Academic and translator Aruna Chakravarti is the author of five novels and eight books of translation from the Bengali. Through a Looking Glass is her second collection of short stories. The nine stories here are all women-centric, presenting a true picture of the fate of women in India. Most of the protagonists are involved in a struggle for their rights in a society that exploits them emotionally and physically.
However, it is not a picture of unrelieved gloom. “Perceptions,” the longest story in the collection, demonstrates that there are two ways of looking at women’s lives. Khukurani, the narrator’s childhood friend, confesses, “I always end up painting women. Suffering women. Ma is the archetypal suffering women.” The narrator does not agree, “I didn’t see them as suffering women. They had suffered, yes, but flashing an unquenched defiance to the stars that control their fates, they had battled and resisted their destinies. They had won...”
Women of the 20th century
The stories are located precisely, in terms of time and space. The settings are recreated so vividly, with every small detail perfectly in place, that we are transported to the place in that period of time, whether it is rural Bengal in the first quarter of the 20th century (“Through a Looking Glass”), government quarters in New Delhi in the late 1940s (“Satwant Chachi”), 1950s (“Perceptions”), 1970s (“Princess Poulomi”) or contemporary Delhi (“From an Upstairs Window” and “Accident”). The characters linger in our memory long after we finish reading the book.
Characters come from all classes of society – the story “Mobile Mataji” depicts simple villagers eking out a living. In “Perceptions”, the narrator’s father is a senior bureaucrat, while “Crooked House” features sex workers. “Second Sight” features a Scottish girl and her missionary husband in Srirampur in the 1940s, and their mixed race granddaughter in Calcutta.
There is a wide variety of narrative techniques. Three stories are written in the third person: “Mobile Mataji” begins with a news report, while “Accident” has the protagonist Shreya, the Principal of a college in Delhi, waking up to the news of the death of “Kavita Goel. Of the philosophy department.” The title story has 99-year-old Mrs Das (Promoda Sundari) lying in a coma in her youngest son Nikhil’s house in England. Nikhil is mowing the lawn; as she sees his reflection in an ornamental mirror hanging on the wall, another face swims before her eyes, that of Raja Raghobendra Chandra Rai, the zamindar in whose household her widowed mother worked as a cook. The only difference is a white moustache.
Promoda, born in 1905, is told that her father died before she was born. Vignettes of different phases of her life come alive as she drifts in and out of consciousness. Chakravarti recreates the setting so well that we can visualise the life of the time, and feel the pain of the child when “a large woman” (the zamindar’s wife) rips the “Cashmere shawl from off Pomo’s small body”. The writer has empathy for all her characters – Nikhil’s wife Pritha “a stout practical woman of sixty with a no-nonsense air about her...who had taken care of her mother-in-law for many years now and knew how to handle her,” and the bewildered Nikhil, wondering why his mother called him “Babamoshai,” the term the Raja’s sons used for him.
“From an Upstairs Window” has several narrators. It begins and ends with a third person narrative, centred on Rahul, a young man living in a Delhi housing colony, who is very friendly with his father’s tenant Sandip Mitra’s young wife Neelanjana. A major part of the story is narrated by Sandip, a professor in Delhi University, who is not happy with this friendship. His mother Srilata and his wife Neelanjana provide their own perspectives on their dysfunctional marriage. Neelanjana falls from the window at night, and is paralysed neck downwards. The narrative of Dr Idris Ali, a psychiatrist, provides a closure to speculations whether it was suicide, murder, or accident.
The story “Second Sight” deals with issues of conversion and identity. It has two narrators, a Scottish woman Hester and her granddaughter Laura who has inherited her faculty of clairvoyance. Hester has come to Srirampur after marrying Angus Lee, a missionary. Her narrative begins on September 17, 1942, the day her only surviving child Priscilla leaves home. She wants to marry Daniel Maiti, a convert. Angus is a racist, and forbids the match, stating, “Black is black and white is white.”
Daniel and Priscilla die of cholera when their child Laura is hardly two years old but Angus prevents Hester from accepting the child; she grows up in an orphanage. Laura takes up the narrative on January 1, 2000 as she lies dying of cancer. She remembers the taunts she faced as a child of mixed parentage, who belongs nowhere. She trains as a nurse, and marries her mentor, the middle-aged Dr Sukumar Ghosh. His mother makes Laura change her name to Leela, and undergo prayaschitta, but she is still treated as an outcast. On her death bed, she reclaims her identity as Laura Maiti by insisting on a Christian burial next to her grandmother Mary Maiti in Srirampur.
Four of the stories have an autobiographical narrative. The narrators lead somewhat conventional lives; memories of their childhood spring up when they meet their friends after a gap of 30 or 50 years. As children, they have heard and seen many things, but understand their significance only when they recollect them as adults. We get a charming picture of the innocence of childhood, and the easy camaraderie of the families of government servants living in official accommodation: “There were only eight or nice Bengali families in the row, we were very close and clannish. The women got together for pujas and bratas, and children run in and out of each other’s houses...As was usual in those days, we addressed each other’s parents as Mashima and Meshomoshai.” Every narrator is carefully individualised, and the trajectories of the lives of their friends is varied.
“Perceptions” begins with the narrator Anasuya signing books at a literary festival in Kolkata. The name “Kakoli Chatterjee” does not ring a bell. It is only when the woman calls Anasuya by her nickname “Bulu” that she recognises her as “Khukurani”, their neighbour in Delhi 50 years ago. “Princess Poulomi” begins in 1975; the12-year-old narrator Rakhi thinks of the girl next door as a princess because of their extravagant life style. When they meet 20 years later, Poulomi has divorced her husband; she keeps “borrowing” money from Rakhi. Rakhi’s husband Ranjan insists on ending this relationship. “Crooked House” is another story where the narrator deliberately moves away from a girl who was their neighbour in Bombay many years ago.
A triumph in storytelling
Many of the stories reveal the son preference in Indian society. When a housewife suddenly dies, the Bengali women put sindoor in the dead woman’s parting and alta on the soles of her feet. “For, by dying before her husband, she had redeemed herself from the sin of not bearing him a son.” Satwant Chachi, a widow, is shattered when her son, eight-year-old Sodhi, dies of small pox. His ten-year-old sister Pammi tells her friend, the narrator, “If I had died instead of Sodhi, Biji [their mother] won’t have suffered so much.” Childless women face discrimination. Because she is childless, young Neelanjana is not given the main role in her younger sister’s wedding, even though her husband has sent money for the wedding expenses. “Mobile Mataji” claims to have a direct line to the Goddess through the bone she uses as a mobile; people flock to her for her ability to cure childlessness.
Another sad fact of life is revealed in some stories – the treatment accorded to relatives depends on their wealth. Khukurani’s family has many members, including two young orphan girls. “Anju-di always looked as pretty as a picture in crackling new saris, shining jewels, and flowers in her hair. She worked at herself all day, creaming her face, oiling her limbs...Tilu-di was the general dogsbody. At everyone’s beck and call.”
The narrator’s worldly-wise older friend Chhaya explains, “It was because Anju-di’s father had left a lot of property in her name and a big box of jewels, whereas Tilu-di’s mother had had difficulty even in feeding her.” In the story “Crooked House”, the narrator thinks that 12-year-old Chitri is a maid. She learns later that “she was a distant cousin of theirs from the village of Domkel...unable to feed her, her widowed mother had sent her to her rich relatives in Bombay.”
The length of the stories, 20 to 30 pages each, enables the author to develop the characters in depth. Every character, every narrator, is individualised. Chakravarti is too skillful a writer to state everything. The reader gets fully involved in the stories, understanding the events and working out their implications. The stories can be re-read with profit, fresh insights emerge with every reading. “Perceptions” presents women as winners, not just sufferers. The narrator shares her personal encounters with many women who have triumphed over difficulties.
Through a Looking Glass: Stories, Aruna Chakravarti, Om Books International.