LISTEN GIRL! By Krishna Sobti Translated by Shivanath Katha Price: Rs 150 Pages: 112

In the days approaching her death, an elderly woman finds herself a physical captive to her illness and yet, for the first time in her adult life, free to think and say exactly as she pleases. This agonising rapport between paradoxical elements is the foundation of the woman's relationship with her daughter and is explored by Krishna Sobti and translated by Shivanath at multiple levels in the play Ai Ladki.

Throughout, the woman's apprehension about death is laced with a desire to be rid of a "grief so intense that one has to experience it all alone", and her pride in her daughter's single status is mingled with a fear the stigma carries. Essentially, the Ladki of the title, reduced to a mere noun, is confronted with a mother whose desire to be more than a life partner and a breeder was never realised, and whose memories of a spirited youth mingle with hallucinatory dreams to bring forth with all force, the resentment of her crushed spirit. Thus the Ladki, at the receiving end of this deprivation, is in turn made to savour the poverty of her position-the inequity of never being able to be the best she could be because of the reduced status of her gender.

Sobti's own relationship with her mother fuelled the narrative and the simplicity and truth of her experience echoes powerfully in the words of both protagonists. Both the mother and her daughter speak for a generation that considered itself more progressive than the one before (as portrayed in the independent spirit of the daughter) but which ultimately only reiterated the position of the woman at the bottom of the social chain-symbolised by the mother's increasing and ultimate weakness.

What fuels the conversation, supported by the single additional character of a nurse, are the conflicts faced by both characters. "You! Neither a mother nor a grandmother. You are nothing, Ladki, nothing. Nothing more than a vegetable. A blade of grass. A shard of straw!" screams Ammi, only to recant her envy a short while later, saying, "Listen child. No one in this world can steal your desires." The Ladki too is torn between duty towards her mother and a pride that refuses to accept the insults sometimes snidely, else aggressively, thrown at her. The tug of war is most poignant because of the great love mother and child share, which is what permits them to lash out at one another so unabashedly.

Sobti's story is eternal in its theme. The cinematic flashbacks that overwhelm the dying woman are used as additional characters in her tale and her use of gender and memory and human failing, and, above all, the feeling that at the end of one's life so much more is left to be said and done, is translated in both language and spirit by Shivanath.

AUTHORSPEAK BISHAN NARAIN TANDON I of the Storm For a full seven years between 1969 and 1976, Bishan Narain Tandon was joint secretary in the Prime Minister's Secretariat (PMS), serving Indira Gandhi. Twenty years later, in the summer of 1996, Tandon was back in his former workplace, now called the Prime Minister's Office, as principal secretary to Atal Bihari Vajpayee. The government lasted only 13 days, not time enough, Tandon smiles, to "assess how things had changed". Yet, certainly, much had changed. Indeed, India had not been the same since that moment in 1975-77 called the Emergency. Tandon's PMO Diary I (Konark) records the genesis of that cataclysm. It is a Prelude to the Emergency, as its subtitle affirms, and a bit more, covering the period from November 1, 1974 to August 15, 1975. The sequel-ending in July 1976, when Tandon left the PMS-is expected in early 2003. There is a vast body of literature on the Emergency era. Where does this work come in? At times, it is remarkably prescient. On December 31, 1975, Tandon writes, "a crisis is building up" and worries that a prime minister of "pedestrian intellect" is unequal to it: "If the crisis deepens ... the PM will not flinch from anything to maintain herself in power ... Individual liberties can be quashed." Elsewhere, the diary sounds even banal. Critics have accused Tandon, 75, of not giving the proverbial "full picture". Sidelined after Indira came back to power, Tandon-whose "fault" was deposing before the A.C. Gupta Commission inquiring into the Maruti scandal-took early retirement from the IAS in 1983. The man himself has a point to make: "Some readers are treating it as a book, not a diary. You have to realise I was writing privately at the end of each day's work." Since 25 years, an informal cooling off period he set himself, had passed, Tandon decided to have his jottings translated from Hindi. His book is wonderful reference material, important not for the words it contains but for the volumes it could help inspire. The old man has stated his case. It is for posterity to play judge.