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One reads Anuradha Roy’s books to travel — from life to life, through the overlaps of myth and history, across the warring landscapes of possibilities and the steep price they exact. If ever there was an argument that print is a static medium, the affective power of Roy’s Sleeping on Jupiter , which won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature in 2016, would effortlessly bulldoze it.
Roy’s earlier novels, An Atlas of Impossible Longing and The Folded Earth , received critical acclaim worldwide, heralding a voice of unique depth and sensitivity. However, her latest offering, All the Lives We Never Lived , bears the shifty-eyed anxieties of the habitually successful. The novel is immodestly grand in its scope, traversing geographies and events of historical significance that in the hands of a lesser writer might have been reduced to a semi-intelligent backdrop. But Roy, as much a scholar as she is a writer, is able to make the context as alive as the characters, so the ambitious scale does not seem forced, but merely extravagant.
Set in the early 19th century in the fictional town called Muntazir, which in Urdu means ‘to wait for with anxious impatience’, the name of the location reveals the cornerstone of the novel — a futile grappling with absence. The story begins with the flight of Gayatri Rozario from Muntazir, leaving behind her nine-year-old son, Myshkin, and her husband, Nek. She is, however, in illustrious company: with the German artist Walter Spies and the English dance critic Beryl de Zoete, both of whom in real life are renowned for their pioneering contributions to art. Gayatri’s departure — forewarned in an incident where a magician made her briefly disappear, making her son scream in terror — upends Myshkin’s childhood idyll. Even as the rest of the Rozario household attempts to move on, the plot frequently switches to the past, showing how events add up inexorably to the point of her exit.
Seventeen-year-old Gayatri, educated and well-travelled, traits that are discouraged in unmarried Bengali women in the 1920s, loses her loving and indulgent father to illness after a long journey to Bali. After meeting Rabindranath Tagore as well as Walter Spies over the course of the voyage, she resolves that Santiniketan’s art school would be “her only possible life”. But her father’s abrupt death leads her family to hastily arrange her marriage to her father’s former student, Nek Chand Rozario, who does not share her love for art and dance, actively disparaging it instead. So we are left with Gayatri, who is, rather predictably, “young, beautiful, gifted, tortured, stifled”.
Ten years later, unapologetic yet guilt-stricken, she undertakes the journey to Bali once more, this time in the tumultuous milieu of World War II and the Indian independence movement, in search of a life unlike hers. Her pursuit of colour and self-reliance is visualised beautifully in the book’s cover design. However, the part of her life in Bali, revealed to us only through her letters to a friend is, for some reason, rushed and cursory.
Myshkin agonises over his mother’s absence, like the protagonist in Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, who loses his [also beautiful and stifled] mother at a tender age. Since the narrative initially moves through a nine-year-old’s point of view, we share the intensity of what he witnesses without the strained reasoning of an adult. The narrative voice then shifts to that of Myshkin as an elderly man, who receives a package containing his mother’s letters from Bali. As a horticulturist who is “good at the business of waiting”, he is able to regard his mother’s actions with the kindness he couldn’t muster as a child. In the end, he ventures to make the same voyage as her.
All the Lives We Never LivedAnuradha RoyHachette IndiaFictionRs 599
In addition to Myshkin, the other voice that jostles for space in the plot is that of Amrita, the Bengali author Maitreyi Devi’s protagonist in the pathbreaking novel, It Does Not Die . The parallels between Amrita and Gayatri, through themes of loss, yearning and restlessness, are evident, but the diversion takes up more space than it should, making the narrative arc unwieldy.
Moreover, as far as figures of inspiration are concerned, Spies and Zoete alternate between being tiresome and annoying, ignorant of their privilege that allows them to be intrepid explorers of the East, cheerfully spouting wisdoms like, “My country is the world.” Yet for all that, Roy’s depiction of women, and their quiet, million mutinies are restrained and respectful. Defiance takes many forms, and the defiant suffer its consequences, more sharply so when one is a woman in pre-Independent India.
Despite being hampered by its scale, All the Lives We Never Lived is a tender, exquisitely crafted novel, the lucidity of the prose allowing the reader to inhabit its perpetually evolving atmospheres. Rich in descriptive detail and sensitive to each character’s social location, it is a story that does not have to try hard to make sense; the familiarity of its restlessness speaks to our own unfinished journeys, which is the price of our pragmatism.
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