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Hindustan Times

Review: Life on Mars by Namita Gokhale

In Namita Gokhale's Life on Mars, the women speak as if they have nothing left to lose. Or perhaps they've simply grown bored of politeness. Across 16 stories divided into two parts, Gokhale writes women who stagger through marriage proposals, viral fevers, God, bureaucracy, and desire. It is not just that they are ordinary, it is that Gokhale trusts their ordinariness to hold meaning. She trusts their stories to bend and reflect the tragicomedy of living in a society that never quite knows what to do with women who think. Pahari painting of Gandhari with maid-servants, by Purkhu, c. 1820 CE. 'The pleasure of reading Life on Mars is that the stories aren't driven by moral arcs, as much as I ached to pass a judgement. They are driven by discomfort. Qandhari blindfolded herself and became a queen, a mother of a hundred sons. She is a woman raging at the absurdity of her fate'. (Wikimedia Commons) 200pp, ₹322; Speaking Tiger Take Savithri, the protagonist of Savithri and the Squirrels, who introduces herself with a nonchalant bombshell: 'I am one of the five Panchkanyas.' The invocation is as layered as it is ludicrous, absurdly sacred. The Panchkanyas — Ahalya, Draupadi, Kunti, Tara, and Mandodari are figures from Hindu mythology, revered despite (or because of) their sexual complexity. But Savithri? She works at a matrimonial agency, possibly faked her resume, and feeds squirrels as a form of religious praxis. The juxtaposition is not meant to amuse (though it does) but to shake loose the reader's assumptions about what it means for a woman to be mythic in India. Savithri's 'gajra of fresh mogra flowers' and her thin braid channel some inner theatre. 'You North Indians don't even know the difference between Italy and idli,' she spits at the narrator, furious that her name — Savithri Subramaniam is mispronounced. 'Subramanian is not a Subramaniam,' she insists, as though identity itself might rupture over a vowel. Gokhale has long been alert to how language betrays social stratification, and this story practically throbs with it. Gokhale is being slyly mythological and sarcastic, but in service of something deeper. She draws from the Indian short story tradition that has given us Krishna Sobti, Mahasweta Devi, and Ismat Chughtai, all writers who understood that a woman's inner world is a battleground no less sacred than Kurukshetra. But unlike some of her predecessors, she rarely positions her characters as victims. Even in their most pitiful states, they are full of unpredictable movement. The titular Life on Mars is less interested in extraterrestrial questions than it is in the loneliness of a woman who has outlived her husband by a decade, is ignored by her grown sons, and falls into an accidental friendship with a man far younger than her, one Udit Narain, whom she instantly recognises as 'a crank.' But the real story isn't him, it's her wry self-awareness. 'Even seeing my name in print doesn't give me a lift anymore,' she says, in a moment of bone-dry deflation. Unlike the melancholic, inward turn of much Western short fiction, where women are often drowning in epiphanies and bathtub wine, Gokhale's characters have a larger Indian sounds, that of landladies, astrologers, nosy aunties, fevers, lockdowns, and WhatsApp forwards. These are not metaphors. She doesn't need to point neon arrows at her symbols. And the stories linger back. There are glimpses of COVID-19 lockdowns, of urban estrangement, of domestic routines so precise they become existential. The author does not rush through these. She doesn't write like she's afraid to bore. If you expect catharsis, you may not find it. What you get instead is clarity. The book's two-part structure is almost invisible, themes do spill into each other. Titles are deceptively simple: The Rock, The Weather in Darjeeling, The Girl Who Could Not Weep. But Gokhale's women are not symbols. They don't stand in for 'India' or 'trauma' or 'feminism.' They stand in for themselves a bold, almost defiant literary move in a culture that loves to reduce. In a short story tradition that has often hovered too neatly between the sacred and the cynical, Gokhale's stories zigzag. They can be mournful, yes, but never inert. In Life on Mars, she's clearly writing toward something. Surely not salvation, not resolution, but perhaps recognition. Namita Gokhale has always been a shapeshifter. From Paro to Things to Leave Behind, she has chronicled women. But Life on Mars feels different. This is her at her most distilled. There's a lightness to the prose. You feel she's laughing, not just at the world, but at herself. In the world according to Gokhale, exile is not a geographical condition. It is a posture, a mutiny, a rejection of the gaze. In Life on Mars women refuse the obvious choices. Some, like Qandhari in Chronicles of Self-Exile, become a myth of their own making. Gokhale is not interested in exalting women through their suffering. Her project, if one can be that reductive, is something colder and more subversive: to inhabit the consciousness of women so intimately that their decisions no longer appear moral or immoral, just inevitable. The pleasure of reading Life on Mars is that the stories aren't driven by moral arcs, as much as I ached to pass a judgement. They are driven by discomfort. Qandhari blindfolded herself and became a queen, a mother of a hundred sons. She is a woman raging at the absurdity of her fate. 'There is no mirror in his eyes,' Zara tells her, perhaps the saddest line in the book. And Qandhari's reply is chilling: 'You think this is a whim, Zara. No, it is a vow.' What Gokhale has written is interior archaeology. She scrapes away at the myths, the grand narratives, until all that's left is the raw, stubborn ruin of one woman's will. And through Zara, the servant and witness, we learn not just of Qandhari's choices but of the fragile ecosystem that makes such choices possible. Servants who comb her hair, astrologers who cannot explain her illness, a brother who may have poisoned his own kin. If Gokhale's Qandhari is a kind of oracle in self-imposed darkness, she is not alone in this landscape of estranged women. Across the collection, Gokhale constructs women on the brink of madness, of myth, of history's blind spot. The stories are not linked, but have a shared frequency. There is a kind of psychic correspondence between them. They are all about women who speak through refusal. There's something almost defiant in Gokhale's unwillingness to redeem her characters. She has always been interested in what lies beneath ordinary lives, how routine relationships carry the weight of years, silence, and accidents. In GIGALIBB, Bindu is remembered as a striking woman who doesn't seem to know the effect she has on people. She eventually walks into a lake after a period of decline. The narrator doesn't treat this as a moment of revelation, or a tragedy to be decoded. It just happens. A woman walks into a lake, her sari floating around her like a sail. She's pulled out, survives, ends up in a hospital bed, and later vanishes again. We're told simply that she wasn't found for a month. The image is direct with no flourish. Author Namita Gokhale (Bandeep Singh) What's more interesting is how people behave around her, how they remember her, interpret her, or ignore her. Her husband, now a religious recluse, disappears from the narrative. Her son is in boarding school. Kaka Kohli remains obsessed but ineffectual. The narrator is left piecing together fragments of gossip, memories, objects like a photograph in a wallet. 'For so many years,' Kaka Kohli tells her, 'I have carried this photo. For so many years, I have loved you.' But we're not meant to take him entirely seriously. His romanticism is as much about himself as anyone else. Indian women short story writers have long been invested in the iconography of female rebellion. But what sets Gokhale apart is her studied refusal of political neatness. Her women do not rise. They don't heal. They linger, rot, obsess, sometimes disappear. There's something deeply unsettling about this and it is exactly what gives Life on Mars its charge. What makes her fiction stand apart from the more anodyne stories of Indian English writing is her unembarrassed theatricality. Namita Gokhale's language too, though occasionally ornamental, never distracts from the emotional grime of her characters. You don't so much read her prose as eavesdrop on it. Pranavi Sharma writes on books and culture. She lives in New Delhi.