Skip to main content

Women as Victims or Survivors



Book

Title: The Blue Scarf and other stories

Author: Anu Singh Choudhary

Translator: Kamayani Sharma

Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2023

Pages: 188

There is no doubt that the Indian social system is overtly patriarchal and hence a lot of women endure restrictions of all sorts. There are exceptions like the matrilineal tribes of the Northeast. The 12 short stories in this volume by Anu Singh Choudhary focus on some women from the patriarchal societies of India, particularly North India. Originally written in Hindi, the stories have been translated quite effortlessly by Kamayani Sharma though the book does show a few signs of poor proofreading.

The very first story, First Look, shows us the rising aspirations of a few women from a remote village and the futility of those aspirations in a world where even marriage is a business deal. “With this deal, we’re interested only in maximizing profits for both parties,” The boy’s father says. But the girl’s family can’t ever touch a deal of the sort that is being offered.

Many dreams crumble. But the women know how to deal with frustrations. After all, they have dealt with so many already. They accept this too with the “bittersweet consolation” of some rationalisations like “This sort of thing happens…”

In the next story, The Last Puff of the Cigarette, the female protagonist is quite a contrast. She asserts herself, her liberty, even by going to the extent of smoking cigarettes and drinking vodka. Her Boy is unable to reconcile himself with that sort of assertiveness. He’s too ‘good’ for her, the Girl decides.

The third story, The Way Things Were, shows how a female teacher alters the world of a young female student. The girl was born 18 years after the marriage of her parents. Their son had hanged himself because he thought death was easier than dealing with his dad’s pain on coming to know about his failure in math. The girl child becomes ever more special to the parents. But she knows that she is a kind of substitute for her dead brother. The teacher brings about a transformation to that situation and helps the girl discover her own identity.

Shyamali Sengupta’s 21-year-long search for her college crush Swati Prakash is the theme of the next story. They had been the best of friends until one day Shayamali got into Swati’s bed in the hostel. Swati changed her room in the hostel the same day. Twenty-one years later they meet again at Tirupati, the temple town. They have realised by now that love can have many shades.

A poignant contrast is presented in The Lines of Destiny with its two women: one a very rich one who is unable to bear a child in spite of all the medical care she gets and the other a very poor one who can work till the last moment and then go into the labour room and give birth to yet another healthy child of hers. The story raises the question about the worth of a woman who can’t bear a child for the family.

The live-in relation of Avi and Naina in the story titled The Live-in has a theme similar to that of The Last Puff of the Cigarette: Incompatibility of certain relationships. “How is marriage possible when in a live-in wasn’t?” is a question that the two young protagonists who are supposedly in love must answer.

Most stories in this collection question the very value of life. “From being born to going to school to attending college to marrying – it’s all without reason,” says the story, Life the Pain, Life the Cure. Is life an incurable disease whose medicine is life itself? The protagonist of this story is still finding the answer.

Anu Singh Choudhary
The meaning of life and human relationships is what binds these 12 stories together. There are many break-ups here. Some make compromises and go on. A few learn the essential lessons from their experiences. Anu Singh Choudhary has created some unforgettable characters in these stories.

 

 

Comments

  1. Sounds like an interesting compilation.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sounds like stories of quiet rebellion and backlash. Interesting. What are suppressed find different ways of expression.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Your comment reassues me that my review is quite right. 😊

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...

The Life of an Activist

Book Review   Title: I am What I am: A Memoir Author: Sunitha Krishnan Publisher: Westland, Chennai, 2024 Pages: 284 Sunitha Krishnan is more of a conqueror than a survivor. She was gangraped at the age of 15, and that too because she had started working for the uplift of the girls in a village. She used to interact with the girls, motivate them to go back to school, give them remedial classes, and discuss topics like menstrual hygiene “and other intimate issues”. Some men of the village didn’t like such “revolutionary” moves coming from a little girl. Eight such men violated Sunitha Krishnan one evening as she was returning home from the village. “Any sexual assault is a traumatic event and leaves deep scars on the psyche of the survivor. The shame, the guilt, the feeling of being tainted, the self-loathing that it brings in its wake is universal. I was no exception.” That is how the third chapter, title ‘The Girl Who Did Not Cry’, begins. Sunitha Krishnan didn’t l...