Unveiling complex emotions with the expertise of a surgeon
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“In my childhood, I was known as the boy whose mother had run off as an Englishman”-so begins Anuradha Roy’s latest novel All The Lives We Never Lived, a story about people out of sync with their times and their surroundings. This is a beautifully written and compelling tale of how families fall apart and of what remains in the aftermath.
Myshkin is nine years old when his mother leaves him and his father in the Indian town of Muntazir, to embark on a new life. After his mother’s departure, Myshkin’s own life is spent anxiously waiting – for her letters to arrive, for her to return and seeking to understand why she made the choice of leaving the family home, and to this end he delves into the unusual freedom of her adolescence, compared with the rigidity and constraint of her married existence in 1930s India.
The older Myshkin, a man in his 60s, narrates the story. He is the adult version of the child whose mother left inexplicably, a horticulturalist, now living quietly, more at home among trees than people. In the course of this deliberately self-contained life, a bulky envelope arrives ‘pulsing with the energy every unopened letter in the world has’. It has something to do with his mother, he knows, but he cannot bring himself either to open it or to throw it away. Instead, his narration takes us back to his mother’s childhood, and then to his own childhood.
Having grown up with an indulgent father who encouraged her to blossom, Myshkin’s mother Gayatri was an artist and dancer married to a man who saw dance as scandalous and art as irrelevant. Nek Chand, Myshkin’s father, who taught at a local college and was a follower of a local freedom fighter and spiritual guru, Mukti Devi restricted his mother’s creative freedom by denigrating her efforts. Abandoned suddenly by his wife, Nek Chand responds to this crisis in his life by also leaving the child for an extended period of time; and he is later imprisoned for his anti-British activism which he pursues.
But Gayatri’s own life and art and Myskhin’s memories of his parents’ marriage are not sufficient to explain to him why his mother did what she did. He looks for answers elsewhere, searching in literature for insight into the tensions between women’s desires and the world’s expectations of them.
At its heart, All the Lives We Never Lived discusses complex emotions such as war, nationalism, freedom, love, abandonment, loneliness and nostalgia, with Anuradha Roy unveiling each of these with the expertise of a surgeon. This novel is not interested in condemning absent mothers. By contrast, Roy is refreshingly unimpressed by the anti-imperial activities of Myshkin’s father – who seeks freedom from being ruled while behaving like a tyrant in his own home. The world that rewards men for their public actions and forgives them their private cruelties, placing national politics above gender politics, is one that Roy slices through in her prose, though always obliquely.
Hailed as one of India’s greatest living authors, Anuradha Roy’s novel Sleeping on Jupiter was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2016 and won the D.S.C. prize for South Asian Literature. She won the Economist Crossword Prize, India’s premier award for fiction, for her novel The Folded Earth, which was nominated for several other prizes including the Man Asia, the D.S.C., and the Hindu Literary Award. Her first novel, An Atlas of Impossible Longing, has been widely translated and was named one of the best books of the year by the Washington Post and The Seattle Times. She works as a designer at Permanent Black, an independent press which she runs with her husband, Rukun Advani. She lives in Ranikhet, India. In Sri Lanka, Anuradha Roy is published by the Perera-Hussein Publishing House.
| Book facts | |
| All The Lives We Never Lived by Anuradha Roy. Published by Perera-Hussein Publishing House. Price: Rs 1,250. Available in all bookshops and www.pererahussein.com |