Book Title: Sakina’s Kiss
Author: Vivek Shanbhag
Translator: Srinath Perur
Publisher: Penguin Vintage
Publishing Date: October 2023
When readers first encountered Ghachar Ghochar, in Srinath Perur’s sharp and fluid translation, it was the peculiar blend of whimsy and unease that lingered. Vivek Shanbhag’s slender novella unravelled the domestic fabric of a small Indian family whose sudden wealth brought both comfort and corrosion. Its charm lay not so much in plot progression as in the way it teased meaning out of the mundane — the absurd little gestures that make ordinary domestic anxieties feel both familiar and faintly unreal. The title itself, colloquial and intimate, mirrored the book’s texture: deeply desi, gently humorous, quietly unsettling.
It is with this context — of whimsy meeting discomfort, of small lives caught in unexpected turns — that one approaches Shanbhag’s Sakina’s Kiss, once again translated by Perur. This novel begins with similar notes: a close-knit household, a narrator alert to the tiny frivolities of daily life. Venkataramana, or Venky/Venkat as he is later called, is a man who delights in the crispness of aphorisms — the kind of person who collects compact sentences and stores them away like trinkets. “My half-hearted rummaging hardly amounted to searching,” he says early on. “It was like this whenever I tried to find something: I would dig up everything I had preserved over the years and lose myself.” The line captures the essence of Shanbhag’s voice — wry, self-deprecating, and exacting in its ordinariness.
The novel opens in this modest register. Venkataramana and his wife, Viji, are visited one evening by two young men with improbable nicknames — Manjuprakash (MP3) and Raj Kumar (RK) — who insist on speaking to their daughter, Rekha. “RK’s exaggerated politeness and MP3’s shiftiness had made me suspicious,” the narrator remarks, setting up the faintly tense, faintly comic tone that defines much of the book. These opening scenes, with their faint sense of intrusion and social unease, recall the earlier novella’s preoccupation with ordinary discomfort.
Between such interruptions, Shanbhag returns to his signature domestic rhythms. The relationship between Venkataramana, Viji, and Rekha is painted with light irony: daughter and wife often gang up against Venkat in debates. The narrator’s acceptance of defeat in trivial matters and his irritation when politics enters the frame feel instantly recognisable. Shanbhag continues to excel at these fine-grained sketches of domesticity, where banter and resentment coexist with ease.
But there is also a discernible sameness to the texture. The prose often lingers on gestures so small that they begin to feel repetitive. Shanbhag, like many writers who seek profundity in the everyday, risks mistaking plainness for depth. His descriptions of early marriage — the couple’s reliance on each other for the smallest things, the little adjustments and habits that shape domestic life — read like observations stretched thin, circling around an idea that remains stubbornly obvious. The intention, to locate meaning in the mundane, is clear; the execution, however, sometimes flattens the life it seeks to illuminate.
One begins to wonder whether this flatness is intentional — whether Shanbhag means to give us a two-dimensional view of middle-class existence. The narrator’s recollections, especially about his daughter’s birth and early years, feel more factual than emotional. Rekha “throws tantrums over the smallest of things,” Viji’s career “is affected” when she stays home — these are surface-level statements, uncoloured by introspection. The novel offers details without delving into their undercurrents. The result is a narrative that feels more recorded than experienced, leaving the reader to supply emotional texture on their own.
The tone shifts sharply midway, when the two young visitors return with their uncle. It is revealed that MP3 was once tutored by Rekha, and that his father, a crime reporter, may have underworld entanglements. What began as a domestic novel turns unexpectedly towards intrigue: there are mentions of a figure named Cheetah, of police complaints, of threats and harassment. The sudden escalation — peppered with cuss words and political insinuations — feels almost like whiplash, as if a literary meditation has stumbled into the structure of a crime drama.
Yet it is in this uneasy territory that Sakina’s Kiss begins to find its real footing. Beneath the thriller-like tension runs a study of human nature: a portrait of a man whose life has been defined by small acts of adaptation, compromise, and quiet performance. Born and raised in a village, Venkataramana has built a stable, upwardly mobile life — a steady job, a double-income household, the appearance of success. But the narrative keeps returning to the gap between who he thinks he is and what his actions reveal. He performs liberalism, rehearses modernity, and yet his thoughts betray an older, more rigid world-view. His mind oscillates constantly between progress and inertia, between moral conviction and self-preservation.
There are not many redeeming qualities in the narrator, and perhaps that is deliberate. Shanbhag’s interest lies in the ordinariness of hypocrisy — in how people who see themselves as sensible and civilised can carry contradictions without noticing them. The novel leaves wide gaps, trusting the reader to fill them. Its meandering structure, punctuated by moments of tension, occasionally frustrates, but it also makes space for reflection.
By the end, Sakina’s Kiss feels less like a story and more like a psychological study — of a man, of a class, of a society that measures progress in metrics but struggles with moral growth. If Ghachar Ghochar found its power in the whimsical disorder of family life, Sakina’s Kiss draws its strength from stillness, from the spaces between action and intention. Not all of it lands, but there is something quietly revealing in the attempt: a portrait of a life so ordinary, it becomes a mirror.