her male characters are very believable, barring one.

In the maze of complex human relationships where nothing is as it seems, Deshpande introduces a very real terror, that of the Bombay underworld. Manjari’s uncle, Laxman, lives and dies — by bullets. But his world of violence never really spills over into their lives, just scratches the surface. In the end, Deshpande is better off chronicling the lives of Urmi (The Binding Vine) or Jaya (That Long Silence) or Madhu (Small Remedies) or Manjari (Moving On).

As Manjari battles real estate sharks in Bangalore, she remembers her underworld connection and promptly casts it aside: “The story is forgotten, no one knows of it… there is no need for anyone to know it, no need for the story to intrude into my life.” It’s as if Manjari could have moved on, it was only a matter of time. “We were a happy family. And then it all came to an end.”