What thoughts do we have when we know we will die soon? Are we truthful with ourselves at that final point, or are our memories layered with self-deception even then? Do we forgive ourselves and others as the hours and minutes take us inexorably towards death?
Dark Star
Context
Pages: 152
Price: Rs.497
Dark Star is a plausible, detached, and unsparing set of answers to these eternal questions; the ruminations of an old woman waiting for death as she very slowly unpacks her memories while her husband of 59 or 60 (she is not sure) years sits in the next room with the television news on at full volume. We are told she is living in a house her husband built in Punjab, but that her childhood was spent in a village across the border and she went to London on a boat as a young girl for an arranged marriage with a man whom she knew only from a blurred photograph her parents had shown her. They had two sons and the family lived in California for a while: the sons grew up and left home and her husband decided to move back to India.
These are the bare bones of her life’s chronology, released in small pieces. She thinks about how hard it is to pin down memory—how photographs fade and she can no longer remember the colour of the sky or sea on a particular day and she cannot ask her husband as they have not spoken for years. Her elder son is estranged; her younger son phones sometimes—she can hear her husband shouting at him from the next room. She reflects: “Most men are weak… but even the weakest man needs to hold on to a fingernail’s worth of power… because what else do I have to give him except power over an old woman who can hardly walk.” But she remembers too that “he never had power over our children…. He tried the hard way, by force, the children fled. It’s what children do.”
The crows
As the woman (there are no names in the novel) ruminates, her thoughts are scattered and the writing reflects that: “I hate you my husband, more than I have ever hated anything all my life. The thought keeps coming back, keeps circling like a crow.” Lying in bed she can only figure out the time of day by listening for the cries of hawkers, but the caws of crows are constantly in her ears. To her they represent regret, or loss or guilt, and she hears them the loudest when she thinks of her lost daughter (who is actually her niece, but she feels is her own) who was caught up in the horrors of 1984; or her own experience of fleeing her burning village in 1947.
“She thinks about how hard it is to pin down memory—how photographs fade and she can no longer remember the colour of the sky or sea on a particular day.”
She recalls telling her younger son that she wants to live in the bottom of a bucket, shielded from the world, but her son insists that the world is the place to be. But she knows, “the world inside the bucket is the same as the world outside… and those, like my son, who try to crawl out, find themselves back inside the bucket”.
Bleak house
Reflections such as these give Dark Star a certain unrelieved bleakness. Gradually, though, we realise what we are being told is not necessarily the whole truth. The apparently uncaring husband may also be the person replenishing the glass of water beside her bed or bringing her slices of bread and butter. Early in the narrative she describes a strange man on the boat who tried to talk to her and whom she indignantly and virtuously repulsed. As the book progresses, other possibilities arise. She recalls “the stranger’s touch on a boat half a century ago” and wonders “if that is the reason for the failure of my life. Not the caress. Not talking to a strange man on a boat. Not disobeying my father and his fathers. But cursing what I was given on a single night sixty years ago.”
The tenor of this soliloquy is a long lament, a keening almost, about the way the world treats women. The woman in this story had her life turned upside down when some men far away drew a line on a map and turned her home into another country. She was later despatched like a parcel to marry a man in another country and on the way perhaps had her only true personal experience: the moment she was seen for the actual individual she was rather than as a cog in the wheel of other people’s expectations. Having experienced love first-hand, she found it hard to love her husband, even though her father promised her that hate would turn into love—one more lie men tell women to make them obey.
The tenor of this soliloquy is a long lament, a keening almost, about the way the world treats women. | Photo Credit: Getty Images/ iStock
Her husband was cold and controlling. Though he too had come out of a bad time in Kenya, he concealed his insecurities behind a rigid, uncaring hardness which alienated not only his wife but also his sons. All this the woman sees as she waits for death. The slivers of redemption are pitifully small: the glass of water and the acknowledgement of a certain humanity in her husband; the remembrance of love, even if it was just for one night; her love for her younger son—even though he writes stories and everyone knows (she knows anyway) that all stories are lies.
Right cadences
Dark Star is clearly meant to be a meditation on life and what it looks like at the end. Ranbir Sidhu’s writing catches the cadences of thought—the repetitions, associations, occasional scramble down random rabbit holes, and the deceitfulness. No one is probably entirely honest even at the end—that is the received wisdom, anyway, and no one can actually prove or disprove it. But Sidhu makes it all believable, itself a formidable achievement.
If there is a false note it is in the introduction of the farmers’ movement and the State’s harsh reprisals. In a story so personal, so inward, so intent on examining what makes a life worth living, this jarring invoking of the outside world feels like the token genuflection to politics and nationalism now nearly mandatory in contemporary Indian fiction.
But such minor caveats apart, this is an unusually intelligent and oddly compassionate book, written with great sensitivity and with a highly accomplished unfolding of plot. It is an unflinching look at the sadness so many women carry with them; the stony ground they are forced to inhabit where tenderness is a rare visitor. Sometimes the unrelieved bleakness of the narrative is hard to take; the relentless questioning of the monologue feels too harsh because we want to think that at the end there is some consolation, redemption, and love or its memory. But in many ways the value of the book is this valour: it does not sidestep into sweetness and provide us with a hopeful landing. It stays on its painful and pitiless course.
Dark Star is a difficult book but a remarkable one. It is among the best I have read for a long time.
Ranjana Sengupta is an editor and author of Delhi Metropolitan: The Making of an Unlikely City.
The Crux
- Dark Star is the ruminations of an old woman waiting for death.
- It gives a plausible, detached, and unsparing set of answers to life’s eternal questions.
- Some minor caveats apart, this is an unusually intelligent and oddly compassionate book, written with great sensitivity.
COMMents
SHARE