Sun. , Sep seven, 2008.

Kasey Cleveland

07 September 2008

Her novel That Long Silence brought her the Sahitya Academy Award and she has written children's books and essays, but we've never heard or seen her courting soundbytes or column inches.

Eventually when Moving On was done or roughly done, she came into my mind and I knew this novel would be about her."Devayani wears a morality that would just be called a hair shirt that each middle class, young girl is predicted to fit into, no queries asked, without reference to her very own truth. The writer adds, "I saw Devayani as a young lady of great moral rectitude, yet when love entered her life, it upset all her concepts about herself, about her very own moral stand. I believe that as much as the love affair, this moral struggle inside Devayani was what became a crucial part of the novel. The concept of love in films has always interested me, as also the difference between the way love is portrayed and how it is, and the way what is seen in flicks starts to approximate real life.". She informs the novel is essentially the tale of a young single lady in the fast changing tiny city she has lived in, since she was born. "The changing face of a little city was also something that I needed to talk about,"she is saying and recounts how Devayani tries to come out from the trauma of her mother's death and attempts to etch an independent existence for herself, all the whilst resisting the attempts of her folks to discover a'suitable boy' for her. The novel is principally about this love affair, about Devayani's relationship with her aunt Sindhu, her older sister Savi and Savi's man Shree, with her cousin Kshama, with Rani, a barrister Iqbal and his better half Naseem.". Morality and love, morphing milieus and the osmosis between Devyani's well-defined sector of right and incorrect, and the dangerously seductive arena of Rani, all come together to form a lot of strands of the novel. It is a live thing, the characters so real to me, that I feel as if I am betraying them by talking of them.". That her tenth novel too has been written with as much participation as her 1st one, speaks for her integrity as a writer. Little wonder then when Shashi Deshpande uncovers a story to take note of, people who need to read and re-read it, find her too.

Send Flowers, Cakes, Chocolate, Fruits to Pune.