Shashi Deshpande

Shashi Deshpande was born in Dharwad, India. Her father, Shriranga, was a well-known playwright and Sanskrit scholar. At the age of fifteen she moved to Bombay and graduated in Economics. She then moved to Bangalore and earned a degree in Law.

In the early years of her marriage she mainly looked after her two young sons. She also took a course in journalism and worked on a magazine for some time. Her writing career began seriously in 1970, with short stories, and several collections of them have been published.

She has also written four children’s books and four earlier novels: The Dark Holds No Terrors, If I Die Today, Come Up and Be Dead and Roots and Shadows. Roots and Shadows won a prize for the best Indian novel of 1982-83.

She lives in Bangalore with her husband, who is a pathologist. When this edition was printed, she had recently completed her MA in English literature.

That Long Silence : Summary and Analysis

Character Diagram:

PART 1: Summary

1. The Opening: Jaya Starts to Write

Jaya, the narrator, says that to become something great (a saint, painter or writer) you must be hard and ruthless, even towards the people who love you.
She is a writer, and writing has always been easy for her. Now she is struggling. She compares this to childbirth, where all she remembers is fear of losing control, and says she may be resisting.
Her earlier stories were about innocent girls who married “the right men.” This time she is writing about herself and her husband, Mohan.
She says you can never be the heroine of your own story. Looking at yourself honestly is like looking in ten different mirrors: you see ten different faces.
She recalls Kamat, who once said, “Your face is like your name.” She wonders if she should tell this story from a distance, as if watching herself from outside.
A magazine once asked for her bio-data. After removing everything unimportant, she was left with: I was born. My father died when I was fifteen. I got married to Mohan. I have two children and I did not let a third live.

2. Childhood Memory and the “Happy Family” Dream

As a child, Jaya secretly loved film songs from Radio Ceylon. Her father loved classical music and called them “disgusting mush.” He told her, “What poor taste you have, Jaya.” The shame stayed with her.
Later, Mohan would say, “No need to hurry, we’ll only miss the ads.” Jaya secretly loved the ads: happy mothers, smiling children, cosy homes. To her they were fairy tales of “happily ever after.”
Ten days ago, she and Mohan came to their old flat in Dadar. That evening she imagined the four of them (herself, Mohan and the two children) as a glossy advertisement. But when she tried to add words, all she could hear was their real dinner talk, full of hostility.
She admits she often found family life unbearable. The worst part was the boredom of the same routine every day. She even hoped for a disaster to break the monotony, since wars, earthquakes and scandals only seemed to happen to other people.
Now the disaster has come: “like a prize packet, neatly tied with coloured ribbons, a gift from my husband.”

3. Mohan’s Story of the Women in Delhi

Earlier, Mohan had told her about women and children sitting on the ground in Delhi with placards reading “WE WANT JUSTICE.” They were army wives whose husbands had been secretly arrested for spying.
Mohan was deeply shaken, which was unusual for him. He kept repeating the word “terrible” and said, “Imagine, Jaya, people like us in that situation!”
He also said the husbands were irresponsible for putting their families in such a position.
Jaya now sees this as a warning that Mohan, who felt so safe, could fall as well. His own words come back to judge him, since he too has now put his family in danger.

4. The Marriage: Coins and Bullocks

At their wedding game, whoever found the coin first would “rule” the home. Jaya deliberately moved slowly so Mohan would win, yet she found the coin first. So neither of them has been a “worm”; their relationship has been a delicate balance.
On the day they arrived at the Dadar flat, Jaya suddenly saw them as “a pair of bullocks yoked together.”
She describes the scene as if watching strangers. They climb dirty stairs with garbage and paan stains. Mohan complains, “Why doesn’t someone clean up this place?” but shrinks when she looks at him. A woman, Nayana, comes down carrying a garbage bin, and Jaya chats with her. Nayana is pregnant again, and her silver anklets are missing. Mohan notices none of this.
At the door Mohan holds out his hand for the keys. Jaya ignores him, takes out the keys herself and opens the door. His outstretched hand starts to look like a beggar’s.
Jaya admits that this was not a sudden act. It was part of a long, quiet “guerrilla warfare” she had waged in the marriage. Every family has such small battles (Rahul refusing his bath, Rati hiding her phone calls, her father eating raw onion in front of his disapproving mother).
Mohan sees himself as a dutiful son, husband and father. He believes he is not like other men and that there is no hidden fighting in a family.

5. Mohan’s Confession

Mohan told her that he had taken bribes and favours in contracts and tenders. An inquiry is coming. His boss, Agarwal, is also involved, and Mohan blames him. Mohan says, “I did it for you and the children.”
This is when Jaya’s first real emotion appeared: anger. Until then she had been confused.
Jaya suggested a death pact, the four of them walking into the sea, like Nair, a man who had killed himself and his family. She compared it to lemmings. Mohan rejected the idea angrily: “Can you imagine the scandal?” Jaya even imagined one of Nair’s daughters swimming back to shore, which showed her that this escape was not possible.
Now she laughs at her own idea. A family that cannot agree on a meal or a movie could never die together in harmony.
Mohan has never wished to die. Jaya is not so sure that is true for anyone.
Mohan’s plan is to “disappear” for a while until the matter cools down. They will stay in the Dadar flat while their children are away. He assumed she would come, and so did she.
Jaya rejects the idea that she is like Sita, Savitri or Draupadi, the mythical devoted wives. The truth is simpler: two yoked bullocks find it easier to walk in the same direction.

6. The Dadar Flat and the Ghosts

When they enter, Jaya feels ghosts of her past: her mother, her brother Dada, her uncle Makarandmama, and little Rahul. The flat smells of mildew.
Mohan, who loves neatness, orders, “We have to clean up.” Jaya’s own family homes were messy, whereas Mohan’s childhood home was poor and crowded, so he cherishes order.
While Mohan bathes, Jaya hears the old “clang, clang, clang” of the toilet chain. This brings back the greatest ghost of all: her old self, a proud housewife who scrubbed toilets and took pride in cleanliness.
She remembers cruelly scolding Kusum for a dirty toilet, then showing off how to pull the chain. Everyone learnt the trick except Kusum.

7. Names: Jaya and Suhasini

Her real name is Jaya, meaning “victory,” chosen by her father on 3 September 1939, the day World War II began. He was always sure of the Allies’ victory.
Mohan renamed her Suhasini after marriage. “Suhasini” is the soft, smiling, motherly woman who copes with everything. Nobody really called her that.
She remembers telling Kamat this, and he laughed. Kamat touched her face easily and casually. She says he is “elbowing himself” into this story, though he doesn’t belong in it. He said her eyes were “hesitant, wavering, uncertain.”
Jaya compares Suhasini to the sparrow in the crow and sparrow story. In Ai’s version, the clever sparrow makes the foolish crow wait in the rain with excuses, then invites him in and tells him to warm himself on the hot chapati pan, where he is burnt to death. Jaya finds this story ugly. She decided not to tell it to Rahul, and thinks it teaches girls to be selfish, home-focused “sparrows.” She now knows that safety is never possible.

8. The First Morning

Jaya wakes to the sound of a local train, which she first mistakes for the sea. She feels at ease in the familiar room.
Mohan wakes up panicking and doesn’t know where he is. They have twelve days before the children return (night of the 15th; school reopens on the 17th). They avoid talking about the future.

9. The Story of Kusum

Mohan sees a calendar with a Lakshmi picture stained with haldi and kumkum. Jaya says Kusum did that.
Kusum was Vanitamami’s niece, a poor, unattractive and unhappy girl. She later became mentally ill. Mohan, Ai, Dada and Ravi all said, “Why get involved? Think of the children.” This was the family’s “sacred cow,” the reason for everything. Jaya, for once, fought Mohan and kept Kusum in the Dadar flat for treatment.
Kusum kept pleading, “I must go home to my children.” Jaya answered harshly, “They don’t need you.” She sent word to Kusum’s brother Dilip, who took her away. Kusum then threw herself into a dry well and died.
Ai wrote that it was “a good thing” because Kusum was “of no use to anyone.” Jaya was shocked by this cruelty.
Dilip, Kusum’s brother, is the opposite: a brash boy who became a rich and powerful union leader. His mother Venu always kept a baby on her shins and barely noticed her other children.
Jaya confesses she felt relief when Kusum went mad, because it proved she was sane. “I was not-Kusum.” Now that Kusum is dead, Jaya asks, who is she?

10. Emptiness and Freedom

With no routine, files or phone, Mohan feels lost. Jaya feels that with no housework to do, her “career as a wife” is in danger. They ask themselves: “What do we do with ourselves?” She compares it to sitting in a stationary train and thinking you are moving when it is the other train that has left.
Yet she also feels free from cleaning, from polishing the mahogany elephants in their Churchgate home, and from the things she and Mohan collected. She admits it was really Mohan who knew what kind of life he wanted. She never had her own wants, unlike Maitreyee in the Upanishads, who rejected her husband’s wealth because it couldn’t give immortality.
She feels a “sense of homecoming” in the bare flat. It reminds her of her grandmother ajji’s austere room, with its hard chairs full of nails. Ajji once said, “I feel sorry for your husband, Jaya, for everything a question, for everything a retort.”

11. Nayana and Waiting

Nayana says she is sure this baby will be a boy, because “a girl suffers because of men all her life.” She had pawned her anklets to treat her sick daughter. She saves a bun for her girls.
Jaya begins to feel that Mohan’s constant calling of “Jaya, Jaya” is a burden. She thinks of the hydrocephalic child of Ramukaka and Shantakaki, who clung to his mother, and of ajji calling out for her son Vasu (Jaya’s father), who left her to make his own home. Both are pictures of clinging and being clung to.
Women’s lives, she says, are full of waiting: waiting for marriage, for husbands, for children. She was also always waiting fearfully for a disaster. Now that it has come, she feels relieved.
Mohan, however, denies the disaster, saying everything will blow over, and changes his mind about going back. When he asks her opinion, she thinks of Sonia telling Raskolnikov to confess and kneel down, and of Mohan answering, “Kneel down yourself.” She laughs hysterically at the thought of both of them kissing the garbage-filled pavements of Bombay.
She also recalls Vanitamami’s wedding advice, “A husband is like a sheltering tree,” which she ignored, just as the cat ignored Vanitamami’s “mau, mau.” She notes that even a creeper in Saptagiri died from too much care.

12. Mohan’s Childhood and His Parents

Mohan talks endlessly about his childhood: walking to school in rain, unpaid fees, hand-me-down clothes, and beating his brother Vasant for stealing his crackers. He often says “my father,” not “Anna.”
He told her how his father kicked him for fidgeting on a mat. Another night, his father flung his plate at the wall because there was no fresh chutney. His mother silently cleaned up, sent the boy for chillies and cooked again. Her eyes were red from smoke, and her voice stayed steady.
Mohan said, “She was tough. Women in those days were tough.” Jaya saw despair and silence, not toughness.

13. Vimala’s Story

Vimala, Mohan’s sister (now dead), once told Jaya a secret. When their mother was pregnant again after losing several babies, she secretly went to a midwife and tried to abort the child. Vimala remembers her mother hitting her own face with floury hands, screaming “I can’t, I can’t.” A week later the mother died. The family never spoke of it.
Jaya has kept this secret from Mohan: “the conspiracy of women.”
Vimala herself later died of an ovarian tumour that had spread to the lungs. She had been silent about her bleeding and pain, and her in-laws dismissed it as a fuss. Mohan asked, “Why didn’t she tell us?” but she died, “her silence intact.”

Characters

Character	Description
Jaya (Suhasini)	The narrator and a writer. She is observant, ironic and honest with herself, but passive and unsure of what she wants. She has lived as a dutiful wife but is now beginning to question everything.
Mohan	Her husband. He is practical, orderly and status-conscious, with a hidden fear of poverty. He is dutiful, and he is also corrupt, self-justifying and now frightened and lost.
Kusum	Jaya’s cousin-like relative, weak and mentally ill. She is a mirror of defeat for Jaya and ends in suicide.
Dilip	Kusum’s brother, a rude boy turned powerful man. He is a symbol of social success by any means.
Nayana	The cheerful, poor maid and mother. She represents women’s endurance and the desire for a son.
Ai (Jaya’s mother)	Careless and harsh. She shows how women can become hardened and unsympathetic.
Appa (Vasu)	Jaya’s father. He is loving, idealistic and Gandhian, and he gave Jaya her name and confidence.
Ajji	Her grandmother, an austere widow who is strict and demanding.
Vanitamami	Her aunt, who gives the traditional advice about husbands.
Vimala and Mohan’s mother	Women who die in silence, symbols of suffering unspoken.
Kamat	Jaya’s friend, a free, artistic man whose casual touch and observations awaken her.
Agarwal	Mohan’s boss, who got him into corruption.

Themes

Silence of women. The title theme. Mohan’s mother, Vimala, Kusum and Jaya herself all suffer quietly. Silence is both their weapon and their prison.
Marriage as a yoke. Marriage is a partnership, but also a trap of mutual dependence, power struggles and unspoken resentment.
Identity and name. Jaya (victory) versus Suhasini (the ideal wife). Who is the real self?
Illusion of the “happy family.” The advertisement dream hides boredom, bickering and fear.
Role of women. Women are expected to serve, wait, nurture and endure. Jaya questions this, though she has also followed it.
Fear and disaster. Jaya expects tragedy constantly; when it comes, she feels strange relief.
Class, status and corruption. Mohan’s fear of poverty drives him to take bribes. Middle-class “security” is fragile.
Self-knowledge and writing. Jaya struggles to be honest in telling her own story.
Motherhood and son preference. Seen through Nayana, Venu, Mohan’s mother and Jaya’s own abortion.
Memory and the past. The “ghosts” of the past define the present.

Symbols

Pair of bullocks yoked together: the marriage, with two people bound and walking the same way for convenience.
The keys and Mohan’s outstretched hand: the shift of power in the marriage, with Jaya refusing authority.
Ghosts: past selves and memories, especially the “houseproud Suhasini.”
The crow and sparrow story: the ideal woman as safe but selfish and cruel. It also warns against passive “good wife” behaviour.
Mirror: self-image and the impossibility of seeing the truth about oneself.
Advertisements: false ideals of happy families.
Toilet chain (clang, clang, clang): the old self; also Kusum’s helplessness.
Mahogany elephants: material show and status, and the burden of possessions.
Stationary train: the illusion of progress; they are stuck in the same place.
Lemmings and the death pact: the temptation of escape through death.
Sheltering tree: traditional belief that a husband protects a wife.
Nayana’s anklets: a woman’s pride, pawned away in poverty.
The well and floury face: suffering and self-destruction of women.
The placards “WE WANT JUSTICE”: the sudden fall of respectable people, and a hint at Jaya’s own demand for justice.

Overall Overview

Part 1 sets up the whole novel. Jaya and Mohan, a seemingly stable middle-class couple, are forced to hide in a small Dadar flat because Mohan’s corruption has been exposed. This crisis removes their routines and forces them to face each other. Through Jaya’s memories (her childhood, Kusum, Mohan’s family, Vimala), the novel shows the long silences that shape women’s lives. Jaya starts to realise that she has played the role of Suhasini, the perfect wife, while losing her own voice, and she is beginning to wonder who she really is. The tone is ironic, reflective and honest, and the story moves between present and past.

Critical Analysis

1. Narrative technique. Shashi Deshpande uses a first-person, stream-of-consciousness style. Past and present blend as Jaya’s mind moves from one memory to another. This reflects how a woman’s inner life is fragmented. Jaya also distances herself (“I can see those two now, as one sees other people”), which shows her split between experience and awareness.

2. Feminist reading. The novel is not an angry attack on men. It is quiet and complex. Jaya is not a victim only: she admits she helped create the situation by staying silent, letting Mohan decide, and being cruel to Kusum. Deshpande shows women as both oppressed and complicit. Jaya’s “conspiracy of women” (keeping Vimala’s secret) shows solidarity, but also how silence is passed down generations.

3. Irony. Mohan said the army husbands were “irresponsible,” then he did the same. Jaya wished for disaster, and then it came. She called herself the “sparrow” but now is the one left out in the rain. These ironies show how life disproves our certainties.

4. Language and imagery. The images are everyday and domestic: chapati pans, floury hands, toilet chains, garbage. This gives the novel its realism and shows that a woman’s struggles lie in ordinary spaces. The Indian mythological references (Sita, Savitri, Draupadi, Maitreyee) are used to question the ideal of the perfect Indian woman.

5. Characterisation. Mohan is not a villain; he is shown with sympathy, with his poverty and fear. Jaya is not a heroine; she is flawed, sometimes cruel, and honest about it. This moral ambiguity is one of the novel’s strengths.

6. Critique. Some critics may find the novel slow or too inward, as little “happens” in the plot. Others note that it focuses on middle-class, upper-caste experience. Still, the novel’s strength is its psychological depth and honesty.

7. Significance. The title, That Long Silence, comes from the idea that women have been silent for ages. Part 1 introduces that silence through many women (Mohan’s mother, Vimala, Kusum, Nayana, Jaya) and sets up Jaya’s journey towards finding her own voice.

Part 2: Summary and Analysis

Summary

1. The Flat and Its Ghost: Makarandmama

Jaya says the "amiable ghost" of her uncle Makarandmama has come back to the Dadar flat. For the family it was always "Makarandmama's place."
The flat first belonged to Makarandmama, then Ai (his sister) gave it to Dada. Dada has now secretly gifted it to Jaya. Nobody knows this: not Mohan, not Ai, not even Dada's wife Geeta. Dada says, "I'd much rather you have it than Ravi."
Geeta has forgotten her middle-class roots since going abroad. She looks down on this part of Bombay and is hostile to Jaya. Jaya wonders how Geeta would feel about the gift, and whether she would still despise the money from selling the flat.
Vanitamami claimed that Makarandmama had meant the flat for her. In Ai's version, Vanitamami said, "I was the only one who was good to the poor boy." Ai answers that he never even spoke to her.
Makarandmama defied his family and became an actor, a "disgraceful" thing. He only got small, bit roles in films. His mother (other-ajji) never spoke of him except with anger. Only Appa helped him, secretly. Everyone thought he died a pauper, but he had bought the flat very cheap from a Muslim actor who was rushing to Pakistan before Partition.
After his death the family "beatified" him as a tragic genius. Ai now says, "I had faith in him," and Jaya notes that Ai believes her own lies.
Makarandmama had hung large black-framed photographs of himself everywhere. Mohan took them down, scraped off the pictures Dada's friends had stuck on the walls, and painted three coats. But ghostly rectangles appear again through the paint, as if Makarandmama is quietly coming back.
Jaya thinks Vanitamami's choice of weak Kusum shows that both were born losers. Both had to live under strict other-ajji. Yet they got their way: Kusum became part of the family. Jaya calls this "the terrible tenacity of the weak."

2. The Illusion That Nothing Has Changed

For a moment Jaya feels they never left the flat. But things change: Nilima bangs the Kelkars' door instead of Satish, Nayana carries the garbage instead of her mother-in-law Sona, and Jeeja has lost the signs of a married woman (kumkum, green bangles, black beads) because her husband is dead.
Rahul and Rati are away on a trip with the family friends Rupa and Ashok. It was Rupa's idea. Jaya and Rupa pretend to be close friends, but they are really strangers who "skate over the thin ice" of daily life. When Jaya mentioned that Rupa's grandmother was the famous singer Ragini Sirsikar, Rupa was cold.
Mohan admires Ashok, who comes from a proud, old Indian Civil Service family, and wanted Rahul to join them. Rahul said it was "boring."
Rahul has been drifting. He once loved comics, then cricket, then music. Now his room is bare and silent. After his bad report card Mohan shouted about his own hard childhood ("I begged, I borrowed"). Mohan arranged tuitions, and Rahul said bitterly, "If you want to buy marks for me, go ahead."
Jaya remembers little Rahul asking after a street fight, "Mummy, what are we? Are we Red Flag or Shiv Sena?" She had snapped, "We are nothing." Now she wonders if Rahul took her at her word and made himself nothing.
Mohan insists the children must be told nothing. Jaya compares them to village women who cover their faces when surprised, thinking nobody can recognise them. It doesn't work: even Nayana asks, "Where are the children, behnji?"

3. Jeeja, Tara and Manda

Jeeja, the maid, is silent and proud of being a "pure professional." Her husband was a mill worker who lost his job in a strike and became a drunkard. When she could not give him children he married again. Jeeja says, "With whom shall I be angry?"
Her husband's second wife died, and Jeeja raised her stepson Rajaram. He now drinks and beats his wife Tara. Tara and her three children depend on Jeeja. Jeeja scolds Tara: "He keeps the kumkum on your forehead. What is a woman without that?"
Jeeja started Tara on a batatawada (potato fritter) business. Little Manda helps with everything, but a mill strike has left no customers.
Jaya admits that her own small freedom depends on women like Jeeja.
Seeing Manda, Jaya recalls reading that baby girls were once killed at birth, and wonders if that swift end was kinder than years of suffering.

4. The Silent Procession and the Noise of Bombay

Jaya remembers the shock of Bombay's grey ugliness after Saptagiri, then the "magic" of its street life.
From the balcony she watches silent mill workers march past, guarded by policemen. The slogan "TOTAL REVOLUTION" is painted on walls. For the first time she is not a comfortable spectator. She feels that "something was breaking up, a design or a pattern I was familiar with."
Mohan watches too. Once he had told her to shut the doors whenever she saw crowds. They do not speak of what they saw.
That night they lie at the edges of the bed. Jaya remembers her first night in Bombay, when Dada explained that the tramping sound was just mill workers.
Outside, a man beats a woman and shouts, "Talk! Open your mouth!" She does not answer, only moans "mother, mother, mother." A neighbour shouts at them to go away.
Mohan says he wanted to strangle the man: "They enrage me, these irresponsible, callous men." Jaya feels he is thinking of his own father. He grips her hand and asks, "I have never been that, have I? Irresponsible?" She says, "Of course not."
He then complains about the marchers: they get what they ask for, "What about people like us?"

5. Lohanagar and the Road to Bombay

Mohan remembers his first job at the Lohanagar steel plant: hope, hard work, freedom from asking for money. He asks, "What went wrong, Jaya?"
Jaya thinks of the hopeful days of "Hindi-Chini bhai bhai" and the war that followed, but she knows Mohan is thinking only of himself.
She says it was the strike and the inquiry (he and Swaminathan got into trouble). Mohan says no, he had decided to leave much earlier. Jaya feels cheated.
The turning point was his father asking for extra money. Mohan cried, "It's not fair!" He had only moved from having no money for fees to having no money for a gas connection, or for his brother's clothes and sister's fees.
Jaya recalls her second pregnancy, when she bled and went to hospital in a shabby sari. A young doctor spoke to her as if she were poor, until she answered in English and the Chief Medical Officer addressed her as "Mrs Kulkarni." She told Mohan, hoping he'd laugh. Instead he was furious and told her to buy good saris and a housecoat "like the M.D.'s daughter."
Soon after, Mohan said he would try for a non-technical "Purchases" post in Bombay. He got it. Jaya never asked how. Like Gandhari, who blindfolded herself for her blind husband, she "bandaged her eyes." They moved up: a fridge, a gas connection, good schools, first-class travel, and money for his family.

6. Nilima, Mukta and the Death of Kamat

Nilima, the neighbour Mukta's teenage daughter, barges in. She was born after her father Arun died (he fell out of a train). She is dark and sharp-eyed and proud of being called a "crow" in a family of "fair swans." She laughs at her grandmother Mai and hates her periods.
Jaya remembers trying the contraceptive pill. Her body "simulated pregnancy," and she later realised she could have had thrombosis or cancer. She has never told Nilima. Rati, in contrast, reached womanhood calmly: "Oh, I know everything."
Nilima asks, "Why are you here?" She says Mai wondered why Jaya came back "now that that man is dead." The "upstairs uncle" was Kamat. Jaya realises the neighbours have known all along, like the women who cover their faces.
Kamat's son sold his flat, and a girl named Usha now lives there. That morning Jaya climbed the familiar stairs and said "wrong house." The emptiness was like the morning she remembered that Appa was dead. Nilima says dead people are "finished," but Jaya's grief remains.
Mukta always holds something back. Jaya imagines her as a still dancer who is waiting for the song to end. Mukta fasts constantly and is already a widow, which Jaya finds sad and pointless. It reminds her of Vanitamami's fasts and pujas, perhaps a way to "flaunt" her married status to widowed Ai.
Nilima treats Jaya's writing with awe, which annoys Jaya.

7. The Diaries and the Many Selves

Jaya has abandoned her fortnightly "Seeta" column. She is alone with old diaries, but finds only "Mohan's wife, Rahul's and Rati's mother. Not myself."
She says there is no single self waiting to be found. There are many, "each self attached like a Siamese twin to a self of another person." She learned from Kamalakaki that a baby girl had died between her and Dada.
The diaries record prices, servants' absences and insurance dates. She jokingly calls them "The Diaries of a Sane Housewife." The cries ("I can't cope") and the question "Is this all?" are missing. The main question was "What shall I make for dinner?"
She recalls Ai scolding her for fuss about food, though Ai once acted too grand to eat at poor Kusum's family home, where the children swooped on the leftovers.
She remembers the years of scarcity (queues for rice, sugar and American wheat, and starving people arriving in Bombay).

8. The Day at Juhu Beach

A diary line, "Went to Juhu beach in the evening," hides a painful day. Starving children silently watched Rahul and Rati eating ice cream. Rahul panicked and flung away the rest of his cone. One child grabbed it, and the others kept staring at Rati, who ate slowly.
A hand reached into the car. Jaya rolled up the window to keep it out. Rahul screamed, "Don't, Mummy, don't do that!" She stopped, and the child let go.
Mohan scolded Rahul for screaming "like a hysterical girl" and smiled to show they were a "normal happy family." They then went to a movie. Jaya later read that the relief-work road was never finished and many workers were blinded by flying stone chips. She still hears Rahul's cry.

9. Role Reversal and Family Burdens

Back from collecting mail in Churchgate, Jaya finds Mohan complaining, "I've been waiting for over an hour." She feels he is speaking her lines. The roles they played so carefully are slipping.
Mohan searches the letters for something that is not there, which shows he is anxious for news.
Jaya recalls how in Lohanagar a crowd once surrounded their car, and she was not scared but strangely excited. She wonders when she became the "nervous, incompetent" woman Mohan believes her to be.
She worries about Rahul. She named him after the Buddha's son. She fears that her love for Rahul has always been mixed with pity, while Rati seems "armed against unhappiness."
A letter from Mohan's brother Vasant asks for money for their father's death anniversary. Mohan grumbles that everyone takes him for granted (Sudha wants help with her husband's transfer; Prema's son wants college admission). Jaya thinks, "You encouraged them."
Mohan once cried, "Why won't he die?" about his father, then explained it away as sympathy. Jaya also senses that he loves Vasant's daughter Revati more than his own son. Revati once begged her father not to ask Mohan for money. Vasant comforted her, and Mohan watched with envy. Jaya thinks parents' hostility towards children is common: a son's growth pushes the father towards old age. Rati's spite against Revati is really anger at her father.

10. Women's Work, Anger and Mohan's Mother

Clearing the table, Jaya recalls ajji's house, where women did all the cooking and cleaning. Her cousin Sujata asked, "Why can't the boys do it?" and everyone laughed.
Early in her marriage she asked Mohan to cook, saying, "After all, your mother was a cook." Mohan was furious and denied it. This was their first big quarrel. Jaya raged back, and he fell into days of silence. She realised she had power over him: her family had always laughed at her tantrums, but Mohan was crushed. He thought an angry woman was "unwomanly."
Jaya learned to control her anger and copied the women in Mohan's family (Prema, Vimala, Sudha), who knew exactly what a wife and sister must do. When Mohan had a missing button, she did not understand she was expected to sew it.
She says her two grandmothers had huge power over their families, ruining their children's ambitions: Appa could not join Gandhi's ashram, and Chandumama became a dull small-town doctor with shabby affairs.
Jaya told Kamat she wagged her tail like a dog when praised. He snapped back that women who "look after others" enjoy making others dependent. Jaya thinks, "Kamat's ghost isn't in Usha's house. It's here, in mine."

11. Ravi's Call and a Night of Love

Jaya's younger brother Ravi has phoned and wants to meet near Dadar T.T. Mohan hides his worry, afraid to be alone. Jaya has "no illusions" about Ravi.
Mohan praises her slim figure. Their lovemaking is silent and predictable, and she can "time it to the second."

12. The Dream and Crossword House

In a dream, Mohan walks ahead and Jaya is left behind. A girl helps her into a house, and she is paralysed. Mohan returns and says a taxi is waiting near the Portuguese Church, but she knows they will miss it, "it is all my fault."
She realises the dream house is Crossword House in Saptagiri, which Mohan had pointed out as the place where "it all began."
Mohan's story: a rich old man paid his school fees (six rupees a week, with a sermon). At a house-warming Mohan was made to eat in a dirty passage with other poor boys. Then three fashionable women arrived, speaking fluent English and smelling of perfume. They showed him a different world.
Mohan told Jaya that the first time he met her, she sounded like that girl, and he decided to marry her. Jaya thanks Appa, who sent all his children to an English convent school.
Vasant remembers that their mother cooked at other people's homes, but Mohan always refused the food she brought. He denies she was a cook.

13. How Jaya Came to Marry Mohan

Dada described Mohan: engineer at Lohanagar, hard-working, no vices, "wants an educated, cultured wife." Jaya hates the word "cultured" but Dada says "you won't notice these things."
Jaya later saw that Dada wanted her off his hands so he could follow his own plans. Ai opposed the match out of dislike for the Kakas and Mohan's poor home, and even said colour doesn't matter, though she often complained that Jaya was dark. The argument made Jaya decide: she would marry Mohan, because the decision would be hers. Ai took revenge by refusing to let her marry from ajji's house.
Marriage felt strange at first, but intimacy came suddenly. They never talked about sex. Only "Did I hurt you?" and "No."
Jaya followed women's magazines (cream, hair brushing) and cut her hair "like Mehra's wife" when Mohan asked. Early on she lived in constant fear that he would die. Time, not reasoning, took that agony away.

14. Mohan's Cry and the Last Question

Tonight Mohan let out a soft cry of despair. Jaya, who found long ago that sex confirms aloneness, feels "the remote pity of one who had been through it all." He did not ask, "Have I hurt you?" She had always wondered what would happen if she said yes, but she never could, because the habit of being a wife is hard to break.
Mohan then suggests she take a job with a magazine, in case he loses his. Earlier he refused to let her teach. He says, "Thank God you have your column, your 'Seeta', your stories."
Jaya wants to tell him she has abandoned them all, but says nothing, because "it was so much simpler to say nothing."

Characters

Character	Description
Jaya	Narrator and writer. Honest, observant and ironic, but still passive. She has begun to see her many selves and the silences in her life.
Mohan	Her husband. Proud, orderly and frightened, he is shaken by the loss of his job and status. He admires wealth and class, and he is hurt by anything that threatens his image as a dutiful man.
Rahul	Their teenage son. Silent, cynical and sensitive; he reacts to pressure by withdrawing. Jaya feels that he is vulnerable.
Rati	Their daughter. Confident and sharp; she is jealous of Revati.
Dada (Dinu)	Jaya's elder brother. Charming and clever; he secretly gifts her the flat.
Ai	Jaya's mother. Controlling and self-deceiving, she rewrites facts to suit her.
Makarandmama	Ai's brother, a failed actor, now a "ghost" in the flat.
Vanitamami and Kusum	Weak women who survive through quiet persistence.
Jeeja	A strong, silent maid who endures hardship without anger.
Tara and Manda	Jeeja's daughter-in-law and granddaughter, showing how poverty passes on.
Nilima	Teenage neighbour, rebellious and observant. She tells Jaya the neighbours know about Kamat.
Mukta	Nilima's widowed mother, silent and restrained.
Kamat	Jaya's dead friend, who challenged her to take herself seriously.
Vasant, Revati, Prema, Sudha	Mohan's family, who rely on his help.
Rupa and Ashok	Wealthy family friends whom Mohan admires.
Geeta and Ravi	Dada's wife, who dislikes Jaya, and Jaya's younger brother.

Themes

Silence and speech. Jaya says nothing to Mohan about her abandoned writing, Mukta and Jeeja hold back, and the beaten woman at night won't answer. Silence is both defence and loss.
Search for the self. Jaya finds only a "sane housewife" in her diaries and says there is no single self, only many linked to other people.
Roles in marriage. Both Jaya and Mohan play assigned roles, such as the dutiful husband and the womanly wife. When these roles slip, they are confused.
Power and anger. Jaya's anger once shattered Mohan, so she suppressed it. Women's power lies in dependence, which Kamat calls her real motive.
Class, poverty and guilt. The Juhu beach children, Jeeja's family, the mill workers and Mohan's childhood show the gap between rich and poor, and the middle class's wish to look away.
Parents and children. Mohan's hostility to Rahul, his love for Revati, Ai's favouring of Dada, and the old women's control over their children all show how love and power are mixed.
Family myths and hypocrisy. Ai praises Makarandmama after death and denies her own past words. Mohan denies his mother was a cook.
Memory and ghosts. Makarandmama, Kamat and her old self all remain in the flat.
Marriage and sexuality. Their lovemaking is silent and mechanical, revealing deep loneliness.
Writing and self-respect. Kamat urged her to be professional. She has given up Seeta and cannot say so.

Symbols

Photographs and ghostly rectangles: the past cannot be wiped away.
Women covering their faces: the false belief that hiding will protect you.
The silent procession and "TOTAL REVOLUTION": the ordinary world's anger, and Jaya's loss of safe distance.
The diaries: a record of a sane but empty life.
Siamese twin selves: selves joined to others.
The Juhu ice cream and the car window: middle-class comfort shutting out hunger.
Rahul's cry "Don't, Mummy": the conscience Jaya failed to follow.
Crows: Nilima's pride, sharpness and difference.
Mukta the still dancer: emotions held in.
Kumkum, bangles, black beads: the symbols of wifehood that Jeeja has lost.
The dream (train, taxi, house): fear of being left behind and blamed.
Crossword House: the origin of Mohan's social ambition.
The haircut: a woman changing herself to please a husband.
Mohan's cry: the hidden despair behind his confidence.

Diagram: From Poverty to the Dadar Flat

Overall Overview

Part 2 shows that Jaya and Mohan's trouble began long before the inquiry. Stuck in the Dadar flat, Jaya looks back at her marriage, her family and her own life, and slowly sees that she has been playing a role. Mohan's fear of poverty, which began in his hungry childhood and was sharpened by Crossword House, pushed him to "get ahead" at any cost. Jaya went along with him. She chose not to ask how he got his Bombay job, "bandaged her eyes," and learned to hide her anger and her own wishes.

The present story is quiet: silent days, a procession, a neighbour's gossip, a letter from Vasant, a night of loveless sex, and a late-night question about a job. But under this, Jaya's memories open out into a wide picture. There is class (the starving children at Juhu, Jeeja's life), family myths (Ai's lies about Makarandmama), cruelty to women (the beaten woman at night, Kusum's death) and the loneliness of marriage. The part ends with Jaya saying nothing about having given up her writing. Her silence continues, which is exactly what the novel's title warns about.

Critical Analysis

1. Narrative technique. Deshpande uses a first-person voice that drifts between present and past. A small object (a diary line, a smell, a shout in the street) triggers a long memory. Jaya also watches herself from outside, as when she says "I had been like those women Appa had talked about." She mixes dream, diary and flashback. The dream of the lost taxi shows her fear of being left behind, and the diaries show how a life can be recorded without its true feelings.

2. The unreliable self. Jaya says there is no one "intact and whole" self. She is Jaya, Suhasini, Mohan's wife, Rahul's mother, "not-Kusum." Her diaries are neat and sane, but they leave out her cries. This tells us that what we record, and what we tell, is never the whole truth. It also explains why she struggles to write honestly about herself in Part 1.

3. Irony and role reversal. Mohan calls men who beat or neglect their families "irresponsible, callous," yet he has put his own family at risk. He condemns the marchers but depends on "favours" himself. At the door he speaks Jaya's lines ("I've been waiting for over an hour"), which shows that these marriage roles are scripts that can slip. Jaya, who once felt superior to Vanitamami, also learns that she has repeated the same pattern of silence.

4. Women, power and complicity. The novel does not paint women as only victims. Jaya admits that her anger once crushed Mohan, so she had real power over him. Kamat's cruel remark that women who "look after others" enjoy making them dependent forces her to look at her own motives. She also had no wish to know how Mohan got his job: "I bandaged my eyes tightly." This shows how the comfort of the middle-class wife depends on not asking questions.

5. Class and conscience. The Juhu beach scene is the moral centre of the part. Rahul's cry, "Don't, Mummy, don't do that!", shows a child's conscience that the adults have lost. Jeeja, Tara, Manda and Nayana show that Jaya's small freedom rests on poorer women's work. The slogans ("TOTAL REVOLUTION"), the mill strike and the scarcity years place the family in a larger social crisis, and show how thin the "security" of Mohan's class is.

6. Parents and children. Almost every family in the part repeats a hurt: Mohan's father kicked him, Mohan is cold to Rahul, Ai favours Dada, the grandmothers ruin their children's plans, and Rati's jealousy towards Revati is really about her father. Jaya's idea that parental hostility is "deeply ingrained" is bold, and it makes the novel more honest than a simple family story.

7. Marriage and sexuality. Sex is shown as silent, mechanical and lonely. The repeated "Did I hurt you?" and "No" show a couple unable to speak honestly. Jaya's insight that sex "affirms your aloneness" is one of the strongest passages. It also links to the title: they are physically close but verbally silent.

8. Possible criticisms. Some readers may find the part slow, since much of it is memory and reflection with little action. The world is also largely upper-caste and middle-class, and poorer women such as Jeeja are seen through Jaya's eyes, not given their own voice. Still, Jaya often admits her own blind spots, which makes the novel more truthful.

9. Significance. Part 2 turns the personal crisis of Part 1 into a study of how silence is learned, passed on and finally broken. By the last page, Jaya cannot yet speak, but the reader understands why.

Part 3: Summary and Analysis

Summary

1. Meeting Ravi

Jaya meets her younger brother Ravi at a restaurant near Dadar. Ravi is the best-looking of the three children: he has Appa's height and sharp features and Ai's fair skin. He calls her "Jayatai" but seems to mock the role of an elder sister.
She pretends she has come to shop for vegetables. Ravi has always made her feel dishonest, even when she tells the truth. As a child he told clever, planned lies, and Ai always believed him and scolded Jaya and Dada. Jaya remembers a fight over a train window seat, and one happy memory of Ravi saying something cheeky in an Ambegaon restaurant while everyone smiled. She feels like crying when she thinks of that child.
Ravi orders tea, a tomato omelette and puri-bhaji. He has just returned from Ambegaon.

2. News from Ambegaon

Vanitamami is unwell with a "female complaint." Chandumama fears it may be cancer, and the pockmarked doctor wants her to be operated on. Vanitamami refuses. Ravi sniggers that she is "holding on to her uterus hoping even now she'll get a kid." Jaya is furious. She thinks of the irony that Vanitamami's womb, which never gave life, may now carry death.
Ravi says Ai and Chandumama complain that Jaya has not visited. Ai's complaint is: "it's as if we are nothing to her any more." Jaya reacts with anger. She remembers that Chandumama paid for her college and hostel after Appa's death, and that she has hated this debt ever since. She says she should not have to be abandoned like Kusum to stay with them.
Ravi loves carrying tales between Ai and Vanitamami and enjoys the fights he starts. Since other-ajji died, Vanitamami has become aggressive, and Ai's twenty years of control in her brother's home is being questioned. Ai is now looking for a place to retreat to, and her three children are all wondering, "Why does it have to be me?" Jaya feels the hint falls on her, because Dada and Ravi have both escaped.
Dada has settled in the United States and will not return. He once wrote that his greatest fear was dying far from everyone, like Appa. His charming smile is wearing thin, and Geeta keeps him and the children away from the family. Jaya thinks Dada is not "simple" at all. He has always avoided real involvement, kept Ai away after Appa's death and also kept Jaya at arm's length, so she turned to Mohan.
Ai now clings to Jaya and is possessive, though when Jaya needed her love she gave it to her sons. Dada called Ai's fussing over the boys "smarming."
Other news: the driver has left and the car is rusting. Joshibua (Chandumama's old compounder) has a son, Ganpat, who now owns a pharmacy. Ai's blood pressure is unstable, and Jaya fears she may end like other-ajji, paralysed in bed for fifteen years.
Ravi asks Jaya to arrange a second opinion for Vanitamami at Tata Hospital through Medha (Jaanu's wife) and to put them up in Bombay. Jaya agrees. He says, "They need you."

3. Ravi's Request and a Dangerous Hint

Ravi's wife Asha has gone back to her father again, and her father has threatened never to send her back. Ravi wants Jaya to talk to Asha and threatens to "chuck her." Jaya thinks Ravi is the one who drifts "on the edge of dishonesty," with a job that is always "purely temporary" and a life built on "contacts."
Jaya blurts out that she and Mohan are staying in Dadar (she gives an excuse about the servant being away for Ganapati and Mohan writing a report). Ravi smiles in the cruel way he did when he read her diary aloud.
Ravi says a man named Mahesh Gadkari from the Legal Department asked him if Mohan was in trouble. He offers help through Dilip, who is now a legislator who can go straight to the Chief Minister. Jaya rejects this sharply: "We don't need Dilip." Fear touches her for the first time.

4. The Pearls

Jaya remembers that Ai's mother (other-ajji) kept her jewels in a locked cupboard with the keys round her neck, and Ai hoped Jaya would get them if she was nice to ajji. But all the jewels went to Chandumama, "The Son." Ai got only the pearl bracelets and a string of pearls.
At Ravi's wedding Ai gave these pearls to Asha, the new daughter-in-law whose father was rich. Jaya was angry for her daughter Rati, who was a granddaughter.
She sees Ravi's back and it looks like Appa's. She walks across Tilak Bridge feeling dizzy and takes a taxi. A seller offers a lottery ticket. She thinks, "not for me, for Rati," then admits it is greed.

5. Mohan's Attack

At home Mohan sits on the unmade bed, his tea untouched. He asks about Ravi. When Jaya says Ravi has heard Mohan is in trouble, and that she told Ravi where they are, his face changes to "the face of an adversary."
He fires questions: who said it, what name, why didn't she ask more? She can only say "I don't remember."
Mohan then lists his complaints. She has been indifferent since he told her of Agarwal's warning and used servants and neighbours to avoid him. In Lohanagar she did not even learn what C.E. meant and would not be friendly with the Chief Engineer's wife. He had to do favours for the C.E. to get them the Type C quarters, and the C.E. made him a scapegoat who passed substandard material while others made a profit. All Mohan got was the house.
Jaya remembers how unhappy she was in their first home in Lohanagar. She cried alone for no reason, and told Mohan only that the place "stinks." He was relieved when she turned out to be pregnant.
Mohan says, "You married me only because Dinkar told you to" (Ai told him) and says he knows she and Dada laugh at Ai.
Jaya finally says, "I gave up my writing because of you." Mohan is truly astonished. He says he always encouraged her, introduced her proudly as "my wife is a writer" and spoke to the editor about her column.
Jaya thinks of her column and the black silhouette picture, a woman with no doubts, unlike herself. She remembers that she can be prejudiced (she thought the ugly doctor repulsive, and after Rahul's birth she asked if he was fair).
Mohan says she has changed since they came here and that she despises him because he failed. She cries, "No, that's not true," but remembers Dada's words, "He's an engineer, he has a good job."
Jaya feels she has finally "killed" Suhasini, the old wife, "between us, Mohan and I." Now she must carry the burden of wifehood herself.

6. The Laughter and Mohan Leaves

Looking at Mohan's hurt face, Jaya sees Rahul's face when she took away his bottle. She bursts into hysterical laughter. When she recovers, Mohan has gone.
She remembers laughing with Dada a week after Appa died, while Ai screamed, "Are you human beings or animals?" She wants to explain to Mohan that she was laughing at "marriage, us, this whole absurd exercise we call life."
She hears the door close and sees Mohan from the balcony take a taxi without looking up.

7. The Night Alone: Fear, Kusum and Retribution

Jaya sits in the dark, disoriented, as she was in Saptagiri after ajji's death when she said "This is my home" to hurt Ai. She remembers Ai lying stiff like a corpse the day after Appa's death.
She lies awake waiting for Mohan. She remembers Rahul once saying, "He won't come now, he must be dead somewhere," and how she slapped him. A funeral procession passes chanting "Raam naam satya hai." She remembers being Sister Sparrow, saying, "my baby is sleeping." She wants to talk to Kamat, but he is dead.
Panic comes. She asks, "Am I going crazy like Kusum?" She realises that Kusum has "welcomed" her as a fellow unwanted wife. In Ambegaon after Appa's death, the family had joined their names, "Jaya and Kusum." Jaya once screamed at Kusum, "My father is dead." She remembers Kusum showing her a naked mad woman next door and thinks Kusum was just as sure she was sane then.
A new idea: Kusum in madness had escaped the burden of pleasing people. She was "gloriously, unashamedly herself." They did not let her stay there, and she jumped into the well. So it is not "poor Kusum," it is "poor Jaya."
She comforts herself that Mohan believes marriage never ends, so he will come back and say, "I didn't mean it." They would go on as before. Then she rejects the picture as false. She thinks of retribution: Dasarath, who killed an innocent boy and died calling for his own son. She remembers leaving Kusum crying, "Don't go, Jaya, don't leave me here."

8. The Dream, Dada's Departure and the Abortion

She dreams Dada is holding her hand, then wakes to an empty pillow. She remembers Dada telling her in Shivaji Park that he was going to Chicago. Children were singing, "We will win or we will die," and she said it was too late, "We've already lost" (the war with China). She felt faint and then told him, "I'm pregnant" (she was expecting Rati). Dada cooked pulao in the Dadar flat. Mohan walked in and stared at them as if they were strangers.
Then she remembers her "great act of treachery": the child she destroyed without Mohan's knowledge, after Rati. Dada was on leave and about to marry. He urged her to tell Mohan, but she refused, afraid she would not go through with it if she told him. Dada helped her reluctantly.
At the time she felt no guilt. When Mohan came back from his official trip, she lied to him. Now guilt returns. She imagines the child as a girl with all the qualities she misses in Rahul and Rati, then admits that this girl too would have played the same role of mother and daughter. Still, she asks, "how had I dared to keep the knowledge of his own child from Mohan?"

9. The Next Day: Mukta, Nilima and Nayana

Nilima tells her Jeeja is not coming. Ganapati is tomorrow. Mukta is fasting for Hartalika and brings Jaya a plate of shira (a sweet) and tea. It reminds Jaya of ajji's ladoos and how Appa would smash a raw onion with his fist, which ajji disliked. She wonders whether such rich food hastened his death. Mohan now has regular check-ups, and Jaya had thought this gave a guarantee against being betrayed by death again.
Nayana arrives red-eyed. Jeeja's son (Rajaram) was injured in an accident, probably drunk. Nayana remembers her mother naming her for her beautiful eyes and says she has kept the kaajal box for her daughter.
Jaya hangs washing on the balcony railing, something Mohan said "people like us" never do. Then she scrubs the bathroom until the brush bristles fall off.

10. The Hostel, Appa's Death and Leena

She lies on her bed and remembers her first hostel days in Bombay after Appa's death: "room number 25." She cried alone and said she had no friends. Dada visited and said, "Appa is dead, get that into your head." She remembers hating Appa for making her feel special, "not like the others," with dreams of prizes and Oxford, when she wanted to be in the lighted room with the other girls.
She blames Ai and ajji for his death, because he cycled every day between the two women. Ai packed calmly for Ambegaon, and Jaya clung to a wooden pillar, getting a splinter in her palm.
Back in the present she says, "I was Jaya, Jaya for victory" to Kusum's ghost. She feels like in the game "Simon says": Simon (Mohan) has vanished and she cannot move.
She thinks of the advice she was given at her wedding by Vanitamami (a husband is a sheltering tree), Ramukaka and Dada, and that nobody told her what to do when a marriage ended. She remembers Kamalakaki crying after Laxmankaka died: "How will I live without him?" She thinks of Ai, who "learnt to live" without Appa and has just one photograph of him in her room. Ai's widowhood has a clear line (kumkum or a blank forehead), while Jaya's position is unclear.
She realises the danger was not outside, the crow in the rain, but inside the house. She longs for a mother to comfort her, but never turned to Ai or the grandmothers. Only once, there was Leena.
Mukta returns with bread and bhajias. Jaya slips and calls Nilima "Leena." She remembers Leena, her hostel neighbour, who shared her food, took her to the balcony to watch the monsoon sea and made her feel Bombay was beautiful. Leena made her feel the "swanks" at college were the problem. But Jaya dropped Leena when she heard she spent weekends with a married man. Years later Leena passed her without a word.
Jaya fears the same will happen with Mohan.

11. Outside the Barrier and Ramukaka's Family Tree

She remembers a function where she was left behind a barricade because Mohan had her pass. He looked through her. Inside, she saw dozens of women just like her, with dark glasses and short hair, and felt invisible. Mohan, smiling, seemed to be at the high point of his life.
She remembers Ramukaka's family tree of two hundred years. Jaya was not on it: "You don't belong to this family. You're married." Mohan just said, "You belong to my family now." She did not question either of them. "I had learnt it at last: no questions, no retorts. Only silence."

12. The Truth About Her Writing

Jaya remembers the day Mohan brought home a magazine with her prize-winning story about a husband who can reach his wife only through her body. He was crushed: "How can you reveal our lives to the world?" She was ashamed to explain that fiction changes real life. She was afraid of hurting him and stopped. If he had shouted, she thinks, she might have fought back.
Then she thinks of a missionary woman who once told her about eternal happiness in Jesus. Jaya laughed at her and feels sorry now.
She cleans furiously, then realises the truth: she did not stop writing because of Mohan. She wrote afterwards. These were rejected stories, kept in a file in the Dadar flat, which Mohan never knew about.
Kamat was the only one who knew. He offered her his address and typewriter and suggested a false name. She now wonders if his generosity was a kind of cold indifference.
Her story about a thirteen-year-old child-widow (Appa's story) was rejected everywhere. One editor said it was "middle-class stuff" and suggested a women's magazine. She stormed upstairs to Kamat. He told her the story was too restrained: "Spew out your anger in your writing, woman." She replied that a woman cannot be angry without being called hysterical. Kamat warned her against the "women are the victims" theory because it leads to a "bog of self-pity." He told her: "Take yourself seriously... The fact is you're scared. Scared of writing. Scared of failing."
She crawled into her "hole" as Mohan's wife and the children's mother. Kamat showed her humorous pieces called "middles," and she began writing light columns. "Seeta" was born. Kamat refused credit. Mohan, editors and readers loved Seeta. For Jaya, Seeta kept out the real women in her, who might resemble Mohan's or her own mother.
Laxmankaka said she was a writer like her father Vasu. Jaya remembers the unsold copies of Appa's self-published poems and Ai's cruel remark to sell them as trash. She kept two copies, as a warning. She fears failing like Appa.

13. Kamat: the Man and His Death

Jaya imagines Kamat's ghost. She saw him dead on the floor, his eyes glassy, with vomit and the smell of urine, while the radio played his own voice selling tea. She walked away, locked the flat, went home to Churchgate and went to bed as if nothing had happened.
She could never address him by name. He called her Jaya from the first day. When she went to return a wrongly delivered letter, he was cooking and offered her lunch. He was proud of cooking and told her Tagore's women make men helpless. He refused to give any woman power over him, except in sex. He liked thin women. With him she was "just Jaya," not a woman. Later she found he cheated at the "honesty game" and had hidden that he did radio advertisements.
She told him the story of Appa's death. She was taking her S.S.C. exams. A girl told her to go home. She delayed, drew a circle with a dot in the dust, and then ran home, praying. The house was locked. Dada came slowly on a bicycle and shook her and said, "Appa is dead." Ajji pushed her to touch his feet. She wrote her exam the next day, with Dada waiting outside every day. Ai then sent her and Ravi to Ambegaon, sold the house, and Jaya has felt homeless since. She called Ai's act of selling the house a betrayal. Kamat said Ai needed the money and said Jaya had "the monstrous ego of a child."
He held her, and she felt it was Appa. When he said "Jaya" she looked up and saw a lonely stranger. Then he touched her face lightly, and her body responded. She rejected the feeling and left without a word. Days later she returned and found him dead.
That night she wept on the bathroom floor. Then she went to Mohan and aroused him and he made love to her.
Part 3 ends with Marx's line, "The relation of man to woman is the most natural of one person to another." Jaya answers: "Natural? There's only treachery, only deceit, only betrayal."

Characters

Character	Description
Jaya	Narrator and writer. In this part she faces her guilt, her fear of failure and her loneliness. She finally admits the truth about her writing.
Mohan	Her husband. He turns hostile when he feels exposed, accuses Jaya of indifference, then leaves. He blames her partly because he fears she despises his failure.
Ravi	Jaya's younger brother. Charming, sly and unreliable. He lives on contacts and enjoys making trouble.
Asha	Ravi's kind wife, who has gone to her father's home.
Dada (Dinkar)	Jaya's older brother. He helped her in crises, then moved to America.
Ai	Jaya's mother. She has become possessive and fearful as she loses her place in her brother's home.
Vanitamami and Chandumama	Vanitamami is ill, perhaps with cancer. Chandumama is the doctor who supported Jaya's education.
Appa	Jaya's dead father. He made her feel special and left her wounded by his death.
Kamat	The dead friend who challenged her to take herself seriously. His death is revealed here.
Kusum's ghost	A shadow that shows Jaya her fear of madness.
Mukta, Nilima and Nayana	Neighbours and a maid who give Jaya food, company and ordinary comfort.
Leena	A hostel friend whom Jaya rejected for being "not good."
Ramukaka and the grandmothers	Symbols of the family that excludes married daughters.

Themes

Blame and self-deception. Jaya blames Mohan for her failure to write, but finally sees that her own fear stopped her.
Guilt. She feels guilt for her abortion, for Kusum, for Leena, and for walking away from Kamat's body.
Marriage in crisis. Mohan and Jaya attack each other with old hurts, and each feels unseen.
Women and the family. Married daughters "do not belong" to their father's family (Ramukaka's tree). Ai's widowhood is clear, but Jaya's situation is not.
Fear of madness. Jaya fears she will become like Kusum. She understands that Kusum's madness was also a kind of escape.
Anger and silence. Kamat tells her to use her anger in writing. She has swallowed it and learnt only silence.
Burdens on daughters. Dada and Ravi escaped, leaving Jaya responsible for Ai and the old relatives.
Loss and grief. Appa's death shaped Jaya, and she still blames him and herself.
Retribution. She believes acts bring punishment here and now.
Desire and loyalty. Her body responds to Kamat, but her mind refuses, and she then turns to Mohan.

Symbols

The pearls: inheritance that passes unfairly between women, and favouritism.
The barricade and "enclosure": Mohan's world of status and Jaya's feeling of being shut out and invisible.
Ramukaka's family tree: a daughter erased from her own family.
"Simon says": the husband whose command gives a wife's life meaning.
The sheltering tree and the crow in the rain: the false safety of marriage and home.
The locked door of Jaya's childhood home: the sudden loss of her father and her home.
The circle with a dot: the moment before the worst news, and memory fixing small things.
"Raam naam satya hai": death moving through the night.
Jaya's "hole": the safe place of wifehood and light writing where she hides from failure.
Seeta: a safe, humorous persona.
Kamat's radio voice and his body: his many faces, and Jaya's shock and avoidance.
Washing on the railing and the broken brush: her rebellion against appearances.
Room number 25: a lonely identity, a number instead of a name.
The lottery ticket: greed hiding behind "for the children."

Diagram: How Jaya's Excuse Falls Apart

Read the boxes in a snake: left to right on top, right to left in the middle, left to right at the bottom. The diamond is the question that changes everything, and the highlighted box is the answer.

Overall Overview

Part 3 is the emotional turning point of the story so far. A meeting with Ravi brings family problems into the Dadar flat (Vanitamami's illness, Ai's fear, Asha and Ravi's quarrel) and spreads the rumour that Mohan is in trouble. When Jaya tells Mohan, he turns on her and lists every grievance, from Lohanagar to her coldness. He believes she despises him for failing. Jaya, for the first time, says aloud that she gave up writing because of him. Then she bursts into hysterical laughter, and Mohan walks out.

Alone for the first time, Jaya is flooded with memories: Appa's death, the hostel, Leena, her abortion, Kusum's madness, Ramukaka's family tree. These show how often she has been silent, hidden the truth and walked away. The most important discovery is about her writing. She did not stop because of Mohan. She stopped writing seriously because she was afraid of failing. The part ends with the truth about Kamat: he is dead, she saw him, she left him there, and after weeping she went to Mohan and made love to him. Jaya sees only "treachery, deceit, betrayal." The long silence now has a name: fear.

Critical Analysis

1. Structure of the part. The present is very short: a lunch with Ravi, a quarrel, a night, a day. Almost everything else is memory. Deshpande moves between past and present through small triggers, such as a dream of Dada, a slip of the tongue ("Leena"), or a plate of sweet shira that brings back ajji's ladoos. This shows how a person in crisis relives her whole life.

2. The big reversal. In Part 1 Jaya wrote of Mohan's crime. Here the focus turns to her own faults. Her claim, "I gave up my writing because of you," is a tidy excuse. The novel then removes it step by step: she kept writing, the stories were rejected, Kamat said she was scared. Deshpande shows that blaming others is another form of silence, because it avoids the real question.

3. Guilt and honesty. Jaya lists her betrayals: the abortion kept from Mohan, her harshness to Kusum, her rejection of Leena, and her flight from Kamat's body. She is not made into a victim. Her self-examination is painful and honest, though she often stops short of judging herself fully. The novel suggests that confession, not blame, is the start of understanding.

4. Mohan's quarrel. Mohan is shown with some sympathy. His accusations are partly unfair, partly true. He is scared that she despises him for failing, and Jaya's thought about Dada's "he's an engineer, he has a good job" shows that his fear has a basis. The couple speak at last, but they are really talking at cross-purposes, like "the kids in a comic strip" saying "No, that star, the other one."

5. Women's positions. Ramukaka's family tree shows that a married daughter has no place in her own family, only in her husband's. Ai's clear line between kumkum and a blank forehead shows how society defines a woman by her husband, and Jaya now has no such label. The pearls, the jewels given only to the son, and Ai's changing love for her children show how property and affection also favour sons.

6. Madness and escape. Jaya's new view of Kusum is one of the most important insights in the novel. Kusum's madness is seen as the only way she could be herself. This links to the question of what Jaya's own escape or breakdown might look like. Jaya's fear that she is becoming like Kusum is also a fear of what happens when a woman stops playing her role.

7. Kamat as a mirror. Kamat is both an ideal and a failure. He treats Jaya as an equal, tells her to use her anger, and challenges her. But he is also a cheat in the "honesty game," lonely, and in the end dead, left alone by Jaya. Her response to him (body yes, mind no) shows the split in her. Her return to Mohan that night is not love but a way of shutting out grief, which explains the bitter final lines about Marx.

8. Language and tone. The language is plain and domestic, but sharp with irony ("Simon says," "Sister Sparrow," the washing on the railing). Short, broken thoughts show panic. The flood image (the Panshet Dam) captures the sense of being swept away by Mohan's anger.

9. Possible criticisms. Some readers may feel the part is long and heavy with memory, and that the middle-class, upper-caste world leaves out many voices. Jaya's reflections are also very self-focused. Still, this inward style is the point of the novel.

10. Significance. Part 3 moves Jaya from blaming to knowing. She is still silent, but she can now name what silenced her: not only Mohan or society, but her own fear.

Part 4: Summary and Analysis

Summary

1. Jeeja's Plea

Jeeja, the maid, arrives with her granddaughter Manda. Her face is broken with grief. Her stepson Rajaram, Tara's husband, was stabbed by thugs after a drinking session. His drinking friends used his money, and when he asked for more drink without paying, they stabbed him and left him on the footpath.
Rajaram is now in Sion Hospital. He has been operated on and given blood, but he is serious. Jeeja fears for his children, and for Tara: "Let her have her kumkum on her forehead. What is a woman without that?"
Jeeja asks Jaya to speak to a doctor so Rajaram gets special care. The doctor is Dr Vyas, who once lived in Dada's Dadar flat with Dada and Shahani. Jaya says she barely knew him and offers money instead. Jeeja refuses: "We don't need money... Saheb is a big officer, you are his wife."
Jaya remembers the blind beggar woman to whom she gave ten paise each day. It made her feel good, and Mohan disapproved. But Jeeja "refused to make things easy" for her. She also remembers writing her name in the sand as a child and finding it erased by the sea: "You are his wife..." no longer feels solid.
Jeeja leaves Manda to stay and work. She says, "Nayana was telling me Saheb has gone away," and Jaya feels shamed, as in a recurring dream where she is caught using a public toilet.
Manda chatters about the day. Ai (her mother) fainted, and her mother's brother's wife, who looks down on them, took the boys. At night Manda whimpers in her sleep, and Jaya calms her by saying, "I'm here."

2. Ganapati Day and the Hospital

In the morning Manda delivers the milk. It is Ganapati day, and the first idols are being carried home. Manda wanted to wear her green and yellow maxi but forgets it for her father.
Jaya sees Manda's future like Cassandra: marriage, a drunken husband, children, poverty. But when Nilima asks a question in English and Manda answers in Marathi, Jaya realises Manda understands English and goes to school, so she may not be like her grandmother.
Jaya watches a noisy procession with detachment, finding all the excitement for a clay elephant-headed god absurd: "If it was faith that created god, was such an extravagant statement of faith needed to keep this god alive?" Rain washes the red powder from the dancers' faces into the gutters, "like the scene of a holocaust."
At the hospital Tara is sodden with tears, and her brother Vijay gives them the bed number. Dr Vyas recognises Jaya. She says, "I'm Mrs Kulkarni now." He mentions that Agarwal is his neighbour, and Jaya thinks, "Mohan, again Mohan." He asks about Dada ("Dinu"), and Jaya says he is the same old Dinu, though she thinks he is "a frightened man, afraid of loving, afraid of dying."
Vyas promises to set his Registrar on the case. He remembers a dinner at Dada's flat where Jaya was silent and stiff, and Dada was angry afterwards: "Sitting there like a goonk. Poor Skinny, he was only trying to be friendly." Jaya admits she felt vulnerable. He says, "drop in some time, with your husband, of course."
Jaya wonders if she can only relate to the world as a wife. "A husband is like a sheltering tree" returns to her mind. She wonders what Vyas would think if she said Mohan had left her.

3. The Empty Churchgate Flat

Hoping Mohan has gone home, Jaya goes to their Churchgate flat. It is dusty, with letters on the floor and rotting flowers in a vase. She feels like a stranger. She remembers her typhoid in Ambegaon after Appa's death as a "watershed" that separated two girls.
She remembers their first party in this house: Mohan solemnly rearranging the flowers she had arranged. When the first guest, brought in by Rati, said, "Except for the flowers," Mohan answered, "You know how the ladies are," and Jaya laughed along. She had hidden her anger with guile, Dada's "guerrilla warfare." She realises she can never laugh at Mohan, because it would shrink him, and she did not want a "dwarfed husband."
The next-door servant Damu says her phone has been ringing since yesterday. The phone rings, and it is a trunk call.

4. Rahul Runs Away

Rupa and Ashok are on the line. Rahul has disappeared from their house, taking his bag, and they have informed the police. They demand that Mohan come at once.
Jaya asks for Rati. Rati is calm and bored and only wants her brown shoes. Jaya is shaken by Rati's indifference.
A crow lands on the window. Jaya's palm bleeds from hitting the window. She imagines a caravan of skeleton-like vehicles with masked drivers, each moving alone. "Where had that glossy coloured picture of a happy family vanished?"
The phone rings again. Revati says Rahul is in Saptagiri with her father Vasant. Jaya begs Rahul to come home, but he hangs up after crying "Mummy, I can't..."
She remembers Rahul's first day at school. She saw him standing alone against a wall with a look of "utter desolation." That night he woke up screaming. She admits she knows almost nothing about her son. She also remembers failing to breastfeed him, and Ai saying, "Not able to feed your own child?" She sees that she and Rahul were like "two clumsy amateurs, novices playing the roles of mother and child."
She also sees that Rati's calm, mature self was a cardboard cut-out she had propped up. She gives up the "halo" of motherhood: "Smugness fell away from me... like a house collapse during the monsoon."
She calls Rupa and Ashok to say Rahul is safe and tells them to carry on with their plans.

5. Breakdown in the Rain

She cries by the window, and two people across the courtyard stare at her. She sees dead ants in the water jug and rushes out into heavy rain.
At a bus shelter she sees a beautiful girl with two men. She is drunk, grabbing at a cigarette, and the men fondle her roughly and laugh. Jaya shouts, "Stop," but nobody hears her, and she runs away from the laughter.
Then she wakes up in bed. Mukta is wiping her face. She had a high fever (nearly 104) and was delirious all night. Mukta found her soaked, ringing her own bell and banging on the door, speaking of Rati, "leave her alone." Mukta, Nilima and Manda stayed with her.
Jaya remembers going to Churchgate Station and boarding a train. She felt suffocated by hostile faces and tried to push out. Only one woman, embroidering a child's dress calmly, stayed clear in her memory.
Mukta tells how, after Gandhi's death, her father (in the Hindu Mahasabha) had to hide, and a mob that called itself Gandhian looted her family's shop. "Poor Gandhi, he thought he could change human nature, but people don't change." The words fall on Jaya like "a knell."
Jaya feels that Mukta watches her with "clinical detachment," like the doctor who put her on the pill and was writing a paper.
Jeeja comes, smiling: Rajaram is better, and she hopes he will now stop drinking. Jaya thinks, "People don't change. Poor Jeeja."

6. The Second Night and the Third Day

Alone with Manda, Jaya walks around the house as she used to check the children and doors. She recalls Maitreyee's question and Nilima's "What do you want?" She had always thought she only wanted to live, enclosed and safe under a roof. Now she knows the darkness has "invaded" her.
She cannot imagine going back to what they were: "Something had been lost, only an illusion maybe, but its loss had left such a rent in our lives."
In the morning she imagines Mohan and two children running together, then sees a father and two daughters, one running unwillingly, scolded by her father.
Nilima tells her about the morning's fight. Her brother Satish refuses to marry and wants to go abroad, and Mai screams, "Who'll cremate us when we're dead?" Nilima says she will jump off the terrace. Jaya remembers Kusum, and quotes: "Despair behind and Death before doth cast such terror."
Mukta says Nilima often says that but is "too curious about life" to do it. She says she stays in Mai's house because Nilima needs a family, not only a mother.
Mukta has taken leave for Jaya. Jaya tells her, "I think he has left me," and speaks about rebirth. Mukta says being born again is itself a failure, and the real goal is not to be born at all.
Jaya says, "I've failed him. All these years I thought I was Mohan's wife; now he tells me I was never that."

7. Mukta and Kamat

Mukta asks if it is about Kamat. Then she shakes Jaya: "Then why did you leave him alone the day he died? You left him to die alone, didn't you?" Mukta saw Jaya go up and come down, and went up later to find him dead.
Mukta explains. Kamat was her husband Arun's friend. After Arun's death, Kamat gave her the courage to take teacher training and a job, against her father's and the family's wishes. Months before his death he had a minor heart attack, gave her a key to his flat and asked her to ring his nephew if she heard no sounds, saying, "I've lived alone for so many years, but dying alone is a different thing." He said they were not to wait for Gopal.
Jaya realises she ran away because Kamat reached out in his loneliness, and she thought, "I'm only Mohan's wife." She tells Mukta that Mohan did not know and the reason was not Mohan. She understands it was "not Mohan but marriage" that made her cautious.
Mukta says, "What does it matter now? Let it go."

8. Jaya Begins to Write

Alone, Jaya looks back through her life like a magic peepshow. She sees a child in a dress with pockets, thrusting her hands in them, "feeling heady with the excitement of finding unexpected resources within herself." She decides to begin with that child.
The narration shifts to the present tense. Manda asks, "Finished? So much writing." Jaya says the writing is like a patchwork quilt, a "crazy conglomeration."

9. Rahul Returns

Rahul arrives with Vasant, both tired from travel. Vasant says he was made to get off at Dadar. Rahul looks afraid.
Jaya tells Rahul his father went to Delhi on work and will come back tomorrow. She shows the telegram, "All well returning Friday morning," and can only think of its "triumphant trumpet call." She tells Rahul not to worry: "It's all right." Rahul's face lightens, and she feels some resentment.
Watching Rahul and Vasant eat breakfast easily together, she sees them differently, "as if I've put my head down and looked at the world from between my legs." They are not the "irresponsible younger brother" and the "difficult son," just two people at ease. She feels she has released both of them "from the slots I'd put them in" and herself too.
Rahul says she looks like a nun in her towel, and Jaya gives him the word "coif," which he refuses. Vasant says she looks thinner. She mentions that Nilima and Manda looked after her. Vasant asks if they are coming to Saptagiri for Anna's ceremonies, and she says she may go to Ambegaon first.

10. The Final Reflections

She remembers a day she walked out of the house, overwhelmed, and a man on a bench smiled at her and said, "Hello, sister." She planned to break down and tell her family she couldn't cope. But they only said, "Where have you been?" and, "It's late, I'm hungry." She went and made food. She thinks of the man Nair and his family, tied together walking into the sea: "We've been like that, all of us, bound by fear."
She says writing has helped. "I'm not afraid any more. The panic has gone." She cannot cut off parts of herself to be only Mohan's wife. The child with her hands in her pockets is still with her.
She quotes Defoe, who called fiction "a sort of lying that makes a great hole in the heart." She asks who can draw the line between fact and fiction, and whether we can live with that hole.
She rejects the image of two bullocks yoked together: "If I think of us in that way, I condemn myself to a lifetime of disbelief in ourselves." She thinks there are "so many crossroads, so many choices."
She recalls the Sanskrit words in Appa's diary, Yathecchasi tatha kuru, from the Gita: "Do as you desire." She now sees them as Krishna giving Arjuna his humanity, the freedom to choose.
She answers Jeeja's question, "With whom shall I be angry?" with, "With myself, of course."
She asks what Mohan's "All well" means. In the past, she looked at his face and gave the answer he wanted, and this restored his authority. But now she must speak and listen to "erase the silence." She remembers learning that in Sanskrit drama women could speak only Prakrit, which sounded like a baby's lisp, and realises she has been speaking Prakrit herself.
She wonders if Mohan too means more than going back to the old ways. The book ends: "People don't change... But we can always hope... life has always to be made possible."

Characters

Character	Description
Jaya	Narrator and writer. In Part 4 she breaks down, sees her failures as a mother and wife, and decides to speak and make choices.
Mohan	Jaya's husband. He is absent and appears only through the telegram "All well." His meaning stays open.
Rahul	Jaya's teenage son. He runs away from Rupa and Ashok's house to Vasant. He is fearful, sensitive and close to Vasant.
Rati	Jaya's daughter. She seems calm and indifferent when her brother is missing.
Jeeja	The maid. She is silent, proud, practical and asks for help only for her family.
Manda	Jeeja's granddaughter. She is lively, bright and resilient, and a sign of possible change.
Rajaram and Tara	Jeeja's stepson, a drunkard who is stabbed, and his wife who waits at the hospital.
Mukta	The neighbour. She nurses Jaya, speaks bluntly, and reveals Kamat's loneliness.
Nilima	Mukta's daughter. She is lively and bitter and talks of suicide, but is full of curiosity.
Mai and Satish	Mukta's mother-in-law, who is harsh, and Satish, who wants to go abroad.
Kamat	The dead friend, seen through Mukta's account of his loneliness.
Dr Vyas ("Skinny")	Dada's old friend, polite and busy, who agrees to help Rajaram.
Vasant	Mohan's younger brother. He brings Rahul to Dadar. Jaya now sees him as kind and at ease.
Rupa and Ashok	The wealthy friends who looked after the children and were frightened by Rahul's disappearance.
Damu	The next-door servant who reports the phone ringing.

Themes

Speech and silence. Jaya realises she must "speak, listen and erase the silence." She compares her silence to speaking Prakrit, the language given to women in Sanskrit drama.
Choice and freedom. Yathecchasi tatha kuru ("Do as you desire") becomes her principle. She sees that life has many crossroads.
People change or do not. Mukta says "People don't change." The novel ends with hope: change may be slow, but we can hope.
Motherhood and failure. Jaya sees she does not know Rahul, that Rati's maturity may be a mask, and that mothers do not know instinctively.
Class and obligation. Jeeja refuses money and asks for personal help. Manda's schooling suggests a different future for poor girls.
Women supporting women. Mukta, Nilima and Manda nurse Jaya, while Jaya has long avoided real friendship with women.
Loneliness and death. Kamat's fear of dying alone and Jaya's flight from him show the cost of fear.
Truth, fiction and writing. Writing becomes a way to fight her panic. She cannot tell where fact ends and fiction begins.
Fear and the "happy family." Jaya sees her family as bound together by fear, like Nair's family walking into the sea.
Self-anger and responsibility. She says she must be angry "with myself," and not blame others.

Symbols

Ganapati procession and the red powder in the rain: blind, loud faith, and an absurd, almost violent spectacle that Jaya watches from outside.
Name written in sand: how easily a woman's identity as "his wife" can be washed away.
The blind beggar woman and the ten-paise coin: cheap, easy charity, in contrast with Jeeja's real need.
The dead ants in the water jug: a sign of rot behind a clean, ordered home.
The crow at the window: ill omen and the old crow-and-sparrow story.
The caravan of skeleton vehicles: a family moving together but alone, each person isolated.
The girl in the bus shelter: exploitation that nobody sees or stops, and Jaya's helplessness.
The embroidering woman in the train: calm, unthreatened domestic life contrasted with Jaya's panic.
The magic peepshow: looking back at one's life from a distance.
A child with hands in her pockets: the original self with hidden strength.
The patchwork quilt: the fragments of memory that Jaya sews together by writing.
The telegram "All well": a message with an open meaning, either returning to the past or a new beginning.
Prakrit: the weaker, "lisping" language women were allowed to speak.
The "hole in the heart": the damage done by habitual lies, and Jaya's silence.
Two bullocks yoked together: the image she finally rejects.
The key Kamat gave Mukta: trust and responsibility toward another person's loneliness.

Diagram: From Breakdown to Choice

Read the boxes in a snake: left to right on top, right to left in the middle, left to right at the bottom. The highlighted box is Jaya's turning point.

Overall Overview

Part 4 is the end of the novel. It begins with a crisis outside Jaya's own marriage: Jeeja's stepson is stabbed, and Jaya, who has always given help cheaply, is asked for something harder, her time and her standing as a "Saheb's wife." Then Rahul runs away, and Jaya realises how little she knows her son and how far she is from the ideal mother she thought she was. She breaks down in the rain and falls ill with a high fever.

On her sickbed, three women nurse her: Mukta, Nilima and Manda. Mukta also shocks her by accusing her of leaving Kamat to die alone. Jaya admits she ran away from his need because she saw herself only as Mohan's wife. Alone, she starts to write, beginning with the child who put her hands in her pockets. When Rahul returns with Vasant, she sees them as people, not as roles. She rejects the image of the two bullocks, accepts Yathecchasi tatha kuru ("Do as you desire"), and decides to speak instead of staying silent. The book ends on a note of hope, not a promise: people do not change easily, but life "has always to be made possible."

Critical Analysis

1. The ending and its tone. The novel does not end with a dramatic reunion or a break-up. Mohan never appears. His telegram, "All well," is left open. Jaya's decision is inward: to speak, to listen, to stop giving the answers others want. The ending is hopeful but cautious. Deshpande avoids both a "happily ever after" and a tragic escape, which fits the title's idea of a silence that is slowly broken.

2. The shift of tense. When Jaya starts to write about the child with her hands in her pockets, the narration moves from the past tense to the present tense ("Manda... stands near the table"). This small change shows that the writing has made her more present in her own life. She is no longer only remembering; she is living and choosing.

3. Rejection of the bullock image. In Part 1 Jaya compared the marriage to "a pair of bullocks yoked together." Here she rejects it: "If I think of us in that way, I condemn myself to a lifetime of disbelief in ourselves." This is the novel's key turning point, because the image had justified her passivity.

4. Choice and the Gita. Yathecchasi tatha kuru ("Do as you desire") is a clever use of a religious text. Jaya first thought it a cheat, but now reads it as Krishna giving Arjuna freedom and humanity. The novel thus uses Indian tradition to support a woman's choice, not only to limit her, as in the myths of Sita and Savitri earlier.

5. Prakrit and the language of women. The Prakrit image is one of the best in the book. In Sanskrit drama, women were not allowed to speak Sanskrit, and Jaya realises she has been "speaking Prakrit" with Mohan: offering the answers he wanted and not her own thoughts. This turns the title's silence into a question of language and power.

6. Motherhood without illusion. Jaya's memories of failing to feed Rahul and of her ignorance about him break the myth of natural motherhood. Rati's indifference and the "cardboard cut-out" daughter show how children, too, hide behind roles. At the end, Jaya's ability to see Rahul and Vasant as free people, not as "slots," is her first real act of understanding.

7. Class and women's solidarity. Jeeja's refusal of money shows that real help means personal responsibility, not cheap charity like the ten-paise coin. Manda's schooling gives a note of hope for poor girls. Mukta, Nilima and Manda nurse Jaya, which shows female solidarity across class and age, though Mukta's anger about Kamat reminds us it is not always gentle.

8. "People don't change." Mukta's belief is repeated three times. Jaya hears it as a "knell," but she ends by accepting it and still choosing hope. The novel is realistic: change is slow, uncertain and may not happen. Yet Deshpande insists that hope is necessary: "life has always to be made possible."

9. Writing and truth. Jaya says writing has taken away her fear. But she also quotes Defoe, who said fiction can make "a great hole in the heart." She cannot tell fact from fiction, and she asks whether we can live with that hole. This self-doubt keeps the ending honest and avoids a neat moral.

10. Possible criticisms. Some readers may find Mohan's absence frustrating, since the marriage is never directly resolved. Others may feel Jaya's change is too sudden or too intellectual, and note that the world of the novel is mostly middle-class and upper-caste. Still, the ending is true to Jaya's character: a small, inner, believable change, not a loud revolution.

Glossary (from the book)

Word	Meaning
Ai	"Mother" in Marathi.
Avva	"Mother" in Kannada.
Behnji	"Sister" in Hindi, also a term of address.
Tai	"Sister" in Marathi, also a term of address.
Ganapati bappa morya	A joyful chant hailing Ganapati, the elephant-headed god.
Ganapati festival	A festival celebrated soon after the monsoon.
Hartalika	A day of fasting for women, a day before the Ganapati festival.
Hindu Mahasabha	A militant revivalist political organisation whose followers were suspected in the plot to kill Gandhi (shot by Godse).
Jagannath	"Lord of the world"; the god of the temple at Puri. Dying under the wheels of his chariot is believed to lead to salvation.
Kaajal	Kohl, or eye black.
Maitreyee	The scholarly wife and pupil of the philosopher Yajnavalkya.
Moksha	Salvation, or release from rebirth.
Mudras	Hand gestures in Indian dance, each symbolising a thing or emotion.
Raam nam satya hai	The chant that accompanies the dead on their last journey. Literally, "God's name is the truth."
Red Flag	The Communist Party.
Shiv Sena	A party that arose in Bombay in the 1960s, based on regional and linguistic loyalties.
Shira	A sweet made of semolina.
S.S.C. examination	The school leaving examination.
Sachivalaya	The building in Bombay that houses the Maharashtra State Government ministries.

1 comment:

elioOctober 29, 2026 at 2:54 AM
That Long Silence rewards slow reading. Jaya's silence isn't passivity — it's the space where she audits her whole life, which is why the ending lands quietly instead of dramatically. Your notes on the novel's structure helped me see how the present-day frame holds the flashbacks together.

Pages

Wednesday, October 28, 2026

That Long Silence by Shashi Deshpande

Shashi Deshpande

That Long Silence : Summary and Analysis

Character Diagram:

PART 1: Summary

1. The Opening: Jaya Starts to Write

2. Childhood Memory and the “Happy Family” Dream

3. Mohan’s Story of the Women in Delhi

4. The Marriage: Coins and Bullocks

5. Mohan’s Confession

6. The Dadar Flat and the Ghosts

7. Names: Jaya and Suhasini

8. The First Morning

9. The Story of Kusum

10. Emptiness and Freedom

11. Nayana and Waiting

12. Mohan’s Childhood and His Parents

13. Vimala’s Story

Characters

Themes

Symbols

Overall Overview

Critical Analysis

Part 2: Summary and Analysis

Summary

1. The Flat and Its Ghost: Makarandmama

2. The Illusion That Nothing Has Changed

3. Jeeja, Tara and Manda

4. The Silent Procession and the Noise of Bombay

5. Lohanagar and the Road to Bombay

6. Nilima, Mukta and the Death of Kamat

7. The Diaries and the Many Selves

8. The Day at Juhu Beach

9. Role Reversal and Family Burdens

10. Women's Work, Anger and Mohan's Mother

11. Ravi's Call and a Night of Love

12. The Dream and Crossword House

13. How Jaya Came to Marry Mohan

14. Mohan's Cry and the Last Question

Characters

Themes

Symbols

Diagram: From Poverty to the Dadar Flat

Overall Overview

Critical Analysis

Part 3: Summary and Analysis

Summary

1. Meeting Ravi

2. News from Ambegaon

3. Ravi's Request and a Dangerous Hint

4. The Pearls

5. Mohan's Attack

6. The Laughter and Mohan Leaves

7. The Night Alone: Fear, Kusum and Retribution

8. The Dream, Dada's Departure and the Abortion

9. The Next Day: Mukta, Nilima and Nayana

10. The Hostel, Appa's Death and Leena

11. Outside the Barrier and Ramukaka's Family Tree

12. The Truth About Her Writing

13. Kamat: the Man and His Death

Characters

Themes

Symbols

Diagram: How Jaya's Excuse Falls Apart

Overall Overview

Critical Analysis

Part 4: Summary and Analysis

Summary

1. Jeeja's Plea

2. Ganapati Day and the Hospital

3. The Empty Churchgate Flat

4. Rahul Runs Away

5. Breakdown in the Rain

6. The Second Night and the Third Day

7. Mukta and Kamat

8. Jaya Begins to Write

9. Rahul Returns

10. The Final Reflections