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the complete review - fiction

Sakina's Kiss

by
Vivek Shanbhag

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B+ : effectively written

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "Few novels of any length are so versatile in their offerings. (...) The strongest resemblance, however, is to another novel that, like Sakina’s Kiss, was published in 2021 -- Damon Galgut’s Booker-winning The Promise. That story dealt, like this one, with the moral and psychological consequences over generations of a family’s failure to honour a promise. In each case, the promise in question is a plot of land. But where Galgut impedes the force of his moral inquiry with a heavy-handed, sometimes sanctimonious tone, Shanbhag’s novel is subtler and thus ultimately more devastating." - Keshava Guha, The Hindu

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Sakina's Kiss is narrated by Venkataramana, generally called Venkat. He is married to Viji, and they have one child, a college-age daughter, Rekha, who still lives at home; they live in Bengaluru (Bangalore). Both Venkat and Viji have corporate jobs and the couple is reasonably well off.
       Venkat has long been a reader of self-help books -- he brought one on Living in Harmony with him on his honeymoon --, with a whole bookcase full of them at home (he doesn't seem to read much else). Eventually, he'll come to think of them as: "a desperate attempt to cover up defects within me, to compensate for something inside that was broken", but it takes him a while to come to this realization. Meanwhile, the books and their advice aren't much help anyway with the issues he is dealing with in the novel -- specifically a crisis involving daughter Rekha. The main events of the novel cover just a few days, but Venkat also reflects on the past -- bits of which weigh on him, as is also suggested by his also coming to a point where he convinces himself: "Best to erase this history completely" (which also gives a sense of how he has not managed to come to terms with some of this history).
       The novel begins with somewhat menacing visitors showing up at Venkat and Viji's apartment, youths looking for Rekha. Rekha has: "gone to the village", Mavinamane, Venkat's ancestral home, where his uncle lives. There is no landline there, and barely any cell coverage; Rekha is, essentially, unreachable.
       The youths, who are at the same college as Rekha, return -- with their uncles -- pressing Venkat and Viji further, though there is not much they can do. Still, the uncertainty of what it's all about, and the sense of menace get to them some. Eventually, Venkat and Viji make the arduous trip to Mavinamane -- though here too find more uncertainty and questions than answers. And when they return to Bengaluru with Rekha, they find their apartments has been broken into.
       Rekha has always been a strong-willed girl, and while her parents give her some freedoms and sent her to a prestigious school, she chafes at the limits imposed on her -- though the way Venkat sees it is that: "As Rekha has grown up, it has become increasingly hard to keep her under control". So too in Mavinamane, she seems to have gotten involved in things that cause her father considerable concern.
       Weighing on Venkat is also some family history which he clearly feels some guilt about -- the novel's title comes from an episode he recalls related to it -- and he seems to worry about it being uncovered. In reflecting on events -- past and recent -- he notes that much has: "strong narrative potential", and that: "There are any number of possibilities for an exciting twist" -- but Shanbhag also lets his protagonist, and the reader, dangle some, not offering neat resolutions. Venkat's reflections and actions reveal much about him, a man who insisted to Viji, when he first met her, that: "I am not at all conservative. I don't believe in caste and all that. I think women are the equal of men in society" yet also finds that in practice --especially regarding his daughter -- he can not quite live up to these claims. The broader implications are also suggested by the major episode near the end of the novel having the family debating and then going to vote in a local political election -- the first time Rekha can vote in an election.
       With a nicely done underlying sense of ominous menace, and conveying effectively Venkat's sense of how his life hasn't quite shaped up as he had hoped (as suggested also by his constant turning to self-help books, looking for improvement), including his career (beginning with his early admission that: "Something I have not been able to come to terms with after all these years is the fact that my work has no connection to the electrical engineering I studied"), Sakina's Kiss simmers nicely, without offering easy answers or resolutions.

- M.A.Orthofer, 20 May 2025

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Links:

• McNally Editions publicity page
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• See Index of Indian literature

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About the Author:

       Vivek Shanbhag (ವಿವೇಕ ಶಾನಭಾಗ) is a Kannada-writing Indian author.

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© 2025 the complete review

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