Marital incompatibility in Anita Desai's Cry, The Peacock

In Indian English Literature, Anita Desai is one of the most powerful contemporary Indian Novelists. She is concerned towards the inner characters of her world. She tries to look for the unfathomable requirements, emotions and feelings felt by her characters and shown them as the influencing aspect behind their action. Her depiction of man-woman relationship is influenced and habituated by complex social environment. She chiefly portrays the predicament of modern woman in the hands of man dominated society where she makes an attempt to voice herself.

She basically portrays the inequality in characters which affect the relationship of man and woman.

Cry, the peacock is a maiden novel and it presents a mismatched marriage life of the protagonist, Maya. She is married to Gautama, an honourable lawyer, who is elder than her twice. Gautama is a convinced husband who thinks concern of Maya and loves her in his own way. But, Maya is not satisfied and happy and this shifts her to a notion of marital incoherence and incomplete conjugal life.

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The peacock’s cry is an inference of Maya’s agonized cry for love and life.

According to Desai’s novels, married couples are shown as unions of inaptness. Men are considered to be rational where as women are sensitive and touching. Desai has explored varied aspects of feminine consciousness which also represents man woman relationships. Cry, the Peacock is mainly focused with the theme of marital conflict between husband, Gautama, and wife, Maya. The novel is about Maya’s sob for affection and life of association.

The husband is too much occupied in his own dealings to meet the demands, partially unpredictable, partly spiritual, of his young wife. Gautama’s sensibilities are too rough and it is not practical to suit Maya. He is a faithful husband who loves and cares his wife in his own way. Yet, Maya is never satisfied. Usha Pathania, a noted critic, remarks:

“Marital relationships are established with the explicit purpose of providing companionship to each other. However, the element of companionship is sadly missing in the relationship between Maya and Gautama.”

The novel exposes a consciousness of marital absurdity and discontented married life. Maya’s marriage with Gautama was more or less a marriage of soothe and expediency. Maya is deeply sprinkled with insensibility, two-facedness and disdain exposed through other marriages around her.

All these relationships between man and woman point out the optimist and pessimist points of brides and bridegrooms. Wedding is a combination of two souls. It is to be established very deliberately and cautiously. Its outcomes are the clashes, extreme anxiety, mania, isolation and seclusion.

Cry, the Peacock is about Maya’s cries for love and affection. The cry of peacock symbolizes Maya’s anguish for love and life. Maya starves for husband’s companionship and spends wakeful nights consuming with this starvation. Whoever it is, solitude never gives happiness to them. Only by the love and care of one’s companion, he or she could lead their life in happy mode. He never takes any attempt to take any interest in things which suffers her. She languishes to satisfy her physical hunger and when it is not satisfied, what else can Maya does? She would lie awake the entire night dormant by the starvation; she doesn’t feel not merely for Gautama but for her life’s inactiveness. She says,

There were countless nights when I had been tortured by a humiliating sense of neglect of loneliness, of desperation that would not have existed had I not loved him so, had he not meant so much. (173)

She starts to gaze upon her relationship with Gautama as a fish out of water. She develops a pessimistic approach towards life and finds its entire spirit as ineffective and worthless. Therefore Maya says:

All order is gone out of my life, all formality. There is no plan, no peace, nothing to keep me within the pattern of familiar. Thoughts come, incident occur, then they are scattered and disappear. Past, Present, Future, Truth and Untruth and I am tired of it. My body can no longer bear it; my mind has already given way. See, I am grown thin, worn. (179)

Even her husband doesn’t take care of things that she loves always. Though she couldn’t get love from her husband, she collapses herself and starts to adopt a dog. She starts to show all her love towards it and becomes very adoptive. After her anguished life, she embraces and living by the love of her dog but it dies on a day. She feels that her possession is gone. With that grief and heartbroken, she explains it to Gautama. But he is not persistence enough to hear her mourning. There hate surrounds Maya. Under the stress of this terror she becomes insane and argues that since Gautama is not involved with life and does not care for it. She doesn’t wants to live a life of scarecrow, which has properly placed in a field. So she kills Gautama in fury and soon she accepts and meets to her own death. In order to place Anita Desai in proper viewpoint it is essential to compare her with the other woman novelists who have more or less the same thematic and theoretical experiences.

Maya is a revolt woman who fails to recognize herself in her husband Gautama’s world and finds herself estranged from the affection she got from her father. There are other personalities in Maya’s character which go beyond the idea of Feminity. She is in search of new outlook for a woman’s world. Maya thinks of her married life with Gautama as a fatal struggle in which one is predestined to kill the other. Denial by her husband, Maya is torn between her love of life and her fright of death. She is extremely incapacitated with the sense of loneliness and insecurity, she says,

“God, now I am caught in the net of the inescapable, and where lay the possibility of mercy, of release. This net is no hallucination, no. Am I gone insane? Father! Husband, Who is my savior? I am in need of one. I am dying and I am in love with living, I am in love and I am dying, God, let me sleep, forget me, But no I’ll never sleep again. There is no rest any more only death and waiting.”

Desai has shaped woman characters that are more and more figurative, undermined and dormant. She proves them as that they are also a part of human beings who seek emancipation, who feels to move from oppression to freedom, who wants to change from indecisiveness to self-assertion and from weakness to strength.

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