Patterns? Or Mirages?

In a pattern that has become visible only in retrospect, I find that a majority of the books that I’ve been reading and enjoying of late are by women, and more specifically Indian women writers. The reason for this is something that had been floating around in the head for many months and yet has been eluding articulation, but I’m going to try.

It all started with a book called Tokyo Cancelled, by Rana Dasgupta a while ago. It was an interesting book, one that kept the mind engrossed for the better part. But one that I finished with a vague sense of dissatisfaction. At the time, all that I could articulate was ‘that it was too cerebral, from the mind and that it didn’t have soul.’ More interesting was that fact that I couldn’t work up the enthusiasm to do a review of the book. I let it go for then.

Just recently, I finished Book Of Shadows, by Namita Gokhale. And it was then perhaps that the loop that started in Tokyo got closed in the ancestral house of Rachita Tiwari (the central character in Ms Gokhale’s book) in the Himalayan foothills near Almora. Without comparing the two books, what I found in the latters was both cerebral and also something more, the aspect that I was (and still am?) unable to articulate - a form of understanding and acceptance of the contradictions that go to make the human condition.

What does that heavy sentence mean? It has to do with paradox. Or contradictions. Or the half-empty, half-full state that governs so much of our life, all life. So much of life has to do with this-or-that choices, where both this and that make sense, where some part of us wants this and the other wants that. And then something else goes on to happen! So it seems to me that contradictions are what make us what we are. And how we go through the experience of contradiction is what tests us and shapes us.

And what does all this have to do with books and patterns?

It seems to me that women seem to have a better sensing of the inherent contradiction that is life. The masculine approach that tries to convert such situations into a problem, which is then to be solved through rational, logical and intellectual methods, which even while its doomed to failure has a tendency to get judgmental or worse yet simplistic. The feminine approach seems to be more about embracing the contradiction along with all its contradictoriness, and then going on to live through it. And at this time, while I ask if there’s any other way, I find myself savoring writing that reflects this.

It’s for this reason that I enjoy Shashi Deshpande’s writing so much all of her writing that I’ve read so far has to do with life, with all its grit and grime, passions and emotions, brought out with a remarkable eye for detail and an appreciation of the dilemma of contradictions, truly delightful.

Likewise The Bone People, by Keri Hulme, a book that I’ve mentioned sometime before, is one that’s so exquisitely layered and then detailed out that its hard to put it down and it’s a long book!

I’ve not spotted this quality of sensing among too many of the male writers of today. But that may well be due to the fact that I seem to have been quite unconsciously picking up the female writers! A notable exception to the pattern I’ve mentioned above is Naguib Mahfouz, but could it be that this may be due to the fact that he belongs to a very different generation (given his age), one where there was a more composite and integrated world-view before the term metro-sexual came along to blight the landscape?!