Dark Holds No Terrors

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Why are you still alive—why didn’t you die?’ Years on, Sarita still remembers her mother’s bitter words uttered when as a little girl she was unable to save her younger brother from drowning. Now, her mother is dead and Sarita returns to the family home, ostensibly to take care of her father, but in reality to escape the nightmarish brutality her husband inflicts on her every night. In the quiet of her old father’s company, Sarita reflects on the events of her life: her stultifying small town childhood, her domineering mother, her marriage to the charismatic young poet Manohar (who turns vicious when he realizes his career is going nowhere and that his wife has overtaken him professionally), her children…. As she struggles with her emotions and anxieties, Sarita gradually realizes that there is more to life than dependency on marriage, parents and other such institutions—and she resolves to use her new found truths to make a better life for herself. The Dark Holds No Terrors is a tremendously powerful portrayal of one woman’s fight to survive in a world that offers no easy outs.

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Shashi Deshpande, daughter of the renowned Kannada dramatist and Sanskrit scholar Shriranga, was born in Dharwad. At the age of fifteen she went to Mumbai, graduated in economics, then moved to Bangalore, where she gained a degree in law. Her writing career began in earnest only in 1970, initially with short stories, of which several volumes have been published. She is the authorof four children`s books and seven previous novels, the best known of which are The Dark Holds No Terror, That Long Silence, which won the Sahitya Akademi award, and Small Remedies. Shashi started writing children`s stories for her two young sons. She recreated her own happy childhood in a small town in her first book, A Summer Adventure, and subsequently wrote two more adventure books. The Naraynpur Incident, her fourth book for children was based on th 1942 Quit India Movement.