Book Review: Pilgrimage by Ira Singh

 

Book: Pilgrimage 

Author: Ira Singh 

Pages: 152 

Read: Paperback copy 

Read in: ~2-3 hours

Plot Summary: From early to middle age, Pilgrimage tells the story of Monica—Mona at home—over three defining, pivotal events in her life. 

In the opening section, set in contemporary times, Monica, now a woman with a penchant for causes and sympathy for the dispossessed and the underdog, is stranded on a highway, surrounded and stalled by aggressive kanwariyas marching to the Ganga, even as her father struggles for life in the ambulance they are travelling on. 

Then, going back in time, the novel unearths two incidents which made the girl the woman she has become. 
‘Punishment’ finds Mona stepping into adolescence in a small town in north India in the 1980s, becoming aware of her body and its possibilities for the first time, the norms and attitudes which seek to control it, and the ways in which she can subvert them. But when her mother catches Mona spying on a rooftop homosexual encounter, everything changes.

And the in-between story, ‘Transgressions’, follows Monica as a young scholar of Delhi University in the 1990s—having rejected the demands of home and parents—conducting research on the psychology of drug-addicts, and a doomed, intense love affair with Ajay, a heroin junkie.

Evocative, precise and spare, Pilgrimage is an extraordinary exploration of one life negotiating family, sex, love—and the illusion of home. It is also the story of middle-class India and its dysfunctions, its casual bigotry and paralyzing insecurities.

Things I Liked: 

1. This book has a very interesting approach to character study. We get to see the life and journey of a woman- Monica- at three different ages/ life stages. Through each of these snapshots, we learn about her and the events that have shaped her into the woman she is. There is not a ton of navel-gazing but the book is still insightful and interesting. 

2. The first story is of a middle-aged Monica driving her father to a bigger hospital when the come across a contingent of kanwariyas. The story examines the saffronisation of India, the power of these religious processions and their unwillingness to step aside even for emergency vehicles. An interesting little story. 

3. The second story a twenty-something Monica working towards her PhD on addiction in families. She finds a family of addicts and the story focuses on her interaction with this family and its broken and weird family members. This is a very interesting story because whilst we look at Monica's interpersonal relationships with this family of addicts, we also get to look at the impact of addiction, especially, if one's whole family is addicted.

4. The third story takes us back to when Monica was thirteen years old and curious about sex and sexuality. She witnesses something that fascinates her and the impact of her voyeurism on those she was spying on! 

Things I Didn't Like: 

1. The pitfall of a character study via three discrete stories is that you never end up getting a holistic sense of the person. It is almost like we get to see pieces of Monica, which is sort of interesting, but there seems to be a huge gap between the 20-something, who got high and fell in love with a heroine junkie and the 40-something woman, who works with addicts. 

Rating: 4/5