Crowfall : A Magic Carpet to Life – johny mL
I am not able to forget Sindhutai Joshi. Her relationship
with Dr. Bhaskar remains an enigma to me. Were there any
undertones of erotic desires in that relationship? Or was it
a gesture of her rebellion? She waited for seven years for her
absconding husband who had bequeathed all his property and
wealth in her name and she endlessly waited for her children
Ashesh, an artist and Anima, a cultured widow to visit her
at least once in a while. ‘Crowfall’ written by the eminent
writer and journalist, Shanta Gokhale, is not the story of
Sindhutai alone. It is the story of a lot of people whom we
know, very closely, I should add. ‘Tya Varshi’ (In that Year)
is now ‘Crowfall’. Originally written in Marathi, Gokhale
has translated this pivotal novel herself. At the outset itself
I would say, with this one novel, Gokhale reaches the galaxy
of our eminent writers like Asha Poorna Devi, Mahashweta
Devi, Kamala Das and so on. And again, I reiterate the fact
that the best novels in the world (and in India too) are written
in local languages.
You may be wonder why I’m writing about this book (I don’t
call it a review because a review cannot do any justice to such
a wonderful novel) and my answer is this: This is about us, the
artists and art workers. Like many of our cultural writers who
turn themselves into novelists at some point of time in their
creative lives, Shanta Gokhale has an insider’s view on the art
scene as she has been a cultural journalist for many decades.
But an insider’s view can produce novels that loom around
somewhere between poetic utterance and caricaturing. But
Crowfall is a grand poetic utterance. We have a few novels on
our art scene published in the last few years like ‘Artist, Undone’
by Sanjay Kumar, ‘Faking it’ by Amrita Chowdhury and so on.
With due respect to these writers, I should say, Shanta Gokhale
stands several steps above in literary excellence.
We have ‘Lust for Life’ by Irving Stone and ‘Raja Ravi
Varma’ by Ranjit Desai. While they remain centered around
the iconic characters, Crowfall makes contemporary artists
and people around them icons. But the greatest icons in this
novel are the mother-daughter duo, Sindhutai and Anima.
Crowfall is like snowfall. They see crows falling one after the
other from the sky as someone does target practice on them.
The crowfall is like an ill omen, which Aba’s tempura carries
with it at a later stage in the novel. And the novel starts in a
riot ridden Mumbai.
On that fateful day Anima loses Siddharth, her chosen
man, to rioters. He is butchered by the fundamentalists.
Anima recovers from her shock slowly, but decides to remain
single for the rest of her life. But there are no foretold
conclusions in life. The novel could have one, had the writer
wanted Anima to find a mate in a lonely Parsi artist, Ferose
Banatwala, whose works are attacked by the fundamentalists
in the presence of Anima; two accidents that she is destined
to witness. She remains a witness; a witness to the life of
the anarchic, woman-eating Haridas, Sharada, the singer,
Shekhar, her husband, Janaki Patil, the young journalist who