And I remain an eavesdropper to the dead - a review of "If I Had to Tell it Again" by Gayathri Prabhu

I come from a family where stories were considered the bread and butter of real survival. Stories about money, old relatives that had passed, the migration of people, their willingness or unwillingness to adjust, the joys of rediscovering long-lost neighbours - stories floated like smoke rings everywhere. And amidst them were beliefs that my great-grandmother had passed on to my grandmother, my grandmother to my mother and finally, my mother to me. One of these I believe was an oft repeated saying in the family, "The sins of the fathers and forefathers always visit upon their children." To be honest, in all these years, I never went back to verify the exact formation of this statement, because in how it was said was a power that moved me then. And in the last ten years as I went deeper into myself, my patterns, my ways of relating to people, I found the secret answer to always be in the intricate web that tied me to my parents and them to theirs. 

So you can imagine the relief that came from pure resonance when I read Gayathri Prabhu's "If I Had to Tell it Again". By no means an easy read, the book grasped me by body and intellect from the first word itself. An intimate telling of the author's fragmented relationship with her father across chapters, and sometimes an objective narration of intergenerational patterns. 

The first time I attempted reading the book, I failed after the twenty first page. There were way too many triggers for me to continue. So months later, when I went back to it, I took a deep breath and decided to see what the book does to me, from the first written page until the end. In reflection, I found a rare beauty of storytelling that moves beyond description - description of the mundane, the metaphysical and everything in between. Here was an account that sought closure and exploration in the same breath. How else could the author speak of her own confusions, deep down, and measure them against the clarity she had shaped out of her coping mechanisms? 

The ebb and flow of the narrative in "If I Had to Tell it Again" achieves a rare rhythm, as Prabhu moves between her admiration for her now dead father and a bitterness being proof to all that she had wished for in the relationship. One can swim between these shores, one of which is filled with warmth and pride and the other festering with unanswered questions. Allow yourself a little and the text can take you by the hand and guide you into the bygone years of the author's childhood and before you know, walk you into her adult years filled with the pain of growing up a little alone. 

"Do we write as we remember? Or do we remember as we write?" is an example of the kind of reflective questions this autobiographical book raises. As the author gives glimpses of the turns her life takes, you get the picture of a daughter who is human enough in wanting to be understood for who she is and wanting to understand her father in ways that she never did. It is a non-linear consistency that stands out in the text, the author's identity created as a moderator to witness that which the daughter lived. 

In the book, each section is a lifetime. As the telling weaves from the author's internal processing of her own universe to the one she shared with her father, the reader is exposed to the fullness of each person. Coming home to the truth that not even the truth is ever one-sided. Coming closer to cause and effect, only to pause and see why acceptance could be the only way forward. So, when the author describes it in this way - "And I remain an eavesdropper to the dead." - you begin to see how histories are made and remade. 

From a larger perspective, "If I Had to Tell it Again" is an authentic telling of what the collective shies away from. That no family is perfect, and that it is okay to express a chequered history. That parent-child connections linger also in spaces of disharmony. That in creating a current narrative of the past is to make an attempt to question it as well as to make peace with it.