Exploring Love and Loss in Namita Gokhale’s ‘Life on Mars’

A Journey Through Love, Grief, and the Afterlife

There are moments when we ponder the power of love, both in its creation and destruction. Love is a necessity for the soul’s true freedom, yet it can also be a crushing force. Love has the capacity to grow exponentially, consuming everything in its wake.

Namita Gokhale’s latest collection of short stories, Life on Mars, delves into love as an uncontainable force and its aftermath. The sixteen stories are categorized into two sections: ‘Love and Other Derangements’ and ‘The Mirror of the Mahabharata’.

Love and Other Derangements

• Middle-aged women, primarily, who have been relentlessly battered by love.
• Husbands or male partners often appear as unwanted figures in their romantic lives.
• True love is scarce within formal institutions, but relationships develop, deteriorate, and conclude, squandering life and love.
• The wrong individuals get married, couples cease communication, infidelity is rampant, and sometimes, children can be unbelievably cruel.
• Gokhale emphasizes the female experience, revealing the woman who has been left behind, buried under marriage and motherhood expectations, yearning to escape.

The Mirror of the Mahabharata

• Three stories narrated from the viewpoints of the Mahabharata’s seldom-heard voices.
• Grand tales of sacrifice and valor are flipped on their heads.

Gaining and Losing Love

“Life on Mars” is a poignant story about motherhood. A widow’s health scare reminds her of her solitude, despite raising three sons who have since left. A friendship with a younger man provides comfort, but it is short-lived. In “Habit of Love”, a mother vacations in the Himalayas with her daughters following her husband’s death. Their youthful banter irritates her, but this is her new reality – grief and new forms of love.

Lessons on Love

The stories in Life on Mars are filled with grief. There is a constant fear of being overwhelmed by it when happiness is finally achieved. These moments of happiness are fleeting. Love arrives only to depart quietly soon after. Mothers and daughters argue but remain, mothers and sons argue and grow apart. The less said about the husbands, the better. However, amidst this frightening transience, there is a steadfast presence of love – of families that infuriate and protect, cherished stories and books that remind you you are not alone, and the mountains and the river that stand firm against every storm.

Life on Mars: Collected Stories, Namita Gokhale, Speaking Tiger Books.