Swarnavel Eswaran
Book Review: A Journey Gone Wrong
Author: Gita Viswanath
Pune: Vishwakarma Publications (January 2022)
Gita Viswanath’s recent novel, A Journey Gone Wrong (2022), lives up to the promise of her critically acclaimed first novel, Twice It Happened (2019). Both have significant authorial themes uniting them, like the spanning across generations, gender, women’s agency, the straddling between tradition and modernity, and, most importantly, being sensitive and humane amidst the impossibility of it in contemporary times. If Nagamma, Jyoti, and Chitra become the lens for us to perceptively meditate on the schizoid self in us through Jyoti, who is possessed by Nagamma’s interiority regarding the spectre of patriarchy. It recalls the author’s meditations on the nation and the misogyny of the State in privileging borders over human lives in The ‘Nation’ in War: The Study of Military Literature and Hindi War Cinema (2014).
Here in A Journey Gone Wrong, it is Krishna’s predicament and Rohini’s sensorium that haunt us. Their parallel journeys across generations enable the space for the author to trace the tumultuous history of India through the plague, the wars, the Babri Masjid demolition, and the Bombay riots. Gita Viswanath’s exceptional writing skill etch Gajulupur in our memory with its caste hierarchy and the way traditions are accepted without question or reflection. For instance, the name reflects the profession: Chakalichengi is a washerwoman. At the same time, the humanity of the deeply connected community at Gajulupur is foregrounded through a character like Meshter, who is instrumental in Krishna’s journey to Bangalore. The scene of his departure from the bus stand adorned by a tamarind tree has the entire village bidding him bye. Later his travel to Bombay and Chembur and the marriage with the other Krishna led to the Telugu/Marathi union/syllogisms as well. The author does a great job of borrowing freely from Marathi, adding to the already lyrical Kannada words and marking her language as specific to this novel and the vivacity and travails of its characters. Naturally, the constellation of Krishna, Rohini––the daughter of Krishna & Krishna becomes the constellation of travels and engagement with diverse cultures, including Italian, across time and cultures. Her language, of course, is of the contemporary times of new media and emojis as language segues into WhatsApp texts, informing us of the freedom the author sought through spaces outside academia and exploring her multidimensional creativity across the forms of creative writing, painting, cinema, and poetry in her novels.
Gita Viswanath’s vast experience across borders, particularly in the north and south of India and the East and the West, enables her detailed observations and meticulous weaving of dense narratives surrounding independent characters through a lucid, borderless, singular language. Moreover, the investment in the local dialect and its accurate translation and languid and poetic prose enables the travelling with thoughts at an unhurried pace––a quality that marks her as a significant writer of our times, invested in the complex layers of human relationships, as predicated on the predicament of the complex palimpsests, the protagonists Krishna and Rohini, in these globalized times of the schizoid pull between the old and the new, the joint and the nuclear family, and of global travels juxtaposed with the shrinking of space for solace and healing. Nevertheless, the succession of events revolving around colourful characters makes the novel absorbing and swift, as instanced by Krishna’s movement from Gajulipur to Bangalore to Bombay and later to the US for studies, leaving his family back.
The detailing of diverse cultures, not only of the local, as exemplified by Krishna and Krishna, and the invocation of the cantonment life elsewhere, but the global Italian through the profound narrative of Elena are poignant and foregrounds Gita Viswanath as a writer of our times who explores the meaning of life through the web of relations and its concomitant ephemerality and unchanging nature and the scars and trauma that results. For an earlier generation, a bohemian lifestyle, like the one aspired by the father, would not have involved thinking about ethics or the concomitant responsibility––the element that troubles Rohini. Rohini is modern, and her relationship with Akshay and her friendship with Dimpy is open and not hidden, as in the case of her father’s past and his relationship with Elena, which Rohini accidentally discovers, when she is in the US on a break, as a busy software professional. Rohini also discovers love is not as described in the classics. Nonetheless, she could not come to terms with the trust broken by her father and his slippery deception in an intimate relationship, not having the spiritual courage to remain faithful and face the consequences.
As a protagonist, Rohini’s existential impetus enables her to face life’s vicissitudes even as they unveil the design of patriarchy and tradition as it contains her. While at the same time, quotidian life and its daily rituals simultaneously provide spaces for friendship and dialogue. The spectres from the past recall Gita Viswanath’s debut novel Twice it happened, which also engages with the cultural specificity of multiple generations mainly through language and the depiction of the paranormal regarding the other world and its spectres. Dreams play a significant role as the conduit, and her epistolary mode lends a personal subjective flourish. In contrast, A Journey Gone Wrong is posited in a relatively logical universe where the epistolary is replaced by the energy of the idioms of the new media, including the emojis, particularly in the “texts” exchanged by Rohini and Akshay and their friends. Rohini is heartbroken when her affair with Akshay fails.
Nevertheless, she could not reconcile with her father’s ethically troubling past. In a way, her return troubles him and leads to chaos in the otherwise “well-settled” and happy and upwardly mobile middle-class family. The spectre of the past haunts Rohini, and she wants to hold her father accountable for infidelity and promiscuity. Thus, her investment in responsibility and ethics in consensual sex mirrors the Me Too movement and its spirit.
Gita Viswanath is the author of two novels; Twice it Happened (2019) and A Journey Gone Wrong (2022), a non-fiction book, The ‘Nation’ in War: A Study of Military Literature and Hindi War Cinema (2014), and a children’s book, Chidiya (2016). She has also published poems, short stories, travelogues, and essays in journals and anthologies. In addition, she is the co-founder of an online film club called Talking Films Online.
