Vivek Shanbag’s Ghachar Gochar was the first of his novels to be translated into English, and that slim novel—which captured the challenges of family life in Bangalore—captivated readers for its whimsy, well-drawn characters, and economy of language. Almost a decade since that novel was published, his second novel translated into English, Sakina’s Kiss, has just arrived. This one continues to captivate readers with its story of a middle-class Bengaluru family and their secrets.
Shanbag’s protagonist, Venkat, is a middle-aged engineer who is married to Viji. She is employed in IT (like the majority of middle-class Bangalore), and they have a twenty-year-old daughter, Rekha, who is a college student and aspiring journalist. Venkat epitomizes mediocrity: he has an undistinguished career; he owns a home and two cars like every middle-class family around him; his marriage has lost its spark and his relationship with Viji is monotonous; and he devours self-help books constantly seeking to improve himself but ends up spouting banalities with a religious fervor. He is proud of his daughter but does not understand her much and articulates his role as a father largely through trying to control her life and movements. Essentially, he is neither interesting nor exciting as a protagonist, and yet Shanbag’s reader cannot help being drawn to this character.
Venkat’s calm life shatters when one day two young men knock on his door seeking his daughter. Venkat is suspicious; these men seem to be of dubious character and cause him to become uneasy. Since Rekha is away at their ancestral village with limited phone and wifi access, he dismisses them with a vague promise of having her call them back. The young men come back the next day accompanied by some “uncles” and an entourage that loiters outside their apartment building. Venkat and Viji feel threatened by this posse and, fearing for their daughter’s safety, they set out to the village to find her and bring her home.
When they arrive, they learn that Rekha has left for parts unknown possibly in search of a journalistic lead. Shanbag deftly weaves in Venkat’s family story: land stolen from a maternal uncle who was orphaned as a child; this uncle growing up and becoming politically subversive by joining a Maoist group; the police search for the uncle; and the uncle’s mysterious and indecipherable missives (his penmanship is atrocious). These mysteries seem to have propelled his daughter to potentially seek out this uncle’s story.
The Sakina’s kiss which is the title of the book has nothing to do with a woman named Sakina nor with any romantic entanglements but with the misreading of the uncle’s indecipherable letters which takes a collective to unpack. While some read his lines as being about Sakina, another, who is an excellent decoder of the penmanship, arrives at a more ominous reading about police potentially killing the man. Venkat and his wife find Rekha and compel her to return to the city with them where they find their home burgled in their absence possibly by the thugs who had visited earlier. The narrative ends with little resolution but with Venkat sorting through his things and reflecting on the turn his life has taken.
Shanbag’s novel is about the crisis of masculinity in globalizing India. Middle-class professionals like Venkat chug along in relative comfort but there is a menace that lurks in society that threatens to upend their lives. Their pasts are complicated, petty, and threaten to upset their carefully crafted lives. The father-daughter relationship is fraught as the daughter asserts her idealism and independence and largely ignores the father’s attempts at advising her and managing her life. The husband-wife relationship is mostly transactional, and Venkat finds himself outside looking in at the bond shared by mother and daughter. While this novel may be slender and subtle, its questions about globalized India and the people who live in it are deep and provocative. This novel should be on your reading list.
Nalini Iyer is a Professor of English at Seattle University where she teaches courses in Asian American, Postcolonial, and South Asian Studies. She is the author/editor of several books in literary criticism. She lives in Kirkland. WA.
