A Matter of Time

May 31, 1999
Deshpande has published, in India, four novels, a screenplay and dozens of short stories. Her first book to reach these shores reveals a novelist who cares less for exotic cultural properties than for the intricacies of family relations. When respectable professor Gopal walks out on his wife, Sumi, and their three daughters, she has no recourse but to move back into her family's house in Bangalore. There she reencounters her estranged sister Premi, delves into the scandal behind her parents' marriage (they have not spoken to each other for more than three decades), and then into her grandparents' complex past. With psychological acuity, Deshpande switches between first- and third-person narrators, crosscutting skillfully among passages of fraught conversation, swaths of remembered narrative, and meditation: "the bliss is only for moment," Premi speculates, "It touches us and goes on." As Sumi, Premi, Aru and their peers unravel the problems Deshpande poses, they discover new and clearer ways to think about their own status as mothers or daughters or wives. Analogies from Hindu belief and myth make clear that Deshpande writes for readers inside India first and foremost. But her careful exposition renders literary and historical reference no more a barrier to comprehension than the characters' unfamiliar names. Published in India in 1996, this novel places Deshpande in distinguished international company; readers who enjoy Anita Brookner or Isabel Allende may find distant analogues here. An afterword by Indian feminist editor and publisher Ritu Menon helps American readers grasp Deshpande's aims.