Any dramatic or violent shift in society will mean that the lives of ordinary people are drastically affected. When country borders are redrawn people must also redraw their sense of identity. Some will survive this shift and some won’t. Shobha Rao writes about a large group of loosely connected individuals whose lives have been changed or residually affected by the Indian subcontinent being partitioned into the countries of India and Pakistan in 1947. These are short stories which can definitely be read independently, but this book exists in that murky realm between the novel and a collection of short stories. Part of the book’s power comes from seeing how certain characters appear differently in stories which don’t focus on them. But each story brings to the forefront the concrete life-altering changes caused by Partition in a fascinating variety of forms.
Rao’s characters embody a wide spectrum of individuals from men to women, from the wealthy/powerful to the poor/helpless, from gay to straight or somewhere on the spectrum in between, from Hindu to Muslim to agnostic and from young to old. It’s certainly not necessary to read them in order, but since I did so I could detect the way some themes or ideas would recur in different forms throughout the book. Where in the story ‘The Merchant’s Mistress’ a female servant triumphs over the lord and memsahib of the manor, the story ‘The Mehsahib’ shows a similar situation but the servant’s triumph feels much more morally complicated. A woman’s grief over the death of her baby in ‘The Lost Ribbon’ resonates much differently from the grief felt by a woman taken on holiday by her husband to try to save their marriage in the story ‘Curfew.’ These show a vibrant array of personalities and how common experiences will have different repercussions depending on each character’s individual responses to them.
One of the most engaging things I found throughout the book was how Rao shows a variety of sexual identities. The first two stories ‘An Unrestored Woman’ and ‘The Merchant’s Mistress’ include female characters Neela and Renu who are housed together in a camp for women that have been outcast or left without means because of the loss of their husbands. The physical connection they find together isn’t explicitly sexual but involves complicated feelings of romance, desire and love. Another story ‘The Imperial Police’ is from the perspective of Jenkins, a British officer stationed in (what is today) a city in Pakistan. He falls for one of his subordinates named Abheet Singh who is a Sikh, but isn’t able to fully articulate this desire to him and discovers a very different perspective on Abheet’s life after he’s killed in a violent community skirmish. I always find it fascinating to read about sexuality presented in complex ways within stories, but this collection also includes different perspectives on heterosexual marriage and the problematic challenges these couples face.
I was particularly interested in reading this alongside Arundhati Roy’s “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness” as both authors sought to explicitly depict the repercussions of Partition for a wide variety of individuals. While Roy’s novel is more an overarching look at society and explicitly political, Shobha Rao’s stories focus much more on the preoccupations and individual conflicts within particular moments in her character’s lives. Some are directly involved in Partition and some are not. The story ‘Such a Mighty River’ explores the life of an old man suffering from a form of dementia where he wanders the streets searching for his long-deceased wife. He’s been removed from time and circumstance in a curious way, yet he’s drawn back into it when a former prostitute he once visited and her cohorts decide to hold him hostage. However, the story ‘The Opposite of Sex’ is about a character named Mohan, one of the surveyors responsible for literally drawing the borders between India and Pakistan. He decides to use this power for his own selfish means with tragic results. Then there is the story 'Unleashed' which is far removed from India and involves a woman named Anju who lives in America in a drunken, depressed state which is reminiscent of a Jean Rhys novel.
Watch Shobha Rao discuss her collection and read from the story 'Kavitha and Mustafa'
One of the most memorable stories for me was ‘Blindfold’ where Bandra is a woman stripped of any prospects or livelihood, but she decides to muster what funds she can to found a brothel. This is a woman whose course in life was severely disrupted because of the repercussions of Partition, but who chose to survive and earn money to better the lives of her children through the exploitation of girls and women she buys from impoverished farmers. While her decision brings her temporary security and prosperity, it ultimately destroys her in both her estrangement from her children and a particular girl she purchases who cunningly asserts her independence. It’s fascinating how the issue of selling sex is represented here when compared to how it’s played out in the story ‘The Road to Mirpur Khas’ where a wife named Arya decides to sell her body when she and her husband face starvation.
In these stories, Shobha Rao powerfully represents a variety of experience all the way from the formation of the borders between India and Pakistan in 1947 to the present day where a woman of Indian descent contemplates what was lost along the way. They are at turns harrowing and heart-warming, but all utterly absorbing.
