Jaishree Misra’s Ancient Promises,
a sensitive account of a girl’s efforts to find her destination in life, is
full of keen psychological observations, and culminates in a sane and balanced
view of life. Transplanted from her home and the familiar world of Delhi at the
age of eighteen to a highly conventional and aristocratic Nair family in Kerala,
suffering from the pangs of separation from her first love, married to a man
who is neither good nor bad but simply an ‘expert in the art of escape’, and
surrounded by nasty and sly in-laws who will never let her belong to their
world, the problems Janu has to face are numerous. All her efforts to endear
herself to the family of her husband, which includes even begetting a child who
is supposed to bridge the gap between herself and her new family, are in vain.
It comes as a terrible shock to her when her child is declared ‘mentally
handicapped’, but her intense attachment with the baby forms her best
protection, and surprisingly, also her means of salvation. She starts rebelling
against the snobbish conventions of the family, and slowly there emerges the
first faint outline of a plan of escape. She manages a foreign scholarship to
go abroad, and it is then, when she is almost ready to get out, that the
panicky husband and in-laws try their best to stop her. The last step in this
manoeuvre is to take away her daughter Riya. Still she goes to London and
completes her course. These are her stolen days of perfect happiness with her
lover Arjun. But she must return to Kerala to get her Riya back, because she
believes that a life of happiness built on the pain and sufferings of other
people cannot last. There is a lacuna in her soul which only her daughter can
fill. Thus her return to Kerala is at the risk of losing even the only other
happiness of her life, that is, Arjun. Back in Kerala, things suddenly turn out
in her favour, she gets the divorce, Riya is returned to her, and she is ready
to start a new life with Arjun.
Now the question Jaishree poses, Janu faces, and the
reader wants to pursue, is this: what we call life, this life with all its
sufferings, acts of injustice, and rationally incomprehensible puzzles, like,
why should innocent people suffer, should people accept suffering as their
fate, should we break the cycle of karma and rewrite our story as we like,
etc., well, does this life have a design or is it all merely chance? If there
is a God who is at the helm of affairs, has he made a mess of things? Or to put
it simply: what are we to do with this life when we find ourselves at odds with
its main current? Perhaps this is the single, most important question that,
since time immemorial, sages and philosophers and great novelists have been
trying to tackle. The attitude Jaishree takes towards this question is perhaps
more important than the answer she gives. It is the inexplicable suffering of
innocent children that makes Ivan ‘return his ticket’ to God’s kingdom in **The
Brothers Karamazov**, the same which generates and justifies the atheism of
Tarrou in Camus’s The Plague, the very same which turned Mulk Raj Anand
into an atheist at a very early age itself. Now let us see how Jaishree Misra
deals with this issue.
Janaki, or simply Janu, the heroine of **Ancient
Promises**, presents this question in the very beginning of the book. She
wonders, “ if some God had finally given up his endless task. Had finally drowned all his tools in sheer
despair at the weight of errors and mistakes that He simply wasn’t able to
control anymore”(p.5). She was not sure whether it was her mistake or His; “
was it a mistake at all or part of some grand plan? That’s what I want to think
it was. A grand plan, ancient and meaningful and free of blame”(p.5). She is
sure that there has to be a reason for everything and that nothing can happen
without a reason. And the whole of the story succeeds in bringing out this
conviction in a forceful and convincing way.
Now what are the things which distinguish this tale from
the all too familiar one of a woman leaving her home to run away with a lover?
First of all, it must be remembered that her art of characterization sees to it
that no character other than Janu receives the ‘close-up’. For example, Arjun
does not appear as a ‘real’ character throughout the novel, and it is
especially so in the first part. This, I think, is both deliberate and
significant. He does not somehow belong to the real world so that we do not
pass any judgment on Janu when she decides to marry Suresh. If the character of
Arjun had been developed more thoroughly and if we had witnessed his pain and
disappointment at her betrayal, our response to Janu’s action could not have
been as unequivocal as it is now. The same argument is true about Suresh too,
for given a glimpse into his thoughts and feelings at her betrayal, it would
have been difficult to withhold moral judgment from Janu’s actions. Similarly,
when Janu rushes into the arms of Arjun, and as she enjoys the moment of bliss
without guilt, we are convinced that it is beyond blame. For one thing, the
dream like figure of Arjun does not seem to be real enough to bring in moral censure.
What she experiences then is a moment of pure bliss, uncontaminated by any
bitterness or selfishness or even a sense of taking revenge on her insensitive
husband. The purity of her experience is thus effected, by a two-way action,
which while cutting off her husband from the picture on one hand manages at the
same time to sublimate the lover into an ethereal image so that the question of
praise or blame does not occur.