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Literary Review
Feminist veneer
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A simple-minded sermonising undermines Nambisan's novel, says MUKUND PADMANABHAN.
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EPITOMISED by Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary, hip comic accounts on the lifestyles of liberated post-modernist women have set cash registers ringing in the West. Kavery Nambisan's On Wings of Butterflies seems very much like an attempt to cash in on this genre. The seemingly serious feminist veneer that coats her novel — which revolves around a "dizzying, majestic" plan to unite women across the country — flakes away all through the narrative to reveal pulp rather than literature, froth rather than substance.
Evita, a 20-year-old from Goa, has the brainwave of uniting the country's women and writes letters to a few dozen successful ones inviting them to do so. Over time, this results in a clutch of improbably diverse women (such as the police officer Tara Amar, the thrice-married ex-beauty queen Naveena Tandon, the frustrated and love-starved Kripa Kagal, the bi-sexual Rani of Kantipur and the teenaged members of the rock band The Nice Girls) enrolling as members of the group which soon enough develops into a huge men-threatening movement acronymed WOW.
An election is fought, a strike is called, a convention is held and the battle of the sexes escalates into a disturbing sequence of kidnaps. Finally, the children (who meanwhile seem to have formed a third autonomous grouping) come to the rescue and hammer some sense into the warring sexes — an ending which lends a rare touch of irony to their battle.
Nambisan's fanciful story line might have worked if it was overlaid with a steady humour and narrated with a sustained irony. But in taking the exaggerated twists and turns in her narrative, she seems unable to sustain a convincing voice. Now and then, she does make a stab at affecting a chic bohemian wit. Her mother narrative is punctuated with a number of deliberately weird asides — a politician who uses sanitary pads as an electoral symbol, a young girl who gets pregnant after fulfilling her rape fantasy, a painter who uses menstrual blood as pigment.
But for the most part, her carnal humour and her bizarre witticisms are undermined by the extraordinarily conventional and unimaginative way her story unfolds, which is replete with dreary and cliché-ridden homilies. As Evita tries to rope in people into WOW, the feminist issue is presented in an unforgivably simplistic manner and introduced with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Example: "We witness injustice every day. Everywhere. Two-thirds of the illiterates are women. The men find it easy to divide and rule."
Right through the novel, her characters make banal observations which, annoyingly, appear to be served up as profound truths. Example: "There are only three mysteries in this world. Life. Sex. Death." Or: "Love is a messy business like an egg. All nice and perfect to start with, but when it breaks..." Or again: "There are two types of men. The one who can only love his wife physically and the other who loves with his heart and mind. Most of us are combinations." Ironically, Nambisan seems unaware that the significance of her novel is undermined by this kind of simple-minded sermonising rather than its seemingly eccentric or unorthodox twists.
On Wings of Butterflies, Kavery Nambisan, Penguin Books India, 2002, Rs. 200.
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Literary Review
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