Of Journeys and Life: Reading A Journey Gone Wrong

Stories remain with us to resurface with resonances. Places and people that form part of these stories linger on. Journeys of all kinds, those that entail physical movement and those that take us inwards form an important aspect of our lived experience.   Gita Viswanath’s A Journey Gone Wrong (2022) is one such work that took me across a gamut of relationships that the novel brings to the fore as the narrative negotiates with places within India and abroad.

The novel begins with Krishna, a young boy, in Gajulupur. Gajulupur, a small village in South India beautifully comes alive in the description of the harikatha singers performing, in the description of the people, in the way the characters of Chakalichengi, whose profession gets linked to her name (she is the washerwoman), Munsami, Meshter and Krishna, the boy whose mother died at childbirth, in the shop that sells bajjis, in the toddy shop, are depicted. Caste and class figure in the way the characters and their lives are described. Meshter, whose name is Hanumanthaiyya but who is known by his profession, the teacher at the school in Gajulupur, plays a very important role in the life of the protagonist as he takes an active interest in the boy’s studies and admits him to a school in Bangalore.

When the Vinayaka Travels bus arrived at the stand below the old tamarind trees and their resident ghosts Meshter and Krishna were all set to board. Munsami, Munepa, Chakalichengi’s family, and the entire neighbourhood were there to see this little child take off for a faraway land on the basis of total trust.

The narrative moves to Bangalore as Krishna begins his studies there at Fort High School. Woven into the story of Krishna’s life are events that affect the people and life around him – the plague, the India Pakistan war, the Babri Masjid demolition. In a novel that traverses a huge span of time, these are important markers.

. . . the day Krishna and Krishna were married was also the day of an ugly demolition that triggered some of the worst riots that the city of Mumbai had ever witnessed. It seemed as though the day held an ominous sign of the future for their wedded life.

This move to Bangalore leads to many more moves in Krishna’s life as he goes to Bombay, settling down first in Chembur.   As he begins his professional career, finds love, marries, has children and then moves to the US for studies, the novel goes on to focus on other characters and most importantly on the next generation. Their daughter, Rohini, soon occupies centerstage in the novel and it is her life, her romance and heartbreak, her travels that take her to the US, to the place where her father had lived and studied that makes her uncover aspects about her father that completely change the course of the lives of the entire family. Past deeds, faith, allegiances, broken trust, deception and truth that surfaces in the most unexpected times fashions much of the narrative as characters caught in the whirlpool of life try to pull through and end up strugglling to deal with things.

Written in a fast paced style, the language wonderfully brings forth the essence of the various lived places, of the characters that belong to several generations. Viswanath uses emojis in the conversations presented in the novel, mostly in conversations that feature Rohini, Krishna’s daughter. Some of these conversations are presented in the former of text messages between Rohini and her friend, Rohini and her boyfriend, among others. Languages figures as an important aspect of the narrative with Krishna belonging to a Telugu family while his wife’s (who is also called Krishna) mother tongue is Marathi.

In a quiet, court ceremony on a cool December morning in 192 in Bandra, Krishna Chengi and Krishna Sathe became man and wife.”

It is interesting to note that Krishna uses his grandmother’s name as his surname. Viswanath uses a number of words from these languages, particularly from Marathi as the children too speak the language. The words are knitted into the novel and is reminiscent of much of our conversations as we use multiple languages in our daily lives.

A Journey Gone Wrong brings in issues of love, of the generational changes, of life hanging and then going awry due to wrong choices, of the way in which people go their separate ways, in the way in which some hold on, of changing human values and relationships. Viswanath presents the lived experience of Rohini in the US with equal ease as she does with the depiction of characters and their lives in India. The migrant experience in the US, of an Italian family also adds to the idea of journeys, to moorings that one holds on to and to ties that are severed as life moves ahead.

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