Review: Halfway House by Mohan Rakesh
- shivangi83
- Sep 9, 2021
- 2 min read
Once again, the small thing all over again…
Halfway House is an English translation of the Hindi drama play, titled “Aadhe Adhure”. I had read this book for my English class and I remember reading this and having that deep, sad but yet wholesome moment where I don’t feel like complaining about but I know I want to say something for it.
Sorry for confusing you, lol. Let’s jump in to the blurb.
‘Halfway House’ means choosing to compromise and on that note, the story revolved around this family that is stuck in this very closed-knit-web situation of toxicity and insecurity. And nobody gets out of it. It’s a family that keeps fighting with each other but is highly dependent on each other. There’s the woman called Savitri who does all the work of the house and of outside. Her husband, Mahendranath has recently lost all his money and is dependent on his wife. Their son doesn’t want to work, their eldest daughter keeps leaving her husband’s house and no one listens to the youngest. The whole concept of this story is based on the compromise that they all do for each other as they progress through their sad, miserable lives. Hence the name, “Halfway House”.
What really attracted me to this quick read was the fact that this book ends exactly where it starts. Nothing really changes in anyone’s situation and there’s no character development. Again, hence the name of the book, the halfway house.
I know a lot of people don’t really like open ended endings. I know, I don’t like that but this is also the sole reason why it stood out to me. Everyone remains flawed throughout the story, although we do get a whole lot of exposition on backstory by the end of it, along with the reasons why they always stick up with each other no matter what.
It had that helpless feeling of not having an end solution which made it a little tragic but there’s a lot of active mentioning of concepts like independence (financially and emotionally) and how the situation of past predicts the future as well as how people affect one another.
It’s a short story, so definitely the pacing is pretty much catches up and doesn’t slow down. I did like the symbolism in this play, which was pretty unusual— a single man is given multiple roles because one of the characters evidently see the lot of them as ‘just the same’ which I could never have predicted. That was a good one!
There’s also a mention of sensitive topics like domestic abuse (although there’s nothing explicit), so if that is something that makes you feel uncomfortable, please don’t read it.
Overall, there’s not really much to talk about in this book except for maybe a few couple of hidden symbolisms that people rarely notice and the relationships between the morally grey misfits of the said family. I guess, I’d give it a 3 out of 5 stars ✨ Although I would recommend this to anyone if they want to read an Indian classic drama play for its uniqueness.
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