That long Silence……

I read this book I guess a month or so back and I found so much of it echoing my thoughts….thoughts which I thought were really off track with the ways of this world.

It was a great empathizing book for me…something I rarely come across in the amount of fiction ive read.Ive read quite some Indian fiction and have my own fav’s but I came across her books recently .she’s not as hyped as all the other famous ones but hers is the truer picture.Her exploration of the Indian psyche esp middle class ..its more of a woman’s perspective but not feminist. it so touches a chord for anyone daring to speak the truth at least to themselves.

Some examples are when the heroine (narrator) is thinking of her maid jeeja

‘all those happy women with husbands in good jobs ……. were of no use to me…It was jeeja and her like…..women who saved me from the hell of drudgery. any little freedom I had depended on them’.

It looks like a strange statement but how much we today depend on our maids even with the modern machines(they are no match work done by hand).If they were not there would housewives… forget working women(they wudnt have a chance)ever have leisure for their wonderful weepies by ekta kapoor or gossip or shopping or any fun or quality time as its said.

When we had moved house some months back and among the many reasons against I gave one saying we would never find such a flexible and good maid as we have here---- my mom had said we cannot build life around maids……well here we are in our new house day in and night out mom suffers due to our reckless new maid.we have to come and go adjusting to her timings…I can only smirk but the it does not register with her anyway.

The other line is a more poignant one…

“baby girls are done to death ….swift ending of agony….than prolonging for years”

I always (since I heard of female infanticide) thought of this but I guessed I if I said it people would simply not understand so I think I never argued much on the subject with anyone and its so locked up kind of thing ..Neither here nor there.

My thought is this …government with its laws and all can prevent these babies done to death but can they ever make someone callous enough to do this love them.

I do not think so….….rather than living a whole life of rejection ,pain not understanding why…what’s wrong with ending it at the start as a few cells. We are willing to raise a hue and cry for a biological case but what about someone who feels, who lives for years in hurt….even if they go on to succeed in the world somehow which is more of one in a thousand case can they ever outgrow a childhood steeped in rejection and pain.

I do not think the law is unfair its fine but its just that--- a law-- and life is all so different.

There is so much more in the book that captures you throughout like

“I want solitude now not when I am old and frightened of being alone”

“Poor Gandhi he thought he could change human nature but people do not change”—this one’s amusing since there was a recent movie. I don’t remember the name --- where there was a joke about Gandhi in the same vein. How Gandhi preached against money but ended up being stamped on money and I and my sis simply thought it the absolute cynical truth.

It’s a book that’s so very raw about some truths ….which some people do not even confess to themselves as they play out the great Indian happy family. Such books you cant say you loved it…they simply haunt you …as truth haunts….The other book I read of hers ‘The dark holds no terror’ is also amazing in its portrayal of exorcising past ghosts.