If your debut attempt at a novel is the story of a merciless massacre in your ancestral land, it justifies the anger in your words and perhaps defends the gimmicky tones you pick up to craft its pages. Erratic in style and mindful in structure, Meena Kandasamy’s The Gypsy Goddess is a raw approach to writing nonlinear fiction.
Kilvenmani, the shy and oppressed village in East Thanjavur district, is the protagonist.
The story is an intersection of politicking and discrimination, and is split into four sections: Background, Breeding Ground, Battle Ground and Burial Ground. Titled ‘Cutthroat comrades’ — the satirical chapter which introduces the antagonist and prepares the reader for the tragedy — reads like an exaggerated extension of a Tamil feudal film. Gopalakrishna Naidu, the president of Paddy Producers Association, is portrayed using cinematic measures. You hear him utter punch-lines to his fellow landlords: “If you can’t be men, wear bangles”; “Nothing we give them will be enough for them, so it is better that they are given nothing.”
On Christmas evening in 1968, 44 Dalit men, women and children were herded inside a hut, which was bolted from the outside and set on fire. You witness them being engulfed by the flames in Chapter 10, ‘Mischief by fire’, which is a testament to the writer’s literary genius.
“… and now the fire spreads with fondness and familiarity and the old men and the women and the children bathed in blisters making touch their greatest trauma and long-ago tattoos of loved one’s names show up on their arms but they are almost already dead as they continue to burn and soon their blood begins to boil and ooze out of every pore sometimes tearing skin to force its way out in a hurry to feel fresh air and the blood begins to brown and then blacken. ”
At the centre of this novel is Maayi, the widow of the village witch-doctor. She can hear the dead and heal the living. In ‘Survival guide’ we see Kilvenmani and its grief through Maayi.
“ Maayi was aware of the anger that stiffened this boy’s hands. She knew the knots behind his nerves, the bones burning in his knees. He had been throwing stones. Onnu. Randu. Moonu. Naalu. He had been breaking things. Naapathi-onnu. Naapathi-randu. Naapathi-moonu. Naapathi-naalu. He had been keeping count. He had not forgotten what he had seen. ”
Kandasamy knows the secret of empathising with her characters and strives to do the same with her readers. But, for her, the reader is a collective noun. Her running commentary and crass retorts in advance to the questions she assumes one will ask all point to this. She loses you several times to bursts of self-indulgence and unconnected digressions, but brings you back with jolts of lyrical ache. The book silently asks several questions, most of which are left unanswered. Every chapter is an experiment. She plays with various literary devices. Chapters come in the form of a Marxist party pamphlet, an inspector’s observations, an anatomy of a fairy tale, minutes of the Paddy Producers Association’s emergency meeting, and even as an imagined question and answer session with a literary critic! Kandasamy mentions in her monologue that she has left the rules of the novel on her clothesline to dry. Let it flutter in the wind and fade with time.
