Namita Gokhale’s short fiction collection Life on Mars is an ode to women, mythology and desire

While one, an astrologer, mans the matrimonial desk as she grapples with her own uncertain future, another finds love on the internet during the pandemic. Elsewhere, a beautiful woman loses her reason to live, and another shapeshifts, declaring, “I have given up my woman’s body. I am no longer man nor woman. I am a pure soul”. Gokhale’s women are devout believers and pragmatic sceptics, those who place faith in the divine and those who understand, in a brutal world, that one can only rely on oneself.

Much like life itself— cyclical, contradictory, eternal — the Mahabharata runs like a pervasive force through this collection. The Mahabharata is often told as a tale of men and their wars, but Gokhale shifts the lens, revealing the lives of women whose stories have long been ignored. Through the stories of women named after virtuous maidens, scholars wrestling with translations of the ancient text, or the griefs and longings of Gandhari and Kunti revisited through the eyes of a help, the Mahabharata is lived and reimagined in voices both modern and ancient.

In this collection, some characters have their lives cut short in moments of inexplicable violence, while others languish slowly. Obituaries become bridges between the living and the dead, bringing the comfort and certainty that, in another world, friends will continue your stories.

The Taj Mahal, the ultimate mausoleum of love, bears witness to visitors grappling with the ghosts of failed relationships, the dead weight of lifeless marriages, and the flutterings of new love. A self-proclaimed ugly ‘stepsister’ grappling with infidelity muses that for all her beauty, even Princess Diana could not keep the Prince forever. In another tale, Vatsala Vidyarthi, who ironically hates alliteration, against her better judgement, has a life-altering one-night stand with an enigmatic man in Rishikesh.

The storytelling is refreshingly imbued with Indian metaphor and flavour. One might find a mystery or two, not in the tradition of Sherlock Holmes, but with a uniquely homegrown flavour. One takes in the damp, pungent smoke of funeral pyres, the silent stare of a Bhutia dog, the whisper of ancient stone walls and the majestic, grieving mountains. And, one is also surprisingly treated to the inner lives of stones, some of whom are absently kicked and others worshiped as God.

Gokhale mingles history with the banal, as when a family in Nainital listens to the radio announcement of Chacha Nehru’s death and processes the profound loss of someone they have never met. In the end, one cannot help but agree with a character’s proclamation: “God is great and love is bloody blind.”