Anita Nair's latest novel, The Art of Forgetting, is a compelling read. Its narrative braids together the stories of Mira — a refined, impeccable woman in her forties suddenly abandoned by her husband — and Professor Krishnamurthy, called Jack, a cyclone expert who returns to India from the United States to care for his eldest daughter. At nineteen, she lies immobilized in a coma following an accident whose details remain unclear.
Throughout these pages runs a constant tension: the difficult struggle between tradition — with its values, prejudices, and stereotypes — and modernity, with its promise of freedom and its cost of lost meaning. A reminder that as we gain and improve, we inevitably lose something along the way.
Yet for all its careful and skilled examination, Mira is not truly the novel's protagonist. She is a gifted acrobat, balancing a family on the edge of collapse while reinventing her social, economic, and professional life. The real protagonist — the hero, one might say — is the professor of cyclones: Jack.
Abandoned by his father as a child, Jack grew up consumed by the desire — almost obsession — to be nothing like the man who fathered him. But when he becomes a father himself, he finds himself treading the very path he despised, replaying his father's shadow, albeit in new clothes tied to a different era and geography.
And so The Art of Forgetting becomes Jack's discovery of the father he always wanted to be. For love keeps him steady before what no parent should ever have to hear. Above all, Jack is the father who never stops seeing his daughter in that motionless form.
His Smriti. Because fatherhood — however difficult, however clumsy — is care. The way mothers know it.
C.T., 2011