Middle Novels In The Binding Vine (1993), Shashi Deshpande has ...

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Middle Novels
In The Binding Vine (1993), Shashi Deshpande has shown the
phenomenological aspects of how the whole mankind is bound by the vine of
emotional attachments, struggling to keep these ties alive, as Urmila does, in regard to
her dead daughter Anu. The re are various interpersonal relationships which show
themselves in these bindings . Deshpande has seen them, as we do, though not so
clearly, in the process of living . The opening words of the novel tell the whole truth,
“We all of us grow up with an idea of ourselves, an image rather, and spend the rest of
our lives trying to live up to it
” ( BV 7). Sartre’s whole endeavor also has been to
show man’s trans-phenomenal character, expressing itself in a variety of ways, in
indulging in the past memories, as also his awakening to future possibilities.
As the novel unfolds
, the female protagonist, Urmila (Urmi), a college
lecturer, is shown agonized over the unexpected death of her one year old daughter
Anu. It must be observed that Deshpande
see the phenomenon of death from her
existential perspective, that catastrophes often happen unexpectedly. As we have seen
in Deshpande’s novels, as in Sartre’s phenomenological existentialism , human life is
superfluous, de drop . Both death and birth are absurd. And
every tragedy leaves us
with the sense of emptiness and nothingness, but also freedom. Urmila is left blank
and vacuous after her daughter’s death.
Urmila finds it difficult to let go her
memories; she says, “This pain is all that’s left to me of Anu. Witho ut it, there will be
nothing left to me of her; I will lose h
er entirely ” ( BV 9). Harish, her childhood
friend, Vanna’s husband, makes her understand by saying, “I’m trying to tell you that
this—losing a loved one —happens to every human. People recover eve ntually, don’t
they?” (BV 18). For Urmila, the loss , however, is terrible and despite the efforts of
her friends and family members , she clings to her grief. Deshpande would admit that

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there is, no longer, any other side of life, and death is a human pheno menon, it is the
final phenomenon of life —life’s ultimate boundary . According to Sartre, “As such it
influences the entire life by a reverse flow. Life is limited by life ; it becomes like the
world of Einstein, ‘finite and unlimited.’ Death becomes the mea
ning of life as the
resolved cord is the meaning of melody ” (Sartre 681). Although Urmila tries to fight
this terrible loss , she feels that f orgetting the death of Anu will be an act of betrayal,
“I must reject these memories, I have to conquer them. This is one battle I have to win
if I am to go on living. And yet my victory will carry with it the taint of b
etrayal. To
forget is to betray ” (BV 21). This is also what Sartre says, “To be forgotten is to be
made an object of an attitude to another, and of an implicit decision on the part of the
Other” (Sartre 681).
We know that Urmila is surrounded by the feelings of nothingness, blankness
and emptiness. She gets frustrated and annoyed when people come to comfort
her by
saying, “It was only a baby af ter all, does it matter so much ” (BV 23). At this point ,
she herself asks, “Does a person’s value increase with age?”
(BV 23). She finds it
extremely difficult to bear the blow of death of Anu. The
memory of Anu cannot be
separated from her (Urmila) even after her death. In fact, it becomes stron ger by the
day. But , she at the same time
feels the emptiness and nothingness of life very
intensely and suffers from utter helplessness about it. Her psychic problem is
intensified further by her physical problem i.e. asthm
a. Though her relatives try to
console her, she continues to feel the blankness of life, haunted by the memories of
her daughter. It is likely in such a state of mind
she feels herself disassociated from
others as well. After Anu’s death, a vacuum is creat ed in her life . She also becomes
devoid of feelings for others. When she hears Vanaa, her childhood friend, crying, she
feels irritated at herself. She of course realizes:

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‘I can’t bear your pain. ’ Why can’t I feel her pain? Why can’t I feel
anyone’s pain? Kishore lying beside me in bed, his arms by his sides…
and the tears pouring down his face. When was this? The night after
Anu’s death? I could hav e wiped his tears, but I didn’t. I watched with
a detached curiosity instead. How could a person cry so soun
dlessly?
And now Vanna. Has Anu taken all my capacity to feel away with
her...There’s nothing else. No pain at all. (BV 14-15)
At this point of time she situates hers elf between being -free and not being -free. She
even rejects the idea of having a framed ph otograph of Anu on the wall, “I don’t need
a picture to remember her, I can remember every bit o f her, every moment of her life”
(BV 68). When La lita asks Urmila how many kids she ha s, she again feels herself
completely lost and replie s, “Only one. A son…” (BV 106). She further says, “How
could I deny my Anu? I can feel the grittiness of the sand under my palm as I push my
hand deeper into the sand, pour more sand on it, smoothing the sand ridges flat,
patting it into shape, angry little p ats that hurt and are somehow satisfying. Only one
son… how could I? (
BV 106). Sartrian to be precise, in her upsurge into being,
Urmila, as the for -itself, must assume a position in relation to the dead. Indira
Nityanandham writes, “She clings to her pain and the memories of Anu, every small
incident to flood her with longing and a great sense of loss” (Nityanandham 25).
Urmila is subsumed with the consciousness of nothingness
. However, her
nothingness occasioning her freedom, on the positive side, makes her perturbed over
the suffering of her long -dead mother -in-law subjected to rape in marriage and the
unmarried girl Kalpana —also the victim of rape. One day , Urmila happens to find a
photograph of her mother -in-law, Mira is introduced as “Kishor e’s mother. Kartik’s
grandmother” ( BV 42). She looks at a group photograph of Mira and from the

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formality of the picture , she conjectures that it must h ave been taken to mark “an
occasion—Mira’s wedding perhaps—a parting of ways for a group o f friends, the end
of a chapter” (BV 43). She also takes out many books and diaries from the trunk. The
poems of Mira are in Kannada and the diaries in English. Akka tells
Urmila that her
brother (Kishore’s father) saw Mira at a wedding and fell in love with her. Since then
he had “single -minded pu rsuit of an object: marrying Mira” (
BV 47). Through her
diaries, Urmila establishes a communion with Mira and tries to reconstruct her tragic
tale, who suffered and wrote poems, “…in the solitude of an unhappy marriage, who
died in giving birth to her son at twenty two” (BV 48). Urmila herself realizes, “This
is not a daily account of her routine life, but a communion with her self” ( BV 51).
Then Urmila tries to probe further into Mira’s poetry to visualize the kind of troubled
life she had lived. Urmila reflects:
Perhaps the fact is that we , all of us , create our own truths, shaping
them to our needs, in particular the need to be able to live comfortably
with ourselves, with those we love and need. And to do this I will have
to leave Mira’s life alone. I wi ll go on to her poetry; that’s less
complicated. (BV 54-55)
Urmila comes to realize how consciousness of nothingness might have engulfed Mira.
Mira was a favo urite daughter of her father , who was obviously proud of her
intelligence and talent . She also had a strong desire of being recognized as a good
creative writer and a poet, but
she feared that if she expressed herself openly , she
might be laughed at. Her poems are the tr ue reflections of her feelings of nothingness
and anxiety:
Huddled in my cocoon, a somnolent silkworm.

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Will I emerge a beauteous being?
Or will I, suffocating, cease to exist? (BV 65)
In Sartrian concept of phenomenology , whenever the in -itself tries to be the
for-itself, one feels shamed, because the latter opens oneself to others.
Mira fe els
ashamed and embarrassed in her relation with her husband. She makes an attempt to
objectify the Other rather than oneself. Her husband becomes a
sadist and seeks to
incarnate the Other, his wife, by using her
body as a tool. The Other becomes an
instrument in his hands and thus , is deprived of the freedom. Thus , Deshpande,
following Sartre, is made aware of the futility of all attempts to establish harmonious
relations with the Other. We know that this inability of Mira to achieve genuine
communication leads to despair in which nothing remains
treated as an object by the Other, in her case, her husband. Her
the for-itself. Mira i s
poetry reflects the
extent her rape in marriage, and she becomes an inert object; that’s why , her whole
life is filled with the feelings of anguish and anxiety. Urmila also realizes what might
have happened to Mira:
It runs through all her writing s—a strong, clear thread of an intense
dislike of the sexual act with her husband, a physical repulsion from
the man she married. When did it begin? Before Marriage? During the
girl-viewing ceremony? When he came with his parents to officially
‘look’ at her? Or did it have its genesis later, during their first night
together? (BV 63)
It is indicated earlier that Mira makes her own body as an object, as in-itself, and thus,
stages a flight or an escape from the-for-itself. She loses her subjectivity and sense of
absolute freedom. She exists in bad fait h. When Akka read s Mira’s poems, there she
cries. Mira laments:

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But tell me, friend, did Laxmi too
twist brocade tassels round her fingers
and tremble, fearing the coming
of the dark-clouded, engulfing night? (BV 66)
In Deshpande’s fiction, there is nothing hidden behind the appearances. As we have
noted above that the phenomenon of Mira’s relationship with her husband
shows
itself, as in most conjugal relationships . Mira’s relationship wit h her husband i s
obviously not comfortable , because it is impossible to maintain an absolute
subjectivity or freedom without objecti
fying the O ther as the material for one’s
freedom. This leads to the insecurity of love, because her body becomes a tool or an
object for her husband. Her body flows to the O ther, who sucks it into the orbit of his
projects and brings about dissolution of her world. Indeed, she like Saru, in The Dark
Holds No Terrors , begins to hate the word “Love” as
cunningly uttered by her
husband. This is further expressed by the diary entries:
But I have my defen ces; I give him the facts, nothing more, never my
feelings… And so it begins. ‘Please,’ he says ‘please, I love you.’ And
over and over again until he has done, ‘I love you.’ Love! How I hate
the word. If this is love it is a terrible thing. (BV 67)
Mira’s relationship with her husband and her feelings towards him
are accompanied
by a sense of void and blankness. Urmila reflects on Mira’s the sense of being lost ,
her longing to be left alone, “I don’t mind his anger, it makes him leave me to myself,
it is bliss when he does that… why can’t he leave me alone?” (BV 67).
For Deshpande, as for Sartre, t here is a relation of the for -itself with the in -
itself in the presence of the Other . In Mira’s case, t he Other is her husband. Urmila

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finds herself incapable of sharing this suffering of Mira with Vanna. She realizes that
there is another pocket of silence between them because
, “One can never see one’s
parent as a sexual being, he or she is merely a ca rdboard figure labeled ‘parent’ ” (BV
83). She remembers the poem beh ind which lies the man who tries to possess another
human being against her will. Mira’s mother always warns her by saying:
Don’t tread paths barred to you
obey, never utter a ‘no’;
submit and your life will be
a paradise, she said and blessed me. (BV 83)
But for, Deshpande loneliness is part of Mira’s , and for that all matter all beings.
When Mira comes to her in -laws’ house, she is christened Nirmala. She fears that if
she resents, it may involve her in confrontation with her husband . So she remains in
dilemma and feels bewildered. Like Jaya in
That Long Silence , s he also protests
against the new name, as she bursts out:
A glittering ring gliding on the rice
carefully traced a name ‘Nirmala’.
Who is this? None but I,
my name hence, bestowed upon me
Nirmala, they call, I stand statue-still
……………………………………..
can they make me Nirmala? I am Mira. (BV 101)
These are numerous manifestations of Mira’s life which reveal themselves. On the
one hand, Urmila thinks about Mira’s life, and on the other hand, she thinks about the
choices of her own life, of her freedom. Deshpande seems to agree with Sartre that, “I
am condemned to exist forever beyond my essence, beyond the causes and motives of

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my act. I am condemned to be free. This means that no limits to my freedom can be
found except freedom itself or if you prefer, that we are not to cease being free ”
(Sartre 567).
Sartre further observes that the for -itself wishes to hide its own
nothingness from itself and to incorporate the in -itself as its true mode of being; it
tries also to hide its freedom from itself. She question s herself how she went on living
with a man she could not love. Urmila visualizes the moments when and where Mira
could have written the poems. Certainly , she did not ha ve a room of her own, Urmila
says, “I can see her stealthily, soundlessly getting out of bed, sitting down on the floor
by the window perhaps, forgetting everything while she wrote” (BV 127).
Mira’s diary also mentions her meeting with the
up-and-coming poet, Venu
who later became an eminent poet of Indian literature. Mira gave
him some of her
poems to read, and he asked , “Why do you need to write poetry? It is enough for a
young woman like you to give birth to children. That is your poetry.
Leave the other
poetry to us men” (BV 127). This reflects the agony and anguish of a creative woman
writer in a patriarchal set -up. This is how Deshpande’s fiction shows her feminist
concerns, at times unobstrusively. But Urmila realizes that perhaps “it was her writing
that kept her going, that kept her alive” (BV 127). Sartre is absolutely right when he
says that it is “the for-itself which is responsible for everything—even though it could
not be without the in
-itself” (Sartre XXIX). These feelings of emptiness and
nothingness lead Urmila to discover the sense of absolute freedom in Indian middleclass
women in the patriarchal social set -up. Deshpande, following Sartre, seems to
have shown that nothingness as the for -itself is not only “the internal negation and
revelation of being but also the desire and choice of being” (Sartre XXXI). Mira’s last
completed poem, just scribbled on a piece of p aper, as if she did it in hurry, expresses
her contentment and happiness, when she feels the child grow ing within her. And she

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died a few months later “having bled to death within an hour aft er her child (Kishore)
was born” (BV 136). The text of the poem is as follows:
Tiny fish swimming in the ocean of my womb
…………………………
you will emerge one day.
…………………………
and I who was stone quivered.
Bridging the two worlds, you awaken in me
a desire for life.
Desire, says the Buddha, is the cause of grief;
but how escape this cord
this binding vine of love? Fear lies coiled within
this womb piercing joy.
Smiling and joyful, Karna tore off his armour,
………………………….
will that courage be mine when, denuded
I stand naked and bare? (137)
It has been observed that she negates the in-itself, her earlier self which was fixed and
full. Nevertheless, this desire for being -for-itself inspires her to write her feelings of
nothingness and emptiness. After reading her last poem, Urmila finds the word , i.e.
desire—lack in Sartre, which will help her to solve the rest of her crossword
. She
finds a kind of relief. It is like a house that is cleared of everything. Now, it is possible
for her to leave it behind and go on. She further realizes, “It is Mira who is now taking
me by the hand and leading me ” (BV 135). Now with this poem, Urmila feels that
Mira has cleared her emotional life, swept away the confusing tangle of cobwebs. She

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is, no longer , the in-itself. In another incident, Amrut, her friend, asks Urmila if
women want to be dominated. Urmila replies:
No, Amrut , no human being
wants to be dominated. The most
important need is to love. From the moment of our births, we struggle
to find something with which we c an anchor ourselves to thi s strange
world we find ourselves in. Only when
we love , do we find this
anchor. (BV 137)
Sartre explains in his lecture Existentialism and Humanism, as Deshpande exemplifies
existentialism and humanism in The Binding Vine i.e. making human beings confront
human reality, summed up in his phrase, existence precedes essence. It means that
“man, first of all , exists, encounters himself , surges up in the world
—and defines
himself afterwards” (Sartre, 1948: 30). The whole of The Binding Vine , including its
title, suggests Urmila’s encounter with herself, from the day she gets awareness about
her world, more particularly from the time of
the death of her daughter , before she
defines herself, her indefinable self. Her husband , however, does not pay much
attention to her existential thinking, and she makes what she might be . Like Sartre
again, Deshpande finds that “there is no human nature because there is no God to
have a conception of it” (Sartre, 1948: 30). She simply is i.e. what she wills as she
conceives of herself to be, i.e. what she wills to be after the leap towards existence. In
Sartrian terms, “Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself”
(Sartre,
1948: 30). Urmila shares the anguish not only of her mother -in-law but also of
Kalpana—a girl who b ecomes a prey to her own relative who molests her. Kalpana
has been violently attacked and raped. Vanna makes
Kalpana’s mother, Shakutai,
cannot doubt what the doctor has diagnosed
, “She was raped ” ( BV 58). At this
Shakutai cries, “No, no, no tell him, tai , it’s not true, don’t tell anyone, I‘ll never be

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able to hold up my head again, who’ll marr y the girl, we’re decent people ” (BV 58).
Urmila finds herself caught up in the pitiable predicament on account of Kalpana and
her mother’s attempts to protect the honour of the family. Urmila wishes to break the
silence on an issue of rape which is generally sought to remain hidden . Deshpande
also feels that there is nothing hidden in the phenomenon of rape, or any other
phenomenon, for that matter. In a program to BBC World Service, she speaks thus:
30 years ago it would never be talked about and I think that to me was
the worst thing that it's so bound up with the honour of the family. It's
the men in the family who are wronged not the wom
en and the
disgrace is the women's. I think this is what The Binding Vine is really
about: why is the mother afraid to speak? The disgrace is not the girl’s;
the disgrace is the criminal's. But that is not how it is
—because she
thinks that it will hurt her family. It's really the dilemma which Urmila,
the narrator, faces because, if she makes it public, it's possible the
family is going to be affected, and if she does not, you know it's like
saying the woman is the one who is in disgrace, who has done wrong.
And I find a lot of act ivists in India also face this problem, it's a very
true problem. (In the Program: Women Writers 2003)
Deshpande seems to agree with Sartre that value haunts freedom. This means that the
relation of value to the for-itself is very subjective. There are no values given a priori.
Existence proceeds essence. Shakutai’s values are social. She has not created these
values. But she would abide by the social values. She requests Urmila, “…to tell him
(the doctor) not to make the report
” ( BV 62). Urmila is amazed to see Shakutai,
whose husband has already deserted her for some younger woman, worried about the
marriage of Kalpana who is, in the words of the doctor, “neither dead nor alive ” (BV

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88). This incident reminds us of Philip Larkin’s the much discussed poem
“Deceptions” from the volume The Less Deceived:
… I would not dare
Console you if I could. What can be said?
Except that suffering is exact, but where
Desire takes charge, reading will go erratic?
……………………………………………
That you were less deceived, out on that bed
Than he was, stumbling up the breathless stair
To burst into fulfilment’s desolate attic. (Poems 1950)
A girl , in Philip Larkin’s poem
“Deceptions”, cries that she is raped and ruined,
despite the fact she was drugged before her rape. She is incon
solable. The male,
however, had a short -lived companionship, if it can be called one , with a drugged
body—partially alive, partially dead, before enclosing himself in a lonely attic. But
the girl continue s to think, her mind like an open drawer, full of knives
as she thinks
of her social shame. It may strike Larkin’s readers absurd, but an existentialist
will
find nothing absurd in it. The girl has not chosen the value of chastity. His sexual urge
or desire got over him ; that is why the girl is less deceived. T hese values are social
values that we attribute to them. As Sartre would say:
But as soon as we consider value, we see that it is itself a surpassing of
this being -in-itself, since value gives being to itself.
It is beyond its
own being since with the type
of being of coincidence with self, it
immediately surpasses this being, its permanence, its purity, its
consistency, its identity, its silence by reclaiming these qualities by
virtue of presence to itself. And conversely if we start by considering it

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as p resence to itself, this presence immediately solidifies, fixed in
itself. (Sartre 144)
Existentialism, as Sartre envisages, entails responsibility much greater than we
have supposed, for it concerns mankind as a whole. Urmila is an Indian woman, but
she i s an exemplum of all women
, and perhaps of all men, in the social set -up,
committed to keep up the façade of decency
. Moreover, Urmila now becomes a
regular visitor to Shakutai’s home in the slums to inquire Kalpana’s condition.
Shakutai, on one hand , is p roud of her daughter’s beauty
, but on the other hand,
resents her behaviour. She considers her daughter responsible for her own tragedy:
She’s shamed us; we can never wipe off this blot. And Prakash blames
me. What would I do? She was so self-willed. Cover yourself decently;
I kept telling her, men are like animals. But she went her away. You
should have seen her walking out, head in the air caring
for nobody.
It’s all her fault, Urmila, all her fault… (BV 147)
Here as we have seen Shakutai’s outburst highlights the social values prevalent in a
patriarchal set-up. Deshpande would agree with Sartre when he says, “I n this upsurge
of the for -others, value is given as in the upsurge of the for
-itself although in a
different mode of being” (Sartre 146). Though Kalpana is raped, the police record it
as a car accident, and try to convince Dr. Bhaskar who protests in rage at the ca se
being reported as an accident in the name of female honour, “…think of the girl and
her family. Do you think it’ll do them any good to have it known the girl was raped?
She’s unmarried, people are bound to talk, and her name would be smeared” ( BV 88).
Thus, the victim is always advised to remain silent and unknown rather than to attract
notice by making hue and cry. Even after Shakutai’s nightmarish married life with a

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husband who neglects her and finally leaves her to live with another woman, she still
lives and is much worried about the issue and subsequent efforts of marriage
prospects of Kalpana. Dr. Bhaskar is puzzled at this strange behaviour and comments,
“Women are astonishing. I think it takes a hell of
a lot of courage for a woman like
that even to think of marriage…” (BV 87).
The phenomenon of the self overflow s itself, as we have seen that Urmila, as
being-for-itself, is angr y at the indignity being
piled up on Kalpana and wants to
report this matter to the officials, to which Shakutai pleads with Urmila not to do that.
Urmila tries to explain to Shakutai that Kalpana is not at fault, but the man who did
this to her is the wro ng doer, and, that he is to be blamed and not she, “She was hurt,
she was injured, wronged by a man, she didn’t do anything wrong. Why can’t you see
that? Are you blind? It is not her fault, no, not her fault at all ” (BV 147). Urmila is,
further, shocked to find that everyone wants to hush up the rape case. Shakutai does
not like the case to be registered and given publicity, “…Even if it is true, keep it to
yourself, doctor, don’t let anyone know of it” ( BV 59). Instead of pointing to the
violence perpetrated by the rapist, most people , like Kalpana’s mother , find easier to
blame the girl, “And if you paint and fla unt yourself, do you think they’ ll leave you
alone?” (BV 146). Urmila is unable to do anything for Kalpana, though she is filled
with all sympath ies. She is forced to remain as a silent observer. Shakutai is so much
hurt and troubled that she wishes her daughter’s death. She says to
Urmila, “…But
sometimes I think the only thing that can help Kalpana now is death” (BV 178).
We have noticed that there is nothi ng hidden behind the appearance
. The
phenomenon embodies full reality. These are various manifestations of Urmila’s
character. One of them is clearly visible
when she decides to fight another woman’s
battle on the ground of humanitarian sympathy. She gets no support from her family

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and when the hospital authorities decide to shift
Kalpana to a suburban hospital, she
hopes for the support because she feels life will be impossible otherwise.
Of course, Urmila suffers from anguish
not o nly as being a woman in a
patriarchal set-up, but also as a human -being committed to her responsibilities. She
shows these symptoms of anguish, more particularly in relation to subtle devices the
male uses, backed up by the social connivance.
the matter to the press, thinking that Kalpana
Urmila protests and decides to take
may get justice. Urmila succeeds in
stopping the transfer of Kalpana to another hospital
. Vanna and Inni , Urmila’s
mother, at home , are unable to understand her deep involvement in the c ase. Vanna
goes a step ahead and warns Urmila, “It’s none of our business ” ( BV 171). But
Urmila, as being-for-itself, constitutes a nihilation of being -in-itself. She never feels
hindered in the face of opposition; she pursues the case , and eventually succeeds in
getting it reopened. The police are asked to present new investigations. With the help
of her friend , Malcolm, she takes Kalpana’s case to the press. This rape issue once
again gains public attention and the government orders further investigation.
Consequently, there is a demonstration of protest outside Kalpana’s hospital. Women ,
from all walks of life , pour in. T he pictures of women being jostled and roughed up
during the demonstration are all reported in papers. According to Shakutai , exposure
to the media is as bad as Kalpana being raped. It is clear that the fear of humiliation in
society resulting from exposure of such incidents grips Shakutai . The women, in the
assembly and all local women activists , now stand in solidarity. Initially resentf ul,
Shakutai now seems to be slowly realizing the enormity of the situation. As a matter
of fact, she is overwhelmed with tides of protest of women folk. She says, “The whole
world is my friend” (BV 179).

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In fact, it is evident that t he police investigation reveals and opens up to find
Sulu’s husband Prabhakar, who had always lusted after Kalpana. This bitter truth
shatters Sulu who immolates herself in despair, leaving behind her, her grief -stricken
sister, Shakutai. We have observed that the women like Shakutai, Mira and Sulu are
physically vulnerable even within the secure structure of marriage. Urmila comes to
know from Shakutai that Sulu always lived in constant terror of being thrown out of
her house because she was unable to conceive. Moreover, Urmila comes to realize
various aspects of her mother , Inni’s life. Inni discloses that it was her father and not
she who had sent her away, for he did not trust his wife in matters relating to
childcare. Urmila’s father took the decision of sending Urmila, the infant daughter, to
his mother’s place, because his wife , Inni, in severe urgency , had left the infant ,
Urmila, under the care of a manservant. Inni pours out all the anguish of a helpless
woman who submitted herself to her husband. She says:
He didn’t s ay anything to me, he just took you away…I begged him,
Urmila, I cried, I promised him I’d never leave you alone, but he
wouldn’t listen. Nothing could make him change his mind. You know
your Papa I didn’t want you to be sent away to Ranidurg, believe me
Urmila, I didn’t want that, I wanted you with us, I never got used to the
idea of your being in Ranidurg, I wanted you with me… (BV 199-200)
Despite their social background , women at different levels , such as low class
illiterate women, Sulu and Shakutai a nd educated women like Urmila’s mother, Inni,
her friend, Vanna, and her mother -in-law, Akka—are presented in various bindings.
Urmila is quite upset and angry to see, how even the educated urban women find
themselves fixed and full. Vanna is an educated s ocial-worker by profession; she is
quite submissive and obedient to her husband. Vanna’s submissiveness to her husband

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and not being assertive irritates Urmila. She even wishes to have a son, but when she
discloses this desire to Harish, he gives her
a big lecture on population problem by
quoting figures. She thinks that he might be right. After listening to this anecdote ,
Urmila becomes furious and shouts by saying, “ You let him bull-doze you, you crawl
before him…” (BV 81). She even scolds Vanna for doing all domestic duties single -
handedly.
It must be noted that Urmila very seriously observes the common idea of
making the mother to be sole ly responsible for taking care of children, for ages, has
remained the same without any change
to the days of Inn i. The women have been
made the in-itself since ages. The words of the little girl Mandira show the duties of a
woman in Indian social set -up. She says , “When I grow up, I’m never going to leave
my children to go to work ” (BV 72). Urmila further asks her w hat she will do then.
She replies, “Stay at home and look after them
” ( BV 72). This shows how social
values play an important role in Indian society towards women. This idea is very well
illustrated with the marriage of Akka. Akka realizes the dominance of
patriarchy as
she was forced to marry a widower who still loves his ex-wife, Mira deeply and this
marriage was merely for the want of a mother for a motherless child . Akka, from this
marriage, cannot expect anything . Deshpande shows how Akka has always remained
a fixed self. After getting to know the various aspects of Akka’s complete self, Urmila
thinks, “The cruelty, the enormous cruelty of that silenced us” (BV 47).
As we have observed Urmila’s support for Shakutai gives her comfort
and
resilience. Shakutai opens her heart to
Urmila. Urmila, as being -for-itself, draws
society’s attention to her protest and forgets her own pain in attempting to change the
societal roles and attitudes.
Urmila’s friendship with Shakutai gives her an
opportunity to look into others’ lives. Shakutai’s husband goes to Bombay in search

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of livelihood; he , for any reason , does not contact Shakutai. Hence , she goes to
Bombay to join him. Since , her husband has no fixed job; they are forced to stay in
their relative’s house. Her life becomes quite humiliating and troublesome due to the
burden of the family and her three children.
In spite of doing all kinds of work to
support her family, her husband leaves her and children for another woman. Bearing
the burden of such a worthless husband and struggling all alone to provide a good life
for her children, she finds herself
always pin pointed out for one or the other reason
and if there happens something wrong in the family, she is made responsible for this.
She tells Urmila, “What can you expect, they say, of a girl whose mother has left her
husband? Imagine! He left me for another woman, left me with these children to bring
up” (BV 147). Urmila understands that women like Shakutai, and Sulu are always
haunted by the absence of securi ty in their marriage. Sulu is
an affectionate and a
good-natured person who always tries to help her sister Shakutai. Despite resistance
from Kalpana, she takes over the responsibilities of bringing her up. She has an
inclination for house keeping and deco ration, and this aspect in her goes unnoticed by
her husband. There is the constant hidden fear in her, Shakutai
discloses to Urmila
about it:
After marriage she changed. She was frightened, always frightened.
What if he doesn’t like this, what if he wants
that, what if he is angry
with me , what if he throws me out…? No
body should live like that,
Urmila, so full of fears. What kind of life is it…? (BV 195)
Shashi Deshpande , following Sartre, believes that there is nothing concealed
behind t he phenomenon that after marriage women change, frightened as they feel,
over their future prospect. Alhough Urmila has married a man of her choice, she also
feels a sense of incompleteness. Her life is vacuous incomplete. Long separation from

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her husband provides an oppo rtunity to Urmila, to think of another relationship , and
there are a number of moments when she develops intimate relationship with
Dr.
Bhaskar. He also consoles her and gives comfort after Anu’s death.
Dr. Bhaskar
openly declares his love f or her. Vanna , seeing Urmila in extra-marital relationship
with Dr. Bhaskar, advises her to be careful. Urmila thinks:
But how can Vanna, secure in the fortress of her marriage to Hari
sh,
understand, what it is like—marriage with a man who flits into my life
a few months in a year and flits out again, leaving nothing of himself
behind? Often, after he has gone, I find myself in a frantic grappling
for his image, as if in going he has taken that away as well. (BV 164)
Though she longs for physical gratification and comes c lose to respond to Dr.
Bhaskar, she just holds herself back a little, and thinks, “It’s so much easier, so much
simpler, to just think of virtue and chastity and being a good wife ” (BV 166). She is
also frustrated in her married life due to
negligence of h er husband , Kishore. She
suffers from alienation and utter helplessness about it. In spite of that , she never tries
to look for another man for amours. She refuses Dr. Bhaskar Jain’s proposal of
marriage. She also follows the way which was adopted by Deshp ande’s other women
protagonists—like Jaya, Saru and Indu. It must be noted that
Urmila never dares to
overstep the boundaries chalked out in the institution of marriage. Whether this
free
self of Urmila will be ever appreciated by her husband or not, she continues to love
her husband dearly. She answers Dr. Bhaskar ’s question, “I love my husband a
nd
therefore, I am an inviolate ” ( BV 165). In another context , she says, “Yes , I was
honest when I told Vanna I am safe ” (BV 165). J.P. Tripathi, comments on Urmila’s
relationship with her husband by saying, “
Urmila, the sailor’s wife and college
teacher, is more self-reliant and has an identity different from t hat of her husband; she

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is self-respecting and does not want to live on Kishore’s money. She, however,
as a
sensitive vine needs Kishore as an Oak to entwine herself around” (Tripathi 152).
But Urmila, at every turn of the no vel, emerges fully aware of her
fixed and
fluid self. Her encouragement to Vanna
to be more assertive in life , her sympathies
with Shakutai, her efforts to take up the work of translating the poems written by her
dead mother -in-law from Kannada
into English and her intention of publishing
them—all are phenomenal in nature. She takes up the responsibilities on behalf of the
rape victim, Kalpana and becomes instrumental in publicizing the case. She becomes
more mature and confident than earlier heroines. Indira Nityanandham observes, “ The
Binding Vine is a refreshing change from the first three novels of Deshpande. Protest
comes easily to her protagonists here and there is less agony in attempting to change
societal roles and attitudes. The hope for Indian wom
en lies in the happy fact, that,
though, there are Miras and Kalpana s and Shakut ais, we also have our Urmilas”
(Nityanandham 66).
Sartrian view of phenomenology has various dimensions embodying full
reality. Urmila thinks a lot about how difficult relationships are with many chasms to
bridge. The relationship s between her Papa and Inni, Baiaji
and Aju, Vanna and
Harish, Vanna and her daugh ters, Shakutai and Kalpana , are all filled with love and
compassion, but at the same time, they are informed by consciousness of nothingness,
for there are clashes of egos, desires and self -centered interests. She feels that manwoman
relationship can be w holesome only when people themselves are whole .
When she studies the fates of Mira, Kalpana, Shakutai and Sulu,
she regains her
courage. She learns to accept freedom and advantages of her life as a gift, and decides
to be content with her life with a hope
that her husband , Kishore, will remove his
armour of withdrawal one day , and thus he will pave a way to reach h er. Urmila still

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has her son , Kartik with her . She realizes, that however burdensome our ties
or,
painful our experience s may be , we can never gi ve them up. The main urge for
everybody is always to survive, to get on with the business of living, even if it
comprises a daily routine taking care of trifling matters that bring an order and rhythm
to it. She alludes to the example of Abhimanyu that he had to die because there was
no other way he could have got out. Deshpande shows that human beings are
absorbed in the dail y routine of living. This is what
Mira realizes, “Just as the utter
futility of living overwhelms me, I am terrified by the thought o f dying, of ceasing to
be.” (BV 203). However, much remains to be said even after the ending of the novel.
Shashi Deshpande discovers that man -woman relationship is more or less the
same everywhere in the world. Throughout the novel , she makes us understa nd that
women should have the courage to express themselves and expose the evils of the
society fearlessly, and that they have to come out of the fixed role that they have been
playing. At the threshold of freedom, Urmila is seen recollecting the bonds of
love
that provide the “spring s of life” ( BV 203) for human survival. Urmila realizes that
one can never lay down the burden of b
elonging to human race. Sartre’s allusion to
Maggie’s conduct at the end of Existentialism and Humanism is a case in point.
Maggie is in love with Stephen but is engaged to her cousin. She, “instead of seeking
heedlessly her own happiness, chooses , in the name of human solidarity, to sacrifice
herself and to give up the man she loves ” (Sartre, 1948: 64). This example can better
illustrate Urmila’s position. She may love her happiness but she must bide for others.
Thus, man is self-surpassing.
Shashi Deshpande’s next novel A Matter of Time (1996) which explores a
story of man-woman relationship in Indian society within an extended f amily,
encompassing three generations of men and women, is once again informed by

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consciousness of nothingness. The first generation is represented by Kalyani and
Shripati, the second by Sumi and Gopal , and the third by three daughters of S umi and
Gopal—Charu, Seema and Aru. Reading A Matter of Time offers an illuminating
analysis of consciousness of nothingness. The novel opens with an epigraph drawn
from the Brhadaranyaka Upanishad, “Maitreyi, ‘verily I am about to go forth fro
m
this state (of householder )” (AMT 1) wherein Yajnavalkya tells his wife that he has
opted for Sanyasa. However, in her novel A Matter of Time , Deshpande explores this
overture of taking to Sanyasa in the larger framework of phenomenological
existentialism of Jean -Paul Sartre, by dw elling on the nature of identity, destiny,
human will and the meaning and purpose of existence.
The novel begins with The House, the house which is , at the same time , not
the house. Gopal suddenly walks out of it without giving any reason; it is not Sanyasa
either, as it can only be explained in terms of phenomenology , that is, what life shows
itself that it is contingent. No explanation c an be sought or given. Creating a family
and then uncreating it can be seen together, not separately. The first chapter
is called
‘The House’. It is alternatively called ‘Vishwas’ reminding us of V.S. Naipaul’s A
House of Mr. Biswas . As Deshpande writes, the house is a place of trust, despite all
the making and unmaking of it; it has the abstract quality of trust, proclaim ing the
name o f the owner etched into a stone -tablet, set in the wall, and though fading into
itself, and yet the house proclaiming the meaning of its name by its very presence, its
solidity. The house, which is called Vish was, has something of fragility a bout it . It
shows now the signs of wear and neglect. It also shows a wide gap in the stone work
of the compound wall. There are all sign
s of temporality. Nothi ngness haunts this
house. Every thing speaks of its wear and tear. Deshpande gives the picture of
nothingness of this house to w hich the family has returned, tinged by negation. There

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is an echo of schizophrenic character of its exterior , the rooms are left uninhibited for
years, and they are dark, brooding and shadows over it. What we call Vishwas, a trust
has also nothingness in it, lying coiled . This is characteristic of post modern thinking
in the cryptic remark of Jean-Francois Lyotard in his neo -classic reading, The
Postmodern Condition : A Report o n Knowledge, when he states, “Postmodernism ,
thus, understood, is not modern as at its end but in the nascen
t state, this state is
constant” (Lyotard 79).
The house is a house more like those of existentialists, Sartre in particular. It is
neither an es sential, nor a permanent abode for human beings to l ive in it. It ha s not
only the front but also the back doors open. Therefore, it is susceptible to desertion,
deconstruction and death. The novel revolves around four generations of women —
Manorama, who is, now dead though whose presence can be felt through her portrait,
represents the first generation, Kalyani and Shripati, the second, Gopal and Sumi and
their three daughters , the third and the fourth . When Gopal, a lecturer in History in a
local college, walks out for reasons, which are best known and even unknown to him,
Sumi decides to return with her three daughters Aru, Charu and Seema to the shelter
of the Big House. In it her parents Kalyani and Shripati live in a strangely oppressive
silence. They have not spoken to each other for thirty -five years. There is a distinct
parallel between Shripati’s veritable desertion of Kalyani and Gopal’s desertion of
Sumi. In empirical phenomenology, whenever the in -itself tries to be for -itself, one
feels ashamed because of sudden release from bondages . But for Deshpande, Gopal’s
desertion is taken not just a tragedy for Sumi and her daughters; it is also assumed as
freedom. The family, no doubt, feels disgraced. This is a social stigma that they have
to bear, but despite this fact Sumi’s reaction is not surprisingly customary. However,

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as the title suggests, “It takes time to get used to sharing your life with another person,
now I have to get used to being alone.” (AMT 23).
The house has now five inhabitants. After the departure of Gopal, nothingness
enters the house. The family of three children with the mother has to shift. Deshpande
finds that a single rupture is enough to break the house. The family move s to the Big
House of Sumi’s parents. The family rues the day Gopal left the family in the lurch.
Sumi wishes h e could have spared, could have spoken to them. But
we know that
without this rupture there is no possibility of freedom. Deshpande’s sense of time is
Sartrian—that the structure s of the for -itself are ontologically rooted in temporality
which provides the ir unifying ground. This t emporality, as of Gopal’s family , should
again be understood in
Sartrian phenomenological analysis as a synthesis of
structured moments. The elements or directions of time—past, present and future—do
not constitute an infinite series of ‘nows’ or collected ‘givens’, in which some are no
longer and others are not yet. If one asks Deshpande what this infinite s eries, made of
discreet ‘nows’ are, she would say that time get annihilated and
evaporated. Like
Sartre, she will not dissolve temporality in this manner. Sartre is right when he says:
…the future does not allow itself to be rejoined; it slides into the past
as a bygone future, and the
present for -itself in all its facticity is
revealed as the foundation of its own nothingness and once again as the
lack of a new future. Hence comes that ontological disillusion which
awaits the for-itself at each emergence into future. (Sartre 185)
The novel suggests in its very title A Matter of Time that the past is still existentially
real and the present already existentially real and the future existentially possible. In
fact, when Deshpande refers to a matter of time, time for her is not privileged for that

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matter, future over the past. The past remains an integral part of the family,
which
now consists of Sumi and her three daughters and her parents.
In A Matter of Time , Shashi Deshpande, as a phenomenologist , explores a
woman’s inner life, emotionally isolated from her family. The women protagonists, in
her novels , for years , have been sil ent sufferers and have never been able to claim
their own individuality. She highlights a woman’s desires, efforts and failures in
patriarchal Indian society. Her depiction of woman’s world is authentic, realistic and
credible. Even Aru thought that her mo ther, Sumi was indifferent to desertion of her
father, Gopal, though she realizes this fact after her mother’s death. She reflects, “I
thought she didn’t care about what papa did, I thought she was uncaring, indifferent, I
said angry words to her but I kno w now that was not true” (AMT 240). Sumi tries to
persuade Aru to ignore the queer relationship between
her grand parents just as she
tries to make her forget what Gopal has done, “
Do you want to punish him, Aru? I
don’t. I’m not interested. I just want to get on with my life… Let him go, Aru, just let
him go. This is not good for you” (AMT 61). Sumi is more interested in getting on
with her life, in finding a meaningful existence. She, instead of wallowing in self-pity,
seeks to find her own path. Now , back in the Big House, she feels like a parasite and
is keen to get a job.
Seen in the phenomenological context, Gopal’s desertion of the family is a
common phenomenon; it requires no further probing.
There is nothing concealed
behind this phenomena or any ot her appearance. This appearance embodies full
reality. It is indicative of itself. Yajnavalkya left his wife , Maitreyi, alone. In the Big
House, Aru and Charu are seen discussing Gopal’s behavio ur and the reason of his
leaving them alone. Aru states:

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…But I don’t know him, I don’t know him at all, she thinks
despairingly. All these things mean nothing, they don’t add up to
anything, certainly not to a reason for walking out on us. Even Sumi
says she doesn’t know why he did it and I have to believe her, she
doesn’t lie, but…. (AMT 13)
It is indicated that Sumi at the age of forty is deserted by her husband , Gopal,
and stands alone along with her three teen
-aged daughters. Sumi is an epitome of
silent suffering and passive resistance. The feelings of nothingne
ss and emptiness
haunt her, including the Big House. Her continuous struggle and suffering at various
levels vis-à-vis economical, emotional and psychological highlight the other aspects
of Sumi’s life.
After Premi’s visit , Aru asks Ramesh if he ha s an ide a where her
father’s whereabouts . He assures her that he has been trying to find him out. At this ,
Sumi frankly admits that she does not bother what people will say about Gopal’s
desertion. As a matter of fact, Aru reacts violently over her mother’s indifference:
…You don’t care about his having gone, you don’t care where he is,
you don’t care what people think —but I care, yes, I do, I care about
Papa having left us, I care about not having our own house. I don’t
want to live like this, as if we’re sitting on a railway platform, I want
my home back, I want my father back…. (AMT 21)
Sumi, as being-for-itself, is fluid and empty rather than fixed and full. She is
characterized by incompleteness, potency and lack of determinate structure and
generally correspon ds to the being of human consciousness. She thinks that Gopal’s
life is shaped by his being what he is . Unlike Aru, she knows that getting answers to
questions w ill not provide her any solution. All these questions leave her cold ,

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desolate and abandoned. Gopal resigns his job because he c
an no longer stand in a
position of authority before his students. And if Sumi asked him why he has left them,
he would possibily have given an impossibly metaphysical answer. Sumi, as being -
for-itself, becomes conscious of her freedom. For Deshpande, as for Sartre, freedom is
nothing but “the existence of our will or of our passions in so far as this existence is
the nihilation of facticity; that is, the existence of a being which is its being in the
mode of having to be it” (Sartre 573). She thinks:
And yet , she thinks, if I meet Gopal I will ask him one question, just
one, the question no one has thought of. What is it, Gopal; I will ask
him, that makes a man in this age of acquisition and possession walk
out on his family and all that he owns? Because…it was you who said
that we are shaped by the age we live in, by the society we are part of.
How then can you, in this age, a part of this society, turn your back on
everything in your life? Will you be able to give me an ans wer to this?
(AMT 27)
It is in human expectation that nothingness shows itself. It is therefore not a question
of the age or the society. It is well over a month now
since Gopal left home, Sumi is
now reconciled to vacate the house , but Aru is still incredulous. As long as the house
is theirs, they still have a home and a hope that Gopal will return, and that they will be
able to resume their lives a new. But Sumi decides that they have to leave the house
because they cannot afford to pay the rent for it any longer. But Aru also knows the
fact that it comes “to pronounce the death sentence of that hope
” (AMT 28) . Aru
thinks:

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But Sumi’s hurry to have done with this has more to it than these
financial considerations . With Gopal’s going, it was of the swift -
flowing stream of her being had grown thick and viscous
—her
movements, her thoughts, her very pulse and heartbeats seemed to
have slowed down. It had worried her family
, but it has been a
necessary physical reaction to her emotional state, as if this slowing
down was essential for her survival. (AMT 28)
Aru is still struggling to understand her father’s desertion and her mother’s
indifference. When Aru sees her belongings scattered in the open, she feels hurt. Sumi
and her daughters look so pathetic and vulner able; the stares of the neighbo urs seem
like a violation. So Aru tries to avoid what the society would speak about Gopal’s
desertion. Deshpande seems to agree wi th Sartre that it is thr ough human
consciousness that nothingness comes into the world.
There is a ruthlessness with
which Sumi makes the girls discard things when they vacate their house and decide
s
to live permanently in the Big House. When they are about to set off , Aru steps over
the threshold , but stops a while, to kneel and to pray . She sits s ilently, feels herself
unable to shake off the paralysis of fear. But afterwards
, in the Big House, the girls
give the impression of having taken up the threads of their li ves to weave them again
into a pattern. They are no longer living on the edge of contingency; they have found
a routine in which grief and fear have a minor place. But , in Deshpande’s world ,
Sumi, as being-for-itself, is no longer complete in
-itself, she is on the way to
completion. The feelings of nothingness
and emptiness prevail even in her parental
home. She is the one who has the feelings of being lost , having no place in the Big
House. She looks hollow -eyed and drawn after her last night in her own house , but
Aru finds her mother looking very bright and normal in the morning after he r bath .

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She thinks, “Perhaps things will work out, may be we will be able to go on, even if we
can’t go back” (AMT 30). She shows no outward sign of distress and affliction. More
so, Sumi comes closer to her daughters and they notice a new woman in her, with a
new way, “of touching them, holding their hands, smoothing their hair, as if this
physical contact is a manifestation of some intense emoti on within her ” (AMT 33).
Therefore, these are various manifestations of Sumi’s character which reveal the other
aspects of her incomplete self.
The family seems to be recovering from the shock of Gopal’s desertion.
Sumi
is born anew from the ashes of her past. It is not something which Sumi and her
daughters had at one time; it is something of which the family is a ware in the present.
Thus, their past includes Gopal’s walking out on the family , for reasons he could not
frame. He himself regrets that he could have spoken to Sumi the truth more explicitly
and honestly that nothingness haunt ed him. He stops believing in life that he has been
leading. Suddenly , it seem s unreal to him and he felt could not go on with it. He
thinks:
In the event, there was nothing for me to say to Sumi, for she asked me
nothing. I am thankful I never had to suffer the mortification of wading
through this slush of embarrassing half -truths. I have not been fair to
Sumi, I know that now. I should have spoken to her earlier; given her
some hint of what was happening to me. (AMT 41)
Thus, his desertion has become the past for the family, Gopal’s action i.e. his negation
of the family , is occasioned by his sense of freedom, and so of the family. That is
why, no reason can be given for Gopal’s act of negation and of his nothingness. His
sudden disappearance is no pure fiction. If we say so, w
e disguise negation. Every

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being reveals his negation. Every question , we raise, is negation in the sense that one
is questioning and, therefore, is in a state of indetermination. Every question leads us
to the heart of being. Meanwhile, Kalyani meets Gopal to d iscuss the reason of his
desertion. But, the next moment , she bursts into tears and asks him, “What have you
done to my daughter, Gopala, don’t do this, don’t let it happen to m
y daughter, what
happened to me ” (AMT 46). And, she further curses herself by s aying, “How could
she have known what being a good wife means when she never saw her mother being
one? I taught her nothing, it’s all my fault, Gopala, forgive me a
nd don’t punish her
for it” ( AMT 47). But Gopal himself is haunted by a sense of nothingness and he
again tries to convince her that he never expect s Sumi to create for him the world of
expectations, nor does he hold her responsible for giving him all that he want ed in
life. This conversation attests to be the birth of nothingness in human expectations. In
another incident, when Aru happens to meet Gopal , she, in her anger, reminds him of
Sumi, and she hits him hard with a blunt weapon for being an uncaring father; she
hurts even herself in this process. Her questions are like the Yaksha’s questions which
leave him with a sense of emptiness and acute pain. He thinks:
At one moment I almost blurted out what is perhaps the only thing I
can say to her: I was frightened, Aru, frightened of the emptiness
within me, I was frightened of what I could do to us, to all of you, with
that emptiness inside me. This is the real reason why I walked away
from Sumi, from you and your sisters. (AMT 50)
For De shpande, as for Sartre, nothing is inherent inside all of us. There is
nothing exceptional about the presence of emotions in Gopal’s heart. It has ever been
there. Indeed, it is a frightening prospect. Sumi was apprehensive of his desertion for
long. That is why she is not alarmed when he leaves the family. It is
, indeed, good

126
that it has happened. Deshpande would agree with Sartre that, “ This nothingness is
this hole in being, this fall of the in -itself towards the self, the fall by which the fo r-
itself is constituted” (Sartre 126). It is clear that Sumi does not want to look back. She
comes out of the fixed role as Gopal’s wife. She, for that matter , and also for the sake
of her three daughters , understands that life must go on . She appears as a strong and
resolute woman after Gopal’s desertion . Gopal’s action makes her experience the
trauma of a deserted wife an d the anguish of an isolated partner. At the age of forty,
she stands alone and helpless. A woman , in such a condition , must feel totally
shattered, but Deshpande’s fiction is not written to empirical, but existential
psychoanalysis, which posits that noth
ing can be possessed . Like any responsible
mother, she helps her children to get on with their lives
without thinking about the
past. Deshpande, as a phenomenologist , shows that there is no -thing, no noumena
behind the phenomenon of Sumi’s relationship wit h Gopal and her three daughters .
This is what her fiction reveals.
Sumi is different from other protagonists of
Deshpande because she straightaway decides to face the facts squarely. Gopal, after
twenty years of marriage with Sumi, one evening, for reasons
he cannot supply, in a
very casual way, walks out and very easily unburdens his responsibilities as a husband
and as a father of three grown-up daughters. Throughout the novel, Gopal and Sumi’s
relationship is informed by the consciousness of nothingness.
Sartre maintains that
nothingness is dependent upon in a
way that, being is not dependent upon
nothingness. This is what Sartre says:
Nothingness is always an elsewhere. It is the obligation for the for -
itself never to exist except in the form of an elsew
here in relation to
itself, to exist as a being which perpetually effects in itself a break in
being. This break does not refer us elsewhere to another being; it is

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only a perpetual reference of self to self, of the reflection to the
reflecting, of the reflecting to the reflection. (Sartre 126)
Meanwhile, Sumi enters a world of creative writing. On writing a play “The
Gardener’s Son” for staging it on the occasion of a school function, she feels so good
over its success that she suddenly says, “I want to do so many things ” (AMT 231).
This gives her courage to deal with more daring themes like female se
xuality. She
decides to write about Surpanakha, the demon sister of king Ravana, at the center. On
Aru’s eighteenth birthday, she informs her about a new job and about her going away
to Devgiri with Seema. For this reason , Aru feels shattered. Sumi makes her
understand by saying, “Be happy for me Aru. This is the first thing in my life I
think
that I’ve got for myself…
” ( AMT 230). Now, she ponders over the stor y of
Surpanakha in the Ramayana from a different perspective, from a different angle. She
reflects:
Female sexuality. We’re ashamed of owning it; we can’t speak of it,
not even to our own selves. But Surpanakha was not, she spoke of her
desires, she flaunte d them. And therefore, were the men, unused to
such women, frightened? Did they feel threatened by her? I think so.
Surpanakha, neither ugly nor hideous, but a woman charged with
sexuality, no t frightened of displaying
it—it is this Surp anakha I’m
going to write about. (AMT 191)
In Sartrian sense, this shows how Sumi wants to fill the part of emptiness and the
sense of nothingness. In fact, she has the full support and sympathy of her parents,
sister, cousins and others. This support of
the members of her family helps a lot to
withstand the shock, pain, humiliation and the trauma of Gopal’s desertion. It also ,

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however, turns out to be the beginning of another phase of troubles. Her
consciousness of freedom does not allow her to be free and complete in herse lf. Sumi
and Gopal once had a harmonious, joyous and intimate married life. Their married life
was their conjugal bliss. However, this happiness walked out of their li ves, as there
was, a basic incompatibility, a dissimilarity of temperaments
, indeed, diff erent
expectations. There was a constant fear in Gopal, of not being able to do his duties as
a husband and a father . This apprehension is filled with intense loneliness and a
feeling of isolation from his wife and daughters that compelled him to walk out. As a
matter of fact, Sumi also undergoes her own type of suffering after Gopal’s desertion.
She says, “It takes time to get used to sharing your life with another person, now
have got used to being alone ” (AMT 23). In a very straight manner, she makes h
I
er
daughters to discard all the unwanted things when they vacate their house and decide
to live in the Big House permanently. Sumi decides to learn to ride the scooter
, and
this is her first step towards a more independent existence. One day, she meets Gop al
when she happens to pass by the house of one of the students at whose press Gopal is
working and with whom he is living. She has a strong, almost, overpowering desire to
talk to him about her grief.
But she realizes that Gopal and she must now move on
alone, and then she reconciles herself to their separation:
We can never be together again. All these days, I have been thinking of
him as if he has been suspended in space, in nothingness, since he left
us. But he has gone on living; his life has moved on, it will go on
without me. So has mine. Our lives have diverged. They now move
more separately, two different streams. (AMT 85)
It is important to note that
Gopal’s abandonment creates a vacuum in Sumi’s
life. She tries to trace out
, eventually, the clues in the past acts and utterances of

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Gopal. He had once uttered the word Sa-hriday to Sumi and started arguing about the
meaning of it. He explains, “ Sa-hriday in the sense of oneness is an impossible
concept.” (AMT 24). And it is for those who accept the tr
aditional Hindu view of
marriage, where God unites both the hearts and believes that the husband and wife are
described as two halv es of one total being. But
, somehow, he realizes that he was
utterly failing the idealistic expectations of the institution o
f marriage. He could not
feel himself a Sa-hriday with her. Her marriage was a failure and had circumscribed
her in an unexpected condition. Although Gopal’s absence leaves her in a state of vast
emptiness, she, from the depth of her despair , struggles har d to redefine her identity.
She does not remain passive but becomes an active agent. She, like her mother ,
Kalyani, is an oppressed and wronged woman. Still, Sumi does not question Gopal for
having left them without saying anything.
We have noted that Sartrian view of phenomenology has various dimensions;
one of them is highlighted by Deshpande through Kalyani’s mother, Manorama, who
always remain s a full and fixed self
in the novel . She is devoid of potency and
becoming and is also roughly equivalent to t he inert world of objects and things. She
always wants a son to be born, but Kalyani is born and Kalyani becomes an invisible
symbol of her failure to have a son; now that she has a daughter, she want s her to be
beautiful and accomplished in all walks of l
ife, and also wishes to celebrate a
wonderful marriage of hers. But Kalyani does not come up to her expectations. She
has come from a background which is poorer than her husband, and after her marriage
she has broken off all her ties with her own family, e xcept the youngest brother who
has been left motherless, “ …perhaps this boy, born after her marriage , was the one
child she had never cared about , and therefore brought her fewer reminders of a past
she wanted to forget ” (AMT 121). Manorama, as being-in-itself, expresses neither a

130
relationship with itself nor a relationship to anything outside itself. It is
further
characterized by an absolute contingency. She
can never get over her fear that her
husband m ay marry again because she could not give him a son. In fact, she is not
very beautiful, but is very intelligent and good in studies. Because of her mother’s
insecurities, she is not allowed to complete her studies. Her education is discontinued
abruptly and she is married to Manorama’s only brother , Shripati. This marriage is
solemnized and Manorama uses it as a tool to keep the property in the family
Thus, there is nothing hidden behind the phenomenon of their marriage.
itself.
Both,
Kalyani and Shripati bear the burden of this decision and remain unhappy forever and
as a result, their relationship is haunted by the sense of nothingness. Kalyani exclaims,
“Perhaps, after this, Manorama felt secure . The property would remai n in the family
now. Her family” (AMT 129).
In Sartrian terms, the being-for-itself is always incomplete, a lack as Kalyani
feels—a future which is ever a possibility
and subjectivity. As the past provides the
foundation for facticity, the future provides the foundation for possibility. Her story
has not ended because their future constitutes the meaning of her present for-itself as a
project of possibilities. The novel shows , in a chronologically order, ‘nows’ which are
yet to come. Kalyani gives birth to a son who is mentally retarded. She loses him at
the railway station on her way to a visit to her parents’ house. Shripati searches for the
lost boy throughout the station, for the whole day.
She returns home, as a deserted
wife, and he returns home after two months, but, since then, for the last thirty -five
years, he never spoke to her. After this incident , he stops all his communication with
her and she does
not react . On the contrary, s he resist s him by building her own
world; she has Goda (her sister) , Sumi and Premi (her daughters) and their families
around the house. It is actu ally Shripati who has confined himself in void and

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loneliness, not Kalyani. This does not mean that she does not suffer, in fact, she is a
silent sufferer and she alone bears the blow of desertion and experiences the anguish
of rejection throughout her lif
e. By and large, she maintains a stoic silence and
becomes a powerful tool of resistance when it is practised with lack of participation in
the social relations. Kalyani’s resistance is so powerful that she appears to Aru not as
a helpless victim but as a strong woman. Here, we see that Kalyani seems to have an
endless capacity to bear pain with endurance and strength . She feels happy when she
signs as Kalyani Bai Pandit. She comes out of her fixed and solid self which earlier
held her captive in desiring to be secure. Thus, Kalyani emerges as the most powerful
character in the novel. Even , Sumi realizes, “Kalyani’s past, which she has contained
within herself, careful never to let it spill out, has nevertheless entered in to us …It has
stained our bones” (AMT 75). Gurudarshan Singh rightly remarks about Kalyani:
In her attempts at making sense of the situation, she , gradually, moves
towards an understanding that perhaps, whatever we do, we are always
giving the past a place in our lives . However, Kalyani has come to
terms with the past and she reminds Sumi of a spider she had seen a
few days ago, spinning an intricate delicate web into a beautiful design
because of the variety of relationships she has at present . (Muse India:
The Literary Journal Mar.-Apr.2011)
The family does not seem to realize, “the real miracle is Kalyani herself, Kalyani who
has survived intact, in spite of what Shripati did to her, Kalyani who
has survived
Manorama’s myriad acts of cruelty” ( AMT 151). It is her identity, her individuali ty
and her incomplete self that she finds ultimately. Kalyani, as an incomplete being ,
struggles and suffers at all levels—economical, emotional and psychological. But this
is her strength, her resilience.

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‘Being’ in Shashi Deshpande’s analysis evinces trans-phenomenal character of
Aru besides these two women , Kalyani and Sumi. For Deshpande
, as for Sartre,
‘being’ is never exhausted by any of its phenomenal aspect. ‘Being’, in totality of its
aspects and manifestations , never becomes wholly translucent to
consciousness.
Everything which as being overflows , the phenomenon of self is trans -phenomenal,
for that matter, when Aru tries to reposition herself through constant protest
s, she
appears as a trans -phenomenal being. She feels quite responsible for the family and
she insists on taking her mother to the dentist, trying very hard to fill the
void that
Gopal has left. The grandmother, Kalyani and Aru do not like each other’s company
as Seema and Charu do. But very quickly, Aru learns that there is some thing strange
in the relationship between her grandparents. She remarks:
Why does n’t Babu ever come down? Why doesn’t he have his meals
here with the rest of us? Why doesn’t he ever speak to Kalyani? She is
his wife, isn’t she? And why is she so frightened of him ? He rings the
bell and she responds, he controls her from a distance. What has
Amma done to make him behave this way towards her? (AMT 39)
We know that Sumi after Gopal’s desertion, regains identity, her individuality
and her subjectivity. Kalyani feels e mpowered when Shripati in his will, address
es
her, not as his wife but as Vithal Rao and Manorama’s daughter, not even for a
second, she feels the pain of deprivation of her marital status. Goda, Kalyani’s cousin
looks anxiously at Kalyani and observes , “On the contrary, it is as if the words have
given her something more than the house, restored something she had lost; they seem,
in fact, to have strengthened her” (AMT 245). As we have seen, Sumi quitens Aru and
asks her to ignore the strange
relationship between her grand parents, just as she
herself has ignored what Gopal has done. Sumi asserts, “Do you want to punish him,

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Aru? I don’t. I’m not interested. I just want to get on with my life. Let him go
, Aru,
just let h im go. This is not good for you”
(AMT 61). Premi, Sumi’s sister , is furious
and is quite angry at the carelessness shown by Sumi and Gopal towards each others’
lives, “…in throwing away what they had, uncaring, it seems to her, of the va
lue of
what they have discarded” (AMT 136). Even Kalyani and Goda worry about it. There
is no concrete reason for Gopal to desert his family. He is not able to give reasons to
Kalyani, Ramesh, Premi or even to Sumi, but he only assures all those who question
him that Sumi, his wife , is in no way responsible for his decision and she should not
be blamed. Kalyani suspects that Gopal has done this for the sake of money, but this
is not true. In fact, h e feels humiliated by one of his students at the college, which
leads him to resign his job but this cannot be the s ole reason for his decision. To
Premi’s question why he left his job, Gopal says, “I can give you so many answers,
but I’ve begun thinking that the plain truth is that I just got tired ” (AMT 133). He
discloses his awareness and meaninglessness of life and his loss of faith in it. Then, he
speaks about Yaksha’s question to Yudhishtira , “What is the greatest wonder in this
world.” At this, Yudhishtira replies, “We see people die and yet we go on as if we are
going to live forever” (AMT 132). Then, Gopal calls it the miracle and the secret of
life itself. He answers Premi by saying:
We know it’s all there, the pain and suffering, old age, loneliness and
death, but we think, somehow we believe that it’s not for us. The day
we stop believing in this untruth, the day we face the truth that we too
are mortal, that this is our fate as well ; it will become difficult, almost
impossible to go on. And if it happens to all of us, the human race will
become extinct. (AMT 133-134)

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Furthermore, Gopal is surrounded by the fee lings of nothingness and blankness . He
Gopal, for that matter , is an existentialist, for he realizes the futility of existence and
its irrelevance. He stop s believing in the miracle and he thinks that there is nothing
left for him. He says, “… You’ve got to be the Buddha for that emptiness to be filled
with compassion for the world. For me, there was just emptiness” (AMT 134).
We come to know that he is haunted by the memories of his past and his past
is bound to his present. He is always related to his pas t but he is , at the same time ,
separated from it in so far as he engages in a constant movement fr om himself as past
to himself as future. The reason for his desertion lies in his childhood. His childhood
was not a normal on e. He painfully remembers that
his father had married his own
brother’s wido w and that he was born out of this marriage. In his adolescent period
when he heard about this fact, somehow, his mind had not accepted this marriage, and
now he thinks of several possible reasons for it. He struggles a lot within himself and
his predicament is parallel to that of Hamlet’s frustrated state of mind, “It was when I
read Hamlet, fortunately much later, that the mos t terrible version of my parent s’
story entered my mind. Just that once, though , for I slammed the door on it
immediately” ( AMT 43). In this story , his father became a man succumbing to his
passion for his brother’s wife, the woman compliant, a pregnancy and a child to come
and then, “after the husband’s convenient death (no, I couldn’t, I
just couldn’t make
my father poison his brother) a marriage of convenience” (AMT 43). Gopal’s father is
his mother’s guilty partner. Their gruesome death leaves him in great confusion and
void, that ruins his peace because of his painful realization that even his sister, Sudha
and he, did not share the same father.
Thus, the past tends to become solidified and
takes on the quality of an in -itself. Gopal feels isolated and abandoned as he has been
nurturing these feelings of loneliness and desolation since long. He speaks:

135
Emptiness, I realized then, is always waiting for us. The nightmare we
most dread, of waking up among total strangers, is one we can never
escape. And so it’s a lie, it means nothing, it’s just deceiving ourselves
when we say, we are n ot alone. It is the desperation of a drowning
person that makes us cling to other humans. All humane t ies are only a
masquerade. Some day, some time, the pretence fails us and we have
to face the truth. (AMT 52)
His insecure childhood, lack of understandin
g, true concept of happiness and
ignorance of true quality of joy
have led Gopal to renounce his Grihast-ashrama in
search of eternal bliss. Gopal cannot convince any one the reason for his desertion, at
least, not to his daughter , Aru. Thus, throughout the novel, his whole life is
accompanied by this sense of emptiness and nothingness. It must be noted that
Kalyani also bemoans the repetition of history, “My father died worrying about me,
my mother couldn’t die in peace, she held on to life though she was s
uffering, she
suffered terribly because of me, she didn’t want to leave me and
go” (AMT 47). She
explains to her son -in-law her own misery and the agony that surmount s in her heart
all through. She implores him, “What have you done to my daughter, Gopal do n’t do
this, don’t let it happen to my daughter…” (
AMT 46). Sumi knows why Gopal has
left her and his daughters because he had the fear of
commitment, family ties and
responsibilities. Sh e kno ws what Gopal believes, “… Marriage is not for every one.
The dema nd it makes —a life time of commitmen t—is not possible for all of us ”
(AMT 69).
Sumi remembers that before their marriage
Gopal had proposed that, if, by
chance either of the two wanted to be free, he or she would be left to go. There should
be no ties to tie them together. Reminding Gopal about this, she tells him, “And I

136
agreed. I was only eighteen then and you were twenty -six… But it meant nothing to
me then. How can you think of separating o
r wanting to be apart, when you are
eighteen and in love? …I th ought we would always be together ” (AMT 221). She is
conscious of the strange developments taking hold of him. She tells him, “Then you
began to move away from me. I knew exactly when it happened.
And I knew I could
not stop you, I could do nothing. When y ou left, I knew I would not questi on you, I
would just let you go ” (AMT 221). Unlike others she does not seek any explanation
from him, but bears all the disgrace and humiliation. She knows that there is no
external reason, but “… the reason lies inside him, the reason is him” (AMT 24). She
did not hinder his way of life, for she understands that everyone has to find her /his
own path of life . After getting a job,
she starts searching for a house and luckily
happens to pass the house of one of his students at whose press Gopal is lodged. She
meets Gopal there. But she does not question him, and he is grateful to her for not
asking him anything and thus, saving him from embarrassment. She hates to share his
desertion with anybody. In an incident, when Devaki starts crying over his behaviour,
she removes Devaki’s glasses and wipes her eyes with her sari. And
when Devaki
asks her whether she does not feel like crying over his desertion, she responds:
I have never been able to cry easily, you know that. And what do I say,
Devi? That my husband has left me and I don’t know why and may be
he doesn’t really know, either? And that I’m angry and humiliated and
confused…? Let that be, we won’t go into it now. (AMT 107)
Deshpande also reveals the various aspects of Aru as
a trans -phenomenal
being in the novel. She is ready to go
along with a purely impersonal search. She
silently reaches out to others and embraces the whole of what is happening. The bond
and blend of various relationships of the three generations are depicted realistically as

137
in any Indian family. Aru does not want Gopal to get away scot -free, while they have
to face the disgrace, shame and
humiliation that his desertion has brought to them.
She demands for family maintenance, but Sumi, who endures pain with patience, selfrespect
and magnanimity, refuses family maintenance. No doubt, his desertion upsets
the apple-cart of the family, but his desertion gives room for freedom, for negation.
As a wife and as a mother, Sumi had led a contented life, and had wil lingly accepted
the responsibilities of a wife and a mother. Though now disappointed and frustrated,
she learns to cope up with disgrace and humiliation of
his desertion in a courageous
way. All the members of her family are agonized over his desertion . But she builds
around her a death -like silence, which expresses her pain more effectively , and she
further recognizes the need for essential loneliness of all human beings that sets them
free. This is not passivity; for she deliberately maintains her matter -of-fact attitude.
Her patience, tolerance, sense of equanimity and stoicism make her an ‘enigma’. In an
interview with Vimala Ramarao, Deshpande comments:
Sumi’s acceptance is not passive. She blocks out the unpleasantness.
She has a good opinion of herse lf; she is more concerned with getting
on with life. She does not want pity; she will do anything for pride. She
distances even her husband. The point is, they are both unusual. People
are puzzled by the abandoned wife not feeling bad. (Ramarao 13)
In fac t, it is very clear that Sumi never likes to unlock her heart an d lay bare her
emotions. Sumi, as being-for-itself, is a free being that emerges from the in -itself by
virtue of its power of negation. Her pride prevents her from begging anything from
anybody; so she does not request him even to come back to her. She controls all her
feelings and presents a composed expression to the outside world. She feels that, it is
important for a woman, like her, to retain her feelings, for, “…the picture she presents

138
to the world is one of grace and courage, to be admired rather than pitied. Unchanged,
except for a feeling —which only those who know her well are aware of—of
something missing in her” (AMT 172). She even feels lost in her parent s’ house. She
cannot demonstrate her own grief in this house.
Rather, it is that region of Sumi’s being which circumscribe s her expanding
possibilities, and defines herself as a being who is always incomplete and is always on
the way to completion . She reveals an independent and in
dividualistic spirit, by
working as a teacher, though on a temporary basis . She wants to be her fluid self, and
thereby, asserts her identity. She does not accept any kind of economic assistance
either from her parents, or from Premi, her doctor sister or
from Ramesh, Gopal’s
doctor nephew. She picks up
courage and prepares herself for the possibilities of
future. She says, “…retracing my steps, picking up things, thinking
—is this it? But
she has turned resolutely away from even her immediate past , she is preparing herself
for the future…” ( AMT 122). She learns to ride a two
-wheeler, at her age, the
moment she learns to balance her drive; she is thrilled at her success. She de
cides to
move out of her parent s’ home, to lead an independent life along with her daughters.
She makes a serious search for a house. But at last , she is made to give up the idea,
considering very well the impracticalities associ
ated with moving out of the Big
House, which is spacious enough to accommodate her family. By the time Sumi starts
weaving the threads of her life and shows
her will -power and independence , she
appears to be a confident woman. She lack s the spark, though she is be autiful and
educated. Sumi , however, comes across the disapproving comments from other
women:
When are you going back to your husband …Y ou should be with him.
Look at his state! It’s all right to stay with your parents for a while, but

139
that’s not your home. When my daughters come home, I don’t let them
stay long. Go back to your husband; he’s a good man. I f you’ve done
wrong, he’ll forgive you. And if he has —woman shouldn’t have any
pride. (AMT 161)
Sumi’s parents , Kalyani and Shripati have behaved like complete strangers
without any communication for more than thirty -five years. Their relationship is also
informed by the consciousness of nothingness.
Sumi apprehends that Kalyani’s
marital status has been lost but still she tries to pose herself as an ideal housewife.
Sumi observes, “but her k umkum is intact and that she can move in the company of
woman with the pride of a wife” (AMT 167). Sumi fails to understand the meaning of
such existence, she thinks “ Is it enough to have a husband, and never mind the fact
that he has not looked at your face for years, never mind the fact that he has not
spoken to you for decades? Does this wifehood make up for every thing, for the
deprivation of a man’s love, for the feel of his body against yours, the warmth of his
breath on your face, the touch of his lips on yours, his hands on your breasts ? Kalyani
lost all this...” (AMT 167). In fact, it is clear that Kalyani, like an ideal house-wife, is
contented and accepts life, as it is . Aru is amazed and realizes that i t is not very easy
for a woman, separated from her husband, to start a new life. Although, Sumi does not
seek divorce, she displays a rare courage and self -confidence in trying to adjust in
such a situation all by herself. Generally, a wife is so much dependent on her husband
that his absence either in death or in desertion makes he r miserable and lonely .
Gopal’s sister, Sudha was very lively and active when her husband was alive. But
after his death , she becomes very belligerent, self-centered and almost debilitated. It
feels as if all the activity of her life has evaporated from her.

140
These thoughts of Sumi reflect that she, as being-for-itself, is both a flight and
a pursuit; she flees the in -itself and at the same time pursues it. In Sartrian ontology,
“there is a relation of the for -itself with the in -itself in the presence of the Other ”
(Sartre 472). Sumi, as the being-for-itself and as the nihilation of the in
-itself,
temporalizes herself as a flight toward, the in -itself in her over -protective attitude to
her daughter, Aru. She has a sound understanding that man -woman relationship
should be sound, equal and non-partisan. She stands for responsibility, motherly care,
love and concern. Every moment , she is concerned and worried about her grown -up
daughters. She is worried about their future, and is aware of her responsibility as a
mother cum -single parent . She becomes quite frantic when Aru meets with an
accident, cries for help, despite the profuse bleeding from her own injuries. She is so
much worried about Aru that she does not leave her daughter alone nor does she take
rest. She desires that her daughter
’s life must become easy and comfortable. She
fervently hopes, “I want her to enjoy the good things in life; I want her to taste life, I
want her to relish it and not spit it out because, she finds it bitter” (AMT 220).
Nevertheless, Sumi, as being -for-itself, simply finds herself there , and at a
glance, she separates herself from the absolute fullness of the in-itself. She emerges as
an irreducible and ultimate fact or phenomenon . She reveals essentially an optimistic
vision of life. She demonstrates
strength and maturity even in adversity. She never
wants to end her life like that of her mother ’s. She thinks over her relation with Gopal
in a very mature way and recognizes that his life, as of everyone else has always been
different in identity from h ers, “…o ur journeys are always separate, that’s
how
they’re meant to be. If we travel together for a w hile, that’s only a coincidence ”
(AMT 212). She starts working in a school on a temporary basis, but when she gets
her permanent appointment, she wants to go there with Seema, her youngest daughter.

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She meets Gopal and informs him about her decision, recalls many incidents with him
and departs on a note of laughter. She believes that e ach day is a different one, each
moment is different and human life is always on the brick of uncertainty.
As we already know something catastrophic often happens in Shashi
Deshpande’s existential world. One day
, Sumi and her father start from their Big
House to a bank nearby ; unfortunately, they m eet with an accident, while S umi was
driving. Both Shripati and Sumi die, leaving the daughters and Kalyani grief-stricken
and desolate. The fact , that Sumi dies a sudden death in an accident just as she
about to begin a new life, is a little hard for the reader to reconcile to
was
such a
contingency. As per the existential philosophy of Sartre , death and birth are absurd.
Deshpande would agree with Sartre that, “Sudden death is und
etermined and by
definition cannot be waited for at any date; it always, in fact, includes the possibilit
y
that we shall die in surprise before the awaited date and consequently that our waiting
may be, qua waiting , a deception or that we shall survive beyond this date; in the
latter case since we were only this wait ing, we shall outlive ourselves ” (Sartre 686).
The revelation about her father’s real vulnerable self , which lays behind the grim and
long silence, is too brief to be convincing. But , Sumi had established her identity and
found a meaningful existence before her death. She was preparing for a fuller life, but
it is really an irony of fate that her life is cut short in the prime. It is a pity that Sumi
dies when she had taken up a job to support herself and her daughters. Had she lived,
she would have become an economically independent woman with
a mo dern and
mature outlook on life, and at the same time, a loving and responsible mother.
In an
interview, Prasanna Sree ask s Deshpande what made Sumi to die
so young and
premature. Deshpande replied by saying:

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…I wished I might ask myself why do people die at all? Why is there
death in human life? We have both birth and death. So the novel
contains a slice of human life, birth is there , death is there. Premature
deaths we see all the time. Why people die we cannot say, why it
happened...my focus was on Aru. So even if Sumi dies that is not the
end. Life goes on, there is Aru who is going to flower and who is really
going to be very remarkable. (Sree 153)
Shashi Deshpande, as a phenomenologist, through Aru, looks hopefully at the
younger generation to penetrate silence and to make women realize their situation and
speak themselves from the scratch. Inheriting her mother’s pride and dignity, courage
and confidence, Aru assures her father, “Yes Papa, you go. We’ll be all right. We’ll
be quite alright, don’t worr y about us’’ ( AMT 246). The novel comes to a full circle
with Aru’s reconciliation with Gopal’s desertion. Now, lest with her grandmother, she
initially resents Kalyani’s oppressive love and the way she looks at her and her sisters,
however, her attitude later changes into a special relationship with the former. When
on hearing the news of death of Sumi and her grand father, Shripati arrives, she rushes
to Kalyani and says, “Amma, I’m here, I’m your daughter, Amma, I’m your son, and
I’m here with you” (AMT 235). She articulates the feminist voice in the novel and she
deliberately asks the reasons of her father’s desertion.
Later, she joins a computer
class and becomes part of women’s activist group.
As we have seen that the phenomenon of the self is trans -phenomenal and it
reveals various manifestations of phenomenal appearances . In Deshpande ’s novels ,
Sumi’s daughters find their voice and establish their identities through
education,
determination and inner strength after Gopal’s desertion. Aru now begins to
understand turns and twists of various relationships , as it happens when all security

143
falls apart, revealing nothing. Aru, as a lawyer , and Charu , as a medical practitioner,
become aware of their talent s and qualities. The girls are already being pursued by
two very capable young men , Rohit and Hrishi. It is because of Aru and Kalyani and
the partnership they have forged and the strength with which they face suffering that
the novel ends on a note of hope. They desire to be their free self. The last image on
which the novelist closes her story is not of Sumi’s death but of Aru and Kalyani
standing together at the door with the smile with which they face Gopal . In fact ,
Deshpande wants to develop a good companionship between m an and woman. When
Prasanna Sree mentions that there is concept of sisterhood in the two novels
The
Binding Vine and A Matter of Time and asks Deshpande if it c an be interpreted as a
solution to end male domination in society, Deshpande retorts:
I do not see that as a solution but certai
nly it is a comfort. For a
solution we need men and women to live together. Men and women
should live together in a more friendly way. That is a solution that is
not going through sisterhood. There must
be good companionship
between man and woma
n. Without that I don’t think there is any
solution to the problem of women… (Sree 149)
The novel A Matter of Time moves beyond feminist concerns. The novel raises
certain existential questions. It tries to penetrate and analyze the very predicament of
human existence and solve the riddle of life from Sartrian view of phenomenology. It
is only through a process of self -examination and self-searching, through courage and
resilience that one can change one’s situation from despair to hope.
Gopal, as beingfor-itself,
perpetually, strives to surpass him self toward reunion with the in -itself and,
thus, achieving totality by healing the fundamental rupture in being. But , this totality
is an impossible synthesis. In the end , Gopal realizes that it is indeed true that human

144
beings are bound to their destinies, and there is no point in struggling against them .
He further says, “even then this remains —that we do not submit passively or
cravenly, but with dignity and strength. Surely, this, to some extent, frees us from our
bonds?” (AMT 246). His daughters, however, accept negation, because w ith Gopal
they would have been in the state of the in -itself. They, no longer, want to be afraid.
This is their freedom, freedom, which exists in negation.

145
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---. The Binding Vine (1992). New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1993. Print.
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New Delhi: Prestige Books, 1995. Print.
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Ramarao, Vimala . Interview. “A Conversation with Shashi Deshpande
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