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Indian Writings in Literature

Notes Javed's words make him realize that his smug liberality is only a cover for complicity, an evasion
of the sense of guilt. Indeed his failure to speak the truth to his mother can be seen as pointing to
a deeper block: the inability to squarely confront the truth in its genesis. Until now he had been
pacifying his troubled conscience by merely virtuously responding to the urge to protect and help
Javed and Bobby. He had not really come to terms with his conscience in which the memories of
injustice done to a happy Muslim family lie buried: the shop he has inherited from his father was
actually snatched from the rightful ownership of Daksha's friend Zarine's father through vile
stratagem soon after the Partition. Daksha never came to know of this; she only thought that
Zarine's father, after his shop was destroyed in an accidental fire, had expected some help from
her father-in-law, which had been refused. And she had rationalized the withdrawal and hostile
silence of Zarine's family as an instance of resentment and arrogance. The memories of her father's
alleged lynching by a Muslim mob in Hussainabad during the violence of Partition had reinforced
the rationalization.
Deprived of the luxury of indulging her taste for Noorjahan's songs by listening to Zarine's
collection of gramophone records at her house, she feels deeply hurt. Little does she realize that
her deprivation is the consequence of her innocent taste crossing the path of her father-in-law's
and husband's greed to posses the shop that Zarine's father owns. And those men, in turn, do not
seem to comprehend either what they are doing: they hide, probably even from themselves, their
real economic motives behind a screen of hatred of the other community. They do not understand
that no rationalization can transform acts of vandalism and theft into acts of divine justice. The
sins of the fathers are finally visited upon the son as Ramnik carries the burden of guilt and suffers
quietly for years before Javed redeems him through painful self-knowledge. Redeemed, he has at
last the courage to free also his old mother of her own burden of hatred and resentment. Looking
back, one can now better understand Ramnik's hostility towards his mother for keeping back the
complete truth and pretending not to know everything. He had transferred his own repression of
truth to her and had been evading a confrontation with his own guilt by holding her guilty. Freed,
when he announces the truth to her, he does it without any trace of hostility and without expecting
her to be in possession of the complete truth. Rather, the few words he speaks to her are laced with
earnest consolation ("You have to live with this shame only for a few years now").
The subterranean overflow between the personal and the collective strains the relationship between
Aruna and Smita and between Smita and Bobby also. Smita challenges her mother's emotional
investment in the security of religious identity and asks her to see the arrival of the two boys as an
opportunity to leave behind a life lived in pettiness and false security. She refuses to be stifled any
longer, but does it with tactful politeness. At the same time, she tells her father that she did not
share her real feelings with him before because that would have pushed her mother into greater
isolation. Smita has the strength and clarity of mind to see collective religious identities for what
they are and she can also articulate her urge to be free from their oppressive hold. Listening to her,
Bobby realizes he has been less well equipped in this regard. The finest uncomplication of the
relationship takes place, thus, in the case of Smita and Bobby only. Smita is very clear, of course
after having given it sufficient thought, that she does not wish to carry on her relationship with
Bobby and that her decision to do so follows personal reasons. It is, hence, a freely made choice:
I am sure that if we wanted to, we could have made it happen, despite all odds. It is wonderful to
know that the choice is yours to make.
Through Smita's free and happy choice, Dattani avoids the temptation of vulgar secularism and
affirms the subjective agency of rational humanist individualism with full force. Subsequently
however, in Bobby's transgressive final act the limitations of even this kind of agency are exceeded
in so far as the act grounds agency in the far more fertile soil of phenomenology of relationships.
In picking up the idol of Krishna and placing it on his palm, Bobby is responding decisively yet
viscerally to the ringing of the bell of prayer. The sound of the bell has left Javed stiff: he is battling

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