When the pages are ' filled ', there's nothing, you can read about

A disappointing novel on love that too easily slips into clichés…



In the Country of Deceit, Shashi Deshpande, Penguin/Viking, 2008, p.259, Rs. 399.

What struck me repeatedly while reading In the Country of Deceit was the enormous likeness Shashi Deshpande has with Jane Austen. Both writers come from a completely different space and time but that little phrase I learnt in colle ge while studying Austen has strangely remained in my memory — “little bit of ivory, two inches wide”. It seems appropriate in describing Deshpande’s world too. For, Deshpande’s novels are about the ordinary lives of women, too ordinary I might add. These are women who live a humdrum existence, mainly jobless, surrounded by children, a world so common that I sometimes think it does not deserve to be written about.
I reach page 41 of Deshpande’s new novel without coming up against anything striking — some development in the plot, an instance of sparkling wit, an amazing stylistic innovation. There is none of it. What is available is a series of desultory letters, with irrelevant detail, in which well-wishing relatives urge the heroine, Devayani, to consider getting married — a very usual, banal, everyday matter. But the heroine is disinterested. I wonder whether I shall stumble upon the secret of Devayani’s gloom, her “sombre” and “unsmiling” exterior? Mind you, she is only 26 but carries the burden of the world upon her shoulders.

Suffering as abstraction

It is her father’s suicide and her mother’s long suffering and eventual death that the author provides as explanation. The heroine’s victim-complex makes it one among a chain of novels Deshpande has written about unhappy women, women who are content to listen and not speak. Our heroine merges into the mould, compounding the unfathomable oppression faced by women into an enormous abstraction. As Naipaul has said, obnoxiously but memorably, “If writers talk about oppression, they don’t do much writing.”
Like Austen again, Deshpande’s novels are inhabited by many characters, all of whom are related to the central character. Uncles, aunts, cousins and friends — Sindhu, Keshav, Savi, Shree, Gundu, Asha, Tara, Kshama, Rani and, of course, Ashok, the married man Devayani eventually falls in love with. She becomes Ashok’s mistress — his “girl” — and begins her long journey of guilt in the “country of deceit”. Ashok is the stock Mills-and-Boon hero, tough but tender, whom Devayani typically resists but soon he becomes her “sun, moon and stars”. He visits her surreptitiously and showers her with love and passionate embraces, but Devayani cannot accept the role of a “whore” or a “floozy”: “I must stop this. We can’t go on. We must stop. I will stop, I won’t go on with this, I must tell Ashok I can’t go on, I will tell him it’s over.” Is this a sample of the anguished utterance of a woman in love with another woman’s husband or an emotional outburst straight out of a Bollywood film? Torment will be torment in both literature and in commercial cinema, I admit, but somehow one expects rendition in literature to belong to another plane.
I fret through the rest of the novel which assumes a recriminatory tone as Devayani’s sister and brother-in-law try to recover the “Devi [they] know”, urging her to choose between a “clandestine affair” and the “respectable” option: “Only if there’s loyalty can you have an honourable marriage. And how can you expect a man who is disloyal to his wife and his marriage to be loyal to you?” Devayani’s relationship with Ashok pulls her out of the warm circle of love given to her in generous doses by her aunts, uncles and siblings which becomes conditional once they discover her transgression. We are then exposed to a bourgeois world of moral and ethical values in which Devayani has to distinguish between “right” and “wrong”. She does break off with Ashok finally but it is not clear whether it is a result of feeling “cheap” or because he does not tell her that he has been posted out of Rajnur.

Unanswered questions

The novel leaves behind a series of unanswered questions: what is the purpose of bringing in the issue of the disputed land which Devayani and her sister, Savi, have inherited but which is claimed by another through forgery? What is Devayani’s friendship with Rani securing for the novelist other than providing the occasion for Devayani’s first meeting with Ashok? Is she a foil to the heroine? How does Ashok’s love affair with Devayani contribute to her growing up? The novel ends with situating Devayani back where she was at the start of the novel. Deshpande has admitted in an interview that writing about love makes one easily “slip into clichéd language [and] clichéd situations”. We couldn’t agree more.
A word about language: Deshpande’s prose, at its most innovative, includes verbs such as “pruning” one’s belongings, and lingers on adjectives like “limpid”, “cute” and “sweet”. The U.S. is referred to as the “States” and women call themselves “nasty bitchy females”. The novel is well-dressed, its jacket graceful but the plot begs for more.