Book Review: All the lives we never lived — Anuradha Roy
5 mins if you don’t reply to a client message and it is havoc, half an hour if you are off your schedule your family is in panic and they go back to multiple alternates connects to reach you. When you suddenly remembered a college friend you haven’t spoken to for ages you can spot them in a few clicks on networking sites or ask around and 2nd and 3rd contacts will do the needful. In this humdrum of trackable world forget about running away or getting lost.
All the lives we never lived takes us on a sad yet reviving journey of a woman who dares to take a huge step to set herself free from her family to explore what she could be but ends up binding her son for life with a singular idea what he could have if she was around. The only way he would set himself free is via taking the same journey that she took, the only he will understand her more if he lives her life, meets the people she met, sees the paintings she painted, in the lost hut of Bali where she reclaimed herself. For him, it becomes not just a journey but a pilgrimage. This novel is a story about how he comes to realize the liberation of his soul is via the route her mother took.
Touching upon pre-independence Indian sentiment, second world war, fictional at its best with story weaving with the poet Rabindranath Tagore, the singer Begum Akhtar, the dancer and critic Beryl de Zoete and the German painter and curator Walter Spies. There is so much to a story but all these great personalities become just the background and outline in the story about a boy whose mother abandons her home. His journey thereafter to who he becomes in the shadow of her past and her absence. An immediate confusion of her action is his father also abandoned him to find a meaning of his life or rather choose to leave whatever is left over for him. Myshkin — “a man who chose neither pen nor sword but a trowel”, horticulturalists, the protagonist, a boy whose mother runs away with Englishman ( who is actually German ) is 9 years old boy to grumpy old man.
He establishes an aloof relationship with his mother after she leaves him through letters. He writes her about her his life, how he is slowly settling around new environment but still yawn for her, hoping and waiting for her to turn up one for him. He compares that waiting to
“blood being drained away from our bodies until one day there was no more left”.
And then he doesn’t know through her letter he later understands how he stopped looking for her.
Now 60 years old Myshkin craves to understand her. She was an artist, only daughter whose father pampered her and again all status quo took teenage daughter to long voyage to Bali to help her learn, where her creatives senses awaken. Unfortunately, after the untimely demise of her father’s death, Gayatri is married off to a man who sees art an irrelevant hobby against freedom struggle and contribution one needs to make to country’s new shaping political scene. Adjusted to her reality, in own suppressed manner she rebels in ways that adolescent Myshkin isn’t about grasp but 60 years old Myshkin sets his mind to uncover.
The novel covers ers and generations we now only have to image and live through pages of books and novels likes these. But it very well touches upon how families break and aftermath is just remains.
Highly recommend reading this.