Women should always be “manageable” and “tolerable”. The minute they stray from the script that determines how they should be, they are either branded “hysterical” or “weird”. In a world where misogyny and faulty reasoning are couched in misleading morality, Aruna Nambiar’s latest novel, The Weird Women’s Club, is a celebration of three women who fall from grace (quite gracefully, if I may add).
Hema, Avanti, and Jeroo were feeling the strain of being alive. Their lives were running amok and they could do little to impose some semblance of structure into place. To be a woman is to apologise and often that apology comes in the form of suppression of female individuality. As the story progresses, these women discover that there is comfort and power in collective despair. In this witty exploration of womanhood and its side effects, Nambiar also advocates for sisterhood and how it can be a potent weapon in women’s arsenal when disaster strikes.
A tale of three women
After losing her husband, the eternal love of her life, Hema was left alone to contend with the tyranny of her mind. For a while, she was constitutionally incapable of handling the demands expected from a widow and a mother. She let herself fall apart when everyone around her said she couldn’t afford to have a breakdown for the sake of her children.
Avanti, fiercely independent and always equipped with her biting wit, was suffering from the mercilessness of love. Her husband of years left her for someone else and also failed to show up for their young daughter. Marriage, once a safety blanket, eventually morphed into something capable of asphyxiating her in her sleep.
Jeroo was struggling with infertility and nosey relatives whose (unsolicited) opinions about her uterus increased exponentially every day. Time and again sorrow ambushed her and she was yet to excel at the art of indifference.
Avanti, Hema, and Jeroo’s identities were constantly contoured by the desires, expectations, and perceptions of those around them. Theirs were lives not lived but barely survived. Since there was no glamour to their sadness, it was often discredited and mislabeled as mawkish sentimentality bordering on lunacy.
After being divorced and widowed, respectively, as in, after the men around them were removed from the equation, Avanti and Hema, became too passé to be turned into spectacles. And what good was a woman like Jeroo whose entire being couldn’t be boiled down to her reproductive potential? Women could either be the Madonna or the whore and Avanti, Hema, and Jeroo failed miserably at abiding by either of these stereotypes.
The joys of sisterhood
Weird Women’s Club depicts women’s experiences on their own terms. It’s important for these multi-dimensional models of womanhood to invade the cultural mainstream and debunk the binary narratives we impose on women. We need more fallible, vengeful, and thus utterly human heroines so that Avanti, Hema, and Jeroo’s real-life counterparts can measure and shape their identities around realistic standards.
Instead of acquiescing and listening to the muffled sounds of their days passing by, Nambiar’s protagonists demanded more from life and took action. They dared to re-explore pleasure and passion, sexual and other. They also rediscovered their enthusiasm for life (cats might or might not have been involved in this scenario) and while traversing tricky terrains, under the unlikeliest of circumstances, their paths crossed.
However, friendship cannot be forged overnight. Avanti, Hema, and Jeroo bickered to their hearts’ content and didn’t share much fondness for each other initially. But with time they understood the need for delighting in others and in turn being delighted by them. Joining a losing team is preferable to winning a lonely fight and Nambiar’s women learn it the hard way.
Together, they do away with the shining performance of femininity expected of them. As they find empowerment, sometimes in the untrumpeted acts of kindness that sisterhood enabled and sometimes in the arms of new men, Nambiar intelligently emphasises on how the realm of everyday intimacy is the true yeast for social change.
The Weird Women’s Club does not plead highbrow ideologies about the flip side of the human condition, nor is it an advertisement for the next revolution. There is not much novelty to the concepts Nambiar espouses in her novel. But that in no way dims its literary splendour.
Packed with laugh-out-loud humour, this book takes a step toward extending the promise of life and liberty to women. Death is not always physical and this novel reminds women not to die before they can live. And most importantly, Nambiar urges her readers to “rage rage against the dying of the light” when their selfhood is at risk of being scrubbed off.
Weird Women’s Club, Aruna Nambiar, Speaking Tiger