Real Life by Amrita Mahale

 

 a story of friendship, passion for research, a life cut short 

There are several quotes in this book that touched me, held true, audaciously. The cover is beautiful – and was the first thing that drew me to this novel. Next was the blurb – a female friendship, one of them missing in the Himalayas, societal expectations and female angst/rage. It is a novel of self-reflection, of friendship, of male chauvinism, and a search for explanation to the mystery. At 25 pages mark I wanted to write pages on my life and my best friend. I didn’t, except annotate at places, and kept reading.

It is divided into 3 parts – Mansi’s POV, Bhaskar’s and Tara’s POV. Tara is missing for weeks, and Mansi finally gathers courage to leave her life with her husband, in laws, work – taking a short sabbatical – to trace Tara’s whereabouts, if not for a glimmer of hope for her survival, for absolution of her own guilt. She shuts herself for days in Jora, spacing out watching the TV, and sleeping in for hours. When she gets out, she discovers details from nearby café regulars about Tara and Bhaskar, recounting her long emails from Tara about her research on Dholes, the Mahamaya River, the dilapidated bridge, the glacier, the dense forests, and her own part in the making of this tragedy – introducing Bhaskar to Tara unknowingly.

Narrative is reflective in nature, monologues and dialogues sharp at places, slowly unravelling the events that occurred and the mystery that ensued. Tara is surefooted, bold, brave with a no nonsense attitude who calls out her best friend Mansi’s willful ignorance on caste issues, prejudices and biases. Mansi is regretful. Bhaskar is all too much in his head – he devises notions in his head which have little to no precursor in real life. He is fired from his job for his obsession and misogyny. He created a chatbot using office resources feeding it personal emails, recreating the shadow of a person that sent those emails to him, making intimate personal conversations with it - unfair use of Large Language Models – and so twisted. He is obsessed with Tara and has a tough time taking rejection.

Tara is passionate about her work – her study and research. She follows dhole packs in dense forest watching their behaviors while they feed, their pack dynamics, den where the cubs are protected, etc. to create an ethogram - a detailed, species-specific catalog or inventory of all behaviors an animal species exhibits. She is daring – spendings days in caves, humbled by nature and its many indecipherable mysteries. The section of the book with Tara’s POV reminded me of my internship days with Wildlife Institute of India and my co-worker’s excitement on recounting experiences of their field days, almost encounters with leopards, awe of using AI to recognize tigers from their stripe patterns for tiger census. Research days had its joy, wonder and dopamine of proving a hypothesis.

I would recommend this one. Rating -4/5