THE
INTRUSION || INDIAN WRITINGIN ENGLISH || SHASHI DESHPANDE
INTRODUCTION
TO THE INTRUSION:
“The
Intrusion” is a story written by a very renowned Indian writer Shashi
Deshpande. Shashi Deshpande works are woman-centric narrative. This is a story about
a newly-married woman. This woman is the protagonist of the story and she tells
her own story about the act of violation by her husband.
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| The Intrusion |
SUMMARY
OF THE INTRUSION:
The story “The
Intrusion” begins with the woman protagonist, (here the woman is unnamed)
describing about their honeymoon place as the newly-married couple moved
through fishing village. She is aware of the physical surroundings as much as
she is aware of her inner chaos and the unreasonable twinge of irritation
against her husband. They walked out of the seaboard and were back in village,
hiking up a steep rocky path and finally reached the top with the square stalk
building.
The unease
that the narrator is experiences continues to grow when they are finally
boarded indoors. In the room the man attending on them opened the window to let
the wind in. The narrator aware of the man smirking and revealing an awareness
of what they had come here for and the gaze that the man was giving made her
feel uneasy and embarrassed.
The man left
the room, having left alone to themselves, she felt a painful silence as if
they were stranger left to themselves. His stress on the words complete privacy
in describing their honeymoon place made her fell extreme disgust at the
thoughts of it. Her feeling of disgust and dislike is expressed in the lines
which she states:
There was
something furtive about the place, something deadpan about the servant’s face,
which made me feel that the men who came here did so with ‘other women’, who
would laugh and chat with the men, not go through what I was enduring now.
Fear. Tremors. The way I averted my face from the beds. The narrator here talks about the
societal rules and institutions in which a woman is trapped and demonstrating
the fact that female sexuality across classes is under male control.
The sexual
urges on the parts of her husband sickness the narrator-protagonist and makes
her want to avoid him, but to no gain. She was now looking back at her memories
before she got married. She thinks about the exchanging words between the two
families and not asking the girl about her wishes and desire. she was being
binding in a relationship in which there is no returning point. The memories of
pre-marital bliss fade away and she is once again reminded of the uneasy and
awkwardness of being in the room with complete stranger which is her husband.
They spent hardly a moment trying to know each other.
The writer
projects the image of a women who is vulnerable with her fear and annoyed being
with a man who has his own vulgarity, insensitivity, selfishness and sexual
urges. They had not been given time to know and understand each other wishes.
The inner feelings of the woman protagonist are revealed here when she sees the
sea from the balcony expressing ger wish, except that there will be a
difference in what she wishes for and what she gets. Imagining these things,
she utters:
He would
swim, I thought, and call out to me in a lazy and friendly way and I would
respond with a wave and a smile. But all this was in future, possibly, if at
all. And at present we were not friends, not acquaintance even, but only a
husband and wife.
It was night and he asked her to change into her night-dress. She changes
feeling glad that her night-dress was simple. However, escaping his sexual overtures seemed
difficult now.
Unwillingly
I turned went to him, my legs as heavy as lead. And suddenly his arms were
round me, his face close to mine, his rough chin scraping, hurting in cheeks.
His embrace was too sudden, too rough and I wanted to scream, to cry out. But
somehow I knew that this was just between the two of us. I turned my face away
from him, trying to escape, so that the kiss he intended for my lips landed in
the air. He let me go abruptly. There was a foolish, angry look on his face.
[…] ‘What’s this? Why are you behaving like this?’
Despite her
stammering to him that they hardly know each other, her husband only protested
that it had had nothing to with their sexual act. The final act of violation
and the moment of her sense of wounded dignity are apparent in the following
lines, towards the close of the chapter:
And then
I woke up to realize that the sound of the sea was real but I was on a bed, not
on beach. And it was not the sea that was pounding my body but he, my husband,
who was forcing his body on mine. I was too frightened to speak, my voice was
strangled in my throat.
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