“By its very presence” Conventionality and Commonality in Shashi Deshpande’s Realism Ayelet Ben-Yishai 1 forthcoming in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature Shashi Deshpande’s 1996 novel, A Matter of Time, tells the story of a middle-class Indian family whose father, Gopal, in a crisis of conscience and self-doubt, leaves his family a wife and three teenage daughters and his job as a history professor. Gopal’s crisis of faith can be summed up in the words he rehearses (though never actually says) when preparing to explain his actions to Sumi, his wife: “I stopped believing in the life I was leading, suddenly it seemed unreal to me and I knew I could not go on”. 2 For Gopal, life as it is lived has become “unreal”, disengaged from its meaning, and therefore from reality, forging a chasm between the quotidian (“the life I was leading”) and metaphysical depth (“belief”). But though he continues searching — or talking about searching for meaning throughout the novel, Gopal does not find the answer to that which will make his life “real” again. Note that Gopal’s use of “real” here, as it is articulated by its negation, “unreal”, does not mean that he has lost touch with reality, but rather that he has lost the ability to find purpose in it. In other words, the adjective “unreal” here denotes “meaningless” while “real” denotes meaningful. 3 Gopal’s unspoken explanation contributes to the silence that dominates this and other Deshpande novels, whose family secrets and feuds, unresolved marital and emotional