Disha Mullick

The Truth about Me: A Hijra Life Story

andrea — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 08:00:00 +0000

What is it about the form of the life story—the autobiography—that makes it so seductive and so deeply discomfiting at the same time? I think it’s how the boundaries between private and public, someone else’s life and your own, blur in your reading. The relationship you forge is rich and colorful and insightful, but it’s also dark and violent and difficult to come to terms with.

The Truth about Me: A Hijra Life Story is the autobiography of Revathi. Revathi’s ‘truth’ is the first of such to be published in English: at once an illuminating, and a scarring read, that leaves you changed. Hijras are a community of people who are born men, but feel they are women, and so live as such. What differentiates them from eunuchs, or other trangendered/transsexual people is their culture: to be a hijra is to live in a community with other hijras, where you have a mother figure (a guru), sisters and daughters, and a tight set of rules within which you relate with them, what work you can do, how you look and behave.

The book is rich in detail and pulls you determinedly into the whirlpool of Revathi’s experiences—sometimes exciting and joyous, but more often sad and violent, physically, and emotionally abusive—a life of alienation and extreme frustration.

In The Truth about Me, Revathi leads us through her discovery of a community, experiences castration (nirvaanam—this makes her a ‘woman’—‘I felt like a flower that had just blossomed’), learns to dance and sing, becomes a beggar, performs sex work, works as an activist for a nonprofit, is stripped naked and tortured in police custody, falls in love, and more.

What is fascinating about Revathi’s way of telling, and almost painfully illuminating for the reader, is how she sets her own life – her familial relationships, her acceptance of her identity, the journey of becoming a hijra – parallel to the structures that she lives within. We see the demands and injustices that patriarchy inflicts, and its discomfort with her transgression; but on the other hand we also see the norms of the hijra community, which must be followed to be accepted into its fold. The sense one gets is of the (marginalised) self constantly struggling with something—both the mainstream and the alternatives available. She says, ‘A man sometimes has to struggle to live; but for people like me, to live was to struggle and fight…The world looks askance at me.’

While the book validates the necessity and power of a distinct hijra culture and community for a people pushed to the margins, as a slightly distanced onlooker, I felt that it falls silent on how unrelenting and inflexible this culture often seems. When Revathi interacts in the world with her hijra identity, but outside of the confines of the community, the fissures between her numerous worlds are too deep to see, the loneliness almost too cruel to read about: ‘Everyday my feelings died only to be reborn and to die again.’

Written by: Disha Mullick, November 2nd 2010

There Was No One at the Bus Stop

mandy — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 02:00:00 +0000

By Sirshendu Mukhopadhyay

Penguin India

The twelve hours that pass in this slim novella are some of the slowest and hardest ever—both in the lives of the characters and for the reader as well. Set on one day in the lives of two people in a not-so-secret affair, There Was No One at the Bus Stop builds the strained context of their lonely lives, takes you to a point of emotional climax, and then holds you there just a few pages too long, leaving you tired and frustrated. But that’s the price you’re going to have to pay for a deepened understanding of human relationships, it seems.

The form of the novella works well to create, in very few pages, the story of Trina and Debashish. It explores the reasons for the dissatisfaction in their lives, their growing loneliness, and an inability to limit their relationship to one corner of their brittle lives. Debashish’s young son expresses a wish to live with his aunt after his mother’s death, and we witness Trina’s painful alienation from her entire family. To make the decision to live together, to take comfort in the love they have found, seems like the simplest and most obvious yet, at the same time, most difficult thing to do. Over the day, we see their actions, hear their thoughts, and watch them tremulously step over boundaries created by society and themselves. We are frustrated by them, saddened, and made to feel oppressed by the walls closing in, even when they try to escape from within them.

It’s not entirely clear if something in the story is lost in translation (from the original Bengali), but the characterisation in the book—especially of Trina—prevents it from working, entirely. I felt a strongly misogynist undertone, despite efforts to understand what was going on in her mind. Trina appears to us in bits and starts, first as an attractive, vivacious, and intelligent woman, strikingly drawn against her background of middle-class ennui. Before you know it, however, this image shifts to one that is sad, guilt-ridden, and self pitying, the object of impatience and revulsion of her family. Since we remain mostly at the realm of the emotional throughout the short narrative, we don’t have much in the way of explanation as to how her personality changes, or why most responses to Trina are so extreme.

This portrayal of Trina as so self loathing and whinging takes away from the insight the author seems to be making about the complexity human relationships, and it grossly overplays the guilt and shame of a woman who has found love outside of what seems to be a cruel and intolerable family. What we end up with in There Was No One at the Bus Stop is a very disturbing sense that, although cracks and loneliness there may be, there are no good reasons to step out of the all-powerful institution of marriage.

Written by: Disha Mullick, September 18th 2010

Tiger Hills

mandy — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 10:00:00 +0000

By Sarita Mandanna

Penguin India

We used to argue as young literary critics that it wasn’t possible to have feminist romantic writing: the terms were contradictory by their very definition. Love stories were necessarily fissured by unequal relations of power, vulnerability, and injustice. This has always been troubling to me, as a diehard romantic, a firm believer in love stories, and a feminist. It was a niggling worry, too, as I read, and was instantly absorbed in, Tiger Hills.

Tiger Hills spans over fifty years, in the lovely region of Coorg in south India—from the last few decades of the nineteenth century until the buildup to the Second World War. It follows the destinies of two large clans from neighbouring villages, but the fulcrum of this epic novel is surely Devi. The story follows her life, from the heavily symbolic moment of her birth, and evolves around her relationships with three men: Devanna, who becomes her close friend and almost-sibling when his mother returns to their village from her marital home, and then dies; Machaiah, the larger-than-life "tiger killer" of the neighbouring Kambeymada clan; and Appaiah, Machaiah’s son. These individuals and their passions for each other, inextricable from the physical and cultural landscape of Coorg (belonging in the novel is almost always used interchangeably for person and place), form a gripping and emotive narrative.

The story would not be without Devi, and yet ironically, its three parts are named after the men in her life. The beauty of the story lies in the way fate, a strongly patriarchal family and custom, and the foreclosing of choices for Devi over and over again are interrogated by Devi’s own will and restlessness with her situation. At points in the story she recedes into an overly romanticised backdrop, and yet, the crucial turns the plot takes are when she emerges from this passivity, and fights for spaces and moments of happiness. What also keeps you drawn to the narrative is how the characters grow and change, both with tumultuous events that happen in their lives but also, subtly, with the movement of time and the accumulation of hurt and loss. So Devi’s changing relationship with Devanna is quite fascinating to follow, from close friendship to bitterness and repulsion, and these must intertwine in the end to reach a point of acceptance, despite painful past circumstances.

An excessiveness in language and plot notwithstanding, and a thinning hold over the reader’s attention, especially towards the last third of this expansive novel, Tiger Hills is a love story that absorbs you. It makes you angry when Devi—so willful, ostensibly strong, and controlling—seems trapped in her own life, giving in to the silences that patriarchy necessitates, and not articulating the injustices she suffers. But if it is frustrating, it also reflects our own love stories. and seems to understand the complexity of relations that come with love: the intense vulnerability, the often painful negotiations we make along the way, and the tenuous hold we ever have on happiness.

Written by: Disha Mullick, September 16th 2010