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BOOKS
She's Got A Ticket To Write
Anita Nair's new novel is a brilliant evocation of sisterhood
on the move
By Geeta Doctor
In the flood of
"wimmen's writing" that depicts women as battered, bartered
and abandoned on the shoals of low self worth, Anita Nair's second novel
rides triumphantly against the tide. Second novel? Is it possible? The
ink has barely dried on Nair's first one, The Better Man, that trawled
with intent through fiction's latest heart of darkness, the matrilineal
murkdom of Kerala, when she's produced another one. Apparently, Nair's
imagination teems with stories that leap out like tiny silver fish, struggling
to escape a fisherman's basket. As though to acknowledge the fact, she
has signalled that her book is "a novel in parts" and indeed
she seems more adept at stringing together a collection of short stories
than in going for the long haul.
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THE BETTER WOMAN:
A store of revelatory life-affirming tales |
In Ladies Coupé Nair has resorted to one
of the oldest ploys. She has taken a leaf out of Chaucer's mixed crowd
of pilgrims travelling to Canterbury telling tales to each other. He himself,
as is well known, borrowed from Boccacio who had his well-heeled cast
of characters relating stories to each other while sitting out the plague.
Nair's characters too are singularly life affirming. Though they do not
confess their life stories publicly to each other while sitting in what
used to be a regular feature of rail journeys, the "ladies compartment"
or coupé of the title, the manner in which she has them sharing
their experiences with the protagonist, Akhila or Akhilandeswari, as she
becomes towards the end, assuming her full potential as a woman, quite
often sounds like a female version of Alcoholics Anonymous.
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LADIES COUPÉ
By Anita Nair
Penguin
Price: Rs 250
Pages: 276
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Were the railways providing a hitherto unknown
service to the sisterhood of women by throwing them in together for a
night and a day of bonding through the boondocks of the Indian countryside?
We shall never know. Part of the charm of Nair's narrative is that we
are lulled into accepting her thesis. Once locked in together, it's a
question of age no bar, caste no bar, sex no bar, indeed the intimacy
with which the ladies discuss their sexual adventures seems to underline
the message that "having sex" is destiny.
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EXCERPT
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Akhila dreams: a train that trundles, truckles
and troops into a station. Akhila is seated by a window. Everything
but the train is still. The moon hangs at her shoulder and rides
with her. She travels through a gallery of nightscapes, each framed
by the window. A light in a house. A family huddled around a fire.
A howling dog. A distant town. Black oily waters of a river. A menacing
hill. A curling road. A railway-crossing with the streetlight glinting
on the glasses of a man on a static scooter, hands dangling at his
side, heel on the ground, head cocked, watching, waiting for the
train to hurtle past.
At the station, portraits replace impressions.
Reunions. Farewells. A smile. Tears. Anger. Irritation. Anxiety.
Boredom. Stillness. Akhila sees them all. The train begins to move.
Akhila dreams of being there. And not
there. Of adding a memory by the moment.
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Akhila herself is the magnet for their stories.
She has suddenly decided to take her life in her hands. At the age of
45, having achieved near anonymity working as a clerk in the income tax
department she is suddenly filled with the idea of revolt. She decides
to bolt, to take a long train journey to Kanyakumari. Are there shades
of an Anita Brookner heroine here, encased in stiffly starched cotton
saris and the disappointments of a lifetime of sacrifice travelling to
her own Hotel Sea Breeze by the seafront? Though she might lack the subtlety
of a Brookner heroine, Akhila is not without her desires. There's a hilarious
description of her singular form of revolt when she wants to taste a boiled
egg brought by an Anglo-Indian colleague to work and, much later, a tense
moment when she discovers herself responding to the anonymous groping
of a man's hand in a crowded bus.
Nair's evocation of the ordinariness of a middle-class
Brahmin family struggling to keep itself afloat in Chennai, hanging on
to the rigid pattern of their lives, as exemplified in the patterns of
kolam traced in front of their houses and expecting an unquestioning sacrifice
from the women in the family to underwrite this myth, is what powers her
narrative.
Akhila and her friends are on the threshold
of self-discovery. The manner in which Nair relates these transformations
is in turn revelatory and redeeming. Her tale is light enough to relieve
the tedium of a long journey and yet filled with the incantatory power
to burn up the tracks, to seek a new destination. To change.
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