Publishers : Zubaan Books
Belinder Dhanoa is a writer and artist. She also currently teaches Creative Writing at the Postgraduate level at the School of Culture and Creative Expression at the Ambedkar University, Delhi.
A man lies dying tended by his two daughters. A strangely absent presence, their father has dictated the shape of their lives — sometimes distorting and at others shaping their hopes, ambitions and desires. To these two narrative strands, Belinder Dhanoa adds a third, that of the girls’ mother – a strong and single-minded woman, who defies society’s expectations of how a woman should behave.
Set partly in Shillong and partly in the Punjab, Belinder Dhanoa’s novel is not only an insightful study of the pressures of living in a patriarchal society, but also a moving account of the complexities of family loyalties, betrayals and love.
I picked up Echoes in the well while hunting for fiction in Zubaan’s online catalogue. With no reviews of the book to be found online, I approached it not knowing what to expect, apart from a vague idea that it dealt with mental illness. And I was pleasantly surprised.
The book is told from the points of view of three generations of women – Amrita, Madhulika and Ranjita. They are upper caste, middle class women who are not disadvantaged by their class or caste. The book gives us a glimpse into the inner lives of these relatively fortunate women, and how they deal with everyday sexism, ostracization and the feeling of being outsiders in places they call home.
The narrators are all ambitious in their own ways. While their gender makes their struggle to achieve their goals difficult, there isn’t a hint in their voices of the self-pity that is ubiquitous in the existential crises of middle class men that is too common in Indian writing.
Of the three narrators, it is Madhulika’s story that is at the centre of the book. Madhulika is driven by the urge to do something meaningful with her life. She is perpetually restless because she doesn’t know how to do that, given the constraints of her circumstances. She is painfully aware of the fact that nothing in her life really belongs to her. As her restlessness grows and finds outward expression, she is summarily expelled from the home that she has carefully built over several years.
Some might construe mental illness to be an important theme in the book – but it is merely the inevitable conclusion of an arduous existence. What makes the book stand out is the chronicling of the daily claustrophobia that finally drives women up the wall.
The book is set in the years just before and after independence. While the narrative looks more inwards than outwards, it makes some insightful observations about contemporary politics and society, and the impact that they have on the lives of the protagonists. It also demonstrates an awareness of the injustices that do not affect the narrators directly, which is rare in books with similar structure and themes.
Dhanoa writes in long, carefully constructed sentences which give the book a translated feel. I did not mind this in general, since it contributes to the authenticity of the text which is a first-person account of women whose mother tongues are not formal English. It, however, does get tiresome in places, and there are parts that could have done with lot more editing. The chapters did not need to be addressed to a particular character, since this only disrupts the logical flow of the narrative.
These minor complaints aside, this is an important book, and one that deserves to be read more widely.