All the Lives We Never Lived

Set against the backdrop of British colonial India and the upheavals of World War II, the novel is narrated by Myshkin Rozario, an aging horticulturist in the small north Indian town of Muntazir, who recounts the story of his mother's departure from his life when he was nine years old. The narrative moves between 1992, when Myshkin is in his mid-sixties, and the years of his childhood in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

In 1992, Myshkin lives alone in the outbuilding of the house where he was born, accompanied only by his dogs and a sense that his time is running out. His grandfather, a physician known as Dada, gave him the pet name Myshkin after the epileptic prince in Dostoevsky's The Idiot, a nod to childhood convulsions that permanently damaged his eyesight. A padded envelope has arrived from Vancouver, sent by relatives of Lisa McNally, his mother's closest friend, but Myshkin cannot bring himself to open it. Instead, he begins writing down his memories, starting with the morning in 1937 when his mother, Gayatri, embraced him with unusual intensity and urged him not to be late coming home from school. He cycled off through monsoon puddles. By the time he returned, she was gone.

The roots of Gayatri's departure reach back a decade. In 1927, at nearly seventeen, she traveled with her father, Agni Sen, a scholar who recognized her artistic gifts, to Java and Bali. On the same ship was the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, who told her father about Walter Spies, a German artist and musician living in Bali. The trip awakened Gayatri's passion for art and her longing for a life devoted to it. Shortly after their return, Agni Sen died. Gayatri's family dismissed her tutors and married her off to Nek Chand, a college lecturer sixteen years her senior.

The marriage is a mismatch. Nek Chand dismisses Gayatri's painting and dancing as hobbies subordinate to serious matters, consumed as he is by the Indian independence movement. Gayatri feels her world shrinking, every creative impulse checked by her husband's disapproval and the conservatism of their neighbors.

In the summer of 1937, Walter arrives in Muntazir with Beryl de Zoete, a British scholar of dance, seeking the girl he met in Bali. Their presence electrifies the household. Gayatri becomes their guide for Indian dance research, while Walter immerses himself in local music and painting. Myshkin and his friend Dinu, the son of their wealthy neighbor Arjun Chacha, are enchanted by the foreigners. Nek Chand bristles at the disruption to his household's respectability.

The tensions between Myshkin's parents reach a breaking point one evening when he eavesdrops on their argument. Gayatri erupts, declaring that if she were truly free she would leave the house and devote herself to painting. In a cry that brands itself on Myshkin's memory, she sobs that her son's very existence has stifled her world.

During this period, Myshkin's careless words set off a chain of events resulting in the death of Lambu, the driver's son and one of his playmates. Lying on the riverbank in anguish, Myshkin confesses to Walter, who responds with quiet compassion, arguing that tragedy is too large for any one person to cause or prevent. For years afterward, Myshkin speaks to an imaginary Walter when troubled.

A summer holiday in the hills brings a brief festive interlude when Walter and Beryl visit, but a telegram reports the arrest of Mukti Devi, the leader of the local independence movement, and a subsequent letter summons the family home. Back in Muntazir, Gayatri spends a day with the renowned singer Akhtari Bai, whose fierce independence appears to give Gayatri a final push toward her decision.

Days later, Gayatri tells Myshkin a secret: He must come home from school on time so she can take him on a trip. But a disciplinary incident and a violent storm delay him. He arrives home soaked to find her already gone. Over the following weeks, the truth emerges: Gayatri has departed with Walter and Beryl. She had planned to take Myshkin with her but could not wait.

The aftermath unfolds in stages. Nek Chand retreats into spiritual crisis, moving to a spartan outbuilding and chanting Buddhist mantras. He embarks on a pilgrimage and returns months later with a second wife, Lipi, a young hill woman, and her toddler daughter, Ilavati (Ila). Myshkin refuses to accept the newcomers, criticizing Lipi's cooking and driving her to eat an entire plate of cake in tears, then recoiling in horror at his own cruelty.

Gayatri's letters from Bali arrive sporadically, filled with painted pictures of her new world. Myshkin reads them obsessively, hiding in a broken-down carriage in the garden, where the paintings transport him to his mother's life. Dada takes over running the household, enlisting Myshkin as his assistant on house calls and giving the boy structure and purpose. Meanwhile, Lipi, strained by Nek Chand's austerity and the household's coldness, breaks down and sets fire to Gayatri's saris, paintings, and portrait alongside Nek Chand's papers and typewriter. The aftermath leaves Lipi bedridden, and toddler Ila gravitates toward Myshkin. Reluctantly, he accepts her companionship, and his fragile cocoon of imaginative escape splits open.

As World War II approaches, Dinu leaves for military training. Mantu, another of Myshkin's childhood playmates, enlists as a pantry boy on a British ship and is killed when it is torpedoed. Nek Chand is arrested for sedition after writing an anti-war article.

In the present, Myshkin finally opens the Vancouver package. Inside is a self-portrait of Gayatri and a bundle of letters she wrote to Lisa over the years. They reveal what Myshkin never knew. Gayatri describes her anguish at leaving and confirms that Myshkin was meant to come with her. She writes of settling into Walter's estate at Tjampuhan in Bali, painting with growing confidence, and selling her work. She also confesses what she told no one: For at least two years before leaving, she was secretly in love with Brijen, Dinu's musically gifted uncle. Even as she loved him, she recognized his self-absorption and chose to leave with Walter and Beryl to pursue her art rather than enter another attachment.

The letters chronicle Gayatri's growing isolation as war closes in. Walter is arrested by Dutch authorities on fabricated charges related to his homosexuality, then interned indefinitely as an enemy alien. Gayatri is left virtually alone and increasingly ill with recurring fevers. Her final letters describe her plan to make her way home to India.

No further word comes. During the war, Myshkin travels to an internment camp in Dehradun where Dinu is posted. Dinu shows him a photograph found on a recaptured German prisoner, an entomologist named Gustav who knew Walter in Bali. The image of Gayatri and Walter together is the first Myshkin has seen of his mother since she left. After the war, Gustav sends word that Walter went down with the Van Imhoff, a prisoner transport ship bombed by the Japanese on January 19, 1942. A surviving missionary reported that Walter sat peacefully in his cage on deck, smoking his pipe, as the ship sank. Of Gayatri, no news ever arrives.

In the novel's final pages, Myshkin reveals he is on the deck of a cargo ship headed for Singapore, retracing his mother's journey across the Indian Ocean. He plans to search Surabaya, Java, and Bali for traces of her. Leaning over the railing, he recalls Tagore asking his mother on her first voyage whether the ocean's sighing sounded like tears of grief, and her irreverent teenage laugh in response. He crumples his unfinished Last Will and Testament and tosses it into the sea.