‘Under the Night Jasmine’: In the isolation of the pandemic, a writer finds his story – and himself

Contained within Manav Kaul’s slim novel of about 200 pages are many stories.

In Under the Night Jasmine, translated from the Hindi by Vaibhav Sharma, narrator-writer Rohit wakes up night after night at 3 am, struggling to write amid the early days of the pandemic. In the story Rohit writes, there is another Rohit who seems to be grappling with being attracted to his teacher – Verma Madam. Narrator-writer Rohit too tells us that he finds himself drawn yet again to a former lover, now married, while also flirting with a new woman. Then there are lizards, a metaphor for intrusive thoughts, that keep appearing.

Kaul’s novel evokes the unreal, unsettling days of the lockdown to ask what happens when we sit still for a moment with our own discomforting thoughts. What truth lies hidden in those thoughts, those things we don’t want to remember, those moments from a life left behind?

Rohit, too, is not facing up to something. Is it hidden in the story Rohit tries to write, or is it in the half-life he leads while not writing?

“I have words…a lot of them actually, and they look great typed on my computer,” he writes. “I even get the aura of the story right, but there’s one lie...

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