There's a little girl who got married. But she always has this inkling over whether she has been sold for 500 rupees, and that her marriage was nothing but a sham. Having been married (or shall I say "cast") away by her parents, she's never treated with the slightest bit of dignity, always been tossed about by her husband exclusively for sex, and forever has this "hintergedanken" (a beautiful German word that means "the thought at the back of your mind") that her parents traded her espousal with a sum which is so paltry that it sounds ridiculous.
Such is the setting of one amongst the many heart-wrenching stories in the collection that is known as "एक बाटो अनेक मोड" that loosely (and maybe too loosely to render it "inadequate" or "false" as well) translates as "Same Old Road, Many Digressions". If you’re careful enough to read this small volume of work, which when it came out, could buy you perhaps a seventh of the girl in the aforementioned paragraph, you’re bound by its hypnotic quality. And the more you read, the more you realize that it has nothing to be hypnotic about.
The same old cliches- Can purity be equated with chastity? Is a much too much a smart person much much mad? Are we going overboard with technological tools with the possibility of touching upon singularity- the point after which the AI’s can make better AIs ad infinitum? Can we only create a world where there’s an unconscionable partying going on in a shard while the other broken acreages are burning and being eviscerated?
I always go back to one of the more arresting paragraphs in the book:
“There’s a certain style to life, a way of living. That is perhaps known as a “philosophy”. But you wouldn’t quite need such ideals to die? After all, you die even if you’re adamant that you would want to stick around. And why would you even scratch the surface of a “philosophy” for death! But we’re sticklers for philosophies- whether it be for killing animals, for our feelings, our ideals, or even our suicides.”
We all want our deaths to possess a touch of meaning. Perhaps this might be because we know that pinning down a meaning to our life is too pompous, too grand a task. Sometimes I wonder who will be the very first to know that I have checked out of the earth- whether it be with or without a philosophical touch. And how might the message be conveyed to the others that I am dead? But if I reverse this Gedankenexperiment and say that if I am the first recipient of someone’s death, how would I break it to others? A much worse, and a very probable tremble.
When I first read the story “Patan” where a brother finds it impossible to break it to his newly married sister that she has been widowed only to pull the rug from under the feet of his parents, I was almost gasping to know what would happen to the soon-to-be-declared-but-already-been-widowed sister. It is more than a "worth a read". It is more "worth a feel" of a book.
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The two men who are at the forefront of WiseDumb podcasts are Karan Bhatta and Rupesh Sah who are researchers, educators and media personalities. You can reach out to them for a collaboration:
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