Portraying Claustrophobia: A Study of Anita Desai’s Where shall We Go This Summer?

 

Dr. Neha Nain

 

H.N. 16, Sec-14, Rohtak (Haryana)

 

In Anita Desai’s fiction there is a persistent endeavour to highlight the complex nature of female protagonists who resist against a patriarchally defined concept of normality. She brings fresh insights to the presence of the existential predicament of a woman as an individual. Her protagonists seek a way of living which would respond to the innermost yearnings for self emancipation.

              

Anita Desai portrays, in her fiction, a disturbed family atmosphere. There is a rejection of traditional female role. Emotional deprivation creates psychological blocks in the ability to establish and maintain harmonious relationship. Anita Desai’s characters – Maya, Monisha and Sita all are quite dissatisfied in their matrimonial relationships. Their ability to feel intensely and to experience deeply plunges them into deep anguish. Idealized notions of relationships and unusual expectations from those whom they are related to, lead to despair. For them living means loving. Leave alone love, there are temperamental incompatibilities which force them to live in a ‘privatised world’. Alienation becomes their lot and they have plenty of time for procrastination and musings. Thus, the wide gap between their imagination and reality and its awareness, bring them on the verge of insanity. They try to find different modes to escape the human whirlpool, where they repeatedly feel humiliated.

 

Where Shall We Go This Summer? (1975) is primarily concerned with the education of Sita in the school of life. The main focus in the novel is on the identity crises in the life of Sita due to her unhappy and conflicting relationship with her husband, Raman. From the thematic point of view Where Shall We Go This Summer? is quite different from the earlier novels of Anita Desai viz. Cry, the Peacock, Voices in the City, Fire on the Mountain or Bye, Bye, Blackbird. It is perhaps the most satisfying, harmonious and integrated novel in the sense that in it Sita, the female protagonist, after much turmoil, succeeds ultimately in achieving a better understanding of the compulsions of human existence, acquires a broader vision which enables her to see her life, her husband, her children and her duties in a right perspective which the female protagonists of her earlier novels viz. Maya, Monisha or even Nanda Kaul fail to arrive at.

 

Consideration of Sita’s unusual childhood is necessary to evaluate her character. Her illusions of an ideal life are based upon her recollections of her childhood spent on Island of Manori with her father who had become a legend in his own life time. As a child, she feels discarded and unwanted when she notices her father’s tenderness biased attitude towards Rekha. The disintegration of the family immediately after her father’s death testifies the truth that there was nothing substantial to bind them as a family. Had there been a sense of belonging they would not have drifted apart so easily. Lack of parental love and care in childhood damaged her psyche permanently. Her life started ‘in the centre of crowd’.

              

With calm eyes, she had watched the surge and flow of such masses, listened to endless speeches on the subject, Swaraja, had her chin checked, collected discarded garlands and played with the tinsel till she fell against a bolster and was carried away to someone house to sleep-always a different someone, it scarcely mattered which one.

 

As Sita does not have a family, she has no feeling of belongingness. Sita’s mother in Where Shall We Go This Summer? had run away from home leaving her children to the care of a father whose concerns lie outside the family. A deep seed of insecurity is sown in her life. In the midst of this, Raman comes to the island to see Sita’s ailing father. After her father’s death, Raman is the person who supports her emotionally.

 

Sita accepts readily Raman as the manager of her life and hopes that Raman will be the man who will help her come out of her complex, offer her the needed security and fill the hap in her life created by her father, Rekha and Jivan. This is quite the normal line of thinking and acting on the part of Sita-for it is obviously the emotional side of her self that remains most neglected. She ultimately marries Raman and through this gesture makes a zealous entry into life. As Usha Bande puts it: "Sita makes a bargain with fate-if she is helpless, good and humble, she will be lovable, Raman will love her. As a self effacing person, she poses to be good, without pride and hopes that she will be treated well by fate and by others." (The Far Side of Despair 109)

              

She had left Manori longing for the sane, the routine-ridden mainland, as for a rest in a sanatorium, Sita builds up a relationship in her mind with her husband where love is an engulfing passion, like the vision of the Muslim couple she sees in the Hanging Gardens. "They were like a work of art-so apart from the rest of us. They were no like us-they were inhuman, divine. So strange, that love, that sadness, not like anything I’ve seen or known. They were so white, so radiant, they made me see my own life like a shadow, absolutely flat, uncoloured” (Ansani 198).

              

The Muslim couples are real human beings belonging to this world but the intensity of their love is divine. Sita needs all attention and tenderness like the Muslim woman. She expects Raman to be like the love, making her realize how valuable she is to him. Little does she realize at that time that she is merely entering a renewed phase of alienation. One after the other, her experiences, far from being constructive or conductive towards happiness, exposed her to a world that is much more hostile, much morefull of violence and destruction than the world of her father. She experiences “boredom and loneliness experienced by married women when they feel ignored and unwanted” (Desai, Anita. Where Shall We Go This Summer? 85)

              

Raman is a representative of civilized life in a city. Raman shifts his energies towards his business so as to escape interpersonal conflicts. Raman cannot tolerate lack of control shown by Sita. He cannot understand her rebelliousness. Whatever shocks his wife is something natural and normal for him. The material bond lacks the feeling of relatedness. Sita doesn’t get from Raman the one and the most needed thing – a shared code of understanding and an adequate communicative response. Their inability to be engaged in a meaningful communication to relieve her ever mounting mental pressures slowly builds into a volcano. Much of the maladjustment between the couple is because Raman never tried to read the basic uncommonness in Sita’s temperament. He didn’t have an eye to see beneath the surface reality.

              

Her contempt for the family and friends of Raman reflects her constitutional inability to accept the values of society. She rejects them in very explicit terms. “They are nothing-nothing but appetite and sex. Only food, sex and money matters Animals” (Ram 74).  Their inauthentic existence is intolerable to her. To shock his family into a recognition of reality, Sita behaves provocatively, she starts smoking, and begins “to speak in sudden rushes of emotion, as though flinging darts at their smooth, unscarred faces”(87).

              

The tragic predicament of Sita, her total absence of communication with Raman and her children and her utter intolerance of any sort of violence and destruction is meaningfully depicted in the eagle-crow incident. Like Maya, in Cry, the Peacock for whom the dance of peacock is the symbol of love and death, Sita sees herself as a wounded eagle and crows symbolize the society around her. In this incident, Sita finds a group of three crows joyously screeching and pecking at a wounded eagle on the ledge below the balcony of her flat. She can’t bear this scene of destruction and makes desperate attempts to save the weak and injured eagle from the clutches of the crows. She knows inwardly that the wounded eagles has really no chance of survival against the attack of the crows though she does not admit it openly.

              

Here the eagle symbolizes the helpless and fragile condition of Sita, struggling hard to survive amidst the hostile and destructive assaults of the modern society-rather the modern industrial set up-symbolised by the crows of which Raman and the children from an inseparable part. According to Ramesh K. Srivastava “The incident in which a number of crows assault and kill and eagle becomes symbolic of Sita’s own plight amid violence so much prevalent in society”(34).

              

When she announced her fifth pregnancy “she did so with a quite paranoiac of rage, fear and revolt.” Control was an accomplishment that had slipped out of her hold. Sita talks at the psychological level while Raman hardly goes beyond material life.

              

Sita said the right “No’. Her expectations of emotional and psychological fulfillment were shattered. She plays social role as a wife and a mother for many years but failed to carve out a destiny for herself which she always wanted as an individual. An individual whose psychic needs are fulfilled, who wanted to stay ‘whole’. She wants to assert her individuality and lives in a society which is not ready to accept it. The main cause of Sita’s angst is that she pins high expectations on people and wants them to display certain metaphysical qualities. She falls to realize that the world cannot be remoulded according to her whims, rather she will have to adjust and modify her personality if she wants to enjoy living.

              

Her desire to escape to Manori is actually ascribable to her deep seated reverence for life and all pervasive violence which she knows she can’t stop. The conception of the child is an act of creation and she wants to protect it from destruction by not giving birth in this destructive world. She doesn’t want to be involved in life physically or emotionally. The world appears violent to her; in a scene Sita, extremely, upset by a sight in front, is seated on her balcony holding a pop-gun trying in vain to keep away the crows that were attacking a wounded eagle on a neighbouring roof top. The process of alienation, thus, which Sita experiences while living with Raman had its roots very early in her life.

              

When mental escape proved futile for Sita, only then she decided for physical escape from the city. She hopes to relive the experiences which were mere satisfying and had their basis in magic. As island is cut off from the main land similarly she wants to lead a life cut off from the mainland. “She wants to offer herself and her unborn child-an alternative-a bewitched  life” (Jain 114).

              

Sita’s decision to return to Manori mainly for the purpose of holding back the birth of her unborn baby by magic and partly to escape from the violence so much prevalent in the metropolitan Bombay society and also due to her dissatisfaction with Raman-may be termed as an act of neurotic and illogical mind. In doing so she bears a close affinity to Maya and Monisha. Like all other Desai’s character she is not ordinary. Desai herself clarifies:

I am interested in characters who are not average but have retreated or been driven into some extremity of despair and turned against, or made a stand against the general current. It is easy to flow with the current, it makes no demands, it costs no effort. But those who cannot follow it, whose ha cries out “the Great No” who fight current and struggle against it, they know what the demands are what its costs to meet them” (Dalmia, The Times of India. 29 April 1979). The prime impulse behind this non-conformist attitude of Sita is that she is quite aware of her strife which has acquired existential dimensions. On her arrival at Manori, she finds the island flat, toneless, related to muddy monsoon sea rather than to the sky and cloud scape. She realized that the magical effect of the house and the island has vanished and consequently she feels guilty of visiting it and of bringing her two children to such withered and dead place.

              

Then in her heart of hearts she has a desire to relate her inner self with the outer. She expected Raman’s help for equilibrium in her in herself and outer society but he could not understand her. After her visit she understands what steps will help her to move from where she is to where she wants to go. After her journey to Manori, she keeps on waiting for the place where she wanted to be and then Menaka came to her rescue, when she secretly wrote to her father. The mother-children relationship lacks mutual understanding. When Raman arrives on the island she wants to be told that he cares for her. As soon as the children put foot on the island their speech reflects failure of Sita as a mother.

 

When the time of Raman’s arrival approaches near, Sita finds it difficult to control herself, something very unusual happens to her. The thought of his adult, quiet, critical company gave her a sense of sharp pleasure. “Strongest of all – felt rising in her a positive cyclone of feminine instinct, a mental reckoning of the clothes she had with her preferring this, rejecting that, seeing herself thus” (Where Shall We Go This Summer 162). His coming makes her feel safe and comfortable. In her subconscious she has realized that for the second time Raman has come to rescue her from the island. But seeing children’s unbearable excitement, Sita feels that they were being disloyal to her, disloyal to the island and its wild nature. Sita now desires Raman’s company but children distract his attention. When Raman informs her that Menaka has called him, this is beyond her to tolerate. She feels disillusioned and betrayed “He had not come to see her, to fetch, as she had supposed; he had betrayed her too" (Where Shall We Go This Summer 186).  They had all betrayed her. Why?

 

Earlier she was unable to compromise with anybody but now she sees things in a circular form. All the elements of negation vanish and Sita’s journey stars a fresh. Things in their real hue start to get clarified in Sita’s mind. Conflicts and awareness of conflicts are in themselves a sure sign of relative health. Sita has the capacity of reach out for full humanness. She starts discovering herself. Her understanding not only of Raman and of cosmic reality improves but she achieves a better understanding of herself also. She gets acquainted with the image she had cherished of herself but was not aware of it. The way she gathers things, binds and packs things reflects her harmonious self.

 

The awareness that life means a participation in the act or living incites Sita to walk back home placing her feet in Raman’s foot mark on the sand – Sita’s acceptance shows growth, triumph of life over chaos. She has resolved the existential dilemma, has made a choice and thus saved herself, Raman and her children from disintegration and chaos.

 

In most of her novels Anita Desai deals with feminine psychology. In Where Shall We Go This Summer? Sita is different from other heroines like Maya, Monisha. Instead of accepting defeat she once again tries to say ‘No’ but it is a positive ‘No’. Sita’s mystic outward journey brings out with a poignant clarity that her relentless quest for self can be satiated even while staying in the city. Search for self is not an independent process and not Sita loses her angularities and interest with otherselves. She is able to relieve herself from the pressures of anxiety stemming from her living in an ivory toe, but only after she has undergone very painful experience in the process of her awareness of self.

 

The novel ends with a positive note of acceptance and not rejection. She feels, the act of courage, as seen in the act of withdrawal, should be repeated by reunion and her quest for self would find its true meaning by reuniting. There is a temporary blockage but ultimately she shows steady signs of constructiveness. Now she makes an effort to eliminate the gap between her individual self and the world. Sita ultimately learns that life is to be faced courageously and practically.

 

REFERENCES:

Asnani, Shyam M. Critical Response to Indian English Fiction: Delhi: Mittal Publications, 1985. Print.

Bande, Usha. “The Far Side of Despair”. The Novels of Anita Desai. New Delhi: Prestige Books, 1988. Print.

Dalmia, Yashodhara. “An Interview with Anita Desai”. The Times of India. 29 April 1979.

Desai, Anita. Where Shall We Go This Summer ? Delhi : Orient Paperbacks, 1982. Print.

Jain, Jasbir. “In Pursuit of Wholeness”. Stairs to the Attic : The Novels of Anita Desai. Jaipur : Printwell Publishers, 1987. Print.

Ram, Atma. “A View of Where Shall We Go This Summer ?” Journal of Indian Writing in English. 9.1 (Jan., 1981):  74, Print.

Rao, B. Ramachandra. The Novels of Mrs. Anita Desai : A Study. New Delhi : Kalyani Publishers, 1972. Print.

Srivastava, Ramesh K. “Introduction”. Perspectives on Anita Desai. Ghaziabad: Vimal Parkashan, 1984. Print.