After writing God is a River and A Bridge to Nowhere, Haridwar-based author Mona Verma has now come out with a novel titled The White Shadow which tells us the tragic tale of a child widow.
Mona Verma’s book God is a River, a story of faith, spoke of a tale born from the “truth” she heard from her grandfather, lajpat Rai Kapur, who migrated from Gujranwala to India in 1947. “It was my personal journey to discover myself and reach out to the past, inspired by my grandparents,” Mona told The Pioneer. There was a strong strain of Sufi philosophy in the book which made it rich. Just as she had dedicated God is a River to her grandparents, Mona has also this time dedicated the new book to them.
To “the eternal light that shines upon me…Prakash and lajpat Rai Kapur”, her grandparents who brought her up and whom she lost a few years ago.”It was their dream to see my book published. But they were not able to see the day,” said an emotional Mona. Mona’s writing has a depth and sensitivity which speaks of her personality and echoes her thoughts and beliefs. Her portrayal of women characters is heart- warming and extremely detailed.
The main protagonist is Brinda, who becomes a widow at the age of five, a few hours after her marriage, and is thrown out of her own house. She is taken by her father-in-law, Bibhuti, to Banaras to be “settled” in a widow ashram headed by Vasanti Bua. The story is entirely set in Kashi (Banaras) where all the characters gather and face their Karma, their lives getting intertwined with one another.
The twists and turns in the story are important but not as important as the internal action that happens in the hearts, minds and souls of the characters, most of them being women. In fact, some of the sections of the book are categorised by the names of the characters –Sia, Vasanti Bua, Debi, Pradeep, Biswaas, Brinda. The internal landscape, as in Mona’s other works, is more engrossing than the physical places where the people are located.The boy Biswaas, believed to have been drowned at the age of eight after he marries Brinda, turns up as Uday later. This is a major twist in the tale. The irony of it all! Since the age of five, Brinda has been living the gloomy and lonely life of a widow and here we find this boy, Biswaas, alive and well.
However, the end of the book befits the development of the characters over the years which the story covers. Brinda’s pain, Sia’s conflict and guilt, Preeti’s magnanimity, Debi’s anger and resentment at her being a child widow, Vasanti Bua’s concern for the child widows — all this and much more enriches the narrative greatly as it is portrayed vividly by the author. Mona effortlessly writes about the way in which Sia has misunderstood Pradeep whom she thought was no good when an offer for marriage had come for her from his family. When she gets a chance to know him later, she is amazed at how different he is from what she had thought.
She is now alone in her house next door to his. Her parents have died. In her loneliness, she comes to self- realisation and understands herself and others better than she ever did. She is central to the novel, connecting the other characters to each other. The 1992 Ayodhya conflict is also included in the backdrop of the book, adding to the internal conflicts of the characters. Banaras is almost like a character as it is evoked well by Mona. “The oldest city in the world shrouded in a haze of ash and soot, the solemn river with its mud -lined banks, the worn flight of steps leading to the burnished façade of temple steeples…..and an air dense with a rich repository of legends, myths ..”
The spiritual dimensions dominates the book, symbolically stressed by Vasanti Bua’s constant reading of the Bhagvad Gita and reciting its passages to the girls. “As a child, I heard stories from my grandparents. The Bhagvad Gita has been a beacon of light for many and its relevance in today’s times is what makes it the most priceless scripture,” says Mona. The White Shadow is not just a story about child widows. It embraces spirituality, nostalgia, destiny and many broader aspects of life.
