Mother. A world contained in the word, the universe in a relationship. It's a topic simply loaded with potential, the potential to mine endless emotions and portray them skillfully. It's also a topic that usually, can be mined better than it can be botched. And An Endless Winter's Night is not a botched book. It holds 20 stories on mothers and daughters, and most are well-told stories. Some of these tales come from the pens of well-known writers like Esther David, Nisha da Cunha, Ambai, Shashi Deshpande , Kamala Das, but the lesser- known names too, pull their weight.
Awkward translation
Having said that, the opening story, “The Swan”, a translation of Usha Yadav's lovely tale about a little girl on a train, is somewhat awkwardly translated, staying too close to the original and unable to soar. Elsewhere though, the translations are deft and evocative.
Esther David's “Miriam” holds within it a revelation; it is written as a letter from a daughter to a long-lost mother, a time-tested but effective device for an emotional recounting of the past and the present, of communities and relationships, love and betrayal. Read it for its ode to the mango if for nothing else. Another letter, another daughter in Nisha da Cunha's “Allegra”, the eponymous heroine asks her mother, “Mama are you listening?” Allegra is in a hospital, “all waste from the waist down” and writes begging her mother to come get her. A story seeped in pathos, but curiously enough, she leaches it of all emotion, even sorrow, through over-calibration and the result is just a story.
Vishwapriya Iyengar's “No Letter From Mother” has a young girl studying away from home and yearning for a letter from her mother. And when she eventually does get a hastily scribbled note, the older woman says, “Don't ask me to write again” and the reader gets that sometimes love cannot be expressed through the written word.
The anthology then swerves, successfully, into poetry. “My Mother's Way of Wearing a Sari” by Sujata Bhatt is a neat meld of memory and nostalgia. “Mother” by Jyoti Lanjewar is about an episode in the long chapter that is the Ambedkar movement as experienced by a Dalit woman, a mother of course.
Ashita's “The Lies My Mother Told Me” has all the lyrical rhythm of the original work in Malayalam; it is not so much a look back in anger as acceptance of what the mother had to endure.
“My Mother, Her Crime” by Ambai, written with the writer's characteristic sensitivity masquerading as pragmatism, draws lines between the terrible fragility of a mother's world and its power to unwittingly destroy. Urmila Pawar's “In a Childhood Tale” recounts the moment of glory in a basket weaver's life when the unlettered woman fearlessly stands up to the high caste local school teacher in order to ensure her daughter gets an education.
Vaasanthi's “Birthright” is the horror of female foeticide visited afresh, as is “Killing Abhimanyu” by Vibha Rani. Ajeet Cour's story “One Zero One” is arguably the jewel in this anthology; a disturbing account of a mother who hears of a terrible accident that befalls her younger daughter, her baby. Shashi Deshpande's “Lucid Moments” deals with the last days of a mother, chronicled with understanding and affection by the daughter sitting quietly at her bedside. Another dying mother in Gita Hariharan's “The Art of Dying” struggles to let go all the residuals of life.
Moving manner
Nasira Sharma's “The Chest” features a mother who gave, gave some more and kept on giving, all her life. And in “A Doll for Rukmani”, Kamala Das puts a little girl into a brothel and tells her story without any perceivable tear-jerking but very moving manner.
Each story in this very readable book plumbs the emotions of this complex relationship between mothers and daughters, dark and deep wells of elation, perturbation, love and anger. Is it chick lit of another kind? Be that as it may, simply put, this one's a keeper.
An Endless Winter's Night, An Anthology of Mother-Daughter Stories; Edited by Ira Raja and Kay Souter, Women Unlimited, Rs 375.
