It is easy to call the Malayali woman writer offensive. She never resists this indictment. As much as she loves and desires men, she is expected to be a misandrist. That is not counterintuitive for her. Instead, she quips, laughs, and sneers. Every inquiry lulls her into fury, her humour impish yet wry, forever disarming, eyebrow-raising. You can blame her for many things, but insecurity is a charge she will readily acquit. If anything, it is an affront to call a Malayali woman writer insecure.
Like the ideal mystery novel, Jissa Jose’s Mudritha, translated by Jayasree Kalathil, begins with a disappearance. None of those concerned with the missing woman, Mudritha, have ever met her. Not in real life, anyway. The man who filed the missing person’s report spoke to her over many calls to organise a women’s trip, where Mudritha and women she’d met through a women-only Facebook group would travel to Odisha. Written through the perspective of multiple characters, Mudritha burdens itself with juggling many desires, many women, and many stories, testing how much can be stuffed into a novel before its seams rip.
Once Aniruddhan arrives at the police station, Vanitha, the female officer “biding [her] time until the rank list for an assistant professorship was released,” takes a premature interest in his story. He tells it well, with the details you need to make it believable, including a notebook that Vanitha and the reader read. Eventually, the male officers dust off the complaint, their peccadillos sequestered in sentences as if they’re the norm in the profession, precisely because they are (“…Renji recalled an old case in the vicinity and made a lewd comment,” “And this trip, women-only groups…just what ladies with money to burn do to pass time,” “He, his mother, his sister…they’re all a bit weird.”).
There are several moments in the novel where you know someone is lying to you. You ask yourself: “Huh? Is that too believable?” That feeling is about the same as when you realise the novelist is trying to justify, convince, or inform something. You see right through her. Then, the evidence piles up: when a narrator goes a long way to explain a choice, when a tardy subplot wiggles for space, when nothing is left unsaid between the characters, no tension stretched like dough. Such tells lavish in Mudritha. Luckily for Jose, a poker player is as good as her cards, and the ones she lays out leave paper cuts.
The reader never knows what happens on the trip, except that the fellow travellers have become close, waiting to hear from Mudritha, the woman who brought them together. Some of these women are destitute, abandoned by the men in their lives; some disillusioned with love, others smothered. These men, like the women, come in all shapes and sizes, all cuts and varieties – jeering, vacillating, raping, mocking, blaming.
Before the holiday
Jose narrates the story of each of the women as if she’s ghostwriting long-form personal essays. The trip to Odisha is a plucky, selfish beat in all their lives, be it for Sanchari Deeptha, who has to take ten days off from a needling boss, or Marianalini, a nun who commits the iniquity of standing up for herself. All nine of them live life going through the motions, each day an apparition of the last, and while portentous things happen to them, they remember it as inevitable – marriage, assault, pregnancy, labour, heartbreak – for they are women. Eventually, all of them acquire a phone. They log onto Facebook, or someone does it for them.
There are politics on the site, too. “When women use FB, it’s best to post a picture with a man so that people will know you have someone to take care of you. And it will stop people from adding you to groups like this one,” says her friend Nimisha to Baby, another to-be sojourner. Someone had added Baby to a group titled “Lesbos,” which “…[felt] like…a group for those women.” Baby decides to go with just a picture of her. The other picture she could’ve used was one with her son, Agasthi, who “would not even notice that she was gone.” She doesn’t bother telling him when she leaves for the trip. His father had been a nomad who married her willingly and left without a note. And a warning would’ve been nice, not to soothe any emotional casualties, but for the sheer practicality of survival. Poverty, after all, is expensive.
Most men in this novel are, as you'd expect any man in any novel derisively called women's literature, treacherous. The only exception is Aniruddhan, a man so self-aware you’d think he’s a pastiche of the male feminist. “Women usually are not able to attend phone calls in the early mornings in peace as the demands of the kitchen would be pulsating through them like a nasty, throbbing sore,” he thinks before calling Mudritha in the morning. Even his patronising paternity takes the appearance of innocuous regard: “I could imagine that going on such a journey was not an easy proposition for any woman.” But there is a moment where he slips:
I was beginning to get irritated. Explain myself to this slip of a girl … Besides, just that morning I had been in yet another argument with Mudritha and was again made to swallow my opinion and defer to hers, the distaste of which lingered on my tongue.
“So what?” I said, raising my voice at the thin, frail young woman. “I need the time off, so I am taking it. I haven’t signed any contract saying I'll be here permanently. If I feel like leaving, I will. That’s it.”
Many chapters later, Aniruddhan gifts the unsuspecting student/manager he’d yelled at some bangles. They talk, “joking and laughing.” Then, he broods: “I had changed, I felt lighter as though the dark clouds in my mind had rained away,” as if that wasn’t the person he had been all along. The novel performs the stale feat of prompting a good man to change into an even better man because of a woman (for a change, the relationship is platonic). Through Aniruddhan, it seems to insist that men aren’t all bad, even if most are, and reiterate that good ones bear crippling cognitive dissonance about the bad things they do.
Is this where Jose slips from the mould of the Malayali woman writer? Is conceptualising a good man where she becomes insecure? Aniruddhan is collateral in a novel where women implicate men. In divulging its insecurity, the novel staggers as an otherwise nonchalant polemic.
An unruffled translation
“This is my first novel,” writes Jose in her author’s note. “I wrote this feeling some anxiety: Does this work? Is there another novel like this? Would readers find it interesting or boring? And so on.” These are good questions to ask in the paratext. But insecurities are best kept aside in the novel itself. Readers don’t care for writerly insecurity, especially when it demands to be known. They’re voyeurs of characters, not authors. Well, unless you’re writing a memoir.
Jose's insecurity in the Malayalam novel seeps through in its English translation because Kalathil’s assured rendering never announces itself. She is a subliminal translator. If you want to recognise a book as a translation by Kalathil, the story isn’t the best place to look. Instead, peer at the language suspended between Malayalam and English – at the grammar rather than the style. Passive sentences abound. Nominalisation is an often-used tool (“This second going-away is not like the first time.”) Colloquialisms are naturalised. Filler sentences tattle of a preexisting Malayalam construction. (Where an editor of fiction might’ve rephrased it to “…that made me smile again,” “There never seemed to be any women among them, and this thought made me smile again,” remains unruffled in the translation.)
I suppose the best translators wouldn’t fiddle with the style of her writers for the sake of huddling amongst her contemporaries. Where some practitioners insist on a maudlin rendering of Malayalam literature, Kalathil seems to only care for the text itself, not the preexisting oeuvre of literature translated from Malayalam to English. No canon is static, and Malayalam literature is changing too. Kalathil has left Mudritha intact, just as it is: a novel two-timing the expectations that tether Malayali woman writers.
Mudritha: A Novel, Jissa Jose, translated from the Malayalam by Jayasree Kalathil, HarperCollins India.
