And so the Ganeshas in niches, the decorated thresholds, the mango leaf torans, the Oms, the Swastikas, the charms and amulets - all to keep disaster at bay, to stave off the nemesis of a jealous god.
Such small remedies, these, to counter the terrible disease of being human, of being mortal and vulnerable ..."

So thinks Madhu, the protagonist in Shashi Deshpande's latest novel, 'Small Remedies'. Madhu, faced with the terrible vacuum caused by the death of Adit, her only son, sets out on a long and lonely journey in an attempt to come to terms with her loss. Madhu's healing process starts when she is confronted with the lives of two other women, Leela and Savitribai Indorekar. She knew that Leela, her aunt, with whom she had spent her youth and adulthood, was the black sheep of the family, a widow who had remarried - that too Joe, a Christian. Now Madhu realises what an an extraordinary woman her aunt was, that she was a woman who participated in the '42 Quit India movement, who had gone underground, and was responsible for many daring deeds.

Accepting the offer made by Chandru, a family friend, Madhu takes a brave step out of her desperate situation, and comes to Bhavanipur to write the biography of Savitribai, a star singer of the Gwalior gharana. She knew Savitribai from her childhood, when she had lived next door, with her lover and tablaji, Ghulam Saab, and their only daughter, Munni. Savitribai, a daughter-in-law from a respected and conservative Brahmin family, had given up that life to devote herself to music. But Munni rejects the name given to her by her parents, and calls herself Meenakshi. Madhu and Munni become friends. Much later Munni succeeds in breaking away from her mother, and returns to her grand parents' family, finally getting a new identity as Shailaja Joshi. When Madhu meets Munni, years later, in a bus in Bombay, Munni does not want to recognise her, and does not want to be recognised as Munni. Madhu is perplexed when she realises that it was not just the daughter who denies the mother, the mother too has forgotten about her only daughter, at least apparently. Thinking about Bai's silence over Munni, it dawns upon Madhu that both Savitribai and Leela had tried to break out of the shackles, and both had paid the price for their attempts to break out.

It is trying to unravel the mystery of who the real Savitribai Indirekar is - is she just the star musician, is she the brave Brahmin woman who dared to leave her traditional home and go after her dreams, is she the unfortunate mother who rejected her own daughter and was rejected by the same - that Madhu understands that truth is something beyond the words by which one tries to portray it. Her attempt at writing the biography tells her how little the idea of truth is connected with words, how much of it lies in our connections to the unseen world which, and that whether we know it or not, we are always conscious of. It is then that she understands how wrong it was of her to tell Som, her husband, what had happened to her as a fifteen year old girl, when an uncontrollable impulse had made her body respond to the comforting hug of a friend of her father. Sharing the memory of this one incidence in which she had sex with a man who was old enough to be her father, an incidence which drove the man to hang himself, Madhu realises what a blow she had given to Som's image of her as a chaste and untouched person. And she sees her loving, generous and kind husband turn into a savage, a haunted and haunting man. It was during one such scenes that Adit, their only son, had walked out of the house, never to return. It was the time in which Bombay was rocked with religious violence. A bomb placed in a bus blows up Adit, and Munni, to smithereens. The pages describing Madhu's uncertainty of where her son is, her waiting for him through the violence ridden days, her searching him on the crowded streets of the city even when Som tries to tell her that Adit is dead, and her final acceptance of the inevitable truth are some of the most poignant ones in Indian literature.

Madhu's wound starts healing when she meets a young family celebrating a upanayanam ceremony in a simple manner in the Bhavani temple in Bhavanipur. On being asked by the mother to bless the small boy, Madhu thinks: "What do I say? … what blessing can contend against our mortality? Mustard seeds to protect us from evil, blessings to confer long life - nothing works. And yet we go on. Simple remedies? No, they're desperate remedies and we go on with them because, in truth, there is nothing else. She ends up saying 'Sukhi bhava', 'Be happy!'

The healing process is accentuated when Hasina, the grand daughter of Ghulam Saab, Bai's student for the past fifteen years and her lone companion, gives a concert in the temple in Bhavanipur. Listening to her sing perfectly a vachana by Akka Mahadevi, Madhu feels that it's not the dead poet's dream alone that Hasina is singing of, but her own as well..., of my dreams too, so many of them, all woven about Adit. And Som's dreams for his son. It's all over now, there are no more dreams left for me, for either of us... Returning home after the concert Madhu finds a letter from Som, telling her, "Come home. We need to be together at this time." Madhu knows that this is how it should be. That she should be with Som, that they have to recreate their son, to invoke his presence and make his existence real. Because, it's not just living children who need to be free, the dead clamour for release as well. Madhu then understands that as long as there is memory, there's always the possibility of retrieval, as long as there is memory, loss is never total.

It is not only in these details, in these meditative moments which heal, that 'Small Remedies' carries the unmistakable stamp of being the work of Shashi Deshpande. Like Indu in 'Roots and Shadows', Jaya in 'That Long Silence', and Saru 'The Dark holds no Terrors', Madhu also leaves the home in which she has lived since her marriage, and tries to solve her problems on her own. Similar to her earlier novels, here also it is death that draws the final stroke, that reveals the vulnerability of human existence, of human relationships. That final blow comes in a sense as a release from a cosy and foggy existence, and sets Madhu on the search for answers to her eternal questions. The first step out of the familiar surroundings is also the first step towards discovering one's true self, of recognising the truth that sets the tune to one's existence. It is also the first step towards realising that any healing process has to start within one's own self, that no keeping of Ganeshas in niches, no waving of clenched fists holding mustard seeds, no muttering of incantations can help to heal the wound, to ward off the evil.

Madhu, who finally understands this, has taken a step towards the path paved by the seers of the Rigveda who asked, "To which God shall we offer our worship?", words chosen by Deshpande as the epigraph of the book. Deshpande's philosophy seems to be that though each individual has to solve his problems on his own, it does not mean that he has to reject all relationships in life. Her protagonists need to be on their own to come to terms with life, but once they have achieved that, they return to their normal life, fortified by their newly found wisdom. Madhu also returns at the end to her husband, Som.

Deshpande is a master writer in the way she articulates human emotions. Reading her books is like peeping into the hidden corners of one's own mind. Recognising oneself in her characters, one does not feel lonely in the world anymore. Reading her novels and stories is thus an immensely satisfying experience, as reading becomes a healing process. There is also a tension in the book, the kind to which one is accustomed to when reading Deshpande. The plot is never revealed at once, and more questions are posed than answered. This lends such a tautness to the story line that one can hardly put down the book without finishing it, neither can one read it at a stretch as there is so much to understand, to digest, to savour.