When Memory Speaks
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Manjula Padmanabhan walks the earth but doesn’t quite touch the sky, says JITENDRA PANT

GETTING THERE
By Manjula Padmanabhan
Picador India
Price: Rs 195
There are two types of journeys: One that takes you outside your self and another that serves as an introduction to it. There are two instincts as well: One to be anchored, another to let go; to be nomadic, to be home-bound. These often vie with each other. But there is another skill, faculty or achievement, call it what you will, that lets one walk the earth and touch the sky.

I would humbly suggest that that is where Getting There points to. (Disclaimer: Though the reader may think these are thoughts captured from the vague stratosphere that one arrives at after doing LSD, acid or Tantric rites, the author wishes to absolve himself of these honourable tasks.) Essentially, it is a growing-up tale disguised in the form of questions of identity, self-worth, purpose, in a word, it is a discovery of self. Now, there never has been anything as smashingly interesting as one’s own self and writing about it can be an easy, pleasant exercise. It is when the self ceases to enamour you, when a look in the mirror becomes painful (cut to Dom Moraes meeting Stephen Spender in a hotel room and the elder poet telling him that poetry is like looking at a mirror and after a while he can’t) that the tale rises up from the dung heap of fiction by authors who have fallen in love with themselves.

Though dear Ms Padmanabhan has flattened all characters out of respect to herself, she at least makes no claim to the contrary. ‘‘This book is based loosely on events in the author’s life between 1977 and 1978. Almost none of it is entirely factual but as a whole it is more true than false,’’ it says on the first page. Alas, all this is true. The discovery of self, I mean, and the little adverb ‘‘loosely’’.

Yet, what makes the author trip along on this journey? The arrival of two Dutchmen, Piet and Japp, one rainy afternoon at her rented flat in Bombay. ‘‘Their shadows entered the house before they did,’’ she says, but she did not recognise ‘‘the shape of my own future quickening into substance.’’ Nor did she know that the Dutchmen’s shadows were to colour her life black, white and grey in the typical, without-being-invited way that fellow travellers have.

Indeed, in the beginning, the two merely serve with their heavy accents and bodies as figures of burlesque. But, move over to Holland, via America and Germany, and here the author is in Piet’s room, looking at her suitcase, ‘‘feeling like an intruder in my own life, pawing through possessions which no longer felt recognizably my own’’, debating her own definitions of self. Such reflections give her a tendency to theorise in the novel. It can’t be anything else when Piet, with whom she shares a platonic bed in Holland for some time, is described as a man ‘‘who could (while sleeping) entrust his subconscious self to me.’’

The burden of the self weighs too heavily on the words on occasions of authorial self-questioning. There is no revelation in style to surprise you, just eddies of words whirling around each other like snowflakes. It’s too cold sometimes, the self is. But, it is also so temporary. So, why not a bit of humour?

It is not that Padmanabhan can’t make you laugh; it’s that she doesn’t choose to make you laugh more often. Sad, considering that she has a sharp eye for movement and scale (she was an illustrator) and a talent for uncumbersome description that delights in irony, even if it is painting, say, a self-portrait. ‘‘I believed that, compared to the molten river of lust that other people described at the core of their emotional lives,’’ she writes, ‘‘what I had was a slender thread, a strand of cool but witty desire which I liked to wind around a man like the cord which is wound around a top to make it spin.’’

Thankfully, for once, sexuality doesn’t lie, aloof and exposed, in the heart of an autobiography. In its stead, we have an examination, personal and searching, of individuality, its creed (here, feminism) and its relationships (antagonistic, if dependent) with family and society.

So, where have we gone in Getting There? Nearer, it seems, to an untangling of the self from its descriptions, nearer to saying what it is not, than saying this is it. In the end, the problem of Getting There is solved by watchfully, lightly, staying here.

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