Sunday book pick: A tale of a resentful housewife in Shashi Deshpande’s novel ‘That Long Silence’

“I had often found family life unendurable. Worse than anything else had been the boredom of the unchanging pattern, the unending monotony. I remember now how often I had sighed for a catastrophe, a disaster, no, not a personal one, but anything to shake us out of our dull grooves.”

Jaya, in Shashi Deshpande’s 1988 novel That Long Silence, is a rare Indian housewife – she hates the dullness of “family life” and the utter boredom of domestic chores. Being needed by her family does not make her proud; in fact, she resents being seen as just the wife and the mother, forever at the beck and call of her moody husband and children.

The novel begins with a “catastrophe”. It is indicated that Jaya’s husband, Mohan, a public works engineer, is hiding from work. It is humiliating for a respectable family such as theirs, so they temporarily shift to their Dadar flat from their Churchgate house. Their teenage children, Rati and Rahul, show the usual boorishness of their age. Jaya despises having Mohan in the flat all day, especially in a sullen mood. The exact nature of Mohan’s wrongdoing is unknown but he insistently reminds Jaya that he did whatever he did for the family. The reader...

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