A sociological continuum of remarkable women

The 2006 Pedro Almodovar film Volver is, I believe, one of the finest films of the 21st century, an observational masterpiece that works perfectly throughout. The film’s greatness is, more than anything else, built around a string of dazzling performances by its female actors: Penelope Cruz, Carmen Maura, Blanco Portillo and others. It is wrong to say “led by Cruz” or “led by Maura” because there is no leading lady, no second fiddle here: much like the show Orange Is The New Black, each character is allowed breathing space by Almodovar’s affectionate, immaculately written screenplay (no wonder, then, that the entire female cast was awarded Best Actress at Cannes). What we end up witnessing is a sociological continuum of women’s lives: from 14-year-olds to 40-somethings to dead septuagenarians who interfere with the world of the living.

The Trouble With Women , Meghna Pant’s latest short story collection, presents a similar ensemble of remarkable women: here, too, the entire gamut of ages, backgrounds and settings is presented. There’s a story about an adolescent teenager dealing with her mother’s trauma, one about a newly married 30-something with a secret that could scupper her union, another about an old woman who has just been diagnosed with cancer. And like Volver , the pieces add up to a continuum, a spectrum of women in constant conversation with each other and the reader.

The first story, ‘When a Man Loves a Woman’, is the only one written from the point of view of a man — and there’s a good reason for that. The narrator Bilal is a man prone to hitting his wife; in his twisted sense of rationality, this is nothing more than a simple disciplinary measure. The scary part is that for a lot of readers, Bilal’s thought process will seem commonplace, his rationalisations run-of-the-mill. Statements like “Sure, he’d bitten her, slapped her face (...) but he’d never intended to paralyse or kill her” are dropped casually, with something approaching insouciance. The desensitisation revealed is something we should all be ashamed of.

On an afternoon where Bilal is exercising his visitation rights (his wife has divorced him), he ends up watching his wife’s new boyfriend stuck in a jammed elevator. The conclusion is hilarious — and deeply troubling, much like a screwball Coen Brothers comedy; think Burn After Reading.

‘Hunger Games’ is a pitch-perfect confluence of those two Freudian axioms: food and sex, and how the human body seems to respond to them in overlapping circles. The narrator, fed up of being abused by her husband, seeks solace at a vipassana retreat, but finds herself subjected to quackery, moral judgment and extreme sensory deprivation, before a French woman named Ursula turns her trip around.

‘One Drop of Love’ and ‘No Country For Old Women’ take their cues from newspaper headlines. The former is probably the most subtle story in this collection — it juggles conversion, the separation of church and State, and the oppression of minority religions in India, all through the framework of a short-lived romance. The latter critiques thalaikoothal , a practice peculiar to certain parts of Tamil Nadu wherein very old family members are given an elaborate oil bath and euthanized involuntarily, by force-feeding them copious amounts of coconut water till the kidneys fail. Today, there are any number of hurriedly, luridly written books that seek to cash in on ‘trending’ topics. But this pair of stories shows us how it’s done, how a skilled writer uses journalistic base to create a convincing, sensitive fictional scenario. Moreover, Pant has always been very good at this: her last collection, Happy Birthday, featured a smartly-executed story called ‘Hoopsters’, based on a real-life girls’ basketball team from Nagpada, Mumbai.

‘Unknown Husbands’ and ‘The Trouble With Women’ are about two very different kinds of compromises, made by two women who seem to be diametrical opposites but are, in fact, variants of the same subspecies: the eternal pragmatist. The narrator of ‘Unknown Husbands’ wonders whether telling the truth to her new husband (she’s not a virgin) will make him run for the hills. The narrator of ‘The Trouble With Women’ is more disgusted by her media baron boss by the minute, but her cold, rational self is convinced that f***ing his brains out is the best move she can make. Once again, the notion of the voyeur is played with: the spectre of the first night’s blood-letting, the spectacle of a bored rich guy eye-raping every woman he meets.

All of which brings me to ‘The Half-Story of Love’, perhaps the most unsettling piece of short fiction I’ve read all year. The unnamed protagonist is a teenager, a girl whose little brother Sahil was run over by a school bus recently. Her grief-stricken mother never moves on from denial. She smokes and drinks all day. In a macabre twist, she insists that the girl cut her hair short, wear pants and generally pretend to be Sahil. To prevent her mother from sliding further into the abyss, our heroine acquisces, at a terrible cost to herself. “Trisha, the girl with two ribbons, does not budge. She used to be my best friend, till I started dressing as a boy. Now, behind the second door of the girls’ bathroom on the third floor, there is a drawing — of a stick figure with long hair and a ribbon, and a stick figure with a penis and a bob cut. The first stick figure is giving the second stick figure a blowjob.”

There are no easy resolutions in this story, much like a couple of other stories discussed earlier. The Trouble With Women is consistently smart and sure-footed, a collection that never insults the intelligence of its readers: for my money, the best book to come out of the fledgling Juggernaut stable so far.

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