Dedicated to her mother Sara Joseph, Sangeetha Sreenivasan’s new book, unconventionally titled Salabham Pookkal Aeroplane , topples our received understanding of women’s writing in Malayalam, using women’s meditations on life, sex and storytelling to flout all the boundaries that fix the moral codes of women’s language and arrest the erotic flights of their fancy. By practising a studied irreverence of language and by blending the real and imaginative realms of women’s lives into a dizzying labyrinth of the whimsical, melancholic and the archly political, Sangeetha’s narrative prowess enthrals the reader, while being provocative of the first order.
The two female protagonists of the novel, Mumu and Ashy, attributing each other with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, offer the perfect apology for brushing aside jaded conventions of form and structure to offer a heady concoction of irreverent tales. As the narrative pendulum swings from one mind to the other, it ruminates on memory and place, childhood and adolescence, slowly lingering on what it is to be girl and woman within the cultural exigencies of being Malayali.
‘Salabham Pookkal Aeroplane’
As both of them run away, from home and from the prison houses of conventional femininity, their new aspirations, their new lives and even their sexual fantasies weave into each other inseparably, like a phantom body of conjoined twins. One ventures out into the world, struggling hard as a Girl Cadet Instructor and later as a stallion jumper and equestrian instructor, to stand on her own feet and lead her life on her own terms. But it is her forays into the outer world that is fodder for the tales spun by the other, a failed writer who wants to don the mantle of a littérateur.
From her pools of isolation, her manic mood swings, Ashy can see the world only through the borrowed lens of Mumu’s adventures, her battles with the harsh realities of a misogynist world, her tryst with a dysfunctional family. Punctuating these plaintive and dismal ruminations are vibrant hues of her desire and pleasure, pulsating colours that fire the lonely imaginations of a stunted writer.
Using the frame story and framing devices from One Thousand and One Nights, Mumu is the new Scheherazade, the teller of stories whose range of stories keep Ashy alive as a writer. Thus, the listener is neither a king nor a man, but a woman struggling to write new tales.
Fresh perspective
As the teller, the tale and the listener fuse into one there are twists in language, new permutations and combinations of words and feelings, previously alien to the written experience of the feminine. As the fine lines between death and eros, pain and pleasure, celebrations and taboo, are gently eased out and new possibilities teased out of deadened words, the characterisation gains in intensity, becoming both ethereal and vivid. As memories crystallise, the central enigma of the novel, with its spellbinding quests into masculine mental and sexual territories and its brooding sense of mystery, deepens. The split between the decent and indecent, the fine line between the profane and the sacred, the linguistic division between words that are dirty and chaste, all of which women are so strictly forced to uphold, come undone and burst at the seams as language explodes in carnivalesque passion. As a result, there is never a dull moment of reading.
This work is as much about the art of writing, of weaving fantasies and conjuring new narratives as it is about books and their enduring magic. An array of marvellous books offers a rich intertextuality to this work, where an incident sometimes offers a fleeting vision of Plato’s cave, or a sense of déjà vu fills the mind as some of the most renowned writers or artists and their works from Aristotle to Agatha Christie, Bertolt Brecht to Kafka, Kumaranasan to Orhan Pamuk, from Marcel Duchamp to Rene Magritte, awaken new meanings in different contexts and new cultural milieus. The swing from classic literature to the language of obscenity seems a calculated move on the author’s part to unsettle our preconceived notions regarding the wide chasm between the sacred and the profane in language and literature. That women are terrified of taboo and swear words while they seem so natural in the male lexicon is a notion swept away by the author.
In a world where women’s stories are rarely being told in their own languages, Sangeetha’s female protagonists are sisters in arms, demonstrating the necessity of women storytellers and the power of words. Her women are compelled to weave stories to keep their languages and their memories alive, to narrate the ordinary and extraordinary paths they tread, to fire their exhilarating journeys of love, to discover their own licit or illicit liaisons, and not to be stranded as hapless heroines, muted voices or dumb victims in patriarchal fictions.
A column on the best of fiction in Malayalam literature. The writer is Professor, Institute of English, University of Kerala.
Salabham Pookkal Aeroplane
Sangeetha Sreenivasan
DC Books
Rs 299
