My moment of incredulity has still not passed. Is it really possible that three writers, all women, have published three novels about missing women within months of each other? I am one of those women, and like me, I’m sure Anuradha Roy and K. R. Meera will be astonished at this remarkable coincidence. K. R. Meera’s novel, The Unseeing Idol of Light (Penguin), translated from Malayalam, was published in April this year. So was mine — Missing (Aleph). And I’ve just finished reading Anuradha Roy’s All the Lives We Never Lived (Hachette).
As I began reading lists that appear in January — lists of most anticipated books, lists that I must confess I find hilarious, because they border on a semi-religious belief in the unseen (those making these lists haven’t read these books; they are devotees of writers and the promises made by synopses in the way a devotee believes in God and holy books) — I noticed these two books. There was anxiety — a bit like whether the three of us had fallen in love with the same man — but also emotional and intellectual curiosity. Meera’s novel is about a man who goes blind after his wife, pregnant with their child, goes missing. Anuradha’s novel is about a young woman who leaves her husband and son in India to explore a life of possibility in art. My novel (it seems awkward and vain to write about myself in the same space as these two well-respected and accomplished writers, and the reader must forgive me this) is about seven days in the life of a blind man after his wife goes missing.
She left Siliguri
The question that I asked myself right at the beginning, when all I had were synopses of their novels (I knew mine a little better than just the synopsis, of course!) was this — isn’t it important to ask why the three of us had made this thematic choice for books that were being published in a year that followed feminist movements across the world but also, a more actively participatory movement in India following December 2012 and the general indifference of a patriarchal government to women, their lives, bodies, minds, and their safety?
Though the title of my novel is Missing , the phrase ‘missing woman’ occurs over and over again — and more times than in mine — in Meera and Anuradha’s novels. I want to spend a moment telling you about where the title came to me. Disturbed by the riots in Bodoland and noticing how people from lower Assam were moving to parts of northern Bengal for shelter and protection, I began writing about a woman who’d left Siliguri, the small town where I lived, also known as the Chicken’s Neck or the Gateway to the Northeast, to look for a missing girl. This was based on a real-life incident: a young girl, who soon became a hashtag, #GuwahatiGirl, had been molested in Guwahati; journalists had taken photos and videos that had eventually gone viral, but no one had come to her rescue. Then she’d gone missing.
Around the same time I happened to watch the documentary Missing Daughters , about 10 million female foetuses that had been killed, the gap between the male and female population in the Indian census. And then, on a short trip to Kolkata, I noticed graffiti of a black stencilled figure of a girl with ‘#missinggirls 1098’ written alongside. Because of the paint leaking or the carelessness of the painter, the image of the girl had not remained circumscribed to the portion of the wall that it had been plastered on. I remember two related realisations: the first one was selfish — I’d found the title of the novel-like thing I’d been working on. The second one was a bit of an epiphany — I saw Sita in that image of the missing girl that hadn’t remained obedient to the circumscribed lines.
Disobeying lines
Kobita — whose name means ‘poetry’ — goes missing in the novel that I was writing. She’s disobedient to the Lakshman rekha. In my head, she was Kobita — poetry is, after all, the result of a disobedience to our conditioned understanding of the meaning of lines and sentences. The woman exploring possibilities in life, refusing to be contained in the taut perimeter of a line, becomes analogous to a run-on line in a world that knows only rhyming couplets.
Is that why women go missing, when they do not obey the stricture of lines? I wondered. And then came the conceit that’d become central to my novel. That though our first epic, the Ramayana , had been read in various ways, for me it had been about this one question: it was a story of a person, a king, later canonised into a god-like figure, and his people when his wife goes missing. Like the seven adhyayas in the Ramayana , the novel is, to put it simplistically, about seven days in the life of the blind poet and his son. Why has Kobita left her husband to go to Assam? This woman who goes ‘missing’ has gone to Guwahati to look for another missing woman herself.
As I read Meera’s novel, I found something similar — that there wasn’t only one woman who goes missing, but many. Deepti gets off a train and disappears — her husband gradually grows blind. When he finds love again, in Rajani, she too disappears, not once but twice, first from the man she marries, then from Prakash, the man she loves. There is the first wife of a character called Chandramohan — she commits suicide. Why do these women die or disappear? As I read about these women, a quote from Jean Baudrillard that I’d used in Missing came back to me: ‘Dying is pointless. You have to know how to disappear’.
Not allowed to leave
The woman who leaves is either given up for dead, or her character and morality are questioned, the last having been turned into the trope of the agnipariksha by Valmiki. Siddhartha leaves wife and child in the middle of the night and walks away — we continue to celebrate his journey, his transformation to the Enlightened One. Imagine this — Yashodhara leaving husband and child for her spiritual quest. Would our imagination — and our hearts — have been able to accommodate the woman’s journey towards self-fulfillment?
The man is allowed to be saint, loafer, artist, or revolutionary. The woman, if she leaves home and husband, must immediately be turned into a sacred figure, as say Meerabai, or deemed mad, like Lal Ded, or condemned as cruel and immoral. Anuradha’s novel exposes the contrapuntality of this desire to explore the aesthetic and spiritual life by gendering it: Gayatri, who leaves husband and child, to go to Bali to explore a life in the arts, becomes, to use a word she uses for herself, a ‘witch’ in the eyes of the world; her husband leaves home to become a Buddhist ‘saint’ but soon returns with a second wife.
Virginia Woolf, in her essay ‘Shakespeare’s Sister’, asks her readers to imagine the impossible — why hadn’t there been a female genius? Through a series of hypothetical situations — imagine Shakespeare had a sister, imagine she went to school (no, but school education was denied to girls), imagine she got married and then left her husband and children like Shakespeare did, when he went to London, imagine that, like her brother, she waited horses in the stable (wouldn’t she have been raped and left to die?), imagine that she began her journey as a writer by becoming an actor (Oh, but there were no female actors at that time) — Woolf gives us the history of the repressed female artist. I couldn’t help remembering this as I read about Gayatri’s desire to dance, and later to paint, and how her husband dismisses her spontaneity and artist’s passion as useless ‘hobbies’. Gayatri was Virginia Woolf’s contemporary.
Absence of light
Women — and girls — are going missing from our novels. It is only because women are going missing from the world, from our lives. I called her Kobita. Meera calls her Deepti, Anuradha’s missing woman is Gayatri, who signs her letters as ‘Gay’. Kobita, the poetic; Deepti and Gayatri, related to light, ‘Gay’, related to joy, of course. Poetry, light, delight — these are going missing from our lives. In Prayaag Akbar’s novel Leila , Leila is missing; in Meera’s, Rajani goes missing. Both Leila and Rajani are names about the night, about darkness. That is a telling metaphor, a moral, too — the absence of light, of seeing. Prakash, in Meera’s novel, goes blind when his wife leaves; Nayan in Missing is a blind poet; Anuradha’s metaphors show NC, Gayatri’s husband, as a self-blind man. ‘When some women leave, they also take with them the sight of those men who had loved them,’ writes Meera. Prakash imagines himself as a bat all through her novel. Nayan is, like the national poets Homer and Milton, blind.
A common strand
There are many other similarities in these three books. Kabir in Missing and Myshkin in Anuradha’s novel, apart from sharing an obsessive affection for plant life, are sons looking for their missing mothers. Though separated by decades, their search, their rejection of romantic love, their withdrawal from the social, their natural habitat in the plant and animal world make them brothers in a way only literature can. Both their mothers are late risers — it’s a point both notice, as if this too was a violation of the code of female obedience. Both are letter readers, as is Meera’s Prakash — their energy is spent on reading letters about missing girls, Myshkin’s about his mother, Kabir’s about a missing Nepali girl.
I also read, with a mixture of confusion and curiosity, how Myshkin discovers his mother’s hair in an envelope, years after she leaves him — a gesture of rebellion before she left with the White man, he interprets. Kabir discovers an uncle combing his mother’s hair and later wonders whether it is to him she has gone. This moment was annotated by another blind poet’s representation of hair and its relation to a woman’s faithlessness — Milton and Delilah.
But what made these books related in my eyes was a common desire that I had discovered, quite by chance, while reading Therigatha , the first anthology of women’s writing. There was one line that I found was almost a refrain in these poems by Buddhist women: ‘I am free’. Many, many centuries later, the desire of women remains unchanged — that is what Gayatri and Rajani and Deepti and Kobita are still waiting to be.
The writer is the author of How I Became a Tree and Missing.
