The Dark Holds No Terrors by Shashi Deshpande [A Book Review]
“The dark holds no terrors, that the terrors are inside us all the time. We carry them within us, and like traitors, they spring out when we least expect them to scratch and maul.”
I wanted to explore more books written by Indian authors. I came across her name, Shashi Deshpande, in the Out of Print magazine. ‘The Dark Holds No Terrors’ was one of her earliest works. The first line on Goodreads read: ‘Why are you still alive-why didn’t you die?’ These were the bitter words uttered by the protagonist’s mother. What kind of mother says something like that to a child? Something struck a chord in me, and I wanted to know more.
Sarita…Saru visits her father’s home after 15 years. She tells herself it is only to check how her father was coping after the death of his wife. There is no personal agenda for this visit.
When her Baba opens the door, there is a look of surprise on his face but hardly any sign of recognition. He invites her in, and the conversation that follows shows the distance between the father and daughter.
“The familiar irritation, the familiar exasperation. To meet after fifteen years and feel only that!” Saru thinks.
To her surprise, she finds that another person is living with her father — Madhav, a college student. The way her father tells his name, comfortable and with ease, leaves her unsettled. He is yet to call her by her name since she walked through his door.
As she lies down to rest, her thoughts wander to her dead mother. “Do you know your mother is dead?” had asked an acquaintance, crudely letting her know the news of the death.
Eventually, she meets Madhav. The affection her father seems to have for the boy…she had always believed he is a man incapable of having strong feelings. She compares herself to a child, finally understanding that adults have been fooling you all this while. She labels that feeling as humiliation, and it surprised me.
Do kids feel humiliated when they finally realize that Santa is not real and their parents have been lying to them all these years? Betrayed maybe. But humiliation is something I was not able to understand.
Saru goes onto to try getting her father’s attention. She shows him pictures of her children. Her eldest, Renu, as Madhav points out, resembles her mother. Saru vehemently disagrees. It scares her that Renu could be like her mother. But somewhere she knows there is a similarity. Not in the looks but rather in their personality.
The second picture she pulls out is that of her son, Abhi. They tip-toe past the fact that he resembles her dead brother, Dhruva. Saru’s resentment for having linked to the people in her past whom she has nothing to do with brings forth a lot of unanswered questions. What was her relationship like with per mother and Dhruva?
As the story progresses, we see Saru settling in with Baba and Madhav. It is unlike her life in Bombay, but she is more peaceful here. Soon, the news that Saru is in town reaches the ears of everyone. As Madhav points out, it is a small town. They eagerly seek her professional assistance. Occasionally, her kids write to her. So does Manu. She writes back to the kids. Life seems to be good.
Yet, there are times when she is consumed by memories of the past. To her, grief seems to have the ability to stay with you for years, whereas happiness seemed more like an illusion.
She wanted to share it with someone, but she does not have that kind of relationship with anyone. Not her old friends. And definitely not her father.
I was slowly able to understand the kind of childhood she had to endure. There were two generations of difference between then and now. Between her and me. Yet, I was able to relate. I was the eldest child and felt overshadowed by my younger brother. It might have started as sibling rivalry, but it transitioned into something else. He was a boy. And we live in a society where male privilege is considered a myth, but it is actually a very real monster that eats up little girls before they could even realize what was happening.
Saru was bitter as was I. But, I pitied her. She had the trauma of witnessing her kid brother drown, and her own mother blaming her for it.
Her mother’s bitter words — “What are you alive and he dead?” — haunted her still.
Did she love her brother? Maybe. She had let him slide into her bed when the dark scared him. Occasionally, she had given in and allowed him to join her in her games. She, herself, was a child. Her parents did nothing to alleviate her insecurity. If Dhruva was alive, she would have grown to face her own insecurities. Sadly that was not the case.
“Wait for me, Sarutai, wait for me. I’m coming too.”
She remembers him still, but there is no love. There was the guilt of how bad she behaved when he was alive. Her mother had managed to erase all good things of the past and leave her only with a foul taste in her mouth.
Her own mother was a tyrant who influenced Saru’s perception of herself. Growing up, she wanted to be pretty. But she knew she was far from it at least going by what her mother said. When she finally came of age, her mother calls her woman.
“If you are a woman, I don’t want to be one.”
However, after observing another woman (someone visiting them) who Saru thinks of as elegant and had on an air of superiority, she concludes that it is because she is a doctor. For one to walk around, seemingly detached, either one had to be pretty (for Saru, this is impossible) or become something respectable like a doctor. Saru decides she also wanted to be a doctor.
And the journey to medical school was tumultuous. She had to get past her mother and get her Baba to agree to send her to Bombay for college. Surprisingly, Baba concedes. For the first time, she felt like he had taken her side.
But over the years, she seems to have lost the pride for her profession. She calls her profession a ventriloquist, giving her a voice, telling her what lines to tell her patients, what faces to make. She fears, without it, she is just a lifeless puppet.
Is she conveying that it makes her feel alive? Or is it simply a ruse? Something temporary that is keeping her going for now?
Her thoughts, “I can’t go on,” tells me it is the latter. And it somehow is tied to her other life where she plays the role of a wife, a mother, but more importantly, a woman.
It was during her medical college that she meets Manohar again (she had met him before and had developed a crush on the literature prodigy. But she did not dare to talk to him. How could a man like her be taken by a girl like her? Now, she feels different and more confident.) She was the one who initiates a conversation with him. Soon, they fall in love.
She craved…what was the word she had used…insatiable. Yes. She was insatiable for love. And she believed Manohar…Manu loved her. Isn’t the reason she fought with her parents and married him despite not getting their blessing.
Her mother had made it clear that she cannot come running back to them if her marriage to ‘that man’ (he belonged to a lower caste) ever went sour. Saru, at that time, promised that she would never look back. She was happy with Manu.
But now, she feels like she cannot go on. She, unlike her grandmother who lived at a time where a woman had no choice but to move on, could not blame fate. She believed she brought this upon herself. This life…this unhappiness. And her mother…
The knowledge that her mother was dead did not bring her sorrow but anger. Saru always wanted to ‘show her’. Show her she was the better child. Show her she did well without her support, and that she was happy. Now, with her gone, Saru feels somehow her mother came out this victorious. Saru feels it in her bone…her mother has always taken her happiness away from her…then and now, despite being dead.
In the present, Madhav decides to visit his home as his younger brother had run away. It was also the day of Dhruva’s birthday. Without Madhav’s presence, there seemed to be an uncomfortable silence between them. And then something in her breaks when they talk of Dhruva.
She repeatedly asks him whether he also thought she was the one who killed him. She weeps at the memory of his death.
The conversation continues the next day. Baba approaches her, much to her surprise. It is not like him to want to talk. Eventually, she confesses that she is unhappy. And tells him of what her husband does to her.
Her husband is a sadist. He is a violent stranger at night, and she, a terrified animal. He rapes her without a second thought, while she lies there unsure of where her reality ends and the nightmare begins. Yet she doesn’t say a word to him. Why? Well, how can she? In the morning, he goes back to being different. Or would he call it normal? As if the previous night did not happen. Can it be possible they were entirely two different people?
She is unsure of where it all began. They were happy as newlyweds despite living in a dingy room in a shitty suburb. He was struggling to put up plays, and she was struggling to make it as a doctor. But they were happy, cocooned in their world.
The word that Saru is a lady doctor had returned home reaches everyone in the neighborhood. Soon visitors were knocking at their doorstep. They wanted the doctor’s assistance. When they saw her around, there were greetings and smiles. But they were only for her. He was left out of the picture.
She did not realize this then. Or maybe she did, but since he did not say anything, she left the topic untouched.
“A wife should always be a few feet behind her husband. If he is an MA you should be a BA. If he is 5'4'tall you shouldn’t be more than 5'3'tall. If he is earning five hundred rupees you should never earn more than four hundred and ninety-nine rupees. That’s the only rule to follow if you want a happy marriage…No partnership can ever be equal. It will always be unequal, but take care it is unequal in favor of the husband. If the scales tilt in your favor, God, help you, both of you.”
Saru remembers the first time. It was after a girl (she had come to interview Saru about women and career) had asked her husband, “How does it feel when your wife earns not only the butter but most of the bread as well?”
He had attacked her ruthlessly that night. And she endured, unable to fight against his strength. And she had continued to endure well after that.
“But why? Why does she think she deserves to suffer?
“Aren’t you sufficient for yourself?” aks Baba. He reminds her that her mother is dead.
She remembers how Madhav had said, “It’s my life, after all.”
Having received the news that Manu was coming to visit her, Saru is left to decide what she really wants from her life.
