Re-Visioning in Deshpande

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inches taller. But perhaps the same thing that made me inches taller, made him (Manohar) inches shorter. He had been the young man and I his bride. Now I was the lady doctor and he my husband. a + b they told us in mathematics is equal to b + a. But here

a + b was not, definitely not equal to b + a. (42)

Also recalling her relationship with her mother and father she said – “We were like the three points of a triangle, eternally linked, forever separate.” (141)

But her actual understanding and realisation comes in the final section of the novel, when she verbally says to her father about the sadistic, animal-like attacks of Manohar at night on her, something which Saritha couldn’t acknowledge even to herself, let alone discussing with her otherwise normal husband. She feels that as long as she didnot speak about it with Manohar, the thing that happened between them will remain unreal and that by speaking she will make the gross, real.

The little girl, the young wife, the troubled doctor, who was always afraid to face the truth and her past, was left with no other choice but to face it. Her father’s words “Don’t turn your back on things again. Turn around and look at them” (216), lead to her revelation.

Through her new found truths, Saritha realises that it is her life and that she would no more let others, living or dead, torment her. She acknowledges all her selves which she had deliberately rejected earlier and accepts her life as it is. She decides to move on “to some kind of life that would seem right to her.” In a final moment in the novel the narrator says –

They came to her then, all those selves she had rejected so resolutely at first, and so passionately embraced later. The guilty sister, the undutiful daughter, the unloving wife . . . persons spiked with guilt. Yes, she was all of them, she could not deny that now. She had to accept these selves to become whole again. My life is my own . . . somehow she felt as if she had found it now, the connecting link. (220)

Now Saritha is no more an escapist, no more a ventriloquist’s dummy but is ready to confront her life confidently.

This confidence to confront life, gained through Re-vision is also evidenced in Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column where the protagonist Laila, by revisiting her past, comes to terms with her present. Hosain, an Indian born Muslim writer settled in Britain, places her protagonist in a conservative Muslim patriarchal society wherein Laila has to break the traditions of her family and the society in order to find her identity and thereby move from confinement to freedom. Laila finds herself as a fully realised female when she revisits her past and within hours comes out as a different woman, matured and someone who has an identity, from her ancestral house “Ashiyana” which is also symbolic of her coming out of the decayed tradition of the past and starting a new life as a fully awakened female.

Thus through Revision, the transformation of Saritha, Laila and numerous others has taken place where a new woman has emerged devoid of any internalised fears. Simone de Beauvoir once said in her significant 1949 feminist text The Second Sex that woman has always been the “inessential”, “the Object” and “the Other” as opposed to man who is “the Absolute”, “the Subject”.(16)

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