Book Review: 'A Life Apart'

Book: A Life  Apart
Author: Prabha Khaitan
Translated by: Ira Pande
Publisher: Zubaan
Pages: 288
Price: Rs395

An eye doctor looked into her eyes, remarked, “I don’t think I have examined a more beautiful pair of eyes till now”, and 22-year-old Prabha Khaitan was in love. So blindly did she fall for the much-married, 40-plus father of five, that she chose to live a doomed life with him as “the other woman” for close to three decades, suffering as much social humiliation as ill-treatment from the self-centred, dithering Dr Saraf.

Apart from the initial throes of passion, the relationship, between a naïve girl from a conservative Marwari family and a well-established doctor, had little going for it. The story of this relationship, written by Prabha long after Dr Saraf’s death, is a bitter recollection of stressful times, with the doctor calling all the shots.

In order not to get labelled as his ‘keep’, the besotted Prabha plunged into a leather export business so she could be financially independent. It was not easy. Those days, girls of her community were married after a basic education and were expected to live in their husbands shadow. Stuck between family pressures and the turbulent industrial climate of the ’60s in Calcutta, Prabha nevertheless managed to make a success of her business.

Did this increase her self-worth and put her relationship on an equal footing? No. The insecure, older man controlled all her earnings, making even his son a partner in her business, and threw jealous fits about the men she interacted with professionally.

Why did an educated, independent woman surrender herself so completely and abjectly to a relationship from which she seemed to have got nothing? “My relationship became driven with rancour and despair,” writes Prabha in her autobiography. Repeatedly, there are passages of introspection where she frankly admits that her relationship suffocated her. But still she did not break free from it.

This is why the book leaves even the reader feeling claustrophobic. There is no cathartic satisfaction reading about unrelieved subjugation to a man and his family (even his wife manipulated her) by a woman who, otherwise, knew how to hold her own. Most of the moments Prabha spent with her lover had her cringing and weeping before him. Why? Was Dr Saraf a habit she was addicted to? Clearly, he was. And Prabha should have written this book while he was alive to not just get rid of this bad habit but to expose Dr Saraf’s shallow character to a world that condemned her but awarded him a Padma Shri!

A little more engrossing than Prabha’s life with Dr Saraf are the passages that describe the political upheavals that were taking place during her student days and, later, as she set up business. The story of how established Marwari business houses had to leave Bengal for more business-friendly states is also the story of Bengal’s decline. With no rigid ideology colouring her views, she describes the times objectively, perceptively.

Her encounters with struggling, working women in other countries also makes interesting reading. The balancing act that the so-called weaker gender had to do in the ‘60s and ‘70s between professional and family lives was the same all over the world, whether it was Los Angeles, Hong Kong or Calcutta.

The biography ends with the death of Dr Saraf, when Prabha was 50. How she lived her life, unshackled from an unproductive affair, we do not know. Neither do we know how and when the son the publisher refers to came into her life.

A Life Apart is an honest narrative that many women will empathise with and, perhaps, learn a lesson or two from.