Shashi Deshpande’s Moving On (Penguin, 2004) is about a father who delights in the human body, its mysteries, its passion, and the knowledge that it contains and conceals. And a mother who wields the power of her love mercilessly. And Manjari Ahuja, the daughter, who after her husband’s death, is made to feel the truth behind the various relationships. Shashi Deshpande’s novel is about the secret lives of men and women who love, hate, plot and debate, and thereby she, using the metaphor of ‘body’, gives realistic presentation to the various relationships. Once again she is not content with the objective but is subjective by delineating the interior landscapes of her men and women characters, and unlike others who, to use R K Gupta’s words “have been content to record and document”( Gupta 1).
It is a story that begins with a woman’s discovery of her father’s (Baba’s) diary. It is through Baba’s diary that Manjari unlocks the past rescuing old memories and recasting events and responses. The ensuing struggle to reconcile nostalgia with reality and the fire of the body with the desire for companionship reaches to an unforeseen resolution, twisting and turning through complex emotional landscapes in relation. The story is about Manjari and her other male and female relations entwined and knitted intricately into hers. As she says:
‘My story’—how can there be such a thing as my story when other people’s lives are so knitted into it? I cannot pick out one stitch and say, this story is mine, take another and say, this is Baba’s story, then one more and say, this is Mai’s … All our lives so entwined, so knitted together that I will never be able to separate them. (270)
Baba, Manjari’s father, lays bare his father’s past and his ...
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... had paid the killers, that she had been acting in concert with a rival who had become her lover. Eventually the rumours died down and “Laxman’s death became just one more act in the unending drama of gang warfare”(175-76).
In a nutshell, Shashi Deshpande has woven the tragic versions of the various relationships through Manjari Ahuja’s relations with Baba, Shyam, Raman and Raja, intertwined with that of Baba-Mai, Gayatri-RK, Kamla-BK, Laxman-Mangal and Bharat-Medha. This novel is about the secret lives of men and women who love, hate, plot and debate with an intensity that reveals the interior landscapes of the numerous human relationships.
Works Cited
Deshpande, Shashi. Moving On. New Delhi: Penguin, 2004. (All references in parentheses are to this edition)
Gupta, R.K. The Novels of Anita Desai. New Delhi : Atlantic Publishers and Distributors, 2002.
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