Lessons in Forgetting by Anita Nair summary

LESSONS IN FORGETTING

                  - Anita Nair

Synopsis:

          Anita Nair is a popular women writer in modern India. Her novels create an easy way for readers to understand life. In general, she deals with the radical changes in social roles and attitude towards marital relationships in her works. Her novel "Lessons in Forgetting" is a wonderful story of redemption, forgiveness and second chances. Meera is a socialite and is confused character when her husband Giri leaves her two children, with her mother and grandmother. J.A.Krishnamurti or J.A.K, an eminent cyclone studies expert, who is coming to India to find out the truth behind the fatal accident of his daughter Smriti. The paths of Meera and J.A.K  were intertwined by a series of coincidences. Both have a ruined past. They forgive the people who caused their unhappy events in the past and they start their new beginnings with promises.

Introduction:

          Anita Nair is inspired from her real life experiences. In Lessons in Forgetting,  she portrays about how women suffer in a sociological system that is forced in many ways to opress, humiliate and abuse them. She raises some questions in her novel, making the readers to think about the ideological base of sociological role in this traditional society. Two main characters of the novel Meera and J.A.K face many obstacles in their lives separately. When they meet each other, they try to find solutions to their problems and also find comfort each other by forgiving the people who hurt their lives. 

The Story of Meera:

          The Lilac house plays an important role in Meera's life. Mr. Raghavan Menon, a native of Calicut, who works in Calcutta and falls in love with Charu. She is a Bengali woman and he married her. A few years later, Charu died and Raghavan Menon sent his daughter Leela to study at Santiniketan. Raghavan Menon's brothers did not like Raghavan Menon's arrival to Calicut. So they sent him a cheque for his share in the family property. At that time, a Bengali director 

who spotted Leela and motivated her to work in Hindi cinema by changing her name as Lily. Lily married a Hungarian painter named Sandor and came to live in the Lilac house. But the house took for ninety nine years lease by Raghavan. Then Lily begot Saro. Saro fall in love with her best friend's brother and married him. Later, Saro's husband died in an accident. When Saro was 39, Sandor died. She came to Lilac house for seeking shelter with her 19 year old daughter Meera who is the Protagonist of the novel. Meera holds a master degree in English.

           Giri was the son of a poor man in Palakad. He was good at his studies. His Maths teacher Sivaraman Iyer guided him away from home, first to the Regional Engineering College, where his eyes widened about a world he never existed. Later, He joined in IIM in Ahmedabad. He got placed in the campus recruitment and found a job in the corporate world. He was a good planner also. 

          As a business matter, Giri went to the house Lilac with some people for a photoshoot. He is more attracted towards the house and plans to marry Meera and wishes to settle there, because of attaining the house. Then Meera suddenly falls in Giri's trap in the name of love. She starts realizing Giri's attachment towards her. Giri convinces her with his lovable tone and promising words. After marriage, Meera changes herself as a corporate wife of Giri and becomes a cook book writer. The couple have two children. Nayantara, the 19 year old daughter who studies in The Indian Institute of Technology at Madras and Nikhil, who is thirteen year old. Then Meera becomes a socialite. Giri plans to start a new business. For that, he needs money. He wishes to sell the Lilac house but Meera is not agree with his plan, moreover she cannot sell the house. Why because the house will revert back to the original owner after forty five years. Giri does not know about the contract scheme of the house. Meera tries to convince him but he refuses to listen her words. She is unaware of his intention. When the children are laid in her arms, the fulfillment she knows that drowns her in its completeness. But Giri is not like that. If he cannot have the benefit of this house, he does not want her anymore and also his children too. 

           One fine day in a party, he leaves Meera with their two children, her mother and grandmother. After that, she understood the intention of Giri rom his unfinished mail.

After Giri leaves, Meera is confused to write another book, but the publisher has lost faith in her. She has to draw on all her mental and emotional resources as she tries to provide for the family. She takes a job as a Research Assistant to J.A.Krishnamurti who is called J.A.K, the guru of simulated cyclones. When Giri left her in the party, it was J.A.K who dropped Meera and her son at her house. But, at that time, Meera did not know that in future she will give solace to

the mind of J.A.K whose mind is like a directless ship due to unexpected cyclones.

 Kala Chithi tells J.A.K to accept the truth that "No one is ever responsible for what happens to someone else.

You have to accept that. It is the truth. Whatever it is my life or Smriti's" (233). Giri beginsa new life and demands a divorce. When Meera's mother Saro dies in an accident, Giri does not come for a help, but J.A.K helps her. The novelist skillfully brings the rebel against the

traditional role of the woman and creates a curiosity in the minds of the readers to know about

the roles of those characters with the life of the main character, Meera.

The Tale of JAK

Kitcha's father (Appa) never wishes for a wife, a child and the grihasthaashrama. He decides to join an ashram. But because of the compulsion of his parents, Appa married Sarada and had Kitcha, his son. After, fourteen years of marriage,Appawalksout off his house. Sarada visited various temples in search of her husband. She took the Bachelor's degree in Education and she becomes a teacher. She married a Physics teacher anda year after their marriage, they went to Tanzania. After the death of J.A.K'S mother,hewent toUSfor further studies and became Prof.J.A.Krishnamurti (J.A.K).

JAK has marries to Nina. She belongs to Madras. They have two daughters, Smriti and Shruti. He is known for the reader of omens, the collector of warnings and the storm warning man. He is a very accurate in his predictions. He spends more time in studying cyclone. Most of the time, he stays out of his house. Like Meera, he fails to sense the change. His absence at home has created a distance among between them. As Nina is a short temper, their marriage comes to an end. Both get divorced and Smriti lives with J.A.K and Shruti lives with Nina.

Smriti, much interested in listening the tales of India. She comes to India for her Undergraduate studies. She meets one of her friends Shivu in the Shakti Forum. Rupa becomes the coordinator of the Forum, plans to conduct a play on the theme of female foeticide. Smriti actively participated in the play. With her friend Rishi Menon she goes to Minjikapuram. While she is walking near a sea beach, she gets injured by a bit of broken glass. She goes to the nearby hospital for treatment. There, she noticed many pregnant women and comes to know that every women came for scanning in order to find the sex of the fetus. If the report of fetus is girl child, they should do abortion either willingly or forcibly. Smriti felt that it is an illegal and wishes to stop it. She tries to collect the proof against that for making a report. She meets Chinnathayi, whose daughter dies at the nursing home in abortion. Smriti was in need of some proof regarding

the female infanticide problem from Chinnathayi. She also promises to help Smriti. But, the people who supporting the scanning method, they warn her friend to leave the village and also they threatened Chinnathayi. They send a message in the name of Chinnathayi and ask her to come to the sea beach. When Smriti comes there, those people destroy her and she becomes a motionless, pathetic frozen figure.

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people gave their different opinion about her accident. J.A.K feels that he is about to know the truth, unfortunately it happens all in vain. As Meera, he also comes to a situation to think about hisfuturelife.The shocking experienced of Meera over Giri's sudden disappearance from her life is nothing when compared to the blow that J.A.K receives over the tragedy of his daughter.

The mutual understanding between Meera and J.A.K leads to a fresh promising beginning

J.A.K takes Meera to his house at Bangalore. Both of them share their thoughts about their families. Meera talks about her daughter Nayantara who is at IIT, Chennai. J.A.K talks about his daughter Smriti who is also nineteen years old. The description of Smriti's room and Smriti is a very touching one. The novelist's artistic hand creates sympathy not only in the mind of Meera but also in the minds of the readers. A few shelves hold books. The rest of the room is covered with dolls of every material, organic and manmade; precious and ordinary.

But it is the girl on the bed who causes Meera to grip her bag even more tightly. Her eyes crinkle. Is that girl? She hasn't seen anything like this creature. Not even in her disaster documentation. A wave of revulsion washes over her.

It lies pole-axed. Legs separate and hands flung wide apart. Swathed in a blouse and pyjamas of fine cotton, its hair razed to stubble. Thin as paper and almost as pale, the skin stretched across the bones, causing the cheeks to hollow inwards. The eyes wide open, cast of glass. The mouth askew. A face stricken in a permanent leer. Something about the hardness of the stare and the grim mouth gives it an evil cunning.

When Meera is stunned by the creature's appearance, J.A.K comes forward and tells her that creature is his daughter Smriti. Meera starts showing a motherly attitude towards Smriti. At

home her grandmother Lily encourages her to make a new life: "If there is a chance for you to make a new life, you must ... When your father died I should have told Saro this. But I didn't. I

A new look that turns you into a new woman. Get real, Meera. Get real before your life slips away from you. (309)

Lily's words are uttered for the sake of Meera as per the story but the real motive of the novelist is to create awareness among the women about modernity.

J.A.K suffered so much when he listened to Chinnathayi's report about the fatal accident of his daughter. "The booming treacherous sea waited, but anything was better than what these predatory beasts could do to her. And then the monster king of the rubbish-the giant twisted log that lay on its side-rose with the wave and came to slam against her head." (357)

Meera on her part thinks: "This could have been my Nayantara, she thinks. If it had been my child, how would I have endured it?"(358)

Meera subsides into silence and she sees J.A.K's shoulders heave. Meera starts consoling him and at the same time shrugs away the sadness that threatens to swamp her. "The gentle afternoon rain, washing away the past. He feels cleansed, alive, and as life stirs beneath the endure , remain steadily pocovisional

gentle but persistent pressure of rain on earth, within him a movement, an awakening, a tentative shaping of possibilities". He feels "she can read him. That much he is certain of one day perhaps, he will find the words."(360) Both understand with each other.

Conclusion

Through the narration of the lives of the two characters, namely Meera and J.A.K, the novelist brings out the theme of forgiveness by describing various events that happened in their lives.

Meera faces an embarrassing situation when her husband Giri leaves her with their two children, mother and grandmother in the middle of the party and also disappears from her life.

But Meera forgives him and takes the steps on her own to lead a respectable life. She is steady and careful in her new life.

"She will be there with him, Meera decides. But to keep herself alive, she will need to drudge all the selfishness that lies deep within her. That alone will ensure that J.A.K does not swallow her up, as once Giri did." (365)

She cannot give him the reassurance as he wants from her. Then she thinks how she savours the pomegranate fruit best when she eats it seed by seed rather then as a handful thrown into her mouth. She takes a cue from that."Of how resurrection is to be fashioned one day at a time." (365). So, Meera does not what she can. She rests her head against his arm. She will be with J.A.K but to a limit.

J.A.K is of the view that whatever happens in one's life, it is inevitable. It has been all decided by someone in his surroundings. But, he never takes revenge upon them; instead of he learned how to forgive. He starts to forgive his father, his mother Sarada who marries another

man, his wife Nina who has divorced him and the persons who are responsible for his daughter's fatal accident and makes up his mind to accept Meera's entry into his life as a promising one.

I . W B&AIBbayaffiM.A Engush

18)cop LESSONS IN FORGETTING

(Anita Nair)

CRITICAL APPRECIATION OF LESSONS IN FORGETTING

Lessons in Forgetting is a tale of redemption, forgiveness and second chances. 1 describes the lives of two characters based in Bangalore - J.A.Krishnamurti (JAK), and Meara The story revolves around Meera, a happy corporate wife and cookbook writer whose life turn upside down when ner husband walks out on their marriage. Responsible for not just her children but her mother and grandmother and their old family home in Bangalore, Meera takes up a parttime job with a cyclone studies expert, who is dealing with his own traumatic past. The two narratives come together and through a series of coincidences, the lives of Meera and her employer get intertwined in strange ways. Parallels are constantly drawn between life and the unpredictability of cyclones.

The first story in the book is that of Meera.(Meera, goose-girl Meera (explained in the book), is a high society wife and a writer of cookery and social etiquette books. She lives in a plush ancestral house called 'The Lilac House' with her husband Giri, son Nikhil, mother Saro and her grandmother, Lily. Her daughter Nayantara lives away from home due to her studies. Everything seems to be going really well for Meera until she attends a high society party with her husband and son. Halfway through the party, her husband disappears and she later learns that he has actually left her and their kids. Suddenly, Meera is left to fend for herself and her family and the house.

The second story is that of J.A.Krishnamurti or JAK a renowned expert on cyclones who comes back to India for good. in the search of something. A divorcee, he is keen on finding out what happened to Smriti, his nineteen year old daughter who lies comatose after going through a "freak" accident in a village in South India. His idea is to trace his daughter's last few days in Minjikapuram, the place where he grew up. Kala, his mother's sister stays with him and takes care of Smriti. Meera and JAK's life later intervene in an intricate way.

Lessons in Forgetting lays bare the life of a typical Socialite Meera with a successful, corporate husband, a well educated daughter in a booming field, and an obedient, lovable son. She has her own assets like an ancient house which would fetch a bomb in the market and her

own thriving and a grandmother. career as a well-known She makes all cook the right book moves writer. of Of a social course, butterfly: the house dresses chic, flirts mother abitandmakes smartbutinane conversation. That particular day, when thestory opens, is a shocker where her whole world turns topsy turvey.Her husbandis missingfrom theparty.She has to somehow reach home by taking a lift from a stranger JAK. From thenonherwholelife twists and never stops spinning. Her life and that of the stranger who gave her a lift, who is a cyclone expert from the US get intertwined. She ends up working for him to support her family as her husband never reappears in her life and every link to him is lost. She is a successful woman, and yet she becomes a lost lamb when her husband leaves (only in the financial aspect). She has to transform from a social butterfly to busy bee gathering nectar forher family.Of course, she gathers information as a research assistant for JAK, the cyclone expert.

JAK has a vastly different tragedy in his life. He is a divorced male with a teenage daughter who is in a state of coma due to a mysterious sexual assault that happened years ago, who lives out a vegetative state. JAK sets out to unravel the mystery to assuage his pain and guilt of not having been able to protect her. Nair again displays her mastery in depicting people and events in depth by connecting to the very core of their being. Her portraits of people come to life as with a realistic brush she touches up the minutest details which give it life and authenticity;so that the characters get finely etched and identifiable. She derives her strength from her understanding of the inner drives of the characters. Her ease of flitting from female psyche to male psyche; the appropriate idiom that roll out easily and connect with the characters is her unique trait. She effortlessly gets her readers' intense emotional and intellectual engagement with her story as she once again proves to be a master story teller. Her intense scrutiny of relationships such as marriage or family is well wrought out. She brings in the element of destiny very convincingly by connecting it with the cyclical nature of events in one's life. The part of poetic justice or redemption is very hard to digest as not everyone faces its harsh punishment.

The two protagonists Meera and JAK meet each other when their life is falling apart and they are in the eye of the storm; JAK looking for truth behind the ghastly act inflicted on his daughter and Meera looking for her lost husband whom she cannot even begin to search for. Nair finds an apt metaphor of Cyclone for the devastation engulfing both Meera and JAK. Nair's insight delves into the essential natures of hot and cold of the two elements of Cyclone - JAK

and Meera respectively; the depiction of them in the heart of it; the aftermath of Cyclone, as in the picking up of the pieces of their lives after the devastation of their perfect world.

Nair's first novel, based in Bangalore, lovingly features an old bungalow as if a living character named "the Lilac House". It has been a historical piece belonging to her family since half a century. Her husband would have loved to lay his hands on it and the mystery of his disappearance seems to suggest that there was heart burn between them regarding it. Both the characters: Meera and JAK, continually revisit their past to make sense of their present while the metaphor of cyclone propels their story forward. Lessons in Forgetting is all about recovery and new beginnings. It is about forgiveness and second chances for everyone. It is about trust and caring of one another in the world. It is about men and women needing and supporting each other.

Nair as usual thumbing her nose at convention and the well-trodden path has her own take on midlife crisis, teenage misidentify, female infanticide, sin and redemption through the well etched characters of Smriti, Rishi, Nikhil or Chinnathayi. Her greatest skill is her ability to give voice to one's common fears, desires; one's everyday thoughts and actions. Her scrutiny of a woman's life with its passage of girlhood, friendship, marriage, parenthood seems to suggest an important ingredient of forgiveness and adaptability to make its course smoother.

Nair is not a feminist but a realist. Her characters attain stature according to the roles they play. It is incidental that apart from JAK and Meera, four other characters: her mothergrandmother duo, Smriti and Kala Chiti stand out in their integrity and strength of character. They linger longer in our mind. It never makes a cultural difference as of the four characters, the young Smriti is from abroad, Meera's family is from urban India and Kala Chiti depicts the rural side of complex India. It is to Anita's credit that she fits in the minor characters as convincingly into the theme and pattern of her story. Her language is simple and hard hitting; her tempo of story-telling building up from a slow pace to finally exploding around us as does the lives of the protagonists. Yet the story ends with a note of positivity and hope and with a valuable lesson to forget and forgive; to move on with courage and conviction.

It is a story of a father's attempt to find a closure to his daughter's comatose condition. "Never run away from things that terrify you" was a lesson that J.A.Krishnamurti had instilled

in his daughter Smriti when she was young, and he probably regrets doing so, for the results could be terrifying. A reality one should wake up to. JAK is obsunately following a trail of clues trying to find out what happened to his once vivacious teenage daughter Smriti, a drama student who was following her heart at Minijikapuram, a small coastal town in Tamil Nadu. She is only 19, and now lays wasted on bed at home.

Meera, on the other hand, has her own challenges. One fine day at a party, her husband just disappears leaving her to battle with their two growing children, her mother and grandmother. She gets the friendship of JAK. Fate brings them together as friends and Meera helps JAK in his endeavour. When we first see Meera, she is a carefully groomed corporate wife with a successful career as a writer of cookbooks. Then one day her husband fails to come home after a party and she becomes responsible not just for her children but her mother and grandmother, and the running off Lilac House, their rambling old family home in Bangalore. Enter Professor J.A. Krishnamurti, or JAK, a renowned cyclone studies expert, ona very different trajectory in life. In a bedroom in his house lies his nineteen-year-old daughter Smriti, left comatose after a vicious attack on her while she was on holiday at a beachside town. A wall of silence and fear surrounds the incident - the grieving father is helped neither by the local police, nor by her boyfriend in his search for the truth. Through a series of coincidences, Meera and JAK find their lives turning and twisting together, with the unpredictability and sheer inevitability of a cyclone. And as the days pass, fresh beginnings appear where there seemed to be only endings. It is a heartwarming story of redemption, forgiveness and second chances.

The novel touches issues like female foeticide, gender-biased sex selection and male gaze, which are usually brushed under the carpet The story moves from third person to first person to a character narration from time to time. Smriti's tale forms the soul of the book without a doubt. As JAK unveils the mystery that led to her current state, our hearts break time and again. With nothing but a few names in hand, he traces her days just before her accident. He discovers that his daughter was working for a good cause and this is what led to her current situation. The scenes that describe the accident towards the end chapters are heart wrenching and disturbing So are the scenes where JAK bathes his teenage daughter or applies her lip balm for her. Kala's back story was very well narrated and stands out on its own where she is no longer reduce i to a supporting character.