Book review: ‘All the lives we never lived’ by Anuradha Roy
There are books so engraved in loss and departure, that reading them becomes a meditative experience of re-evaluation of everything that was presumably ours, heightened by nostalgic repercussions of those years back in the timeline, like ripples making its way to the banks. ‘All the lives we never lived’ was one such book. A book that holds dormant time and loss in such a bizarre inseparable proximity, that one becomes indistinguishable from the other. Then again, what is departure if not resting on the frames of time, and what is memory if not little rivulets flowing in impressions on the mud, left behind by footprints that walked over. ‘All the lives we never lived’ is an ode to life’s bifurcations, a tribute to junctions in the life cycle, a retrospective ideation of what could have happened, and how we can make sense of it.
A summary won’t suffice the book, for it is intimidatingly formless. What the book leaves behind is a void, an emptiness that is difficult to endure or eliminate, but what offers a strange comfort too. It is like a fragrance that wafts in from the distance, stronger if we peep outside the window and milder if we retreat inwards — a fragrance of possibilities, for we do not know what is it we are missing, although we feel the absence. This book does precisely so. It goes on with a streak of melancholic loneliness, that spreads its limbs all across the storyline — through the protagonist Myshkin’s trance-like looking back at his past, and the way he pieces together fragments of memory and artefacts that were retained, to create a saga of his life.
“Sometimes I take my glasses off to see differently from other people. Colours and words swim into each other, meanings change on the page. In the distance, everything becomes a pastel blur. There is a kind of restfulness in not seeing well that the clear-sighted will never know.”
‘All the lives we never lived’ centralizes itself upon Myshkin’s mother Gayatri, who leaves her household when Myshkin is young, to start a contrasting life in the Indonesian islands with a German painter and a British dancer, for reasons which are subsequently explored in the book. Gayatri’s characterization in dazzlingly splendid, not only because she harbours and exercises a personality that was quite rare to find in the early 1900s, but also because she philosophizes the concept of her story entirely within herself. Understanding Gayatri’s character, her decisions, her perceptions — is key to understanding the relevance of the book. She comes alive through two avenues — firstly through Myshkin’s memories of his childhood, the interactions that he remembers, the limited life with his mother that he holds dear to his heart, and secondly through Gayatri’s letters which she periodically sent to India, which Myshkin reads quite later into adulthood. Thereby Gayatri’s life is rooted in the distant past, but is navigated in the present. What is it that makes Gayatri’s characterization so deep rooted in the space that this story occupies, ensuring that what she left behind, never goes extinct? Many answers come up.
At first, comes the uniqueness of Gayatri’s psyche, how she always finds herself at crossroads between the girl she was in the past and the woman she has eventually become: forked roads leading to unknowns or paths coming from previously discarded locations. Gayatri’s idea of freedom and liberty places itself quite naturally in the side of her husband’s idea of freedom. When Gayatri believes freedom is unanimously personal, her husband believes that freedom is largely collective. Gayatri believes that freedom is of the koel who can sing whatever it pleases, engage in songs of the rain in the backdrop of pouring monsoon, live its life in desolation or celebration without a calculative supervision. Myshkin’s father believes that freedom of the koel is the absence of the cage around it. Next, comes Gayatri’s perspective towards art, for she is a trained artist and an amateur singer. Her approach to art is magnanimously explosive, art that doesn’t care for the appreciative crowd that collects around, but what tries to channelize inner turmoil and festivity to strike a harmony with the juvenility of natural phenomenon. Art that resists any sort of stifling, art that liberates and lashes out in eruptions at anyone or anything that dares to smother it. Ultimately, Gayatri’s art is inseparable from her mind that synthesizes it, it is the art that gives her a home, and it is the art that caresses her in times of harrowing distress. Motherhood takes a whole new form in Gayatri’s case. It is etched in conflict — she leaves behind her young son to take on a life of her dreams — and the only connection she maintains with Myshkin is through postcard sized paintings and long letters. Gayatri had wished to get reunited with Myshkin, which never comes to fruition.
Rabindranath Tagore visits the narrative quite frequently in Anuradha Roy’s book, like a lonesome traveller gifting strand of his thoughts. Gayatri’s attachment to Tagore, whom she calls Rabi babu, starts off as a poetic admiration through her ancestry as a Bengali woman, but eventually becomes a continual adherence to the great poet’s ideals and philosophies. It seemed as if Gayatri had come right out of the pages written by Rabindranath, giving embodiment to how he wished his art to be perceived by the people. Gayatri, in what can seem to be a hyperbole, almost appeared as the manifestation of Rabindranath’s core emotions, giving shape to his songs and poetry that resisted domestication. It is perhaps one of the many ways in which Roy gives tribute to Tagore.
“In the dew-dripping autumn, let be
If thou must depart and go,
Leaving thy song to the flowers…”
The above lines is a segment of a translation from one of Tagore’s songs. It wasn’t included in this book, but I can easily fit Gayatri into these verses and make her stand true to the book’s potency.
Anuradha Roy had certainly wanted to make ‘All the lives we never lived’ a historical novel that doesn’t weigh us down by factual intricacies. On the contrary, she chooses to borrow and expertly fictionalize historical events and play around with the story’s parallelism with actual historical landmarks. Truly enough, what is history if not stories governed by evidences and artefacts left behind, memories discarded and dreams realized, people growing up and departed souls fading away. What is history and what is India’s freedom struggle if not for a million sons crying in longing for the mothers they have lost, homes they have vacated, buckets of time they have subconsciously evaded. Perhaps there can be more of these, we can indeed vouch for that.
This book has garnered criticism and love in equal measure. In reality, it is not a book that can be read fast and mapped with precision, be placed in pre-ordained zones of expectation and its mismatches. It is not to be contained in any concrete structure, for it is inherently formless. A direction to appreciate this book will be to participate. If you participate in the story, sit beside Myshkin as he reads his mother’s letters, travel alongside Gayatri as she navigates a foreign land, add your own colours to Gayatri’s paintings or count the leaves of Myshkin’s tended trees, this story can belong to you. Like all the lives we circumstantially never got to live, like all the loss and the absences we held close to ourselves like quilts in biting coldness, all the kinds of motherhood and companionship we lost while moving up the year count, ‘All the lives we never lived’ should live on as an ever-lasting gleaming work in the realm of Indian literature.
Originally published on my book blog. ‘All the lives we never lived’ came out worldwide in 2018.
