Deepan Maitra

Through the fracture of the sentences and the stalls in the feelings, Meera Rajagopalan sketches out a very accurate entity for Ms. Pankajam, her protagonist. She uses the mental fragility of Pankajam to her own rescue, allowing it to meander like a gushing river, taking along rivulets of forgotten memories. Through the diary entries of Pankajam and her daily catalogues, out jumps a much sensitive and thoughtful woman. A wife, a mother, a daughter-in-law, a friend. Rajagopalan's book is basically an impersonation of Pankajam, a quest to unearth her character in the shades that her own mind allows itself to be seen in. The author here is not only the generator of the writing, she is the facilitator of Pankajam's life...she is the lubricant that gets the emotions to be flowing, she is the craftswoman of Pankajam's emotional vulnerability. This quest isn't easy. The author firstly has to write in perspective of the narrator, and within those few pages, she has to give us a glimpse of what story is going on. 'The Eminently Forgotten Life of Ms. Pankajam' is a book with no beginnings or end. On one side, the stories keep piling up, one atop the other, in various concoctions. But for Pankajam, as she battles shock and disillusion and amnesia, memory vaporizes without warning too. They come and go, unwanted visitors in the middle of nowhere...at times taking her back to uncomfortable crevices of her past, and sometimes pushing her squarely to a timely, naked truth too harsh to face. Within a jugglery of happiness, grief and large amounts of directionless wandering....Pankajam evokes a vivid familial sympathy. We begin to see her everywhere, in broken shards of crytsal clear memories...in collected memorabilia of things gone by. She imbibes a lot within her, and as the author attempts to piece her presence together in a jumbled sequence (much in alignment to Pankajam's instability) she becomes surprisingly very wholesome as a woman. We, as readers fit in the remaining missing pieces, apply the last few strokes pf finishing touches...until we've crafted, in collaboration with the author, the woman called Pankajam in our own light. ⠀ As bizarre life is, this book not only simulates Pankajam's life in context of what is going on and what has already gone, it also instills the roots of several affectionate, distant, memorable bondage that ties our existence together. We get to see the intersectionality of lives crossing paths, of viewpoints and newer standpoints gaining momentum, while also keeping intact the invasive fragrance of the past. Tying up the present, past and everything in between...this book is as conveying as it can get. ⠀