Epic saga tugs heartstrings

Shashi Deshpande's latest novel, Moving On, is complex, turbulent and engrossing.

Moving On
Shashi Deshpande
Penguin
2004
Fiction
Pages: 360
Price: Rs 450
ISBN: 0670057819
Hardback

HT Image

In my high school years, in the days of rose-tinted glasses, the bookworm buzz in the girls’ common room used to be “This is my 39th or 59th or 101st Mills & Boon”. Today, I have a confession to make: Moving On is my first Shashi Deshpande. I am told that she’s written books like That Long Silence, Small Remedies and The Dark Holds No Terror, all of which were critically acclaimed.

I’m not surprised. And I’m pretty sure that I am going to move on to reading her other offerings soon enough.

Getting back to , it is the story of Jiji, or Manjira, a search “that’s always doomed to failure” but that’s alright because “the search is the thing”. It begins with her finding “Baba’s diary” a few days after he’s died and what begins as a journey to “getting to know her parents” ends with self-actualisation and new beginnings.

But it’s not about tired old truths and metaphysics and clichés — what bind the book together are the turn of events that are as sharp as hair-pin bends, the time-lines that are distinctly blurred, and the catastrophes and the “magic moments” that seem to pop out of the woodwork.

The narrative is trenchant, turbulent like shards of water crashing on quiet beaches: the dark and unplumbed depths to which Jiji loses Shyam, who taught her how the “places we live in are not just shells we inhabit; they become part us…”; then, there is the “entire expanse” of the sea, which reveals to us that the “magic moment comes to all of us; the secret is to recognise it when it comes, to hold on to the revelation”, because, otherwise, it’s going to recede into nothingness.