The Week: ‘All Those Who Wander’ review: Time travel and horror make a gripping tale

This book carries Kiran Manral’s trademark enthrallment

By Jairam N. Menon Updated: March 03, 2023 14:51 IST

“A story,” said Jean-Luc Godard, “should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.” Author Kiran Manral follows that bit of advice to the hilt. Her ‘All Those Who Wander’ is awash with beginnings, middles and ends, so entwined they could be a plate of noodles. It is not ‘once upon a time’ any more. It’s ‘once upon many times’ and all of them together. The book’s protagonist is sometimes Anna, sometimes Nayana, sometimes neither and sometimes Sue aka Sukanya. It’s as if time has been dropped carelessly into an egg-whisk until you can’t tell today’s happenings from yesterday’s memories. All this could have been maddeningly perplex but it is par for the course. Manral immerses you in multiple stories so completely that you feverishly turn page after page to find out what happens at the end – the real end.

This book carries Manral’s trademark enthralment, her ability to dally deliciously, dangerously with unconventional ways of telling a story and her infectious infatuation with the paranormal. And when you, like Anna or Nayana, begin to wander, you are rooted by the mesmeric quality of her prose. It covers a wide arc. She can be taking you into mysterious realms of the unknowable one minute. The next minute, you are brought down to earth with the acuity of observations of a middle class housing complex with solicitous but unabashedly inquisitive neighbours. She even gets the maidservant’s vernacular right who fears that some ‘galat kaam’ was afoot.

In the sunless world that the characters inhabit, happy times must necessarily be fleeting because the past – with all its ‘galat kaam’ – is waiting to catch up. Death and dismay stalk the pages. Sometimes people die, and they are the lucky ones. Else, they will live and remember, and memories can be more terrifying than nightmares. They last longer and waking up is no longer an option.

As in many of Manral’s books, the central characters are women, etched in fine, almost obsessive detail. They are vulnerable and fragile, but they seem to know their own minds until the burden of knowledge becomes unbearable.

Read the rest of the review here