ABSTRACT
Belief in the tyranny of fate complements Kaaroor’s spiritual orientations. Lalita, an ‘activist’ who mouthed slogans like ‘marriage means slavery,’ becomes the third wife of a widower. Gopala Pillai and his wife Madhavi suffer from separation due to the ultra-orthodox dictates of her bed-ridden father whose finer feelings too were bed-ridden. But there is a hidden property angle here. A forthright matriarchal Amma, whose powers of decision-making were widely known in the neighbourhood, gets a jolt when her pampered son, usually very obedient to her, announces his decision to marry a girl of his choice, a colleague in his school. Shocked to the spine, she agrees to it very grudgingly but later realizes that the two families had an ‘unseen bond’ in the past! The hint here seems to be that many of our decisions are made in the layers far above us.
