I
read Anita Nair’s 2001 opus Ladies’ Coupé
recently. Many thanks to Sunandini, who lent me the book, saying she didn’t
much like it herself. As for me, I am not too sure. But the writing quality is pretty
good, and despite writing about women’s travails, Nair does not come across as
a rabid feminist (‘My identity and self-worth depend in a very important way on
the shortness of my skirt and on how loudly I can quarrel with my elders’), so
I shall certainly encourage everybody to try it before forming opinions.
See
the wikipedia summary
here. Akhila has grown up in a closed and orthodox
Brahmin community in small-town Tamil Nadu, she has had to become the ‘man’ of
the family since her father’s untimely death – working as a clerk in the income
tax department in Bangalore – looking after her mother, sister and brothers,
she has never had much chance to have romantic flings or time to get married,
she has always been one who tries to think for herself, she is lonely and frustrated,
and finally at 45, egged on to live her own life by a school friend who is now a
widow and lives with her daughter, she decides to do herself the favour of
taking a holiday, and goes travelling by train towards Kanyakumari, even having
to fight to assert that much freedom of action for herself. On the train, in a
ladies’ coupe (the kind that existed on Indian Railways till the early 1990s),
she makes an acquaintance with five other women of varying ages and from
considerably different social strata, and overnight, they all tell her their
own stories.
The
stories are well told. Though nothing here is new or really shocking to my kind
of reader, you cannot help feeling shame, sorrow, pity and a strong sense of the
ridiculous about the way most women are still treated in our society,
regardless of which part of India one belongs to, whether they are educated and
well-off or not (ridiculous that one woman finds a modicum of ‘liberation’ in
eating eggs on the sly, another from learning to swim in middle age without her
husband’s knowledge. My daughter has much to be thankful for!). Horrifying and
disgusting, too, that women have so strongly internalized all the iniquitous
mores supposedly imposed by a patriarchal dispensation that they are the first
and cruellest to condemn other women in distress, so they will heap opprobrium
on the head of a mother who sells her daughter into prostitution for want of
any other way to keep the headless family going but won’t do anything to help; other
mothers will routinely blame daughters for ‘tempting’ men into raping them, and
women who find brief pleasure in lesbian relationships will then turn around on
themselves and their partners in revulsion and self-loathing. The writer is
honest enough to show how women can use deadly wile in all stages of life to
keep their men under their control, as far as they can. And moreover, that men –
real men, not the straw monsters constructed by feminists to hurl their barbs
at – are not all bad and ugly but merely weak and stupid creatures, often
trying to simply do the best they can and failing miserably to make their women
happy, either because it is beyond their power or the women simply do not know what they really
want.
That
brings me to the crux of the matter:
what
is it that Akhila wants, and does she ever really find it? From her
childhood she has been resentful of other people’s happiness (even her own
parents’ – why should they be so devoted to each other in such a conventional
way, and why should they ‘make’ her feel neglected owing to their own
closeness?), unable to find any for herself: is it entirely a matter of
unfavourable circumstances or something to do with her character? Love does
come her way, but she runs away, convincing herself that a much younger man
would be highly unsuitable – leaving him shocked and apparently heartbroken.
Later, on her time out, she exults in seducing another younger man literally
off the street and having a one-night stand with him before rubbing him out of
her life without so much as a goodbye, and immediately thereafter rings up her former
beau, no doubt to check if the old flame still burns, and whether something can
be made out of it yet. Remember, she had set out to find out for herself
whether a woman really ever needs a man in her life (other than as a stud, I
presume), and this is how it ends. Look at the last lines of a blogpost written
about it by a woman
here. Just what I ended up feeling myself.
P.S.:
My family is just different, I guess. My aunt has lived unmarried all her life,
and alone since her mother died several years ago. She retired as a professor
in a Calcutta college 14 years back, and has travelled all over India and more
than twenty other countries all by herself. I wonder what the Akhila type would
say if they met her?
[Ladies’
Coupé, by Anita Nair, Penguin Books India 2001, pp.
276, Rs. 350, ISBN 978-0-141-00595-9]
