Rakhee Singh, for example, is initially reluctant to leave her home in Minnesota during her summer holidays to visit her ancestral estate in an Indian village with her mother. But as soon as she learns about a garden that is said to have a “Rakshasi” in it, she is irrevocably drawn to the fantasy. Much like Alice chasing the White Rabbit and tumbling into Wonderland, she chases a curiosity and lands up in an enclosed Eden-like garden where she finds an imprisoned girl, Tulasi, instead of a monster. She is fascinated by Tulasi’s unreal, solitary existence — spending all her life in the garden with a white peacock called Puck for company and with the knowledge that Shakespeare wrote only one play, The Midsummer Night’s Dream. So Rakhee decides to find out more about this “imprisoned princess”. Her investigations lead her out of the fairy tale and into a harsh reality.
But even as she discovers a long-buried secret that has the potential to ruin her family, Rakhee never really comes out of the fairy tale. She hides the secret deep inside her, almost as if she wants to preserve it, for years. If that secret were to be let out into the open, dissected, examined and logically inferred from, the image of the “yekshi” jumping into the well would become the suicide of a cousin, and the “Teacher” a maniacal woman who destroyed many lives just to cling on to the ‘family’s honour’. Only after Rakhee is engaged to be married does she feel the need to ‘confess’. “Keeping secrets had become second nature, an inheritance passed down from mother to daughter like an heirloom,” she writes in her confession.
Rakhee’s mother, Chitra, is caught in a different kind of fantasy — that of an unrequited, adolescent romance that culminated in disaster. Her thirst for this idyllic relationship takes away all her reality. But when she gets the chance to be close to her loved one at last, she shies away from the relationship and retreats into a shell. It seems in the end that she prefers the dream to the reality, and, perhaps, memories to the present moment.
Chitra’s elder sister, Sadhana, apparently a hardened and wise woman, is actually the most unreal — and unrealistic — of them all. She not only hides a newborn child behind stone walls to ‘protect’ her family from social stigma, but also brings up this child in a state of ‘purity’, secluded from all earthly influences. She grows attached to the child in an inexplicable way, so much so that when the secret is discovered and the child taken away, Sadhana gradually turns listless and deranged. The biggest lie she lives is the excuse of preserving her family’s reputation which she cooks up in order to keep the child just to herself.
Among all these fervently dreamy women, the only level-headed creatures in the story are perhaps the men. Interestingly, the men are the weakest parts of the plot. This is a story told by a woman and driven by women. In the beginning, it is the woman who is the victim. Yet, in the end it is the woman who is the ‘culprit’, waiting for years to be forgiven and accepted by society. The men are there to love the women, hate them, abandon them, give them shelter, judge them, but never to share their fates.
The characters are mostly stereotypes, although some have a unique edge. The good-bad divide is starkly apparent. Ironically, it is the arch villain, Dev, who is the most interesting character. “D-d-d-do not underestimate the v-v-villain, molay,” he tells Rakhee, “It is only for the s-s-s-sake of the story that he loses in the end. If it were r-r-r-real life, he would get what he wants. The villain always h-h-has the bad reputation, but in t-t-t-truth, he is the most misunderstood c-c-character of all.” This rare moment of clarity gives the reader a different perspective about the interplay of good and bad, real and unreal, in the novel. But the moment is too short. The endless flurry of fantasy and drama drowns it.
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