Anita Desai's fictional world offers a wide range of duality-ridden structures open for strong psycho-semantic renderings or interpretations. The major dualities woven in the fiction of Desai are of masculine versus feminine, tradition versus modernity, illusion versus reality, body versus soul, self versus other, Oriental versus Occidental, spirit versus flesh, rational versus irrational, emotion versus intellect, esoteric versus exoteric, lack versus desire, presence versus absence, attachment versus detachment, and so on. These dualities become foregrounded with the use of the technique of counter-pointing one issue with the other, connoting darker or brighter aspects of existence. The motif of the dualities comprises recurrent metaphors, metonymic parallelisms, ironic reversals, frequent flashbacks, cultural codings, stream-of-consciousness symbolizing dissection of the psyche, etc. Desai's women characters, though caught in the dynamics of lack and desire, always strive and struggle to find the basic truth of life which can show them the union of opposites manifesting a state of trance and tranquility. The patterns that she weaves are essentially dualistic in nature. The present paper aims at exploring some of the dualistic patterns which, in turn, constitute the thematic conflict in the novel Voices in the City (1965). The author herself admits that her world-view is innately subjective, which gives her ample scope to lay bare the varied feminine nuances manifesting the dualistic dialectics which cause the core conflict in the novel.

Anita Desai is a writer who does not believe in weaving the plots of her novel merely on a fig of imagination. As one delves in the world of Desai, one feels that though works of fiction, her creations are grounded in lived experiences that humans often come across. It is important to mention in the present context that her treatment is often subjective, as she herself admits. Her distinction as a novelist is not confined to wiping the tears of her female characters or simply empowering them to take cudgels, but also to delineate the duality that we as individuals as well as members of mass culture often face. This may often be considered a conflict, choice or absurdity, as our scholar critics like to call.

Duality, in Desai, means a sort of internal confrontation of choices. As life offers various options at every step of life, it becomes really difficult to decide what actually should be done. This dilemma often leads one to a confused territory of thought, where making a choice becomes a difficult task. This difficulty of making an ideal choice results in the creation of psychic tension in an individual who often feels a psychic pull which signifies a `lack', a `void', or a possibility of something ideal left out or missed. The contradiction splits him/her up and the dilemmas start haunting the individual. This sort of condition is common to everybody although, in some cases, the number is less. We do find ourselves standing at crossroads at various stages in life. The oppositional forces are always there to create this existential tension. Desai's characters are special in the sense that they are unable to connect authentically to `others' as they find even very intimate relationships to be hostile to themselves. The relational gulf adds fuel to their lacerated existence. The absence of a desired presence makes them feel utterly lonely and they are left with a dualistic state of mind, foregrounding the repression of their innermost feelings/yearnings.

The fictional universe of Anita Desai is structured around dualities. Life is imbued with complexities and it does not offer a single formula as its solution. It is too ambiguous to be presented in a clear and crisp manner. It cannot be concretized simply by imparting a remedy to understand its inner networked methodology. Dualities constitute the texture of life. It is this bewildering ambiguousness of life that Anita Desai's Weltanschauung weaves and the signifying code suggests the same. In addition, it is rather hard to be straitjacketed in one kind of ideological system or the other. Desai skillfully reflects the tragic `gap' between the individuals who fail to become the carriers of positive values as they proceed on the dialectic of desire to achieve a sense of negotiated meaning. The narrative involves them in a mutual `dialogue' of inter-subjective desire. Usually, the characters are unable to achieve a sense of constitutive `otherness' due to which all the conflict and suffering come into being.

English Studies Journal, Anita Desai, Metonymic Parallelisms, Cultural Codings, Mental Tortures, Traditional Unity, Gigantic Proportions, Domestic Duties, Social Responsibilities, Traditional Values, Psychic Disintegration.