A love story worth remembering

Shashi Deshpande is the author of eight novels, most notably The Dark Holds No terrors; The Long Silence, which won the Sahitya Akademi Award. Other novels she has written include Roots and Shadow, Come Up and Be Dead, If I die Today, The Binding Vine, A Matter of Time, Small Eemewdies, and Moving On.

She has also written three short story collections: The Intrusion and Other Stories, Collected Stories Volume I, and Collected Stories Volume II. She has written books for children and has translated two books from Kannada and Marathi to be published.

Surprisingly enough, India is full of female novelists, many of whom are successful, including Shashi Despande, one of India's senior contemporary authors. Compared to Indonesia, book publication is better in India.

In the Country of Deceit is a novel about love, a very simple story told using first-person point of view and several exchanges of letters, although after being written one of these letters is torn into small pieces by the narrator.

The narrator is Devayani Mudhol, a woman almost 27 years of age, left to live alone by her father and then by her mother in a quiet country area called Rajnur. Her relatives live in the US and also in other cities of India. Another character is Rani, a very rich and beautiful ex-film actress who is married to a rich man, her second husband.

They built an enormous, beautiful, and luxurious house and live there with her children. Rani has a degree in law but she teaches English to some children privately.

The male character is Ashok, a police superintendent about 40 years old. He is married and has children. Devayani and Ashok fell in love to each other.

The narrator tells of her love story only on the last but one page of the novel:

"Why did I do it? Why did I enter the country of deceit? What took me into it? I hesitate to use the word love, but what other word is there? And yet, like the word *atonement' I kept hearing in Klashma's conversation. Though she never uttered it, the word love is too simple for the complicated emotions and responses that made me do what I had done. Ultimately, I did it because he was Ashok, because we met. That's all. Our meeting-it was a miracke, a disaster,"

Love is simple and yet very complicated, and the novel tells us about the beauty, simplicity but also complication of love. For Devayani, her meeting with Ashok is natural, beautiful and yet very mysterious. Who can reveal the mystery of love?

Devayani welcomes Ashok as a reality of her life, to enjoy the body of Ashok and her own body. For her, it is more that sex, she deserves to enjoy the beauty, sacredness, and sweet taste of love. She realizes that her love with Ashok is temporary, and in the end she has to come to a bitter decision to be apart from him.

However wrong she has gone with Ashok, she keeps him in her memory:

".pictures will remain intact in my memory. Pictures of Ashok's face looking at me, loving, wanting, enjoying me, Ashok kneeling before me, his face humble, supplicating, Ashok on the beach, holding out his arms out to me, Ashok folding me in his arms.MustI forget his tenderness, the gentleness of his touch, the urgency of his passion.No, I don't want to forget, I want to remember; it is not remembering but forgetting that will be my greatest enemy. It is what my life is going to be like from now on - a constant struggle between trying to forget and wanting to remember?"

Normally when people are separated in love, they will try to forget, but Devayani tries hard not to forget.

That reminds us of what Milan Kundera writes about the problem of remembering and forgetting.

The novel does not tell us about Devayani and Ashok, but includes other problems and people like Sindhu, Shree and Kshama who appear in their letters that build the novel into a beautiful and memorable experience.

The problem with reading the novel is that the novelist does not include footnotes to explain several expressions and words from local Indian languages in the text whose meanings cannot be inferred from context alone.

The writer is a novelist and book lover living in Singaraja, Bali