If you are passionate about teaching, then Hackberry offers you franchise opportunities to turn this passion into your profession. Fill out the form now!
Shadow Play, by Shashi Deshpande, is a serene read about what makes people human - by exploring relationships, families, and the lives of women.
Shadow Play, by Shashi Deshpande, is a serene read about what makes people human – by exploring relationships, families, and the lives of women.
Shadow Play is a story about ordinary people going about their lives, in a city in Karnataka. It could be Bangalore or Mysore: it is just ‘the growing city’. They are nice people, good people. They go to work, come home, eat, sleep, and deal with each other. There are births, deaths, silences, irrational acts, talk, and more than their share of tragedy, with which they seem to cope rather well. The writing is Deshpande at her serene best. No labored descriptions of landscapes or the outsides of people. No details of food, or spices, or even complicated thoughts. A gentle flow which pulls you in.
The story is about relationships – the characters’ thoughts about each other, a little about themselves. About lives unfolding.
There is a grandmother, a grandfather who stops speaking to his wife for many years over a tragic incident, a sensitive father, aunts, sisters, cousins, and the younger generation. The family is Brahmin – with slokas and learning in their blood. The story details three generations of the family, and how even when one generation has passed on, they continue to throw shadows on the lives of those still living.
Each character is finely etched and very real. They may be lawyers, politicians, TV writers, architects, teachers, model, photographers; but everything is only a background to the living person. The lives of an Anglo-Indian family have been woven in, and there is a little bit of politics. But the book, the writing, is about human beings being human.
It is about people eyes’ meeting in laughter, the barriers that rise however much they love each other, small quarrels between husband and wife, father and daughter, mother and son, niece and aunt. The strong bonds that tie together a family of sisters that sometimes make husbands feel shut out. It is about the bonding between women in a family, and how important these strands are to hold the family together. It is about women who battle a hundred internal confusions but carry on bravely.
It is about the bonding between women in a family, and how important these strands are to hold the family together. It is about women who battle a hundred internal confusions but carry on bravely.
Like most of Shashi Deshpande’s books, this one is about women, too. It is a sequel to ‘A Matter of Time’. Kalyani is the heroine of the saga. Though dead, she lives on in her daughters and granddaughters, and in the house she leaves to them. She loses her son, and so her husband. She leads a miserable life yet finds succor in her sister, and later on, among her daughters and their daughters.
Gopal, the father of three daughters, is a sensitive soul and loves his family deeply. Yet, he walks out on his family to wrestle with his own demons and do some soul-searching after the politics of academic life sears him. The resentment and insecurity that this act creates in his daughter (who never quite accepts him when he comes back), is one thread of the story. Love blossoms in his life gently, slowly. One day they will grow into it, he feels – and there is no rush. His daughters view this development with wonder and resentment, batting their own thoughts, and trying to accept the situation. Yet, there is diffidence towards the older people – a very natural outcome.
‘Shadow Play’ is a world of good people and you want to continue looking on – become friends with these people, visit Aru and Rohit, know the details of their lives, go upstairs to visit Gopal and Kasturi, bask in Seema’s ads, wander around Rohit’s houses, stay with them, and linger on. That is the magic of the writer – the characters come alive in your mind. You want to be part of the family.
Publisher: Aleph book company
Like Women’s Web and want to help us keep it awesome? Use our affiliate links below if you’d like to get a copy of Shashi Deshpande’s Shadow Play:
At Flipkart
At Amazon India
At Amazon US
Women’s Web gets a small share of every purchase you make through these links, and every little helps us continue bringing you the reads you love!
Guest Bloggers are those who want to share their ideas/experiences, but do not have a profile here. Write to us at [email protected] if you have a special situation (for e.g. want read more...
Women's Web is an open platform that publishes a diversity of views, indivisual posts do not necessarily represent the platofrom's views and opinions at all times.
Stay updated with our Weekly Newsletter or Daily Summary - or both!
My house-help asked excitedly, “I am going for wedding. Can you let me wear your red & black saree? To be honest I was stumped for a moment; I didn’t know what to say but I still said yes.
I lent a gorgeous saree to my house-help for a wedding in her family. Soon I stated getting questions if I would wear that saree again or if I was okay to be seen wearing the same saree my house-help was wearing?
We are all so conditioned to give our used clothes to our house-helps but are we okay to wear the clothes they were wearing?
A few days ago she came excitedly to me, “I am going for a family wedding. I want to wear your red & black saree, Ill wash and give it to you after the function. Please can you let me wear it?”
Sivaranjiniyum Innum Sila Pengalum (SISP) is an ode to all of the lost women, who could have been sports stars, singers, bankers, lawyers, doctors, just... happy, if they hadn't been enslaved in matrimony, and then forgotten all about.
One of the cool things about my mother was that she was an ace athlete and a champion sculler as a young woman in the 1950s and 60s. I only found out about this side of her a few years ago. I imagine her in a paavaadai dhaavani, taking on the mighty Kaveri river so many decades ago.
I recently watched a Tamil film anthology on SonyLiv that she would have liked to watch – Sivaranjiniyum Innum Sila Pengalum, (SISP) that has 3 stories of 3 different women – Saraswathi, Devaki, and Shivaranjini.
Like all the heroines in the anthology, my mother’s talents were sacrificed at the altar of matrimony. She pawned her gold medals and silver cups one by one to pay for expensive textbooks for us or a gift for a niece on her wedding, money for which she didn’t dare ask my father, because it was her niece… I remember how she caressed the cups and how her face hardened as she shoved them into her bag to take to the jewellers.
Shadow in the Mirror by Deepti Menon is a fast paced whodunit with fiercely feminist women characters that is a must read for any lover of this genre.
A quaint musing in English that is reminiscent of Jane Austen meets an everyday Indian family when it’s bang in the middle of turmoil. Deepti Menon’s debut novel is a powerful tale that holds you from the moment the narrative begins. A racy beginning takes you through a pregnant woman, Nita, falling off her balcony, and the taut pace holds on without faltering even for a second, up to the end where the truth is revealed. It is a stunning tapestry of intricately flawed characters playing in and out in their pursuit of the truth.
A death is like a stone in the river: leading to many ripples that affect the lives of all those around. And that impact is doubled up when the death smacks of some foul play, something fishy. So, Nita’s father, her upset husband Krish and a young journalist, Vinny, are all brought into the mix to knock on the doors of the story, to find out what went askew where.
Want a quick, light-hearted read with a strong woman protagonist? Great Textpectations by Ruchi Vadehra is the book to pick up.
How many of you (if you belong to that generation) remember the time when mobile phone service providers first added the text feature? When each message character was worth its weight in gold, and we were forced to develop an entire lingo meant specifically for messaging in order to have a text conversation without emptying one’s bank balance?
Today, nearly two decades later, however, texting is a much more evolved form of speech – finger speech, to be precise. Now, we can write the way we talk, especially when characters are not weighed by their monetary value. No wonder, then, that people are having entire relationships via texting. Whether it is a couple in love, living a few kilometres from each other, or two people sitting on different continents running a business together, texting is the new means of interaction, of getting to know each other and thereby establishing a deep, albeit largely virtual, relationship.