A 13-year-old gave his painting a long title, ‘My Mother and the Mothers in the Neighbourhood’. What caught the attention of his teacher and later the Kerala government was his touching portrayal of the work a mother does from morning to night — cooking, cleaning, feeding everyone including strays, washing, drying clothes, braiding a child’s hair, drawing water from the well and more. The State government chose the artwork for its 2020-2021 Gender Budget Document cover.
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But Anujath Sindhu Vinaylal’s mother could not celebrate the moment. In 2019, she succumbed to her illness. “Of our fathers, we always know some fact, some distinction,” Virginia Woolf wrote in her essay, ‘Women and Fiction’ (A Room of One’s Own). “They were soldiers or they were sailors; they filled that office or they made that law. But of our mothers, grandmothers or great-grandmothers, what remains? Nothing but a tradition. We know nothing of them except their names and the dates of their marriages and the number of children they bore.”
A silent spectre
It is this invisibility of women that Geetanjali Shree addresses in her debut novel, Mai, translated by Nita Kumar (and taking on a subtitle, Silently Mother), which has “at its heart a mother.” Recently, Geetanjali’s latest novel, Ret Samadhi, translated into English as Tomb of Sand by Daisy Rockwell, became the first Hindi work to be longlisted for the International Booker Prize, opening the door for a wider readership. But Geetanjali’s work is already known in translation, with two more novels of hers available in English. Besides short stories, she has also written a biography of Premchand in English.
Mai is the story of three generations of women — and men — of a North Indian family and the different ways they face up to, ignore, or challenge patriarchy. At the centre is mai, “who was always bent over. And said little.” Narrated by her daughter Sunaina, who speaks for her brother Subodh as well, she begins the profile of their mother — her real name will be revealed eventually and the reason it was never mentioned — by saying, “We always knew mother had a weak spine. The doctor told us that later.” Physically, she was a “silent spectre moving around, taking care of everyone’s needs.”
Through a rendering of mai’s daily routine, readers get a sense of her life and her relationships with everyone else in the family. “Mai did all the work and dadi [grandmother] made all the comments. ‘Is this what is called khir [milk pudding] in today’s day and age?’” The men — dada (grandfather) and babu (father) — kept to themselves, and the children hovered around dadi and mai, their favourite being mai. “Such a favourite that all the energy of our childhood began to be gathered up in one aim: how to rescue and take her away.”
Thereby hangs a tale
Slowly, they began to rescue her from everyone else, but “could not save her from herself,” or so they thought. And thereby hangs a tale, the real story behind the purda (or veil), a whole new world opening up with great power and subtlety. As it turns out, mai “was not a shadow who moved only upon others’ directions.”
In this splendid translation, Nita Kumar brings alive the rich worlds of Geetanjali’s layered novel, of an inner home and mind, the fruit trees in the garden, a food-laden table, caste, religion and all its repercussions on life. To Kumar, mai’s silence is “communicative”.
Mai was laying down her tracks carefully so that her children would not become her; she put down a ladder to get them out of every pit. They realise mai’s remarkable contribution much later: “We used our eyes to see only the shadow, when there was a whole figure we should have seen that cast that shadow. We used our ears only to hear the silence when there were many, many sounds to hear.”
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