§1. I finished Vivek Shanbagh's Sakina's Kiss a little while ago, sitting in a lounge in Cairo airport that I discovered only with great effort because the signs in this airport serve only ornamental purposes: three promised to direct me to a lounge; one took me instead to an unguarded 'VIP' area in a lower floor with access to halls that I should not have as a transit passenger; another to a little room on an upper floor with a few empty chairs and tables watched over by a sleepy potbellied man and barricaded off from arrival passageways by a small heap of chairs; and finally one to where I am now, an actual lounge. Each time I write the very word 'lounge' I am disgusted, and yet you would have to drag me out of here and into general seating. Draw from this the inferences you will about my politics.
§2. Sakina's Kiss is told from the perspective of Venkataramana, a mild-mannered, middle-aged migrant to Bangalore from the outer reaches of Malnad, rural Karnataka. Venkat, as the city has christened him, has provincial sympathies and liberal aspirations; like other men of his generation, he stumbled into a world increasingly oriented towards the West and discovered in the ambient cultural environment a mixed assortment of norms and ideals that had the air of virtue, or at least of refinement and civilisation. And like most other men of his generation, when these ideals were called upon, specifically for Venkat by his educated, tending-toward-feminism wife, Vijaya, and his bright, politically radical, and domestically rebellious daughter, Rekha, he retreats into a cosy conservatism from where the actions and words of people like his wife and daughter and the irritating men who encourage them seem at times naive, and at other times like efforts to frustrate his dutiful, selfless leadership of the family.
§2.1. I hope this doesn't come across as overly critical of the father—it is somewhat yes, but also the point is to illustrate the mechanisms by which the lurch into tradition occurs.
§3. The title of the book comes from a misreading of the terribly handwritten last letter sent by Venkat's mother's younger brother, Ramana (whose name, I'm noticing now, is precisely the part of Venkat's that was chopped off): getting killed is read as sakina's kisses, for a moment disguised of its gravity. Ramana was himself a radical, a garrulous young man with an exacting sense of justice and a tireless will to carry it out at every scale of social and political life. We first hear of Ramana half-way through the book, and from then on only indirectly.
§4. Ramana and the two other men in the story who espouse in actuality the liberal virtues that Venkat could only pretend towards are tragic characters. Their fates are irrelevance, ignominy, and various degrees of oppression by the state, society, and their benefactors, among whom are Venkat's father and his brother. They also only exist at the fringes of the story. This, it seems to me, is a recurring feature of Indian literature with political content. Maybe because this is the form in which we, the reading class, are most familiar with radical politics: as something that is taken up by that distant oddball relative, that mysterious figure toward whom we feel some envy, because they have lived as we might once have hoped to, and some annoyance, because who are they to upturn the order of things—aren't we the ones left shouldering the burden they have abandoned?—and of whom we remain largely quiet when we tell our children the stories we hope will one day furnish their lives.
§4.1. Do I have the courage to stay the retreat into a cosy conservatism?