Parshati is a bilingual (English-Bengali) novel by Soumyanetra, an academic, poet and short story writer. The novel spread over 29 chapters navigates troubling routes of self-realisation and self-denial that take the readers through the demands of motherhood and the challenges of coming to terms with losing one’s mother. It also explores the exasperating pain and pathos of negotiating the health and wellness industry and the emotionally unsettling relationships one holds dear as they come with a fair share of disillusionment. Paramesh Goswami, author, critic and art connoisseur finds it audaciously confessional, dispensing with questions of customary propriety.

As a bilingual novel, Parshati delves into the possibilities and limits of everyday conversations.  It is also about love, loss and longing.  The novel delicately balances the roles Parshati, named after Draupadi, plays. Precariously poised at the intersection of a past that nudges her into a confessional journey, and a present she is trying to make sense of, Parshati is torn apart by the often conflicting demands of the inner/emotional and outer or social spheres. The novel explores the contested relationship between the private and public realms that women, especially after marriage, generally grapple with. It also unearths their overlaps and their intersections.

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Soumyanetra is deeply aware of our existence scattered across languages. School in English; baby talk in a mother tongue; exclamations of pain (the sound that comes before words when a finger touches a hot pan) in whatever language we heard as young children. A bilingual text, Parshati is steeped in an intimacy, a spontaneity, a completeness that cannot be translated into either of the languages alone. However, the novel does not conspicuously draw attention to its bilingualism. Language or the lack of one is organically woven into the narrative demands. It also recognises the untranslatability of exchanges that the narrator shares with her mother and others, and significantly cannot be conveyed in anything but the mother tongue. Words may not be enough, something Soumyanetra fathoms while unravelling the messy nature of grief and its coordinates. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in her book, “Notes on Grief” says “You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language.” This might deeply resonate with the reader.

As the narrator labours through the dark, disorienting maze of grief she discovers how “grief could physically affect people” (32). People from her past drop in and out of the narrative to remind her of the stronghold of life and its inevitability. The ruminations on love and fidelity are interspersed with richly layered reflections on songs, poems, and authors that cut across the boundaries of time and space: the song “A Thousand Years” by Christina Perri and the poems “Mortal Love” and “A Journey with No Return” by Kamala Das, for instance.

Although the title might have a strong self-oriented focalisation, it is rooted in empathy that informs confessional writing, embedded as it is, in the raw veracity of lived experience. The confluence of voices that crisscross, embody an eclectic melange of perspectives. It is Dr Dashorathi who anchors her emotionally and intellectually (“ultimate succour, ultimate respite from daily chores”) through the epistolary interactions they have. He is not her husband and forces her to rethink societal norms that she with her “middle-class values” cannot forgo. The third-person narrative voice intervenes, to give the narrator as much as the reader a sense of mooring. It is this stream-of-consciousness technique that propels us into a mind inundated with pain and suffering and the futile realisation that the past cannot be undone: “…I couldn’t give any peace to ma…even if I didn’t actively do anything, actively not doing anything maybe is just as worse…just being a passive onlooker to the insults he kept heaping on ma, not only bit and nibbled and ate her spirit away but also mine…” (72).

While sharing the untimely demise of two of her friends Priyodorshini and Chanchalini Parshati wryly states – “…people live, not because they want to, or maybe in small part they want to…but for a large part because others want them to…because they feel loved and wanted and important and respected by near and dear ones…” (75). Despite the deceptive simplicity of these lines, they stand out for the viscerally disturbing poignance they emanate. It is poetry that comes like the healing rains “to bring the much-needed assurance and comfort of peace and politeness” (111). Poetry and prose blend inseparably, like dreams and reality: “In the ramparts of pain/ You hold me like sunshine/ Like light coming through darkness/ Like the fragrance of morrow/…/Like the hope of love” (124).

The text can be read through Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief: Denial, Anger, Depression and Afterward (instead of acceptance). All these stages come and go in turns. With her mother gone, she seeks solace in Dr Dasharathi’s love but is left gravely disappointed, more so in these dark exacting moments of mourning. In the final chapter, Parshati finds Oli her daughter and her work “the means to … to cling on to life” (278). The recounting is seemingly caught in a temporal loop, as the narrator often revisits and dissects the agonising moments before her mother’s death, the very days when she had seemed better, almost wrestling free from what the medical staff had destined, almost nonchalantly, for her; EOL (End of Life).

One wonders if writing about grief brings catharsis, freedom, or maybe letting go of a burden that sits heavy on one’s mind. One wonders if writing it all down is a sustainable way of processing this grief. For the reader it is a reminder that our memories are what we have left, and there’s no amount of remembering that will give us what we seek. In her memoir “Grief is for People” Sloan Crosley writes “Time does not heal all wounds, time does not heal any wounds.” Instead, “time only pushes wounds aside.” However, “life went on” for Parshati as it does for many of us.

The reviewer is assistant professor in the department of English, Diamond Harbour Women’s University

Parshati: A Bilingual (English-Bengali) Novel

Notion Press, 2023

278 pages, Rs 349/-