Gangadhar Gadgil, a man who made places, people, and eras timeless 

There is a story titled The Two in the collection, A Faceless Evening and Other Stories, by Gangadhar Gadgil, translated from Marathi to English by Keerti Ramachandra. In this story, the narrator – a young man – was travelling in a “large and stately car” from Madras to the temple town of Mahabalipuam. The car was owned by the Mudaliars, an elderly couple, who were travelling with the narrator. The narrator was seated, along with the Mudaliars, on the back seat of the car; while the Mudaliars’ young daughter, Padma, a student at a medical college, was seated on the front seat of the car which was being driven by the Mudaliars’ “silver-haired” driver. The driver was driving the car like how “a moderate party politician would run a country”, something Padma did not like at all so she kept on “fidgeting and exhorted” the driver to go faster. Padma’s mother, sitting uncomfortably in the backseat with “her arms clasped around her folded knees” as if “protecting a jewellery box from possible theft” and looking at the “whole world with suspicion”, clearly did not approve of her daughter’s behaviour. Add to it the tension of having a young man in their midst. The party lands in Mahabalipuram, in the midst of the rock-cut temples with exquisite sculptures. As Padma coquettishly interacts with the narrator, watches an erotic sculpture and “impishly” asks her father, “Papa, what is this,” the narrator too feels his “breath caught in [his] chest” and wishes to “[shout] out to the whole world”. This journey of social and erotic tensions ends with Padma, with the “speechless” and “embarrassed” narrator staring at her, kissing the stone statue of a woman and running her lips over the back of her narrator.

The sexual tension in this story is admirable. The difference in statuses of the characters is well brought out. The disapproval of Padma’s mother can be felt. However, the one thing which struck me most about this story was that the translator chose to use the terms “Shri and Smt Mudaliar” instead of “Mr and Mrs Mudaliar”. The translator could retain the original words and she must have done so because the terms Shri and Shrimati somehow express that rootedness more clearly. They tell which place and time the characters come from. Now that we are reading these stories in English translation perhaps decades after when they must have been originally published, this sense of time and place is important. Ramachandra’s translation of Gadgil’s works gives that sense. She does not translate words like “vahini”, meaning the wife of one’s elder brother, and, of course, there are exclamations like “issha” and “aiya” which give that Marathi flavour even in translation.

Ramachandra is an accomplished translator who works in four languages: Marathi, Kannada, Hindi, and English. Her lucid translation of bureaucrat-turned-author Vishwas Patil’s Marathi novel, Zadzadati, A Dirge for the Dammed, made it an engrossing and enriching read. Zadzadati, with its rural setting and colloquial language and the theme of villagers being displaced because of a dam, was not an easy novel to translate. Gadgil’s Bincheryachi Sandhyakaal ani Anya Katha too, in the form of A Faceless Evening and Other Stories in Ramachandra’s translation, becomes as enriching.

In the words of author Usha Tambe, who has a blurb on the dust jacket of this book, Gadgil was a true Mumbaikar both as a person and as a writer.

Gadgil’s characters are the urban, middle class people, and the settings of his stories range from houses of urban professionals to joint families living in an urban centre. Though the places where the stories are set have not been explicitly mentioned, it can be assumed that that place must be Mumbai or its suburbs.

Apart from The Two, there is another story with an erotic context. “Thirst”, the opening story of the collection, has an ageing film star travelling in a train with her filmmaker husband who had, ten years ago, “picked her up as a toy and looked after her, but now she was a shackle trailing after him.” The star is seeking attention from her husband who is not interested in her. Apart from this, she wants her husband to return some money that he owes her. This is her thirst.

Another theme in Thirst is abuse. It is clear to see that the filmmaker husband abuses his film star wife both physically and emotionally. Abuse in urban, middle class setting has been dealt with in another story, Gopal Padhye: The Man. Gopal Padhye, the protagonist, is one despicable man. His wife Asha is always wary that she would be judged by him. “[Gopal Padhye] was eating sheera with utmost concentration. Asha was standing against one end of the table, expectantly. She had held her breath when he put the first spoonful in his mouth, fear of what fault he would find with it today, choking her. Because if he did find something amiss, he would make a taunting comment with every spoonful.”

Gopal Padhye was a serial sexual offender who knowingly bumped into women on the streets and was even slapped by them. Yet, there was a feeling of power inside him, something that made him believe that he could conquer any woman. And he did hold a lot of power over his wife by criticising her and making her feel inferior.

One aspect of this collection that struck me was the description of the houses or the places where the characters live. All fourteen stories in this collection are set in an urban milieu – as Tambe mentions in her blurb – however, the dwelling spaces of the characters have not been described in detail, though it is understood from the plots that the characters belong to the urban middle class.

In Bandu and his Umbrella, the characters have enough money to afford to lose and buy umbrellas as and when they please. The setting of “Multiplication” could be the suburbs or maybe a bigger village closer to the city, but the mention of a character sitting on an armchair and smoking a cheroot presents an image of relative affluence. In Vishwakarma and Sadanand, there are two houses close to one another; while in Our Teacher Leaves School, the mention of stairs gives a hint of the characters living in a bigger house or an apartment block.

What the characters do adds to the picture of the houses they might be living in. In Our Teacher Leaves School, Aai – the mother of the narrator, a little, school-going girl – uses a thermometer, implying that she might be a medical doctor or a nurse. Aai’s profession gives a hint of affluence and, hence, her family could be living in an apartment building.

Just like the dwellings, the time in which the stories have been set too is not explicit, but it can be guessed. In Bandu and his Umbrella, there is a mention of Victorias, the horse-drawn carriage that used to ply regularly in Mumbai in the 1950s and the 1960s. In Thirst, the film star expects to get at least Rs 40,000 from her husband, so that story must be set in a time when Rs 40,000 was a huge amount. Gadgil was born in 1923 and died in 2008, so the stories in this collection were written perhaps in the 1960s.

Gangadhar Gadgil’s stories open up not just a region and its people, but also a time. Keerti Ramachandra’s translation is an important effort to know that place, people, and time.