With Sakina’s Kiss (2023), Shanbhag returns to a nuclear family of three in the bustling city of Bangalore. On the surface, they seem to have it all—an engineer father, an IT professional mother, a college-going daughter, two small cars to get to their respective jobs, and enough self-help books to fill the decent-sized bookshelf in their two-bedroom apartment. In the early days of their marriage, Venkat and Viji connect through a self-help book called Living in Harmony, then are shown many years later to be invested in ticking off their checklist for a successful life, until a knock on their door brings Venkat face-to-face with two cocky young men who are looking for Rekha, their daughter. The couple’s apparent harmony rushes out the door, as Venkat and Viji realize these men are street thugs looking for Rekha, who they had assumed was on holiday in the family’s native village, but who might now be missing. 

“We had a situation at our doorstep. As the man of the house, it was my duty to step forward and take care of it,” the carefully constructed first chapter concludes. Through this internal monologue the reader realizes the middle-aged Venkat is Queen Draupadi, and now that he acquired the modern life he aspired for, his underlying (traditional) need to assert male dominance appears. Following the thugs’ visit, Shanbhag brings subtext to surface: Venkat has been skittish around his daughter’s independent choices and struggles to adapt to the changing gender roles across his family. In a parallel narrative of treachery in his past, Venkat’s maternal uncle had also vanished, and a broken promise made around his missing uncle’s land adds more cracks to the perfect walls of Venkat’s life, eventually revealing what lies beneath.

Because Vivek Shanbhag is a writer whose heft lies in staging the “unsayable,” his hidden intentions braid seamlessly with the complex human instinct to avoid saying out loud what you truly desire, or fear. Since his characters fixate on fulfilling their every desire, once they achieve them, their obsessive quest to keep their life in perfect shape starts to take over. Venkat desires a modern household, but when he finally gets an educated working wife, and a smart, independent daughter, he struggles with his loss of control and employs misguided methods of enforcing rules under the guise of protecting them. Whenever Rekha, his outspoken daughter, wishes to debate an issue that she cares about, Venkat infantilizes her by calling her “Putti” or “small girl.” As if to voice his unspoken loss of control, the novel begins at the point that Rekha disappears, and over the next four days of Venkat’s quest to find her, a hide-and-seek narrative with a complex interplay of caste, class, and gender with power, comes to light.

Owing to his sensibility of the “unsayable,” Vivek Shanbhag’s fiction has gained popularity through its authentic ability to touch mysterious truths and nuances of life. The originality in Shanbhag’s work comes from deeply engaging with Kannada, the language of his birth. In his own words, “When I started writing, Kannada was the only language with which I had such a strong emotional and intellectual preoccupation,” Shanbhag said in an interview with Kelly Sarabyn on Book Club Babble. According to him, translation also requires a similar engagement with that language, which is why he patiently waited for Srinath Perur to translate Sakina’s Kiss, releasing it almost eight years after his bestselling Ghachar Ghochar (2015). It was well worth the wait for readers because Perur mirrors Shanbhag’s seamless integration of cultural idioms to capture the subtle interplay between modernity and tradition without losing the author’s trademark pithiness.

Well-known for his translation of the legendary Girish Karnad’s memoirs, This Life at Play (2021), Perur strives to burrow beneath the skin of an author’s sensibility by rendering strong depictions of the source text’s intentions, its original plot, the character descriptions, and thematic elements. In that respect, Perur finds translating fiction and nonfiction to be quite different from each other. “Fiction is about understanding the author’s sensibility while in nonfiction, ambiguity of language must be carefully dealt with,” he relayed in a 2023 conversation with Sayari Debnath of Scroll.in.

Perur’s strength as a translator lies in his expert ability to create prose that balances fidelity to the original text and readability for English-language readers. Finding the right voice and tone that suits the original text, and avoiding overly literal translation helps him craft a narrative that is not stilted but reads engagingly. In Shanbhag’s writing, every word is used exactly for its meaning and emotional depth, and Perur adapts that brevity and precision. Most readers who enjoy Shanbhag’s work relish his idiomatic expressions rooted in the Kannada language, and Perur understands that cultural context quite well and effectively translates its nuances, honoring the integrity of the original text. In Sakina’s Kiss, one of the ways Perur brings to life Venkat’s inner struggle to process his daughter’s modern ways is by translating regional aphorisms without losing the colloquial tone with which it’s spoken. For example:

“How good things are when our children depend on us for everything, how pleasant is their rebellion when it is within our control. But after a point, our own children end up becoming hot ghee in the mouth for us.”

Even though these regional aphorisms might not directly translate in English, Perur reimagines their colloquial humour and emotional resonance in English to make them fathomable for English readers. From ghee, or clarified butter, to dosa—the Indian rice-and-lentil breakfast pancake—readers can find similar heart in the little scene in which a secondary character unknowingly describes the journey of the Shanbhag-Perur duo and their patient, nuanced literary process:  

 “Oh, the first dosa is always poured on a little thick. It’s to win over the pan. Otherwise it acts up and makes you lose face in front of guests. Just watch, now the dosas will turn out thin and crisp.” 

But then, like Queen Draupadi dealing with the consequences of “achieving” her perfect-husband checklist, those same readers might question why their rice pancakes turned out as thin and crisp as they’d desired and royally served on breakfast platters. In Shanbhag’s words, they would say, “There are no coincidences, only unseen chains of consequence.” 

Then, their stories would begin.