A few thoughts as I say goodbye to Jasoda
I have now lived with Jasoda for over twenty years. Like the standard MCP, I too abandoned her for nearly a decade, and then a German friend of mine, Marianne Wagner, read the first seventy pages and thought it was high time I got back with Jasoda. It took a few years for me to settle down with her again. And now she’s ready to walk out on me and lead an independent life. God bless her.
My Jasoda spends her earlier years in the back of beyond, but as I have learnt time and again, there is no dearth of Jasodas in slums of the major metropolises not just in India but all over the world. Again, she’s not necessarily found in extreme poverty alone but also in middle-class homes and even affluent ones. The husband will make babies with Jasoda, take off, come back and once again live off her. That journey called life ensures that Jasoda almost never has an easy time.
Take any of the great epics, it’s the men like Ulysses, Arjun, Ram, Hector, Achilles who are the heroes. In quotidian life, it’s very often the women who are epic heroines. Jasoda would find it risible if she found out that I thought of her as heroic. She would correct me and tell me it’s just life with zero options. What choice does one have when there are no choices? All she can do is to improvise every minute of her life.
There’s one thing I have never understood. Does life ever teach us humans anything at all? How can one not be bowled over and be astonished with the courage and determination of all the Jasodas in the world? And yet what leaves me dumbfounded is how the same Jasoda will join hands with her son and make life hell for her daughter-in-law in real life. The bahu often feels she has no alternative but to commit suicide. Of course, the saas along with her obedient son will also willingly oblige and bump the bride off by setting her on fire or some such thing.
About the Book
Paar – ‘mirage’ country, where it is often impossible to draw the line between reality and illusion – has been suffering from a decade-long drought. Jasoda is one of the last to leave this ‘arse-end of the world’ with her children and mother-in-law. Since her husband claims he has important work to do for the local prince, Jasoda must make the journey to the city by the sea on her own. Even as she builds a life for herself and her children in the city, Paar seems poised to take off after years of anonymity. Will Jasoda return home with her children? Or stay in the city that’s become home for them?
It’s taken for granted that epic journeys and epics were possible only during the time of the Mahabharata, the Odyssey or the Iliad. Even more to the point, their heroes had to, perforce, be men. The eponymous Jasoda of the novel is about to prove how wrong the assumptions are. Kiran Nagarkar’s trenchant narrative traces the journey of a woman of steely resolve and gumption making her way through an India that is patriarchal, feudal, seldom in the news, and weighed down by dehumanizing poverty.
About the Author
KIRAN NAGARKAR is one of India’s most highly regarded writers. His critically acclaimed novel Cuckold was given the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2001. While Gore Vidal said ‘(Cuckold) is a fascinating book, a sort of fantastic marriage between the Thomas Mann of Royal Highness and the Lady Murasaki’, Khushwant Singh considered ‘Cuckold … as the best by an Indian’. Nagarkar’s other novels include God’s Little Soldier and the Ravan and Eddie trilogy (Ravan and Eddie, The Extras, Rest in Peace). One of the sharpest critics of India’s socio-political scenario, he is also the author of the play Bedtime Story, which had been banned for years, and the screenplay Black Tulip, published as a single volume in February 2015. Nagarkar received the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2012. The Tata Literature Live! and the Chandigarh Literature Festival gave him the Lifetime Achievement Award in 2015 and 2016 respectively. His novels have been translated into German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese as well as Marathi. Nagarkar also writes in Marathi and has penned plays and, in fact, began his career in the language in 1974 with his first novel Saat Sakkam Trechalis, a landmark in Indian literature, which was translated into English as Seven Sixes Are Forty-Three. It has recently been republished as a Harper Perennial.
Acknowledgements
Let me first thank Karthika, who took a look at Jasoda and thought the eponymous lady should go public as soon as possible. But before that happened, Karthika herself had disappeared from HarperCollins. Luckily for me, her colleague, Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri, and the new Publisher, Udayan Mitra, both believed in Jasoda. However, there were still a few bizarre problems.
When you take twenty years to complete a book, chances are you lose all sense of time, and you are not even aware that the timeline within the story has gone so haywire, some of the characters might have become older than Methuselah. Fortunately, Shantanu, Udayan and their colleague Rahul Soni pointed out this peculiar phenomenon. It took me a few days to transform myself into God but I can now assure anyone who is 966 years old that I can, within a day or two, work miracles and make her/him younger by more than nine hundred and odd years. (Please contact my secretary about fees for this miraculous return to youth without Botox or various other cosmetic surgeries.)
A big thank you then to the editing team at HarperCollins.
Celebrating 25 Years of Great Publishing
HarperCollins India celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2017. Twenty-five years of publishing India’s finest writers and some of its most memorable books – those you cannot put down; ones you want to finish reading yet don’t want to end; works you can read over and over again only to fall deeper in love with.
Through the years, we have published writers from the Indian subcontinent, and across the globe, including Aravind Adiga, Kiran Nagarkar, Amitav Ghosh, Jhumpa Lahiri, Manu Joseph, Anuja Chauhan, Upamanyu Chatterjee, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, Shekhar Gupta, M.J. Akbar, Satyajit Ray, Gulzar, Surender Mohan Pathak and Anita Nair, amongst others, with approximately 200 new books every year and an active print and digital catalogue of more than 1000 titles, across ten imprints. Publishing works of various genres including literary fiction, poetry, mind body spirit, commercial fiction, journalism, business, self-help, cinema, biographies – all with attention to quality, of the manuscript and the finished product – it comes as no surprise that we have won every major literary award including the Man Booker Prize, the Sahitya Akademi Award, the DSC Prize, the Hindu Literary Prize, the MAMI Award for Best Writing on Cinema, the National Award for Best Book on Cinema, the Crossword Book Award, and the Publisher of the Year, twice, at Publishing Next in Goa, and more recently, the Publisher of the Year Award 2016 at Tata Literature Live, Mumbai.
We credit our success to the people who make us who we are, and will be celebrating this anniversary with: our authors, retailers, partners, readers and colleagues at HarperCollins India. Over the years, a firm belief in our promise and our passion to deliver only the very best of the printed word has helped us become one of India’s finest in publishing. Every day we endeavour to deliver bigger and better – for you.
Thank you for your continued support and patronage.
Subscribe to Harper Broadcast
Harper Broadcast is an award-winning publisher-hosted news and views platform curated by the editors at HarperCollins India. Watch interviews with celebrated authors, read book reviews and exclusive extracts, unlock plot trailers and discover new book recommendations on www.harperbroadcast.com.
Sign up for Harper Broadcast’s monthly e-newsletter for free and follow us on our social media channels listed below.
Visit this link to subscribe: https://harpercollins.co.in/newsletter/
Follow us on
YouTube Harper Broadcast
Twitter @harperbroadcast
www.harperbroadcast.com
Follow HarperCollins Publishers India on
Twitter @HarperCollinsIN
Instagram @HarperCollinsIN
Facebook @HarperCollinsIN
LinkedIN @HarperCollinsIN
www.harpercollins.co.in
Address
Harper
Collins Publishers India Ltd
A-75, Sector 57, Noida, UP 201301, India
Phone +91-120-4044800
TALK TO US
Join the conversation on Twitter
http://twitter.com/HarperCollinsIN
Like us on Facebook to find and share posts about our books with your friends
http://www.facebook.com/HarperCollinsIndia
Follow our photo stories on Instagram
http://instagram.com/harpercollinsindia/
Get fun pictures, quotes and more about our books on Tumblr
http://www.tumblr.com/blog/harpercollinsindia
First published in India in 2017 by
HarperCollins Publishers India
Copyright © Kiran Nagarkar 2017
P-ISBN: 978-93-5277-100-4
Epub Edition © October 2017 ISBN: 978-93-5277-101-1
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
Kiran Nagarkar asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
This is a work of fiction and all characters and incidents described in this book are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under The Copyright Act, 1957. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Publishers India.
Cover concept: Kiran Nagarkar
Creative director: Prashant Godbole
Artist: Shriram Mandale
Cover image: Shutterstock
Photograph: Sudharak Olwe
www.harpercollins.co.in
HarperCollins Publishers
A-75, Sector 57, Noida, Uttar Pradesh 201301, India
1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF, United Kingdom
2 Bloor Street East, Toronto, Ontario M4W 1A8, Canada
Lvl 13, 201 Elizabeth Street (PO Box A565, NSW, 1235), Sydney
NSW 2000, Australia
195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007, USA
Kiran Nagarkar, Jasoda
Thank you for reading books on BookFrom.Net Share this book with friends