Dr. Sapna Dogra

A Thriller About a Woman and Shadows | The Shadows - Sandhya Joseph

Sandhya Joseph’s debut novella The Shadows is a page-turner that engages the readers from the very beginning; one will never find the book to be tiring. It is an interesting and intriguing story with shades of the supernatural without being scary. Sandhya’s intensely imagined plot successfully captures her characters caught in emotional turmoil.

The novella opens on a note of doubt that alerts the readers to expect marital discord or family feud,

I thought married life would be a blissful breeze. Boy was I wrong! My marriage with Gaurav had been arranged by our parents. This was, and still is, a pretty common practice in my community (5).

The narrator, Medha, is 22 years old, lower-middle-class woman with no “professional ambition” (16) when the novella opens. She is “pushed for a quick marriage” (5) into a fairly decent family and moves to Mumbai. She feels dejected to have “just one modest-sized room with an attached bathroom.” (6) Grumbling and nagging her way she manages to survive in a “sparsely furnished” (8) studio apartment with limited space and scant furniture.

What follows is a homely housewife’s concern for small household things. Things begin to take a twisted turn when “weird things” (13) begin to happen and the narrator begins to find the apartment “unnerving” (15) as furniture begins to cast strange shadows. One begins to wonder: is it a product of her imagination? is she claustrophobic?

Sometimes, I convinced myself I was just imagining things, and sometimes I would talk aloud and try to make a deal with the shadows in the house. I tried to tell them that we can all coexist together; we’ll just try to stay out of each other's way.  . . I told her about the shadows that seemed to be infesting the house, about spoons disappearing and reappearing in another part of the room, and about constantly feeling watched (15-18).

She decides to distract herself by deciding to get a job but is haunted by the ‘shadows’ that follow her. Supernatural is not an end in itself. It is through the trope of the paranormal that many concerns are laid bare before the readers, be it, living in a city, marital adjustment, society’s expectations of a woman, etc.

What are these shadows?” I wondered. “Are they the negative energy left behind by Kaki’s deceased brother? Are they an embodiment of my husband’s desire to keep me trapped within the home? Are they manifestations of my own frustration and discontent? Am I just imagining things? Why didn’t Gaurav ever see the shadows contorting themselves into strange shapes? (25)

Sandhya’s novellas are populated with middle-class characters, indifferent husbands, supportive families and ordinary women with no professional or personal ambition. In The Shadows, Medha lacks the force of character required to surmount the patriarchal control that her husband tries to assert on her and her suppressed anger and feeling that maybe manifested in the form of the shadows that haunted her. Also, there’s no conclusion to the story. The story just ends and left me with a feeling of wanting more.

All the characters in the novella like Gaurav, Aai, are well developed. With lucid prose and a credible plot, Sandhya takes us inside the lives of Medha and Gaurav. The book is well brought out with a nice cover and an apt title. There is also a glossary of non-English words. All in all, The Shadows is a pleasant read. Set in Mumbai, the city is a character in itself in this novella. The novella explores the complexity of a city like Mumbai. This book can only be truly relished by those who have significant knowledge and experience of living in a metropolis with its inevitable problems of space, class differences, angst and ennui.