The planet called earth has been a lonely
place for the women. You move across the continents and across the societies
and can see that the fair sex is treated more as some sort of asset than as
normal human being. Some societies, we feel, places the women on a higher
pedestal but that too is a ploy of the male-centric society to control the feminine
power. In India, it must be remembered, the Ganika
and Devdasi systems were also an
acceptable part of the same society which refers to women as Devi. In some
societies, especially in the Middle East, women are supposed to be the gifts of
God, so they should always be kept gift wrapped. The various kinds of burqas and veils were invented to keep
them covered.
The sound of women’s loneliness and the
eagerness to break free from the manacles of the male-centric social norms reverberate
in many of the stories of this collection of short stories by the seasoned
author Namita Gokhale.
‘Life in Mars’, the
opening story, tells us about the aloneness of Madhu Sinha, a widow and a
mother of three ‘duplicitous sons’ who have virtually abandoned her. As she is
fighting with her solitude and a debilitating illness, the arrival of Udit
Narain, a young man who feels chasing a girl or a job is sheer waste of time, suddenly
ignites a desire to live her life again. The author describes the dilemma as
well as the eagerness of a middle aged woman while planning to enter in to a
new relationship. The title story, The
Habit of Love, also has a widow as the protagonist. But unlike Madhu, the
main character of this story is not alone and has her daughters by her side but
that doesn’t stop her from grieving perpetually for the loss of her long dead husband.
When she goes on a vacation with her daughters to Nepal, one of her daughters, after
seeing the mountain peaks, asks her: how
does a mountain know it is a mountain?’ Discomfited by the question she
travels back to her happy days and thinks of her husband who might have given a
perfect answer to this question. And there she realises how she has internalised
the pain she had received by losing her husband and how ‘the habit of grief’
has created walls between her and her daughters. The opening sentence of this
story is very thought-provoking and it reads: The habit of grief can be as insidious as the habit of love.
There is another outstanding story that comments upon the position of a
woman in our society. In ‘Love’s Mausoleum’, Malika is deserted by her husband
for not bearing any child for him. She visits Taj Mahal and discovers that Shahjahan
had built Taj Mahal for his favourite wife Mumtaz. And , she is outraged when the guide explains to her about
the tombs built outside the Taj Mahal by emperor Shahjahan for his two other
wives because (unlike Mumtaz) they were childless. Time has changed, but not
the attitude of male chauvinistic society, she angrily thinks.
There
are two stories which have two famous female characters from Mahabharata as
their protagonists. In one story, Kunti tells us about her dilemma to reveal
that Karna is her son. Kunti as mother craves to hug her first born but the
fear of social stigma is so huge that she let her son go. What if Kunti were a
man? In the other story a maid servant
of Qandhari, wife of king Dhrutrashtra, tells us about her queen’s struggle as
a woman, as a wife and as a mother. In both the stories, Kunti and Qandhari are
not portrayed as the larger than life mythological characters but as the
regular women who have their own set of dreams and insecurities.
Each
of the thirteen stories is written in Namita’s signature style.
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