A MATTER OF TIME

In her first, somewhat charmless book to be published here, Indian writer Deshpande tells a story familiar to readers in the West: a family crisis is triggered when a husband walks out on his wife. Deshpande, the author of 80 stories and seven novels, begins her tale briskly. When Gopal leaves his wife, Sumi, for reasons that are, at first, unexplained, he opens a wound in her through which her family’s legacy pours onto the page. While very little actually happens here, dozens of chapters are spent retelling the history of Sumi’s people. Bearing her husband’s sudden and unexpected departure with unexpected fortitude, Sumi relocates herself and her three daughters to the Big House, her family home. Sumi’s mother, Kalyani, lives there with her husband, Shripati, whose own abandonment of his wife is recalled. Manorama, Kalyani’s mother and Sumi’s grandmother, quietly presides over the unfolding family story, which is rich in abandonments and betrayals. Finally, Aru, one of Sumi’s daughters, completes the circle, and it is her fate in the context of her family’s historical patterns that provides much of the intrigue. The fragments of this history are often moving, but they seem a loose jumble, lacking the particular flavor of a specific perspective. Given the complexity of Sumi’s family tree, Deshpande’s failure to clearly demarcate her characters—readers will be hard-pressed to say what any of them actually looks like—makes for a thinly presented present time, through which recollections dart quickly into view. After a tragedy at the close, Gopal suffers an existential crisis of meaning in his life. Aru sends him away, freshly fortified among the women of her family. The concept here—that the patterns of family history sustain the women who are able to confront and cooperate with them—is compelling, but the execution, with rare exception, is rather dull.