For every enviable vision of a “marriage of true minds”, there is a long history of toxic literary partnerships: think George Orwell and Eileen O’Shaughnessy, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Sayre, Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn. Strangely, few first-person accounts dwelling on the personal dimensions of a writerly life exist in English literature. The reality of these fraught marriages is a puzzle that biographers piece together from letters, angsty poetry, and gossip.

Hindi authors are more forthcoming. Dharamvir Bharati’s Gunahon Ka Devta (The Deity of Sins) and his wife Kanta Bharati’s autofictional counter-narrative Ret ki Macchli (A Fish in the Sand) capture the romanticised versus real views of their troubled relationship. Likewise, the memoirs of the writer couple Rajendra Yadav and Mannu Bhandari—Mud Mud ke Dekhta Hoon and Ek Kahani Yeh Bhi, respectively—are uniquely illuminating accounts of their flawed partnership. The literary standing of both writers charges the narratives with added momentum, and the dissonance that Bhandari’s truth-telling reveals between Yadav’s public persona and private reality gives these parallel accounts an added edge. Poonam Saxena’s excellent translations bring both these memoirs to English as Echoes of My Past and This Too Is a Story. Her extensive notes ensure that non-Hindi readers, too, get the broad plot lines of the stories that Yadav and Bhandari discuss.

Yadav’s memoir, Mud Mud ke Dekhta Hoon (2001), came first. Along with fellow writers Mohan Rakesh, Nirmal Verma, and Kamleshwar, Yadav was a stalwart of the Nayi Kahani (new story) movement in Hindi. A craftsman of astonishingly fluid prose who experimented with form, Yadav wrote over a hundred short stories and six novels. His fiery editorials and critical essays remain memorable. He also set up a short-lived publishing house, Akshar Prakashan, before fulfilling his dream of reviving Premchand’s Hindi literary magazine, Hans, in 1986. With Hans, Yadav established himself as a formidable editor, a staunch advocate of Dalit, Bahujan, and feminist writing, and a talent spotter extraordinaire.

Bhandari gave voice to the dilemmas of modern middle-class women negotiating love, the workplace, home, and motherhood. In novels like Aapka Bunty (Your Bunty) and Mahabhoj (Feast), she explored themes never before tackled in Hindi literature. Her story “Yahi Sach Hai” (This is the Truth), which explored the psyche of a young girl torn between an old love and a new one, was adapted into the film Rajnigandha (1974) by Basu Chatterjee. She wrote scripts for both television and theatre, including several episodes of the Doordarshan teleserial Rajani. Yadav and Bhandari co-wrote alternate chapters of Ek Inch Muskaan (One-inch Smile), an experimental novel about a man torn between his wife and his mistress.

Yadav’s memoir depicts his evolution from a small-town young man with an injured leg and a bad eye, to an author who emerged in the 1950s as a voice of the struggling urban man. From Saara Akash onwards, he received regular fan mail, especially from women readers. Yadav says that his stories exposed “the hypocrisy, duplicity, pomp, bigotry, insincerity and injustice” in the stifling Indian family system, which makes honest friendship between men and women impossible. The chord his frank voice struck with women readers bolstered his self-belief.

The truth, however, leaks through Yadav’s words. Of his rich lady patrons, he says he despised their lack of freedom, yet he depended on their lifelong support to sustain himself. He veers from acknowledging personal foibles to reframing them as questions thrown at the reader (“What could a man do?”) or ruefully shaking his head over himself (“saala main bhi kya cheez hoon”/“What a piece of work I am!”). He revels in decimating established fellow authors—and often friends—for their feudal mindsets and their literary limitations.

Yadav also discusses his repeated broken promises to “settle” with his girlfriend and muse, Meeta; the guilt he constantly suffered on account of Bhandari and their daughter; and above all, his need to be free. He yearns for a companion like his manservant Kishan—someone who never demands, only fulfils. He confesses: “…this self-centeredness of a writer has not allowed me to be a good husband, lover or father. All I am and can be is a good friend.”

Yadav publicly called Bhandari a khanti gharelu aurat, a regular housewife with traditional expectations from life that he could not have met given his higher creative needs. He insists that his personal choices were a part of his quest for independence. Perhaps he thought that a public confession and justification would absolve him. Or perhaps he wanted fresh controversy. Either way, Yadav’s public airing of the personal prompted the famously reticent Bhandari, who had all but stopped writing, to commit to paper all that he had omitted to say. Her Ek Kahani Yeh Bhi (2008) took seven years to arrive.

Yadav’s memoir begins with a seemingly self-deprecatory speech he gave on his 60th birthday: “…. I too, could have sucked up to people and landed jobs, wrangled awards and honours, made compromises and stuck deals, collected houses, flats, and all kinds of things.... But I only pursued writing to the exclusion of all tangible rewards…. I would not call my behaviour sacrifice or renunciation… it’s not something I am proud of like a peacock’s crown. It’s just my choice and I am facing the consequences happily…. Call me haquir (lowly), call me faqeer (beggarly). That’s how I am.”

Mannu Bhandari clears the air

Contrast this with the title of Bhandari’s introductory chapter, “Clearing the Air”, in which she explains why her personal life with Yadav needs to figure in a memoir about her writerly journey. “There’s no doubt that Rajendra motivated and encouraged me as a writer…. But as a wife?… I was at the receiving end … and the writer in me bore the brunt.” While Yadav relies on quotes, anecdotes, couplets, and poetic flourishes, Bhandari is a physician performing a post-mortem. She writes with precision, specificity, and an unflinching commitment to truth.

“Our lives together began with a bizarre rupture,” she writes, describing the “parallel life” injunction (referring to Yadav’s adultery that he justified as a means of gaining creative energy) that Yadav laid down soon after marrying her. She tackles Yadav’s half-truths line by line until they start collapsing. “Let me help Rajendra’s memory and set him free of his anguished dilemmas….” she writes. “He never had the courage to accept reality with any honesty. I did not know that the Rajendra who always urged everyone to move away from established grooves and who tore into feudal traditions was himself so steeped in these traditions that he could never be free of (them).”

With no time or headspace for the bloodsport of literary one-upmanship that consumed her husband, Bhandari’s life was one of constant, unappreciated labour. A lecturer of Hindi in Delhi University’s Miranda College, she took tuitions, picked up all manner of extra assignments (such as writing scripts for television and theatre) to earn a few extra rupees so that she could support the extended household (comprising Yadav’s sister and brother) and let her “stalwart” non-working husband keep his writerly independence intact. She kept a well-run home that was also a literary salon, brought up a daughter, wrote novels on stolen time in hostels shut for the summer, and made peace with her husband’s injunction to not interfere in his “parallel life”.

As for Yadav’s mythology of writerly independence, Bhandari reveals: “No one knew the economic arrangement of our house and how our home was run. Rajendra never paid for anything I ate, nor for anything I wore. In fact, I fulfilled all responsibilities for both my daughter and the household.” She asks: “...does Rajendra really believe that eight or ten pages of confessing his feelings of guilt (never mind how sincere) can compensate for a person’s entire life?” Neither does she shy away from probing her own need to maintain appearances, to preserve the marriage for the sake of her child, or her own social conditioning.

Bhandari’s voice, shorn of self-pity or blame, manages to overturn Yadav’s poetic clean chits to himself. A lifetime of dealing with the man has given her prose absolute clarity. For her, the break in morality was not Yadav’s adultery, although it did hurt her. It was his need to label his lies and cruelty as a hunger for freedom, his refusal to recognise—and hence acknowledge—the role that Bhandari’s labour, within and outside their home, played in sustaining Yadav’s “independent writer” image. That he could both gloss over her emotional and monetary contributions and publicly absolve himself by declaring that he could not be a good husband and father because of his need for independence was, for her, a delusion too monumental to dismiss.

Read together, the memoirs show that ordinary patriarchal conditioning kicks in after marriage, even in households of literary giants. The woman who is the writer is split into two, to the advantage of the man. Publicly espoused feminism comes handy for literary one-upmanship but is just as easily abandoned behind closed doors. More than pretty words, bare facts—like who keeps the wheels of everyday life turning—tell the complete truth. Long after both books have been read, the story of Mannu Bhandari’s soul-crushing marriage with a celebrated but self-obsessed and emotionally absent husband continues to perturb. 

Varsha Tiwary is a Delhi-based writer and translator.

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