Review of Marathi novellas ‘My Last Autobiography’ and ‘The Woman Who Wore a Hat’ 

There is the pain of being widowed after having remained married for 75 years in Marathi novelist Rajendra Banahatti’s My Last Autobiography. There is the irritability of the children who are unable to understand the whims of the old man. There are friends who are so old as well that they cannot drop by to meet each other. There is the slowing down of the body that once used to go on treks, now unable to climb stairs. There is the dependence on caretakers. And yet, this novella is far from a sad story. Filled with humour and descriptive fineness, Banahatti delivers a literary coup.

My Last Autobiography comes alive through translator Jerry Pinto’s admirable capture of the irreverent tenor and repetitive rhythm of a nonagenarian. At 94, the protagonist is writing his third autobiography, musing on whether death has somehow forgotten him.

The narrator is an engineer, whose name he thinks is perhaps still etched on the side of a bridge in Satara. He loves perfumes and pungent food. He fears dogs, darkness, climbing trees and swimming. His analysis of his children’s traits is filled with love for the quirks of human nature.

He says of his youngest son Bandu, who he unregretfully forced to become a doctor, that he is morose, secretive and introverted: “Some people are like that. They are perennially lost, irritated, angry. However successful they may be, they are always dissatisfied.” And there is the anguished self-reflection that sees through the fragility of his assumptions: “Was my nagging making him irritable? Had he become like this because I had lived so long?”

Banahatti’s narrative style is astonishing: while everything is from the viewpoint of the first-person, the reader catches the unsaid counter-point. Even while the old man insists that his son does not understand him, you do get to see the care and concern of that son. Even as the old man insists that just because one appears to be closer to death, one need not be philosophical or spiritual, one gets to see both these aspects in his attitude to life. The obliquely shared glimpses into guilt, fear and sorrow are all wrapped in love, humour and the ludicrousness of the purposelessness of an ordinary life.

In Kamal Desai’s world

Kamal Desai’s 1975 novella The Woman Who Wore a Hat is usually read as a feminist piece — written as it is by a woman, about societal perceptions around the role of women. However, if this work, translated here by Shanta Gokhale, can be allowed to escape its limited feminist trappings, its philosophical examination of the purpose of life can be profitably foregrounded.

Five old men meet every evening in a house that has an octagonal-shaped drawing room. Each of them carries a tale of loss, separation, grief and low self-esteem. Each individual life has scars — a lost child, a broken marriage, insecurity, dependence. All leading to the big picture of helplessness. The octagonal drawing room is like a giant octopus arm that can devour; where even flowers are destined to wilt.

Excitement enters their lives in the form of a nameless young woman who wears a hat. Men and women alike are triggered by the presence of this mysterious person who has no memory of her past. Her absence or loss of identity does not bother her as it does those around her. She is driven only by the passion to make a film — to replicate, if possible, a Disneyland in Maharashtra. And for the sake of this passion, she is willing to let her female body be used by people who can see nothing more than the body.

Just as in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, where the author imagines Shakespeare’s equally gifted sister running away from home in search of a theatre where her talent can be showcased, we have here a woman who chases a single dream. While the world is preoccupied with knowing who she belongs to, she is wholly absorbed in her creative pursuits.

The Marathi cadence

Desai was ahead of her times. In 1975, years before postmodernism had become popular, she employed a back-and-forth dismembered narration. The story has loose ends which she does not bother to tie up neatly. There are bits and pieces of individual stories that can be patched together. But the author leaves the mysteries intact. Did the woman really lose her memory? Does she have a death wish? How did she die? Looking for definitive answers to some of these questions points to a mindset that expects reality to have causal links that can render matters explanatory. To answer the puzzle is to determine its meaning in the only way in which we know to assess reality. The woman who wore a hat refuses to be bound by such claims to realism or reality.

Pinto and Gokhale recreate the Marathi cadence of these two novellas with adroitness. Theirs is a translation through which the original inflections peep out. While Pinto retains the endearing way of referring to one’s partner only as a pronoun or “Aaho”, Gokhale describes a wall clock that rings in the hour with: “Two tiny sparrows peck-peck-pecked at grain on either side of the gently swinging pendulum.” It’s windfall time for Marathi literature in translation.

The reviewer is a Sahitya Akademi translation award winner, and the editor of ‘250 Years Of Jane Austen: Indian Responses’.

My Last Autobiography

Rajendra Banahatti, trs Jerry Pinto

Speaking Tiger

₹399

The Woman Who Wore a Hat

Kamal Desai; trs Shanta Gokhale

Speaking Tiger

₹399