That familiar unease

Vivek Shanbagh's terrific new novel, Sakina's Kiss (translated from the Kannada by Srinath Perur) is an intimate portrait of a middle-class, middle-aged man bewildered and isolated by the changes brought to his life, which he had painstakingly built for himself and his family over the years.

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Slowly, over four days, Venkat reveals more like confesses to his life's story: his aspirations, accomplishments, self-consciousness and shame.

He and Viji are an ordinary couple, he says. Their neighbors in the building they live in use no adjectives to describe them, as if nothing about them stands out, referring to them simply as "the C-3 people".

But he's an unreliable narrator. His view of his life is so coloured by embarrassment that he cannot see the family's achievements. Their friends see them as successful, but he thinks they're pretty average, maybe a few steps ahead because of their two incomes.

After passing many of life's milestones, he says, they're at the point where they're going to be evaluated by the conduct of their children.

And so the novel begins, in the hands of this iffy protagonist, with two young men looking for his daughter Rekha. She isn't at home; she's in his ancestral village, Venkat tells them, where there's no phone reception. But they return, accompanied by two suspicious-looking men. And so the novel is set up like a thriller. Where is Rekha? What do these men want? Is Venkat hiding something? This unease is familiar. The mood of Sakina's Kiss is much like that of Ghachar Ghochar, the first of Shanbhag's novels to be translated into English, in 2015.