‘Relapse’: Like history, is love with the same person repeated first as tragedy and then as farce?

Relapse: The Consequences Of Love, is a novel written by Srikant Verma and translated from the Hindi by Krishna Baldev Vaid. Two literary giants come together on this project to create an evocative portrayal of love, or rather, the addiction to love.

Verma authored 20 books and won the Sahitya Akademi award in 1987 for his book of poetry titled Magadh. His most significant contribution has been to the Nai Kavita movement in Hindi poetry, but he was also in the Indian National Congress during the Emergency, heavily involved in politics as a member of parliament.

Yet, he’s remained largely mysterious to the non-Hindi reading public – barely any of his poetry, other than Magadh, has been widely translated. With Relapse, the audience finds his debut novel in English, translated by Vaid, another stalwart of Hindi literature.

Vaid, a noted playwright, novelist, academic, and translator was a refugee during the Partition. His own work has been translated into several Indian languages, along with German, Polish, Japanese, and Russian. In an interview with the Penguin Digest, Vaid says: “Two of my dear friends, Nirmal Verma and Srikant Varma, asked me to translate two of their novels, Ve Din (Nirmal) and Doosri Baar (Srikant), and I complied because I liked their work, but I did not ‘pick them’.”

Vaid also translated some of Srikant’s poetry which he mentions have not been compiled into a book, but been published in English magazines. Vaid’s most celebrated translations in fact, have been of his own work. He continues in the interview, “English is the only language I can translate my own Hindi books into; my own kind of Hindi is the only language that I can translate any English book into. Since I translate only what I like and want to and since I do not do it for my living, I do not do much translation.”

Therefore, Relapse published in 2018, is a rare treat, a project unlike any other.

Revisiting the ruins

The novel provides exactly what it promises. An estranged couple meet again upon the woman’s request. Bindo, who was once the most beautiful woman the man had ever laid eyes on, is now plumper, older, and a nuisance. The cover of the book – black and white with the title emboldened in a bright red large font in the middle – has the image of a woman lying face down on a white mattress. The word “Relapse” spills over the cover, as if to incarnadine the story.

What is the relapse the author talks about? Is it a physical addiction to a body that once gave you happiness? Is it nostalgia for a past affair? A nagging, churning, bitter feeling of unfinished drama? The entire story revolves around this game, like a plucking of soft flower petals: she loves me, she loves me not. Eventually the lovers get back together, as expected. But in what capacity? That is up to the reader to decide. The author tells you there is a relapse. But you decide the consequences of love.

Relapse is neither the product of Verma’s time, nor a representation of the politics of either the Independence movement or the Emergency. Magadh is described often as one of the most important texts of Hindi poetry both for being timeless and historical, and in a sense Relapse is also like that, a portrayal of the kind of tug-of-war that love can become. The story, though stunning in some parts, is nothing unusual.

For the first half of the novel, the author keeps the reader in the dark, with barely any plot details, character building, and sparse sentences. All we know is that there is a man, he has gone to visit an old lover, and he has no idea why she has invited him. They have had a painful parting – but of what sort and why, we never find out. The author treats us like Bindo treats her lover: keeps us tightly knotted in a strange kind of mystery, driven by an unknown but sadistic motivation.

For the most part this makes you angry, and perhaps it is meant to do just that, for you are revisiting the charred ruins of an emotional wreck. But the anger also rises because we never get to know why the characters are wrecked in the first place, or what they looked like when they were happy. There is a cat and mouse chase, not as much between Bindo and the protagonist, but between us and the author.

Bindo is absent for the most part, and we never really get an insight into her mind: “I resolved not to break my silence. I wanted to torture her just as she had tortured me with her silence. But she had probably seen through my resolve to remain silent.” With her riveting body and her frivolous remarks, she exists on the pages like the wisps of a character, drawn out by the painful memory of the protagonist who loves and hates her in equal measure.

The blame game

And this is where the book can get really frustrating:

“She used to sulk and be angry like a wife. Partly to establish her authority over me and partly to keep her ideal of a housewife alive she used to extract pledges from me that I wouldn’t ever drink again. And the pity of it was that I only drank on rare occasions when I had to because of social obligations. As a matter of fact, she often made me swear that I would need to give up smoking also. Every woman needs to do things like this to convince herself that she is a woman. And it is these demands of women borne as they are of their egotism which attract men to them because they remind them that they are not meant only for themselves, that some other person has the right to encroach upon themselves.” 

Bindo becomes the whorish woman, hated for her sex appeal and confidence, blamed for their break-up. She is described most often through tedious clichés – and therefore not only the plot but also the descriptions become banal. At the same time, the book can’t be neatly pinned down to this banality. For however much the protagonist might reduce Bindo to the “bad” woman, the reader may find it impossible to hate her.

Mostly, the novel describes petty differences between the couple – who pours the cup of tea, who takes the first bite of food, who gets into the taxi first, who makes the effort to call. One is placed in the centre of an untidy relationship, seeing it unfold into something messier and grittier.

It is nothing if not relatable because it highlights the complexities of love through such crisp but trivial scenes. But the readability of the novel doesn’t make it any less infuriating for me as a female reader who is frustrated by women being the centre of blame in romantic encounters. Perhaps these are the consequences of love – but should they be, I wonder.

Relapse, Srikant Verma, translated by Krishna Baldev Vaid, Speaking Tiger.