Review: Never Never Land byNamita Gokhale
An aspiring middle aged novelist who returns to her home in the hills attempts to investigate her relationship with herself, the region, and with larger forces
“Strange and disturbing” are the two adjectives American writer HP Lovecraft used to describe Russian painter Nicholas Roerich’s mountainscapes. Roerich died in Naggar in Himachal Pradesh in 1947. It’s fitting that the cover image of Namita Gokhale’s Never Never Land is modelled on his painting, Oirot Messenger of the White Burkhant (1925) based on a myth from the Altai region. Never Never Land seems to share Roerich’s spirit as it verbalises an urban melancholia. Its middle-aged narrator, Iti Arya — who has recently moved to Gurgaon, which she can “never call” Gurugram — is a freelance editor according to her LinkedIn profile. Of course, a professional bio can rarely say anything about an individual. The novel begins with Iti being overwhelmed by the barrage of messages on the WhatsApp group of the 1982 batch of St Dolorosa Convent. “Their lives stink of safety and leisure and the security nets of family,” she notes. Her singledom and loneliness set her apart. However, given the absence of love and care in her life, this bustling virtual network is the only contact she has with the world. “My link with myself”, as she reflects when faced with the threat of being removed by Daya Vaswani, the group administrator, who calls out the inactivity and non-engagement of select members.
Gokhale’s bare prose is full of metaphysical underpinnings. On one doleful night, Iti, who is an aspiring novelist, breathes “filtered air” and thinks of returning to her home, The Dacha, in Kumaon, “where everything began.” She writes about it in her journal, which is rendered in a different font in this book. Her grandmother, Badi Amma — housemaid to a 102-year-old Rosinka Paul Singh — is “happy to see” her. Amidst real people, Iti disconnects from her web of virtual contacts. “No social media. No email. Just silence, and the hooting of owls outside my window,” she writes.
Back home, things haven’t changed much because the dust of the past hasn’t settled. For now, her focus is on her grandmother Lila, who has been christened “Lily” by Rosinka. “The pair of them have aged well, achieved a sort of timelessness that has them residing as much in memory as in the present,” she remarks as she thinks of archiving their memories. But she’s soon disturbed by young Nina and her relationship with Badi Amma. Questions about the girl’s true identity begin plaguing Iti. The story, that is suffused with the matriarchal traditions of the Pahari region, moves unhurriedly as she tries to investigate her relationships with herself, with the region, and with forces much larger than she’s able to articulate. It’s almost existential, this quest — a paheli of sorts — that she begins to solve.
The specks of poetry here and there, the inconsistent supply of electricity and descriptions of a quiet life in the mountains further heighten the drama. But each time Iti makes any progress in solving the mystery, her attempts appear like false starts to the novels she has thought about writing but failed to finish – among these are Promises to Myself, HypeReality, and A Litany of Lost Loves. The last one “was soon abandoned, indeed aborted, but those past heartbreaks that continued to haunt me,” Iti notes. Readers might be shocked by the narrator’s memories and in penning them, Gokhale demonstrates the ease with which she manages to steer the focus onto several issues that she raises in her novels. In Never Never Land, she highlights the anxieties of multiple generations and presents the rootlessness that often comes with a well-connected urban existence.
“Friendship can be a good substitute for love,” Iti observes analysing the co-dependent existence of Rosinka and Lila. Thinking of love, she grieves the perennial mother-shaped hole in her life. Though absent, her mother gave her an incurable disease — the inability to “face life”. Depressed, Iti also finds herself trying to figure out a theft in The Dacha that has left her shaken. As it happens, she’s faced with another mystery, which offers a unique urgency to this novel and introduces a new set of characters too.
It’s obvious that Iti is in search of herself. She’s troubled too that the two old women are living more youthful lives than she is. As she continues to mine their stories, their truths, the haunting aspects of the novel resurface. Particularly striking are the chapters entitled Rosinka’s Dream Diaries and Badi Amma’s Memories, which steer the narrative in a different direction while keeping it tethered and satisfying the reader’s curiosity about the other characters in this slim novel.
Gokhale is deft at handling narrative shifts and conjures up a new beginning at the end when Iti chooses to begin a new novel: “A straight narrative with a clear arc of actions and consequences is clearly not possible. Especially not here, in Never Never Land.” Thankfully, there is no compulsory closure.
“Art is the evidence of the mind that created it,” noted Chinese-American writer Jenny Tinghui Zhang in Four Treasures of the Sky. Never Never Land is evidence of the originality of Gokhale’s creative spirit.
Saurabh Sharma is an independent writer who lives in New Delhi. They can be found on Instagram/X: @writerly_life.
