Acclaimed novelist, short-story and screenplay writer and poet, Anita Nair does not need any introduction. A writer who tells stories from both male and female perspectives, there can be no pigeon-holing her as a feminist writer. Nair has reiterated that women should be allowed to live their lives according to their will without any apology, without being made to feel inferior. This strand runs through all her novels, including her latest. Intriguingly titled Eating Wasps , the novel recounts the stories of not one but 10 women who have had to deal with obstacles that threaten their existence.
The story behind the title is explained early on. The protagonist, Sreelakshmi, eats a wasp mistaking it for a bee filled with honey. Later, her grandmother gives her a jar of honey so that she can have her fill. Sreelakshmi soon finds out that the honey she craved does not sit well on her tongue: “It was sweet and heavy, and coated my tongue with the taste of the wasp, I thought I would gag and throw up, but I forced myself to swallow it. I never ate honey again.”
Bitter taste
The bitter aftertaste of the wasp lingers in her mouth even as she tries to rise above the perception of the people around her who see her as ‘damaged goods’. When society turns against her as a collective force, she takes the decision to give up her life. Even in death, however, there is no respite: she cannot depart to the unknown realm as long as a piece of her physical self remains on earth.
“Once I had withstood the sting of wasps. But when I died, I was reduced to a forgotten bone, a ghost of my former self.” This “forgotten bone” — of her right index finger — then travels from one woman to another, bringing us their stories. Radha and Shyam, Maya, Naveen and Koman from Nair’s epic novel, Mistress , appear again along with their resort by the river Nila, providing the location and the means for Sreelakshmi’s ghost to move around. A prescient note in the novel references the recent flood in Kerala, with the rain falling quietly and the river rising up to its banks, threatening to swallow the resort.
No apologies
Nair’s grasp of the art of telling stories in parts, a format we are familiar with from her previous books, takes the readers through the lives of her characters without any disconnect. Whereas in Ladies Coupe the characters were searching for an identity for themselves and in Mistress , Radha and Maya were given the freedom to fight against male domination and to reclaim their sexuality, the women in Eating Wasps find themselves battling both internal and external demons in spite of the freedoms available to them.
Present-day dangers like online stalking and social media exposure, acid attack, the compulsions that follow acts of terrorism, become a part of the stories in addition to child abuse and societal pressure to conform. We also see that women, especially the ones who are successful or live life on their own terms, sometimes find themselves facing hostility from their own kind. Women who hit out at their hapless victims manage to hurt more, inflicting deeper injuries.
Divided into eight sections, each takes forward the stories of the main characters even as it recounts the experiences of yet another woman who has had to deal with unhappy experiences. Many of the ends are not neatly tied up — leaving the reader to decide for themselves.
“Literature teaches you that you can make peace with anything. Time will heal every cut, every blow, every dripping wound. The mind will find within it the strength to say: This too shall pass,” Sreelakshmi says though she herself does not wait for this healing to start, preferring to find a way out.
But Urvashi, Liliana, Theresa, Maya, Brinda, Najma and the others decide to go forward in life without sacrificing themselves at the altar of fear, while Sreelakshmi leaves behind enough of herself to allow the world to speculate on the double standards she had to face in her life. Eating Wasps is a novel about redemption and of women with the courage to write their own narratives without apology.
The writer is an author and translator.
Eating Wasps; Anita Nair, Context, ₹599
