Review Extract
One thing is becoming increasingly clear to Gayatri: that home is no material object, no mere construct of brick and mortar. However, this realization has to mature more to catapult her into the renunciatory state of mind that permanently recasts her perception. She has to go through more pain.Raji Narasimhan in Indian Literature: 198. Sahitya AkademiThe triggering experience for Gayatri comes from her family, as it has to. The experience is a motif of repetition and the second enactment of landmark experiences. Gayatri’s grandson Siddharth plays house with plastic building blocks. His favourite playmate is Gayatri. More, it is the castle-like houses shown in the catalogue that he wants, not the modest two-room affairs. And finally, the inhabitants of his castle are himself and his grandparents.
The whole era of her childhood is re-created for Gayatri in this re-wind of times past. Identities blur and fuse. ‘The five-year-old Siddharth is she herself at five…’ The grandparents he wants are her own grandparents whom she adored. The turreted picture-postcard mansion Siddharth cherishes is the sprawling mansion of her grandfather in Mysore. The details are repeated down to the ill winds that blew below the idyll and tranquility. All her faculties climax into a blinding foresight and vision of the things that are to be, have always been, and will always be. Life is a sequence of events, like the sequential flowering of the mango tree she can see from her window come to its biennial flowering.
The archetypal impulses of Gayatri come into full bloom now, dark and autonomous like a fragrant night-flowering plant that exercises its own sway. She has gained immunity to the pain of suffering by the awakening of higher understanding.