Tales of women who write their own rules

Shanta Gokhale's new collection of short stories, 'The Way Home', is informed by humanity, wit, worldly wisdom and lived experiences

- Somak Ghoshal

In Silences, one of the finest stories in Shanta Gokhale's luminous new collection, The Way Home, 18-year-old Basant is summoned by his father Sharad, who is on his deathbed, for a private conference. As he draws his final breath, Sharad asks Basant to find out why his mother, Girija, had left their family home in Mumbai and moved to Pune—away from her husband—after her mother-in-law passed away.

Basant can't bring himself to ask his mother this question, but it pricks his conscience like a thorn. Finally, when Prof. Sawant, a friend's father, hears about Basant’s dilemma, he tells him, by way of consolation, that “There are silences in every family. It is like a pact.... The silence sets everybody free except the victim.”

This statement, at once familiar and devastating in societies around the world, especially in India, sums up the moral compass of the 12 stories in this volume. Gokhale makes the reader privy to words and actions, beliefs and suspicions, that change lives, shatter illusions, and shift the balance of power between individuals. Silences hover above their lives like weapons, threatening to shatter the fragile semblance of normality in which they have carefully cocooned themselves.

If this summary makes the stories sound heavy, nothing could be further from the truth. Even though Gokhale writes about serious subjects—old age, illness and death are recurrent themes—she does it with a lightness that sometimes dissolves into cynical laughter and, at other times, hardens into an unshakeable resilience.