The Dark Abode: an Oriya novel by Sarojini Sahoo

Selina Hossain

When he writes letter to Kuki in pseudonym, she understands that ‘It is a ploy to hide his identity from the Military Junta.’ Kuki wrote to Safique, ‘Don’t think that there is any less exercise to cook up history in our India. Here the history changes its narrative with the change of rulers. It becomes difficult to ascertain who is the hero, who the villain. The historical facts read by the father are changed when it is the turn of the son to read it. Can you tell when the history of man will be available to man written impartiality?’ The writer does not rest without telling the tale of the individuals, the State, political tit bits, the behaviour of the military and misrule of the State in her novel. The inner conflict gives the heroine much trouble. Different aspects of the crisis of a woman’s life has been described in this novel. The woman fights with herself.

Kuki’s householder, ‘Aniket disrespectfully addresses her as tui, as and when he is angry. Forgetting the right or wrong he uses slang and abuses her, ‘You hussy, neither does she sleep nor allows others to sleep. She moves round the house like a ghost.’

Along side such abuses Kuki’s confessions are there – ‘yes, she loves Aniket. Without him Kuki's existence is incomplete. Still she waits for Aniket, maintaining his family. The children have not yet learned to walk on their feet. Two more Scenes are yet to be acted in her life. Aniket please come back. You are not Safique to break the card-house; you are Aniket, you should come back.’

This inner conflict is of a family, of a society, of the time. The love of the heroine for her husband, her illicit love for another with promises to wait for him, all these tell us that the name of this novel is ‘The Dark Abode’. The woman is there to drag on this false housewifery. The area which is marked exclusively as belonging to her, the housewife under the patriarchal system, is too easily intruded by many relationships, many attachments. The lady, by using technology and analyzing human behaviour, understands that that area is not exclusively hers. There dwells many maladjustments, many falsehoods.

Not following the traditional paths but by using many incidents, happenings in the contemporary world, Sarojini Sahoo has defined the world of woman in her novel under review. She has shown how the lives of men and women are so disjoined that there remains no place for deep sympathy and steady love.

(The Review of the Book is in Bengali , published in Shamokal a Bengali daily of Bangladesh in its October 10, 2008 issue and reviewed by Ms. Selina Hossain ( saquib@agni.com ), the famous writer of Bangladesh and translated by Aju Mukhopadhyay, a bilingual writer, who lives in Pondi

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