The weight of being a woman
Sankar has the flare to write with a note of breathlessness. For instance, “It was becoming a pattern... It was exhausting to lie awake every night, hearing the unnerving footsteps outside my bedroom door... I disliked the mansion as if it were a living entity, one that had absorbed into its very being the discontents, hatred and misgivings of all those who had lived within its walls over the years. Sankar’s labour with setting up the story has worked well to induce a sense of horror and of something menacing that awaits the story. Take for instance the scene when Shalini is coming to the hills and is seeing Akshar’s house for the first time. Here, I was reminded of a scene Iris Murdoch had written in her 1963-gothic novel The Unicorn when Marian, the English teacher, was encountering an isolated country house for the first time. While Shalini’s encounter may not have been as detailed as Marian’s, Sankar manages to convince the reader of its ‘iciness’ and the ‘eerie’ life that awaits Shalini in the house.
Each chapter was divided into three sections where we follow the narrative of three women from three different generations. Much like Evie Wyld’s 2020 novel The Bass Rock, the tripartite can be confusing in the beginning, but Sankar’s deft management of these narratives brings them together as we see Shalini at the root of it. The first one, the narrative of the ‘woman in the room’ who is suffering from Alzheimer’s, is particularly interesting and hilarious at places.
The second one, the narrative of ‘the woman who left’ is of a mother who couldn’t like her child and is unsure of her role as a mother, can attract the reader’s attention to something unique. And the third one was that of ‘the woman who was unafraid of the fire,’ where we follow Shalini in first-person. Shalini’s arc was the most convincing, as it becomes the major plot that drives the novel forward in the present. Words and pages were spent on it, and it showed. However, the other two plots were rather sweeping despite their promise.
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