VOL. 2 ISSUE 3 MARCH

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1 16 PORTRAYAL OF SITA S SUFFERINGS IN WHERE SHALL WE GO THIS SUMMER? Dr. Sadhana Agrawal, Asst. Professor, Dept. of English, Maharani Laxmibai Govt. College of Excellence, Gwalior (M.P.) The contribution of women in Indian writing in English is shining continuously in the galaxy of writers and has occupied a prominent place in the realm of world literature. The women writers have created a different world from women s point of view. Among the notable Indian women novelists, Anita Desai is, undoubtedly, one of the major voices (Dhawan 12) and the most powerful contemporary Indian Novelists in English (Pathak 11). The novelist in her writings paints a world of her own which is full of her extraordinary sensitive beings. Her novels are about the agony of existence in a hostile and male-dominated society that is not only conservative but also taboo-ridden (Dhawan 12). The present study endeavors to throw light on the suffering of protagonist, Sita in Where Shall We Go This Summer? and her journey to search for a meaningful life. Desai here depicts the inner world of Sita by presenting a kaleidoscopic picture of her mind. The novelist chooses a set of her own language and style to describe the inner crisis and tension existing in the life of her character. Where Shall We Go This Summer? is Desai s fourth novel which is shorter in size but deeper in meaning and it is this novel that artistically unifies two journeys. One is an immediate escape from surroundings and the other is towards the futures. The novel deals with the innerouter world of its protagonist Sita and her fatigue for life. It tells the story of the middle-aged Sita, who is fed up with the mundane routine of a meaningless existence. She feels suffocated in her well-ordered posh flat in Bombay and struggles hard to break away from it all. She wants to go back to the island Manori where she had spent many golden days of childhood with her family to seek peace, pleasure and a great pause in her life. The plot and structure of the novel is extremely attractive and similar to that of Virginia Woolf s To the Lighthouse. The novel is well structured into three parts Part one, Monsoon 67 that deals with the present and earlier past of the protagonist, Sita; Part two, Winter 47 portraying with her remote past; Part three, Monsoon 67 that displays her present and near future. The novel begins with the entry of Sita into the island after living a life of dull tedium of hopeless disappointment (58). Desai has portrayed the island as heaven for Sita which wonderfully holds the master key to her final liberation from the existential anxiety, hopelessness and suffering. She completely fails to find joy and happiness in her conjugal life as well as with her children. Manori provides a symbolic solace to her suffering soul and unravels her inner psyche beautifully. When she remembers Manori she goes back to her buried memories and experiences of her inchoate childhood. She finds relief when she thinks of the island, amidst her present suffering. As ordinary life, the everyday world had grown so insufferable to her (72). VOL. 2 ISSUE 3 MARCH

2 92 Sita is certainly not an average woman. She has begun to think of the meaninglessness of life. She has confronted the seamy side of life. She does not share her husband s acceptance of life s ordinariness. All friends, acquaintances, relatives and business associates of her husband are for her no better than animals, nothing but appetite and sex. Only food, sex and money matter (31-32). She calls them animals who are neither pet, nor wild beasts but pariahs.hanging about drains and dustbins, waiting to pounce and bill and eat. (32) When Sita escapes to the island in order to stay whole, to maintain her freedom, and to keep the child unborn, Raman interprets her escape as desertion. She does not accept Raman s plea and is pained much over his opinion for her. She says: No, no, - dissertations, that s cowardly. I wasn t doing anything cowardly, she begged him to see, with a turbulence of pride. I was saying No, but positively, positively, saying No. There must be some who say No, Raman! Perhaps I never ran away at all. Perhaps I am only like the jellyfish washed up by the waves, stranded there on the sand- bar. I was just stranded here by the sea, that s all. I hadn t much to do with it at all. (108) Raman listens to her carefully and ridiculously saying: So you re no more than a jellyfish, he said bitterly. You call yourself a helpless jellyfish. Yet see what you have done to yourself, to all of us. All of you, she vaguely asked. But you have nothing to do with it. Nothing. There s just the sea - it drowns us or strands us on the sand- bar and there s the island. That s all. (108) Raman s reposte makes her helpless and she starts feeling pains about her doings. Here, she becomes inauthentic and object- like. Eventually, she comes to realize her mistakes. She herself becomes a prey to rejustification of her past deeps. So, when Raman prepares to leave for the mainland she mends her ways and follows the footprints of Raman that he had laid out for her: She lowered her head and searched out his footprints so that she could place her feet in them, as a kind of game to make walking back easier and so her footprints mingled with his. (150) This gesture of Sita reveals her existential predicament, of the values of society around her and her return to conformity. As N.R. Gopal rightly points out that, the novel ends establishing victory of reason over fantasy. (Gopal 40) In the novel, the novelist presents a sense of alienation. Sita s state is a representative of the alienation of a woman, a wife, a mother a loneliness conditioned by family and society. Marital incoherence clearly strikes us here. Sita is oppressed and depressed with loveless wedlock with Raman. The main aspect of the novel which firmly possesses Sita s mind in her effort to say No : To certain people there comes a day when they must say the great Yes VOL. 2 ISSUE 3 MARCH

3 93 of the great No. (107) Sita s psychic perturbations are the perceptible outcome of an encounter between the hypocritical world and her inherent honesty that repeals any such compromise. She is transformed from an ordinary wife and mother into a creature who lost all feminine, all maternal trust in childbirth, all faith in it and began to be afraid of it as yet one more act of vehemence and murder in a world that had more of them in it than she could take (56). Uma Banerjee considers Sita a victim of neurosis that destroys her mental equilibrium and threatens her sanity till she decides to run away to Manori Island, seeking the miracle that will give her the power of not giving birth. But the magic power of the island belonged to her childhood fantasy and has disappeared with the passage of time (Banerjee 165). Sita lives with her husband but travels alone mentally and emotionally. In the novel, Desai very beautifully draws the picture of Sita s experiences: She never got used to anyone. When they lived in the first years of their married lives, with his family She had vibrated and throbbed in revolt against their almost subhuman placidity, calmness and sluggishness. The more stolid and still and calm they were, the more she thrummed, as though frantic with fear that their sub humanity might swamp her. (48) Sita feels anxiety and pain with harsh realities of life and retraces her steps back towards the safety and slavish security of her house in Bombay and waits resignedly for the birth of her child. Raman never tried to take care of Sita nor understand her desire. He had only business attitude to life. He was not an introvert, nor an extrovert, - a middling kind of man, he was dedicated unconsciously to the middle way (47). Inspite of living together Sita was alone, bored, dull, unhappy and uncontrolled. It seems an encounter between them and a problem of adjustment. Raman feels disappointed but he has the ability to say the great No if and when needed, as trusted by Sita. It is much more than that, it is a question of the basic truth that is better and naked and can neither be hidden, nor is halved to suit individual. At the end of the discussion of novel we may quote: The tragedy in Where Shall We Go This Summer? arises out of the inability of the characters to connect the prose and the passion in their lives. They have lived only in fragments. The novel ends with a defeated and despondent Sita unable to rediscover the passion of life. But the book ends with the implicit comment that this need not have been the only ending. It could have turned out otherwise. (Rao 60) In Where Shall We Go This Summer? Desai s characters suffer from various difficulties and psychic problems. She describes the intense feelings of her characters and portrays their inner psyche with the use of symbolism which appears to play an important part in her novels. She shows her depth in human nature by delineating the gradual change of a trait into a psychic block which undertakes the form of a disease, making her characters neurotic. This novel is fairly a successful novel. Unlike the earlier one, it is not prosaic and dull. The novel portrays the life of Sita which is similar to Maya of Cry, the Peacock. The protagonist is a woman of aggressive nature and unadjusted character. VOL. 2 ISSUE 3 MARCH

4 94 Sita feels deserted living with Raman and his family. Both Sita and Raman are mentally separated beings under a same shelter. If Raman and his family members go eastward, Sita opts for the West. If the former eats food, what she could eat is uncertain. Sita is reserved and emotionally active. She does not like the members of the family bossing over her. Instead she dominates over, including of her husband. Her smoking and ill-behaviour makes the society dislike her. She is not ready to mend her ways. As a result, she remains lonely and lives in solitude. When her husband advices her how to become conformist, she hates him. She is not even affectionate towards her own children, to say, she is neither a good mother nor an obedient wife. Where Shall We Go This Summer? exposes not only a story of a young disillusioned woman, Sita, the protagonist of the novel but the story of a hyper sensitive and neurotic woman who wishes to escape from this mundane reality of life and wants to live in fantasy. Sita goes to Manori, an island to seek happiness for giving comfort to her perturbed mind that her father had created for peaceful life. She goes there and is overwhelmed by her memory of childhood spent there. But she does not find the beauty, peace and grace in Manori now. Hence, she comes back home and tries to adjust with her husband. Her life in the family displays her tragedy because of her bad faith. She tells many things about authentic life, but she herself does not understand others and cannot lead a peaceful and productive co existence. Thus, this novel has the familiar terra firma, the novelist s preoccupation with woman s occult. (Gupta 203) The island of Manori is cut off from the mainland. Sita also wishes to cut herself off from the mainland, Bombay. Here Desai presents a fine contrasting symbol. Bombay is the emblem of neo-materialistic civilization, while the island indicates nature. Her life in Bombay is full of violence that she wants to keep her unborn child away from it and hence she tells her husband, Raman: I mean I want to keep it I don t want it to be born (35). Regarding this Shrivastava writes: The incident in which a number of crows assault and kill an eagle becomes symbolic of Sita s own plight amid violence so much prevalent in society. By giving birth to a child, she would only contribute to the violence of the world. (8) The starting point of plunging into the invisible mysterious past is that Sita decides to go back to the island. The island is a romantic metaphor for her who values the heroic and redeeming qualities of her father. But when she travels back to the island which is almost deserted, she painfully reconstructs her submerged past. She discovers that her father was not a true Gandhian at heart. She also realizes that the sea is dangerous and evil. It is not the sea which once presented her childhood memories. The very name Sita reminds us of the suffering qualities of the exiled Sita in The Ramayan. This Sita is an extension at the archetypal figure of Sita. She makes a deliberate choice and she is exiled from her disillusionment with her husband and from false social values. The novel suffers from ill-matched marriage. An intimate rapport with Raman her husband is possible only if Sita tries to re-adjust her inner realities to the outside meaningless world. The novel develops from the germinating idea that it would be impossible to go on living in a state of inner contradictions. A sensitive individual will have to make a sacrifice of giving a part of oneself to make way for a meaningful personal relationship. Anita Desai uses an objective VOL. 2 ISSUE 3 MARCH

5 95 correlative technique to portray the plight of Sita as a wounded eagle. An eagle is surrounded and tortured by the crows. Sita did not fight against the crows with a gun, pieces of stones, even a toy gun to help the eagle but could not. The crows are the emblem of civilization, particularly of the city people who rejoice in exploiting the weak, humble and innocent. Sita has an answer to her dilemma in Cavafy s poem. The innermost urge of Sita is to identify herself with the right No; She almost says the right No to the order and routine life with Raman. But she is not fully prepared to go to that extent of defying the ordinariness of her existence. She meekly submits to Raman s wish to take her back to the mainland. Thus Desai s fictional talent in this novel is quite clear. WORKS CITED Banerjee, Uma. An Existential Approach to Maladjustment in Marital Relations in Anita Desai s Novels. Indian Women Novelists. Ed. R.K. Dhawan. Set I. Vol. II. New Delhi: Prestige Books, Desai, Anita. Where Shall We Go This Summer. Orient Paperbocks, All the references are from this book. Dhawan, R.K. Ed. Introduction. Indian Women Novelists. Set I. Vol.I. New Delhi: Prestige Books, Gopal, N. R. A Critical Study of the Novels of Anita Desai. Delhi: Atlanta Publishers and Distributors,1995. Gupta, R. K. The Novels of Anita Desai: A Feminist Perspective. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers & Distributors, Pathak, R.S. The Alienated Self in the Novels of Anita Desai. Indian Women Novelists. Ed. R.K. Dhawan. Set I. Vol. II. New Delhi: Prestige Books, Rao, B. Ramchandra. The Novels of Mrs. Desai: A Study. New Delhi: Kalyani Publishers, VOL. 2 ISSUE 3 MARCH