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Review: The Way Home by Shanta Gokhale
This collection of 12 short stories shows how women often have to manipulate the patriarchal institution of marriage to make it meet their own needs
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Imagine Shashi from English Vinglish being confident right from the beginning of the film, and responding to her husband’s condescension. What if she had left him for the French chef? Imagine her life if she had jettisoned the marriage and family that didn’t value her or her skills.
Shanta Gokhale’s collection of 12 short stories, The Way Home, which presents marriage from the woman’s perspective, provides multiple answers to questions about situations much like the one in the hit Sridevi film. It also shows how women often manipulate the patriarchal institution to make it meet their own needs, and differentiate it from relationships based on ideas of love and commitment.
Short story collections can be tricky. Often, a few stories shine brighter than the rest. This is not the case here. Gokhale writes with the precision of someone who has meditated long on life and writing. Her stories do not have extraordinary events. Instead, they showcase everydayness through familiar events: a friendly reunion, a serendipitous meeting, a family secret, a power conflict between partners, befriending a stranger during a bus journey, learning the stories of ancestors, and so on.
The opening story, In Remembrance of Times Past, challenges social perception and prejudice with its protagonist, a single septuagenarian woman golfer in shorts. The reader learns of her affairs and her one true love through the voice of her married friend whose husband is surprised to see such a person at the golf course. The warmth between the friends shines through as much as the husband’s churlishness at someone singing the songs of Mukesh, Rafi and Talat Aziz in a south Indian accent.
In Ear Apart, the narrator confesses to the reader that she doesn’t like the character she is going to write about. She elaborates that she might have added details to the character had she liked him. It is perhaps true that an author cannot write a believable character if they don’t like them enough to present them with authenticity and empathy. Here, the author isn’t merely playing with the portrayal of characters but also with the narrative voice — which readers may or may not assume is Gokhale’s own.
In Swimming Pool, readers too are being tested when an elderly woman’s experience is presented as a test of trust between young lovers. Here, a woman going from Mumbai to Pune one Sunday a month to swim in a certain pool, shows how women bargain for space and time in families that do not see them beyond their roles as wife and mother. Would a woman commute to such lengths just to swim to help her treat arthritis? This is the question the man asks his partner when she describes this curious woman she met on the bus. One chooses suspicion, the other chooses faith. Can such people then build the foundation of a life together?
Gokhale’s layered stories seem linear and straightforward but the reader realises that they encapsulate the nuances of grief, memory and loss. In The Bhikbali, the author showcases the differences in stories passed down within a family. While men know of the market aspects of an ancestor, who was a businessman during the colonial period, the women are aware of his aura. Written as an exchange full of banter between a husband and a wife, who have been married for 25 years, it is also a picture of a love that grew after marriage.
When marriage is a subject, can extramarital liaisons be far behind? Here’s an excerpt from She Came To Stay that presents the multiple knots in which individuals sometimes find themselves caught up:
“The story, which began rather unpredictably perhaps, ends exactly as you are expecting it to. Ram cannot bear to be parted from Chandani [Savitri’s baby] and asks Savitri to marry him. Savitri says that would make her a bigamist and it’s too much trouble divorcing Narendra, so she’d rather live in sin with Ram just as Narendra is doing with the hotel heiress in Delhi and Ram’s wife is doing with her Frenchman in Paris. Ram’s Vidharba blood revolts against the idea for a brief moment, but he tells it to shut up because marrying Savitri would make him a bigamist too. Sobering down, he begins to move Savitri’s and Chandani’s things from Anisha’s bedroom to his.”
All the stories in the collection oscillate between marriage as a social institution that requires caste-compatibility more than anything else and women’s agency to own their lives and decisions. The authorial voice makes no judgements, and there is much empathy when characters are subject to the judgement of others.
While the focus is on the women in these stories, the men – those who are forgotten and those whose love suffocates their partners too – are also interesting. Together, they form a picture of families with their secrets and revelations, concerns, resentments and suspicions all presented with irony and wry humour.
Gokhale’s spectacular collection reminds readers that the strangest revelations about the self and about relationships can sometimes emerge from the most mundane subjects.
Akankshya Abismruta is an independent writer.
