Journey is the leitmotif of this latest offering of short stories from Ambai’s stable. Locations in language, gender and geography are continually traversed in this deceptively thin book in which seven stories are titled Journey (an intertextual continuation of her earlier collection In a Forest, a Deer, in which one can find Journeys numbered 1-3).
The journeys are not just geographical, though they are spread from Mumbai, Chennai, Pondicherry and New York, and traverse landscapes and ethnoscapes. The more important journeys are also explorations of gender, the opening up of new spaces for the urban middle-class consciousness, and the trope used in them explores different conceptions of the human body. Ambai’s complex position as a Tamil writer located in Mumbai, writing vignettes of life that have been translated from the original into English, is itself a journey: a linguistic crossing that plants these stories in a new hybrid space. In a short preface Ambai foregrounds the cacophony of languages which make up her milieu but emphasises the stories’ plots over the linguistic choice of register or an imagined audience. She writes, she says simply, because she has stories to tell and maybe a few to hear them. The narrator in many of these is an unobtrusive presence, with the tale’s focus rendered in a sparse, conversational style which, in retrospect, surprises the reader with its layered texture.
The opening story, simply titled Journey 4, is a surprisingly tender love story celebrating marriage, though its subject is adultery. The narrator, an unspecified ‘she’ travelling to Nagercoil on work, observes a young pregnant girl’s emotional parting from her husband. Unexpectedly encountering the girl later at the seashore in Kanyakumari, she hears how the husband’s impotence combined with his love for children made her decide on becoming pregnant, adding that the child “belongs to his family, absolutely”. The lyrical prose, in which the girl’s expression is compared to Balasaraswati looking at baby Krishna in his cradle, validates her decision and without irony establishes her love for her husband.
An interesting use of code-switching between languages is used in the story of two schoolfriends who meet after years in Chennai and decide to travel to Pondicherry. The ostensible reason is to attend a literary conference, but the journey is planned as an act of liberated feminism, whereby they would visit a bar. The ironic reversal at the end revisits the concept of liberation: “An illusion came over them both; as if Pondicherry were in some distant land, where they could take wings on arrival and fly as they pleased.” The taxi driver—who plays current Tamil songs interspersed with Hindi and English—however feels they belong to the past when they decide to shift to old Tamil numbers. The women are unable to locate a bar but the climax of the story is spent, through a chance encounter, in the company of a conservatively dressed old widow, Gomati Ammal. While serving them vodka and crabs, Gomati Ammal tells them how, after a lifetime of rectitude, she is now meeting her childhood lover, married to an old school friend. The abiding image of the journey is “an image of a wrinkled cheek laid against a hand whose raised veins spoke of old age”. The women don’t play music on the drive back to Chennai, but the story traces the switching of cultural codes designating gender, class and caste norms.
Ambai’s stories have always been impelled by a feminist search for a new space; they explore real experiences of women rather than reinforce popular conventions. Even so, this collection breaks new ground in its unabashed sexuality. Kailasam, a pun on the male organ, weaves a narrative between the past and the present to highlight the ambiguity young women have about their bodies even when they playfully pun on words. There are journeys describing male gigolos promising “100 per cent satisfaction” being victimised by women—thus reversing gender stereotyping—or daughters who are resentful and cruel to their aging parents. However, the wit, restraint and nuanced narratives that characterise Ambai’s writing is missing. The body is almost polemically explicated, especially in the titular Fish In a Dwindling Lake, where the usual existential gravitas is marred by authorial explication. However, it seems churlish to cavil, as it is not often that the female body, sensitively handled, has been a site in recent fiction.
(The author teaches literature and gender studies in Nagpur)
