Dispossession and Discomfort in Vivek Shanbhag’s SAKINA’S KISS
Vivek Shanbhag’s novel Sakina’s Kiss (2013) features a protagonist obsessed with possession, uncomfortable in the evolving role of his masculinity, searching for meaning in a life where every answer presents a series of more confounding questions.
Vivek Shanbhag’s breathtaking novel Sakina’s Kiss—translated to English and published in September 2023—is bookended by two separate, mysterious instances of entrance. Each such entrance is into the Bengaluru apartment of Venkataramana, the tale’s protagonist and narrator, who lives there with his wife, Viji, and adult daughter, Rekha. Venkat—as his name has been shortened at work—expresses surprise in the novel’s opening pages at a simple knock on the door, for “who knocks when there is a bell to ring?” (2). The reader is asked an unanswerable question straight away, and hinted towards the idea of a story where all may not be as simply as it may seem, where we may be left with more questions than answers.
Two mysterious men wait at the door. They are looking for, Rekha, who is spending some time in Venkat’s village. The brief interaction leaves Venkat a little unsettled. “I think we should not rule out the presence of evil in our midst simply because we cannot see it,” (7) he later thinks to himself.
As the plot progresses, this ‘evil’ that Venkat imagines isn’t necessarily the presence of evil itself, it’s the presence of the unseen. Through the course of the next few days where Venkat attempts to decipher Rekha’s whereabouts, and later, attempt to understand the secrets his daughter is keeping from him, he remains shrouded behind a veil of ignorance. He is always a step slower to untangling the knots that present themselves, often lost in secrets from his past.
In a later scene in the story, when Venkat is now on the other side of the same entrance to his home—this time with Viji and Rekha by his side—a new mystery completely derails him. Now, the doorway is locked from the inside. Someone has broken into their apartment. With the help of a large gathering of nosy neighbours, Venkat is finally able to enter his own home; a thorough search, however, reveals an unsettling lack of evidence. If there was an evil or a crime committed, Venkat just can’t seem to put his finger on it. “Something has happened here, but I don’t know what. A sharp knife has been thrust in and removed so quickly that there is no trace of blood anywhere. I am waiting for blood to spurt out and show me the wound.” (158)
Would the wound ever be shown? Or will Venkat continue to suffer the malaise of ignorance, the painful symptoms of an unidentified disease?
This is one of the central tensions of Sakina’s Kiss (Vintage), Shanbhag’s second English translated work after the acclaimed Ghachar Ghochar. Like its predecessor, Sakina’s Kiss was also translated from the original Kannada by Srinath Perur, and presents the subtle intimacies of a family’s inner complications, with a protagonist whose interiority strings together much of the tension in the plot.
The idea of possession consumes Venkat: he wants to know Viji’s secrets, to know everything from her past. And it is in any slip of knowledge that he suffers his biggest heartbreaks, knowledge gleaned by others—but not him.
Soon after the initial visit from the mysterious men, Venkat is thrown into a world of more unsolved puzzles and suspense. Shanbhag doesn’t easily placate the reader: every door that opens presents another mysterious door beyond it. For a man who often describes his life in terms of mediocrity, the new complications are almost an aggressive affront to the comforts of Venkat’s routine. He is rocked by encounter with small-time gangsters, dubious journalists, nefarious politicians, and, perhaps worst of all from his perspective, a daughter who thinks for herself.
And it is his fledging relationship with the women in his life—his wife, his daughter—that soon becomes Venkat’s central obsession. In the beginning of the book, Venkat describes himself as someone who comfortably adapted to the changing times of gender and social dynamics. He speaks with pride of the double salary that both he and Viji bring in as a working couple, is happy to denounce caste, and refers to himself as a liberal.
Immediately, however, Venkat self-corrects, “To be frank, I don’t know what I really believed. My attitude was shaped mostly by instinct.” (12-13) It’s an early taste of the narrator’s unreliability. How could a man without convictions convince us of anything?
Even the novel’s title results from a place of uncertainty, from a letter written by Venkat’s uncle, Ramana. Ramana is Venkat’s mother’s beloved brother who goes missing, attracts the attention of police authorities, and is never seen again. He is remembered as the family’s great shame. In flashbacks, Venkat describes Ramana as the rationalist member of the household, left-leaning and against religious and social dogmas. Ramana’s handwritten letters to his family members are almost unintelligible, as if “crows and sparrows had walked all over the pages leaving footprints” (108). The handwriting allows Venkat to imagine a “corresponding chaos” within Ramana himself, as someone with a “contempt for the system.” The chaos stirs Venkat, who only seems to find comfort in order.
“Sakina’s Kiss” is a phrase misread, lost in comprehension from Ramana’s chaotic handwriting. The real meaning behind the phrase almost seems beside the point; in a tense scene, as members of Venkat’s family and local acquaintances try to decipher the letter, Shanbhag’s focus shifts to the gestures and power dynamics that explain the tension of subtext, without necessarily revealing the answers that the readers (and Venkat, too) seek from the story. In a novel filled with troubling dead ends, Shanbag tells us that it’s not the answers matter less than how individuals choose to respond to the questions.
Just like in Ghachar Ghochar, Shanbhag plays careful attention to the changing role of masculinity in Sakina’s Kiss. Venkat often questions his responsibilities and his slipping powers in a world that demands him to dispossess control over the women in his life.
The relationship between Venkat and Viji begins with idyllic, marital bliss. Shanbhag finds space for fierce romantic connection everywhere, from the discovery that both purchased the same personal growth book about living in a healthy marriage, to the glow that Venkat feels from making her laugh. In their first sexual encounter, Venkat feels that first urge to “establish authority” over this wife. “There is nothing as exhilarating as taking possession,” he thinks to himself, “I wanted this ride to last forever.” (27) But despite his efforts, they never have sex in the same way again, and Venkat finds himself already slipping from that position of male authority over his wife.
Shanbhag’s prose is straightforward, the narrative is clear and unambiguous, but the attention to detail and emotional specificities makes the story so devastatingly intimate. The novel charts a careful, close observation of the slow evolution of a marriage, of how a relationship changes, how the fiercest fires of passion slowly dampen into soft embers. The idea of possession consumes Venkat: he wants to know Viji’s secrets, to know everything from her past. And it is in any slip of knowledge that he suffers his biggest heartbreaks, knowledge gleaned by others—but not him.
When Rekha grows up, Venkat wishes to possess her independence, too, to have a say over her ability to make decisions for herself. The men who first arrive at Venkat’s door looking for Rekha infantilize her, calling her “daughter” or “sister”. Venkat doesn’t quite share their views of the need to “protect” girls—or, in Rekha’s case, an adult woman—but he hears them out. But as the novel progresses, Venkat is troubled by Rekha’s liberal ideas, and begins to consider the opposing political ideology. His only identity is in being contrarian to hers. He feels insecure when Rekha begins to have an older male mentor who are not him, wondering if she is only working with him because she finds him attractive. Later, his thoughts run even wilder, as he imagines that Rekha could only be coerced into her task if she was forced by shadowy men who threaten her sexually. For Venkat, these could be the only reasonable motivations: as if his daughter couldn’t be driven by her own agency and ambition.
As a result, Venkat begins to infantalize Rekha too, unwilling to accept that she’s a grown person who has the right to defy his wishes. ““You’re still a little girl, keep that in mind,’ I said, fully knowing that both these words ‘little’ and ‘girl’ would annoy her.”” (128). Later, he considers the idea of Rekha’s marriage, and find the idea of “handing over her responsibility to a husband strangely comforting.” (135)
By the end of the novel, Venkat thinks of Rekha as “naïve” (176) and begins to call her ‘putti’ even as she attempts to have a serious discussion about politics. It may be a term of endearment for young girls, but for Venkat, it is his way of showing Rekha her ‘place’ as a child.
Spurred by Rekha’s mysterious trip and disappearance, the ‘present day’ action in Sakina’s Kiss takes places only over a few days, between the city of Bengaluru and Venkat’s ancestral village of Malnad. The mystery further incites Venkat to consider the complications of his past, his losing grip over the women in his family, and pushes him further into a state of masculine insecurity and psychological self-isolation.
And in this mini-odyssey, Venkat searches for something ordinary to “show itself in a new light” (82-83). As his world unravels, he realizes that this revelation arrives when he is willing to look at the ordinary from a new perspective. After the suspicious break-in at their apartment, Venkat realizes that the “things had barely noticed until then grew prominent. We saw the familiar with newly suspicious eyes,” (147).
And what could be more familiar than family? Venkat sees his wife and daughter through these newly suspicious eyes, too. He is so disillusioned and isolated that he asks himself: “Do I really love anyone? Enough to give my life for them?” (161)
In its own intimate way, this ‘small’ story of a nuclear family comments on the much larger trends around the world of crises of masculinity, of men being troubled by the idea of independent-thinking women, and thus, drowning further into the toxic waters of isolation.
By the novel’s unsettling end, Venkat is fully a stranger to the familiar, a man who can’t ‘protect’ the women in his life, a husband and a father who can’t possess their agency and their secrets. Venkat begins to drift poles apart from them, perhaps to prove to himself that he is independent of them, too. That he doesn’t need them to tell him what is right.
It is here that a larger contemporary political sphere of the world spills into the family’s life, and Venkat finds solace in the very kind of men whom he had doubted in the opening of Sakina’s Kiss, the type of men who had knocked at his door.
In the upcoming elections, Venkat denies telling Viji and Rekha whom he’ll vote for; this is his way of possessing something for himself, just like the one that they’ve kept from him. When he doesn’t vocally brandish the sexist politician on the news, he is excited by Viji’s discomfort. “I was elated by the disgust in her tone. This was the perverse pleasure of having gained the upper hand.” (174). Venkat’s only motivation is ‘winning’ this imaginary battle. He wants the tables turned, so she may be disturbed by his secret, too.
There is a not-so-subtle allusion by Shanbhag here to the larger political tectonic shifts in Karnakata in recent years. In its own intimate way, this ‘small’ story of a nuclear family comments on the much larger trends around the world of crises of masculinity, of men being troubled by the idea of independent-thinking women, and thus, drowning further into the toxic waters of isolation. Venkat is a stand-in for many well-placed family men—many of whom have had liberal ideas about women’s autonomy—who, due to changing social and economic conditions, have become corroded into sense of misogyny.
When Venkat finally shows up to the voting booth with his family, he is traumatized by the pressure of responsibility, of making his own choice, of the autonomy that he felt he has been seeking all is life. “It scared me to think that no one other than me would know what I did here,” Venkat thinks, and then admits, “My hand faltered under the weight of this freedom.” (177) Now that he has the possession of agency that he’d always desired, he doesn’t quite know what to think of it. For a man who self-admittedly didn’t know what he really believed, the intimation is that he would sway towards comfort and conservative thought—even if it opposes his loved ones.
Venkat is still looking for meaning by the novel’s end, hoping that some meaning will merely be assigned to his life, like his uncle’s Ramana’s “crow’s-feet-sparrow’s-feet writing”. Much like the misreading of the phrase ‘Sakina’s Kiss’, Shanbhag allows the reader to assign their own meaning to the end; or to challenge us—like Venkat has been challenged—to question our search for meaning altogether.
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Karan Madhok is a writer, journalist, and editor of The Chakkar. His debut novel A Beautiful Decay (Aleph Book Company) was published in October 2022. His work has appeared in Epiphany, Sycamore Review, Gargoyle, The Literary Review, The Bombay Review, Fifty Two, Scroll, The Caravan, the anthology A Case of Indian Marvels (Aleph Book Company) and The Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English 2022 (Hawakal). You can find him on Twitter: @karanmadhok1, Instagram: @karanmadhok, and Threads: @karanmadhok.
