In her debut novel, Meera Rajagopalan explores a woman's fading memory through her satirical journal entries

In her debut novel, The Eminently Forgettable Life of Mrs Pankajam, author Meera Rajagopalan crafts a witty and satirical narrative of a sexagenarian diagnosed with Alzheimer’s who is slowly starting to forget the memories that remain the only witnesses of her life.

Mrs Pankajam, is a bit of a “free bird” the author suggests, whose wings are clipped with the passing years as she goes through the motions of being a dutiful wife and a loving mother to her two daughters. When she realises that she has started to forget snippets from her life that made her whole, Mrs Pankajam takes to keeping a personal diary and upon her doctor’s advice begins to record everything that happens to her, or better yet, around her.

Having lived her own life, she sits back to watch the drama that unfolds in the worlds of her closest family and what emerges through her intimate entries that span some twenty months are the utterly sardonic, funny and thought-provoking observations of an elderly woman who has seen it all: or so she believes.

“She thinks: ‘I read a lot, so I know so much,’” the author remarks but what happens when a person who is supposedly woke comes across something within her family which she cannot accept? How does she react?

For Rajagopalan, the diary entries then become a clever medium to bring home the intrigue of reading the accounts of an unreliable narrator, who might or might not have lived through the experiences that she records or understood those subjects that she claims to know all about.

She concedes, “I did know that I wanted to point the reader to the fact that she might not be all that she is projecting herself to be.”

Whether Mrs Pankajam is imagining certain people that she writes about or deliberately blocking awkward incidents from her mind, continues to puzzle the reader even as she goes about the most predictable tasks like half-heartedly searching for a suitable husband for her younger daughter Vishwa, or wondering idly whether Pari, her elder one has had a row with her husband in faraway America.

Amidst it all, memories too jostle in her mind rushing to find a spot in these pages, some, fond moments of happiness, others, secrets buried beneath layers of time.

“My mother passed away in 2013,” the author says, “and since then I have been thinking about what it means to remember. How different people have different ideas of who she was.” For Rajagopalan, the story of Mrs Pankajam grew from this “germ of an idea” which was fortified when she met her husband’s aunt who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and had already suffered significant memory loss. Barely able to recognise Rajagopalan’s in-laws, she instead spent much of her time with the author’s kids, who were toddlers at the time.

“I don’t have to remember or know them to enjoy them,” she recalls her relative saying.

This renewed perspective on memories and remembering that the author pondered upon is reflected in her emphatic study of the predilections and idiosyncrasies of the characters that people her protagonist’s life. “A lot of writing is empathy,” Rajagopalan opines, “A Pankajam is acting like this, a Jankajam might act differently.”

When asked how she finally decided to write Mrs Pankajam’s story through this book, the Chennai-based author elaborates that a few years ago, she was part of a writer’s circle in the city in which every member would submit short pieces of work for others to comment on and critique. But in 2017, when the group decided to introduce a new model where instead of a small chapter, one could submit larger drafts of a book or an entire novella, the opportunity to put this seed of an idea into a proper draft presented itself. “So, when I sat down to write – this just never happens to me – but it just flowed and then I finished the book for the critique group.”

Through her story, even as she tackles an issue as serious as mental health, the author manages to introduce an element of wry candour in her protagonist’s ruminations, putting a rather witty spin on a seemingly sombre idea. “‘Snark’ comes pretty naturally to me,” she says with a smile, perhaps making it easier to write a prose alive with sarcasm.

Besides, she remarks, “Sometimes, if you are able to say something that will make a change in people’s lives and people’s thought processes, humour is the way to get it across.”

Because apparent in Mrs Pankajam’s narrative is a strong sense of acceptance which helps her to make peace with her diagnosis and instead of mourning over a disease that is spreading fast, she chooses to write about everything from hospitals and ambulances, to her time in America and her assisted living community.

She compares ICUs to Russian roulette for one never does know what really goes on inside those chambers, balks at Pari’s decision to embrace her sexuality and Googles statistics of cancer recoveries when her brother-in-law undergoes chemotherapy. “But then she also talks about how boring it is to be in a place like that [the assisted living community> where everything is the same, one day leads to another,” the author says, because underlying Mrs Pankajam’s explorations lies a certain sense of loneliness and she wonders whether people will remember her when she passes away.

On reflecting upon this isolation and loneliness that elderly people often experience when their children grow up and leave home to build their own lives, the author says that the feeling in effect becomes “a comparison between what is available and what is required.”

“Older people I think are more independent, they know what they want and like to explore their options.” When they tire of taking care of their house or apartment, are unable to cook for themselves any longer, they often resort to moving to a facility where they can be looked after, she suggests. But on the flipside, for the children who have left home, “I would imagine there is a lot of guilt involved, and there’s a lot of ‘what can I do’ sort of thing.”

Oftentimes, what is required is a physical presence or emotional support which eludes the elderly, no matter the ease of money transfers or sophisticated infrastructure.

With The Eminently Forgettable Live of Mrs Pankajam, the author focuses on one such a story of a woman navigating these many facets of getting older and becoming increasingly dependent on other people.

However, as she begins working on a new novel, Rajagopalan is now set to explore the complexities of the minds of young teenagers on the cusp of adolescence. Her next book is a story about two girls hailing from vastly different backgrounds who become unlikely acquaintances.

While for the former, Rajagopalan familiarised herself with the process of growing old in the contemporary times, for the latter, she is on a quest to discover what it means to be a young adult in the same world even as she struggles to understand the latest technology, fervently learning the trappings of social media and video gaming from her children.

Meera Rajagopalan’s The Eminently Forgettable Life of Mrs Pankajam has been published by Hachette India