FICTION
When rules break down
RAJI NARASIMHAN
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The questions that Disorderly Women asks are older than the story.
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Underlying this quintessential story, however, is the history of gender relations.
Disorderly Women, Malathi Rao, Dronequill 2005 Rs. 250.
ON the face of it this is the story of Kamala, child bride, becoming a bashed up, deserted wife in her teens. Kamala is shown metamorphosing into a nondescript working woman, albeit threat-free.
Underlying this quintessential story, however, is the history of gender relations. The story cannot really endure without this mooring in history. The questions it asks, therefore, are older than the story. Can men and women live on this planet without getting into each other's hair? Can hierarchy be banished from gender relations? Can men and women interact on the basis of mutuality, free of hang-ups about whose writ is to run, about prior empowerment?
Negative answers
That the answers to such questions have so far only been negative is made more than clear in the events and situations making up the novel. The boys have it better than the girls. In the vintage brahmin families in the brahmin streets carved out in cities — the locale of the novel — this equation is maintained as a dictum. Girls are homebound, as are Kamala, the aunt of the narrator, and Rukmini, the narrator's mother. The boys too, are not their own masters, even though they do have an outdoor life. They have to prove themselves academically. Breakdowns can and do occur in these strict rules laid down for boys and girls. What happens after the breakdowns is when the inherent discriminations show up glaringly.
Take the cases of Kamala on the one hand, and, on the other, of Rajan, the ne'er-do-well brother of Rukmini. A failed student, who also turns sexually rash, Rajan runs away from the taunts and threats of his father. He finds asylum in a Vedanta Ashram.
Kamala, abandoned wife and sister of Rukmini's husband, gets her rehabilitation in standard ways: through resumed schooling, college, and on to teaching. She is allowed a niche in the family home, no more. A rehabilitation like Kamala's is a pruning and trimming job, in essence. It is a process of reduction, of keeping at bay the look-ahead, out-going impulses that lie dormant and are re-awakable even in battered women.
A different scheme
For Rajan, the spiritual trail he alights on is to be an ever-unfolding forward movement, involving mind, body and spirit. For Kamala, this total enhancement is simply not envisaged in the reparation that society is prepared to make to her. Kamala, however, wants it, thirsts for it. She is never to attain it. Her upbringing and background predispose her to thinking that marriage to a man like Rajan would elevate her similarly. And she's naοve enough to make the proposition to Rajan when they happen to meet. Hers is a SOS doomed to go unheeded.
To the end Kamala remains a prisoner of the proprieties above which society never gives her the chance to rise. Vasudevan, a family friend, and a man she'd rather fancied in her pre-puberty days, proposes a partnership with her outside his own married status. She declines it, for just such reasons of narrow proprieties, though she's still attracted to him.
Kamala belongs to an earlier generation. But Ila, her niece and the chronicler of her story, is a present-day woman. Society now tolerates her single-woman status. She's on her own economically. But the precepts of gender hierarchy are far from inoperative in Ila's life too. She wants the family house maintained as heritage. But her brother is all set to sell it off. Ila has not mustered the tongue to counter argue with him. She's yet to recover from her amazement at the way he has assumed authority and the role of decision-maker without a second thought. Will Ila succeed in making this authority bilateral from unilateral?
On Ila's behalf, on behalf of all the Ilas, and in memoriam to all the Kamalas, Disorderly Women sends up a wish and a prayer.
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