Of Inner Courtyards

While trying to come to grips with the protagonist Padma's story each narrator also reveals a complex world of her own, permeated with desires, adjustments and a quiet despair. After peeling off all the layers when we reach the kernel we find it is familiar enough to be the stuff of a popular film: young love blighted by parental disapproval. In fact the novelist constantly plays with as well as mocks at the filmi cliches: the hero and the heroine separated by cruel society, the trauma and trial of unwed motherhood, the coincidences and mistaken identities on which hinge the twists in the plot. In one climactic moment Padma realises how she sounds like the heroine of a movie and nearly bursts into hysterical laughter.

We do not get to the story of Padma and Karan until we are half-way through the novel. Till then the narrative circles around it, suggesting and foreshadowing. Padma's precocious pre-teen daughter invests her mother's past with the aura of a romantic fantasy even though in saner moments she knew: Alas, no stories in the lives of our mothers. So much more juice in the stories we invented. The novel begins with her version high-strung, colourful, the boundary between the real and the fictive smudged, followed by the matter-of-fact versions of two average middle-class Delhi housewives Padma's neighbours and friends, who have nothing exciting in their lives, yet their accounts are the most moving and consummate sections in the novel.

Padma's own story is an everyday one: the chance meeting of a boy and a girl in a Delhi University bookshop and love sprouting over long walks in the campus, endless cups of coffee, plates of dosa and gulab jamun followed eventually by betrayal and parting of ways. It is the very ordinariness of the first two-thirds of the novel which makes it compelling. The high drama of guilt, curse, passion and retribution that creates suspense in the last part does not succeed in the same way. Appachana can imbue the texture of women's quotidian existence with solidity and substance: kneading dough while sharing thoughts with friends, reheating food for the men who take their time coming to the table, expressing preference for the sons through the almonds to the table, diminishing themselves in the impossible attempt to please everyone, coping with assaults on their bodies, finding strategies of survival in joint families. Much of this has been said before, but not with such vividness and urgency, the cumulative impact of which is quite extraordinary. The author, the jacket tells us, now lives in Arizona, after having been educated in Gwalior and Delhi, but there is very little in the novel to suggest that she has ever been away. The novel moves between Bangalore and Delhi with a crucial part set in Lucknow, and a sensitivity to the three languages Kannada, Hindi and English that the characters speak is conveyed unobtrusively without being stilted or quaint.

Despite easy readability and a seemingly romance format Listening Now is a nuanced reflection on gender relations and the high price of non-conformity for women. It takes courage to write a book like this today when novels about naari jeevan ki peeda have reached saturation point. Also to ignore the nation and the backdrop of history when a good part of the novel is set in the Fifties needs a certain amount of defiance in the current climate. Appachana takes a risk by writing a massive old-fashioned novel about the private lives of people, mostly women, whose richly textured histories suck us in despite our initial resistance to yet another saga of female suffering. The gamble pays off amply. At the end of the novel one expects all the stories to come together like a jigsaw puzzle, but we find that they cannot fit any more after 16 years because stories keep growing and changing with time as do people.