The title of the first of Vivek Shanbhag’s novels to be translated into English from Kannada, in 2018, was a phrase coined by its characters: “ghachar ghochar” describes both the messy entanglements of family life and the impossibility of unknotting them. “Sakina’s kiss”, too, is a locution that leads us into thickets of mystery and confusion. There is, we discover in this new novel, no Sakina, kissing or otherwise; there is instead misreading, not only of impenetrable handwriting, but of motive, circumstance and disposition. That the author has managed to dot such a short and powerful narrative with a number of such red herrings and blind alleys suggests that he is intent on showing how easily misunderstandings, abetted by self-interest and self-delusion, may multiply.
Silence is key. The novel’s narrator, Venkat – his name shortened from its original Venkataramana the further he accesses urban and corporate life – is not a taciturn man, but he does not readily express his deepest concerns or feelings. Rather, he reaches for the personal development books in which he has found encouragement and consolation since his youth, an enthusiasm he shares with his wife, Viji; it is the discovery that they have both taken the same book, “Living in Harmony”, on their honeymoon that gets their marriage off to a flying start. After all, as one of his favourite gobbets of advice has it, “when you want to win a swimming race, you don’t dive in carrying weights”.
Such vague maxims prove unequal to guiding Venkat through the crisis that propels the plot of Sakina’s Kiss. One evening, two young men knock on the door of his third-floor flat in Bengaluru, searching for the couple’s twenty-year-old daughter, Rekha, ostensibly because they need help with college work; soon they are followed by a pair of uncles, filled with tales of romantic disputes that are in turn connected to a local big cheese, Reporter Ranganna, who runs a tabloid filled with pictures of murder scenes. Rekha, all the interlopers are told, is away at the remote rural house belonging to Venkat’s family, but it quickly emerges that she is not there either, and Venkat and Viji take the all-night bus to find her.
Such an accretion of incident might imply a hectic pace, but Shanbhag’s achievement is in his control of tone and volume (once again well realized by Srinath Perur’s translation); even as we learn of the dramatic backstory of Venkat’s maternal uncle, who is nudged away from his inheritance and later becomes enmeshed in radical politics and self-exile, and even as its links to Rekha’s interests and her whereabouts are revealed, a sense of stillness pervades. Each outburst of anger or terror is followed by an anxious dampening of emotion; each flurry of activity by a period of contemplation and stasis.
Ghachar Ghochar’s publication in English prompted comparisons with Chekhov and R. K. Narayan, probably suggested by Shanbhag’s ability to illuminate his characters’ interior lives against the complications of their social and political situations. In Sakina’s Kiss, it is clear that, while Venkat might cleave to the go-getting mantras of the management gurus who promise a way through the modern workplace (“Don’t Climb the Career Ladder, Take the Elevator” and “The Art of Introducing Yourself” are two titles that, by instinct, he keeps hidden from his wife), his natural impulse is essentially passive. “We may not exactly be charismatic”, he says of himself and Viji, “but we are not off-putting.”
The urge to fly below the radar is understandable, especially as the threats to a peaceful life are so various: gangs of young men with “pointy hairstyles” at the gates of the apartment complex; political insurgency in town and countryside; a wife and daughter who seem far more in tune with the demands of contemporary life. The suppressed alienation that Venkat feels in his work – the electrical engineering he studied in college has been replaced by a non-specific series of moves and promotions, and is referred to largely as “office”, without even a definite article – is allied with the cloak of unknowing that he has thrown around the schisms and unhappinesses of his childhood and youth. He is that building block of fiction, the uncomprehending ordinary man forced to confront the realities around him, and Vivek Shanbhag’s cleverly and compassionately constructed novel allows us to see the price that process will exact.
Alex Clark is a literary journalist and broadcaster who writes for the Guardian, the TLS and the Observer. She is co-host of the TLS podcast
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