Diddi- My Mother's Voice

Diddi (2005)


Author: Ira Pande
Publisher: Penguin
Price: Rs 250
Genre: Biography

I picked this up at a quaint local bookstore recently, and learnt that this one-year old book without releasing with any hype,  had already got a good number of readers asking for it.
Diddi is a tribute that a daughter pays to her mother by way of bittersweet memoirs told in a very unique literary style.
Author Ira Pande, who worked as both a university teacher and then editor, unravels page by page the ordinary yet extraordinary life led by her mother - the famous Hindi novelist Shivani aka Guara Pant in this deeply personal yet affecting piece of work.
‘Perhaps because we called our mother Diddi (elder sister), our relationship with her was always somewhat ambivalent…she was for us a difficult sibling, an eccentric, much older sister…’ she says in her opening lines.
The easiest route for Ira Pande, as the author, would have been to simply to write a biography on her now deceased mother. Instead, she ingeniously infuses her narrations with generous sprinklings of her mother’s writing, giving us a real insight into the mind of this witty, sensitive and impulsive writer.
Guara’s (Shivani) writings can be viewed at two levels - The first is the surface one, where she writes about her blissful childhood in Gujarat, her earliest memories of the people, mostly several of her household aids, who formed an important part of her life.
The second level, as Ira Pant points out, is where the real story of Gaura lies. As most romantic idealists and dreamers, she used her writings as a shield to escape from the complexities and harsh truths of the real world. And consecutively, ‘she bled into her plots, often not knowing she was doing so’. Her hidden desires, regrets and pains, which she never made evident before her near and dear ones, preferring to hide them beneath her jovial, wry wit, made their way subconsciously into her stories. Her disappointment with her marriage, her take on the disintegration of the joint family system…all these themes found their way in her fiction.
The fact that this is not a straightforward biography can make it a wee bit confusing in parts and might need you to re-visit certain chapters. Also, there’s an erratic pattern to the presentation, possibly a metaphor for Gaura’s restless, wandering mind.
The language is racy and the choice of stories is very interesting. The parts involving Gaura’s childhood are highly readable, given its old world charm and fascinating characters.
The novel is then, especially useful in studying how reality creeps into fiction writing, creating characters that tell a truer story.