Love in the time of evil

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: This is a first from Shashi Deshpande, author of eight novels, including the Sahitya Akademi-winning That Long Silence. Her ninth is a love story. Actually, readers of Deshpande won’t be terribly surprised because she has written in many forms and genres — short story, non-fiction, children’s books, crime novels and so forth. What’s more, we have met the young Devayani in an earlier novel, a crime novel, Come Up and Be Dead. But as the author herself acknowledges, this is no sequel.

We are re-introduced to Devayani at her new home in the small town of Rajnur. The house has been built after demolishing her parents’ home, and you immediately sense that many old demons will be buried and Devayani will get a new beginning. She gets it in the form of love — and for some time even dares everyone who warns her against it with John Donne’s famous lines: “For god’s sake hold your tongue and let me love.”

With everyone trying to marry her off, Devayani falls in love with Ashok Chinappa, the new district superintendent of police of Rajnur, who promises love and honesty but no future. As Devayani travels the treacherous road to love, she ends up asking a string of questions to herself: “Why did I do it? Why did I enter the country of deceit? What took me into it? I hesitate to use the word love but what other word is there?” There are no easy answers and Devayani doesn’t even try to search for them. She knows she can’t expect anything of Ashok but can’t help recalling what an astrologer had told her mom. “I would marry early, he said. It would be easy, it would happen just like that, he said, clicking his fingers. It would be a happy marriage and I would have four ... Just like that. You fraud, I thought again. You fat fraud.”