Author: Namita Gokhale
Publisher: Penguin India
Pages: 208
Read On: Hardback Edition
How Long it Took Me To Read: 3 days (with many breaks)
Review: In the time between me buying this book and finally getting around to reading it, I had sort of forgotten what this book was exactly about (major bookish problems!). So I went into this pretty blind (pun not intended at all). And it took me by surprise. I found myself back in time. A time we have all lived through and survived and dealt with in our own ways. The Pandemic.
2020.
Honestly, even reading that gets my heart going.
It's some kind of PTSD to even think about the days of stress, checking yourself for symptoms and washing everything in sight and disinfecting within an inch of your life.
God, I don't think we give ourselves enough credit for making it through those days.
Of course, those of us who were lucky to make it through and survive.
Countless people didn't.
It's a good thing I went in blind, I don't know if I would have been brave enough to pick this book up otherwise, in March no less. Just three years out. It took me right back to those eerily quiet days and nights.
Things I Loved:
1. I absolutely love reading about families and their many little inside quirks and equations and resentments and secret histories. Give me a story about an Indian joint family and see me relish every single word. This book was a treat. A mother, her three children and their families made for a very interesting, yet very rooted in reality read. I also loved the writing. This is my second book by the author and I have a few others on my shelves that I want to get to quickly.
2. This book is full of characters that I felt like I knew. The dutiful, endlessly do-gooder daughter, a idealistic son and a younger son who has grown up a little too pampered and a tad bit selfish. None of these characters felt like caricatures and were flawed but good and solidly real. And each person has their own thing going on- the search for true purpose, the search for their biological family, someone worrying about their career and someone wondering if their life has meant anything at all. Feelings and inner turmoils we can all relate to.
3. Our title character, the blind matriarch is like so many women and mothers in our country. Women who've lived quiet, unhappy lives and often lived with domestic abuse and emotional abuse and kept quiet and carried on. Their hopes and dreams and aspirations set aside to keep the Great Indian Family going and to think they do all of this happily, never really wondering if they ought to leave. Of course, for many women, even today, leaving is really not an option. Yet these women make happy homes for their children and raise them with love and affection. I honestly, don't know how they do it. How do you have any hope and love left in your heart when your marriage has become a place of stress of violence?!
4. I love the depiction of a joint family, I mean not in the strictest sense, this is a family with separate kitchens and pretty independent lives. It was refreshing to read about a family sans the hyperbolic dimensions often tacked on my popular depictions of Indian joint families- you know over dramatic TV shows and films. This is how a family often is, there are undercurrents of resentment, old issues, money tussles, jealousy and a quiet judgement of the other that only your close family is capable of. And there is love, the kind that binds and changes but never really goes away. The family here is pitch perfect.
5. My favourite thing here however was the depiction of those days in 2020 when we all came to a screeching halt. When the world seemed insane and unreal. The doom scrolling, the worrying about every little thing and seeing the world grind to a halt and slowly fall apart...honestly it feels like it happened yesterday. The book took me back, and brought the anxiety and throbbing worry of those days back to life. The hopelessness and the ways in all of us came together and the apathy of those in charge. All of this is just brought to life in all it's messy shades.
Rating: 4.5/5
I loved this book and I am so glad I picked it up and in March to boot.
Cannot recommend it enough.
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