Excerpts from 'Deliverance' a novella by Gauri Deshpande, translated by Shashi Deshpande:
- "Why is it like this? Is it the same with everyone? I get on well with my daughters when they're away but I don't want to be with them everyday."
- "How will we ever know, before we really become mothers, whether we are fit for motherhood?"
- "Before I became a mother I had thought that this new experience, this new person, would fill some gap in my life, that I would become more complete, that one of my life's potentials would now be realised, and so on. But what happened was just the opposite. Because of the children all my activities were curtailed. I began to wonder whether we shouldn't deduct fifteen or twenty years from our lives on account of them. No going out, no seeing anything, not even just simple reading and writing. Keep yourself ready for fulfilling the children's demands -- that is all! Since it was my lot, since it was inevitable, I did everything, grumbling all the while, and once the novelty wore off, with anger."
- "To whom can I speak of this? Ultimately, only to myself. In this world everyone will say -- you took it on knowingly, now go through with it. But when I see what the children and I suffer as we go through with it, I think one must speak the truth some time. Don't go on praising motherhood -- say that it is boring, repetitive, constricting and devastating, both for the mind and the body. Does everyone know this truth, and is this why they cloak it with fond admiration, praise, love and regard? Did my grandmother get angry with my mother? My mother with me? I think now that she did. Perhaps she didn't have as much anger as I do, or maybe she had more control over herself, but it was there."
- "Is motherhood like the story about Maruti's umbilicus then, something that everybody knows the truth about, but no one will say it aloud?"
That's one of my favourite authors at her candid best. Whether it was motherhood, womanhood, marriage, relationships or life itself, Gauri Deshpande had the ability to be brutally honest, much to the chagrin of the male establishment of the time. In this, her most autobiographical story, she examines her difficult relationship with her daughters, not sparing herself or them and in the process, filtering her own experiences into evocative literature -- the hallmark of many a great woman writer.
Interestingly, her daughter Urmilla Deshpande followed in her footsteps by exploring the same relationship from her point-of-view in her novel A Pack of Lies a couple of years ago. Gauri would have been proud even though her daughter's portrait of her was far from flattering. In fact, reading both these stories as companion pieces makes for an interesting study of how differently two people can look at the same situation based on their individual position and sensibility.
The mother finds parenting a burden, the daughter is embarrassed, hurt and shocked by her mother's dereliction of duty. Both agree that the mother hadn't the time or the patience to tend to her daughters through their growing years and was self-absorbed to a fault. While Gauri's book, ruthless as it is, still leaves an opening for us to judge the mother kindly, Urmilla is unsparing in her indictment, not allowing her parent's accomplishments as writer to buffer her inherent inadequacies as a mother whose love she so longed for and who was not just neglectful, but cold, cruel and graceless. She also holds the privilege of ascribing her own aimless wanderings and experiments with sex and drugs to her mother's negligence. Gauri's book on the other hand, struggles to make sense of why her daughter picked out an artist with deformed limbs to be her husband -- is this her way of getting back me, she wonders?
Perhaps the most disturbing contrast is the episode of the daughter's troubled relationship with the step father. In Deliverance, she develops a crush on him and her concerned mother sends her to a psychiatrist to help her cope with her feelings. Shockingly, in A Pack of Lies, the daughter claims the same step father sneaked into her room at night and when she ran to her mother, the woman refused to believe her allegation and dismissed it as another attention-seeking stunt.
It would be unwise to presume that all these incidents are indeed autobiographical, given that both books are after all, works of fiction. At the same time, because both writers have narrated similar incidents from their individual perspectives, it may in fact leave some room for speculation about what may or may not have transpired and perhaps Urmilla's version is her way of putting the truth out one more time for people to judge, or then, as her mother suspects, another expression of jealousy or childish defiance.
Ultimately, reading both Deliverance and A Pack Of Lies helps to demystify motherhood. This isn't the pretty picture of doting, self-sacrificing mothers we are fed in popular culture, but the uncompromising story of an individual with a keen intellect and sharp analytical skills who had the courage to look herself in the mirror and not baulk at the imperfection that stared back at her.
