Geetanjali Shree’s novel All at Once is a meditation on aging, memory, and the slow disintegration of order within a household, told through the figure of Bhule Ram, a retired judge, his frail mother Amma, his wife Premlata, his daughter Lachhya, and the servants who circulate around them. The novel is divided into four sections—Na hona (not to be), Hona (to be), Anagat (what is to come), and Prarabdh (destiny)—but the story unfolds less as a straightforward plot than as a spiral of impressions, memories, repetitions, and small domestic events that together create a vast landscape of life at its most ordinary and its most profound.
The narrative begins with a strange jolt inside Bhule Ram’s body, a skipped heartbeat, an irregular tremor that unsettles his sense of balance. He had been watering his plants, rolling up a pipe, when he caught sight of his daughter Lachhya eating a motichoor laddoo that he himself had brought. The sight unexpectedly shakes him. The laddoo, an innocent sweet, becomes a trigger for memory: he recalls the many times he brought laddoos for his little girl, how she would demand fairy tales from him, correcting his words if he strayed from the exact version she wanted, crying at the same places each time, rejoicing when father and child in the story were reunited. Those rituals of storytelling, repeated night after night, represented the closeness between father and daughter. Now, seeing her grown, eating absent-mindedly, he feels a pang of distance, a reminder that time has altered their relationship. The laddoo, instead of sweetness, becomes a sign of alienation, and this shock is what sets his heart into its irregular beat. From this moment, the narrative develops the sense that the body itself is registering changes that the mind does not yet fully accept: that something is about to happen, though neither the characters nor the readers can quite tell what.
Life in the household proceeds in its repetitive rhythms. Amma, the elderly matriarch with her curved knees and fragile body, moves about on the wooden cart designed to ease her movements. She taps, mutters, and insists on her presence even in her frailty. Premlata, Bhule’s wife, manages the house but with constant complaints, railing against the servants, lamenting her burdens, and criticizing her husband’s detachment. Shambhu, the servant, and his wife bustle about noisily, sometimes efficient, sometimes careless, always subject to the scoldings of the family. Lachhya, the daughter, enters and exits, at times affectionate, at times rebellious, representing the younger generation’s independence and also its irritations. Amidst all this noise, Bhule maintains his retreat: he tends to his garden, his van-prangan, as if it were a sanctuary. He waters the plants, scolds the leaves gently, speaks to them as friends, and reads his newspaper with ritualized order.
Yet into this ordinariness, memory intrudes constantly. The tales of Hansel and Gretel, the story of King Midas turning his daughter into gold, return vividly. Bhule recalls how little Lachhya would insist on exact words, how she would weep when the father lost his daughter and cheer when they were reunited. Those memories, tender but insistent, clash with the present reality of a grown daughter who eats his laddoos without acknowledgment, who scolds servants, who seems distant from him. The contrast between the remembered closeness and the experienced alienation deepens his sense of unease.
The theme of aging and frailty intensifies when Amma suffers a fall in the bathroom. There is sudden commotion: Shambhu and his wife rush, Lachhya and Premlata shout, the doctor is called. Bhule, characteristically calm, helps lift Amma, wrapping her in towels, supporting her into her cart. While the household panics, Amma herself downplays the incident, murmuring that nothing has happened. This episode crystallizes the fragility of the old woman, the inevitability of decline, and the various ways the family responds—through irritation, panic, denial, or stoic calm. From this point onward, Amma’s presence in the novel becomes increasingly spectral: she is alive, present, but always hovering at the edge of disappearance.
Bhule Ram’s own sense of self begins to shift. He starts to feel invisible in his own home. People brush past him; decisions are taken without his involvement; even sparrows land on him as if he were no more than a tree trunk. He begins to wonder: is he still fully alive, or already ghost-like? This anxiety of invisibility grows into a major theme of the novel. His routines continue outwardly—tea in the veranda, tending plants, performing breathing exercises—but internally, suspicion creeps in. He asks himself if he is still seen, still counted. When Amma calls him by childhood nicknames—Bhulwa, Bhule bitwa—he feels pulled back into another time, uncertain whether he is being addressed as a man or as a child, as the son he was or the spectral presence he is becoming.
The sparrows, or gauraiya, become a central symbol. In the modern city, sparrows have largely vanished, driven away by pollution and construction. Yet Amma insists she sees them, chirping and fluttering about. One day, Bhule himself sees a sparrow with a brown streak on its neck, and the sight shakes him profoundly. Is it truly there, or is it only a ghostly echo of what once was? The sparrow becomes a mirror of his own condition: half-real, half-memory, uncertain whether it belongs to this world or the next.
As the narrative enters its darker sections, the tone shifts from domestic detail to philosophical meditation. Bhule begins to lose sleep, waking in the night with the sense that he has lost a heartbeat. He suspects that people are walking through him, not noticing his presence, that he has become transparent. The servants, Premlata, even Lachhya—all seem to carry on as though he were not there. The sensation of being a ghost in his own house grows heavier. Memories of childhood lullabies, of earlier tendernesses, of laughter with Amma and Premlata, come back with ghost-like insistence. Past and present blur. The body is still alive, but the self feels already consigned to the realm of shades.
Amma’s decline continues steadily. She spends more time in bed, sometimes lucid, sometimes lost in hallucinations, speaking of long-dead relatives, calling Bhule by pet names from his boyhood, staring at the ceiling as if seeing another world. The family rallies around her: Premlata frets, Lachhya grows restless and scolding, Shambhu and his wife run about noisily. Bhule, however, tends her with quiet care, sleeping near her, helping her to the bathroom, soothing her mutterings. In this closeness, he rediscovers tenderness, but it is marked by helplessness: he knows he cannot stop the inevitable.
The climax of the narrative comes with Amma’s death, which is suggested rather than narrated in blunt terms. One night, after days of incoherence, she slips away quietly, almost with a smile, muttering her son’s name. Her departure is not dramatized with grandeur but presented with the same mixture of noise and silence that has characterized her life: the servants rushing, the family shouting, the doctor checking her pulse, while she herself remains calm, almost amused. In her exit, the novel captures the ordinary extraordinariness of death—at once monumental and mundane.
After Amma’s passing, the household attempts to return to routine, but nothing is the same. Premlata resumes her scoldings and management, Lachhya continues to come and go, the servants chatter, but a void has opened. Bhule moves through the garden as before, speaking to his plants, feeling the air on his face, but the sensation of invisibility has now become permanent. He no longer asks whether he is seen; he knows he is fading. He feels himself half-present, half-gone, like the sparrow that perches on his arm—a bird that may be real or may be nothing more than memory.
The novel closes with this deeply symbolic image. Bhule, once a respected judge whose decisions affected lives, now stands in his garden uncertain of his own existence. He speaks to the plants as if they are his companions, feels the sparrow on his arm, and wonders if anyone else sees him at all. The distinction between life and death, between presence and absence, between being and non-being, dissolves. The four stages of the novel—na hona, hona, anagat, prarabdh—have traced the cycle from a first tremor of imbalance to the final acceptance of destiny.
Through this movement, Geetanjali Shree’s novel becomes not just the story of one family but a universal meditation on mortality, memory, and the fragility of human presence. The laddoo, once a treat, becomes a symbol of lost sweetness; the sparrow, once common, becomes a spectral reminder of vanishing life; Amma, once vigorous, becomes the figure of inevitable decline; Bhule himself, once authoritative, becomes the ghost in his own home. The novel reminds us that death is not a single event but a gradual process of becoming invisible, of fading from recognition, of turning into memory even while alive.
In the end, the book leaves its readers with an unsettling but tender truth: that life is composed of repetitions, quarrels, routines, and small gestures, and that within these seemingly insignificant details lie the greatest dramas of all—the slow passage from being to not-being, from presence to memory, from life to ghostliness.