Presence in absence has long been a theme in literature, wherein a narrative built on the persistence of memory shows how the past shapes the present and influences the future. This theme essentially explores the idea that absence is never truly void — it carries echoes of those who are gone, their influence lingering in the lives and choices of others. The Rising Asia Literary Circle, a book club anchored by Julie Banerjee Mehta and Harish Mehta, met at the ICCR on November 18 to discuss exactly this theme spread across four novels that explore the presence in absence of the novelists’ mothers in their storytelling. Bringing together authors Saikat Majumdar, Radhika Oberoi, Manish Gaekwad, and Cecile Oumhani in the context of how their mothers influenced their works, the discussion delved into how their mothers’ lives, memories, and even their absence, literally or otherwise, have influenced the writers’ creative processes.
Societal scrutiny
The session, aptly labelled ‘Four Authors in Search of their Mothers’ (after the play Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello) had each writer reminisce on the indelible imprints their mothers have left on their lives. Each author had a different story, a different life experience and personal relationship to share with the club, making the discussion intellectually stimulating as well as psychologically and emotionally diverse.
Majumdar, whose mother was a theatre actress in ’70s and ’80s Calcutta, spoke to the club about how growing up in an environment so close to the stage led to him having an adverse relationship with it. He spoke of theatre being, to him, a visceral, destructive, almost brutal art form that he, as a child, had trouble distinguishing real life from. Watching his mother enact a death sequence in Bankimchandra’s Kopalkundala as a child later brought on severe emotional complexities when she really did pass away, when he was a PhD student in his 20s.
On a related note, Majumdar’s book The Firebird is set against the backdrop of Indian theatre in north Calcutta in the mid to late 1980s. Ori grows up in a once-affluent family now struggling to maintain its social standing in a conservative north Calcutta neighbourhood. The novel primarily focuses on Ori’s relationship with his mother, Garima, a stage actress whose profession becomes a source of moral suspicion within the family and the community. This pervasive judgment and societal scrutiny deeply affect young Ori, shaping his complex and ultimately destructive relationship with the art form of theatre. Bearing close similarities with Majumdar’s own life, the novel is a deeply personal exploration of the fraught interplay between familial bonds, societal judgment, and the consuming nature of art.
During the session, Majumdar talked about how he couldn’t have written his novel if his mother had been alive at the time of his writing it due to the destructive nature of the novel itself. “The fear that watching her die in a play left me with was later pointed out to me to possibly contain the seeds of a novel. Much of the life I have lived since has been painful, and much of it has been dramatic so it wasn’t easy to write or talk about it, but the book stands as a strange platform of expression to me because it depicts a boy’s adverse relationship with theatre — so much like my own life — and yet it is fiction,” he shared with the group.
A story of resilience
Manish Gaekwad’s novel The Last Courtesan is, on the other hand, his mother’s memoir, recounted to him verbally and later penned down. Recorded over a period of six months, the book tells the story of his mother’s life in her own words, charting her journey from childhood, when she was sold and trained as tawaif as a nine-year-old child bride and including that point in time when the 1993 Bow Bazar blast in Calcutta left the kothas in the area on the verge of decline. Gaekwad pieces together a coherent whole from fragments of his mother’s life in his mother’s own words, not so much as a resurrection of her than asking her to tell her story her very own way.
“It would probably have just survived as an oral story if I hadn’t chosen to pay attention to it when I was old enough, when I finally started to realise the significance of her life,” Manish said at the session, reflecting on how his mother’s story shaped his understanding of the resilience she had lived her life with. “I remember being at the kotha one day as a child, sitting in one corner of the house with my books while my mother was recording herself in another corner. And she had tried to explain to me that one day I would sit up and take notice of her story. I brushed her words off back then because I was too young to understand what she meant, but years later, they came back to me when I wrote about her on the Internet and that story blew up and I got a book deal on it. That is what I have tried to do through this book, tell my mother’s story, keeping it as truthful and honest as possible. It is entirely her journey; I’m just the typist.”
Complexities of family
Radhika Oberoi’s book Of Mothers and Other Perishables is, on a related yet different note, a story about loss, memory, and the ties that bind. A dead woman narrates the story of her life, her voice filling the storeroom she loved — a space filled with silk saris, baby clothes, photographs, and other remnants of her past. Through her memories, we see the narrator’s life as lived in 1970s and ’80s Delhi, from the joy of romance and motherhood to the illness that ended it all too soon. On the other hand, the narrator’s daughter, nicknamed The Wailer, tells a parallel story: of late nights in an advertising firm, strained workplace dynamics, and the political unrest gripping Delhi during communal protests. The Wailer and her younger sister, Toon, navigate their shared past while grappling with a tumultuous present. Through these intertwined narratives, Oberoi’s book is a vivid portrait of love, betrayal, and the complexities of family and identity.
Oberoi herself lost her mother to cancer when she was 15. How did the voice of the dead mother come through so powerfully in the narrative, she is asked, to which she answers, “My mother was diagnosed with cancer when I was 13 or 14 years old. I attempted several years later to chronicle her life, and not just to chronicle but also to commemorate it. It was important to me not only to commemorate her life but also the childhood she had gifted me with. She gave me an almost idyllic childhood and then she passed away on a glorious spring day — she picked an absurdly beautiful day in which to die. So I think bits and pieces of all of that have crept into my novel, but the dismembered voice in the novel isn’t actually my mother. Memory has a jagged quality to it which lends a certain flavour and texture to whatever you attempt to write. While the inspiration for this novel was, of course, my mother, the woman in the novel isn’t my mother because whenever I tried to recollect her she came back in fragments, which makes for an interesting character when you’re trying to fictionalise somebody you love.”
Writing is important
Unlike the rest of the books that were talked about at the session, Anglo-French author Cecile Oumhani’s Like Birds in the Sky is a collection of nine short stories dedicated to her mother, who, as Julie puts it, is the “moving spirit” of the anthology. The stories explore themes of memory, loss, and the enduring ties between generations, showcasing the tenderness and resilience of familial bonds. The stories are bound together by a pervading sense of the presence in absence of Oumhani’s mother, consolidated in the form of letters that her family wrote to each other from across continents following the harsh days of the Second World War.
Speaking at the session, Cecile said, “My mom was English-speaking and her family migrated to Canada after World War II, and she herself was born in India, where she spent the first seven years of her life. My father was French and I grew up in France. After she met my father, my mother was the only member of her family who lived in France while all the others were in Canada. I grew up feeling her nostalgia because she was very discreet about it. She didn’t speak too much about missing her parents or siblings back in Canada, but I could feel it. And at the time the only link we had with all these other family members were letters. I think, in a way, writing is so important in my life because of that, and I’m grateful to my mother because it is because of those letters that I always give special importance to words. As a writer I always feel the need to bring seeds of reality together, to try to pick them out of darkness, and hope that those seeds later become more than short stories. That is what I have tried with the book.”
The session wrapped up with an engaging question-and-answer round, in which members of the club put forward their queries to the authors and discussed their interpretations of the books as well as personal experiences that shaped their understanding of their stories.