With our destinies, We all have a pact, It is the memories, That can choose their act M iljul Mann is not a ‘slice of life’ novel, but a ‘slice of mind’ novel. It is Realism, but Realism of memory. There are two primary narrators of the novel, the first person protagonist Mogra, and her spinster friend who attempt to recount the story of the life of Mogra’s sister Gulmohar. The two narrators do not come with the Roshomon archetype, that is, they do not narrate the same incidents from different points of view. They have different points of view, and give alternative views to the other narrator’s but keep moving the story forward in a seeming bildungsroman fashion. However, it seems like, for one story leads to other, and this digression is always questioned by the chronicler narrator, but only to highlight the problems of the linear narrative.
June 2013, volume 37, No 6