Subhadra Sen Gupta’s Sukoon is a love story, not the sort of love that sets your heart racing. Not the burning passionate love of youth, but a mature, mellowed kind of love, well aged. A quiet, matter of fact kind of love, a love that is deep, one that comes after years of togetherness, a love that knows it can survive yet has no will to survive in the absence of its partner. And from the ashes of a woman's loss, rises her will to live again. And sukoon. 

    Sukoon is the story of a fifty-year-old woman who has recently lost her husband to cancer, right before his 53rd birthday. She is independent, she chain smokes, she wears an arm full of bangles, she sports crop cut steely gray hair, and a shirt pant outfit which looks incongruous on the traditional ghats of Varanasi. In other words she is not a traditional woman lamenting the onset of widowhood and everything it entails. That aspect of her loss is immaterial. She is also not preoccupied with herself or her loss. In fact, she hardly ever talks of it. Even in sorrow, we find her easily amused by the absurd in the human drama around her. 

    But we know her loss is monumental.   She goes to Varanasi thinking that Ganga will give her a death of her desire, a gentle death. Instead she meets people, all kinds of people, people capable of extracting happiness and peace out of misery, filth, greed from wherever they can find. We meet her Muslim rickshaw-wala, regularly sneaking into the famous Vishwanath temple, taking prasads for his grandchildren. “Kyon bhai”?  “Sukoon milta hai, waisa hi, jaise masjid mein”. We come across a sixty-year old maid whose one burning wish is to buy a "tipricada", (and only filmy songs please, no bhajans) for her burhau, going on 80. And another wish is to go to Sarnath. Why? "Sukoon aata hai". 

    Our protagonist discovers in the oddest of places that irresistible will to live and to find happiness --- that special sort of happiness which comes only to those who know how important it is to live every moment to the fullest and to relish happiness wherever they chance upon. Despite adversities or maybe because of them. Carpe Diem!

This is a story that starts out in a quiet sort of bleak despair and ends in an equally quiet sort of sukoon creeping up slowly on the protagonist, unbeknownst to her. I found Sukoon, by Subhadra Sen Gupta, in "The Namaste book of Indian Short Stories", translations, edited and compiled by Monisha Mukundan.