How do women experience the world? KR Meera's Yellow is the Colour of Longing is perhaps the answer to that question. Each of the fifteen stories in the book shows how differently different women understand the world and respond to it. While some women respond with tolerance, empathy and sacrifice, others engage with love, lust and longing and yet others with anger and vengeance.
Translated by feminist scholar J. Devika, this collection holds its own in emotion, social commentary and wit. She does a fine job of placing these stories on a common ground of emotions and experiences where the English readers too can enjoy them. I especially liked the translation of The Heart Attacks Us, a humourous story of a doting housewife whose only prayer is to have a heart attack since it's a fashionable way to die. She points out the absurdity of praying to a misogynist god, the complacency inherent in patriarchy and the generational suffering of women, with considerable ease.
In the eponymous story, two patients meet in a hospital ward and are instantly attracted to each other. You meet Meera's dry, satirical sense of humour on page 2, "They had infected each other at the Kottayam Medical College. Who is not infected by lust in hospitals?" Her sense of humour while tickling you will also make you think hard about the ghoulish aspects of our society. Meera uses everyday settings and everyday people to create extraordinary situations to phenomenal effect. In another tale styled like the stories of Arabian Nights where the stories stretch over thousand and one nights, she takes a dig at the mega-serial industry with Scheherazade, the scriptwriter, writing an endless plot. In a dream-like fantasy story, Meera makes a study of what souls do at night.
The Saga of Krishna is the story of a helpless father whose young daughter, Krishna, has been lured into a sex racket by her tuition teacher. He watches helplessly as the media has a go at her with their piercing questions. Kerala is the God's Own Country where beginning in the nineties, newspapers routinely carried the story of little girls being raped by neighbours, bus conductors, policemen and even ministers. Most of them were known by where the girl was from or where the scandal took place. And one of those cases even had a rom-com name of sorts, the ice cream parlour case. When you peel away the laurels of Kerala state-- highest sex ratio, highest literacy, highest life expectancy--you will find its core ridden with crime; especially against women.
Though I grew up bubble-wrapped in Kerala in the nineties and noughties, my family believed that I had to be further covered in layers of plastic wrap like luggage for "extra-protection". Everyone around me wanted to make sure I wasn't raped by 42 men and then some like the teenager in the infamous Suryanelli case. My teenage years were spent with a male-bodyguard-member of the family by my side at all times. Even if I were stepping out only to lock the gate. Even if the male bodyguard happened to be only ten years old.
My favourite is Ave Maria, the story of eight-nine-year-old Maria whose life has been a suffering in the name of her beloved husband's politics. It lays bare the innocent lives that pay a price of police brutality. Even in her old age, Maria chants "Ingila Sindaba" like a prayer; a phrase her husband taught her to be a novena to call upon good times when no one would be sad. She learned it on the casual pretext of, "if no one will go hungry, what's the big deal in suffering a few [police] blows?" But she lives to see how that call to the revolution upset her family's life in ways no one could have imagined. Her tolerance will haunt you with a vile emotion. A loathing for a society that remains silent in the face of unimaginable abuse.
In the story The Scent of News, Santhosh and Anna are editors living by the deadline. Meera uses adorable dialogues to endear us to them. Even for mundane activities like going to the market, Santhosh asks, "Give me a deadline...How late can I be?" She also uses dialogues to make incisive remarks, all in the course of conversation. Ramadas, the deputy general manager caught having an affair with his subordinate Suchitra, in A Cat, Utterly Personal, says the trouble with women is that they have no prudence in relationships. And Suchitra replies, "this is the trouble with men...They are always senior officers--everywhere."
Meera tackles the entire female experience from the physical--love, lust, longing and abuse, to the cerebral--understanding the politics of things, accepting homosexuality and coming to terms with oneself. Coming Out is the powerful and poignant story of Seba realising that gender of your love matters only in life. In death, you are neither male nor female. The author takes on patriarchy with acerbic insight drawing blood with every word. The popular left-leaning law of the land is not spared either. When she picks up morality and flings it out the door, it seems warranted. With fantasy by her side, she makes sure some of her women have the final say. She juggles sadness, disgust and rage with the same ease as love and happiness.
Aarachar published in 2012 and translated into English as Hangwoman: Everyone Loves a Good Hanging (2014) won her the Kendra Sahitya Akademy Award. With that, she sealed her place as the frontrunner in the contemporary Malayalam literature scene. But what makes this collection of hers a must-read is the spell her stories casts on us. Next time you visit a hospital, you are sure to long for that stranger to meet your eyes. And when you take a night stroll, you will look out for friendly neighbourhood souls flitting about. The exquisite difficulty in tethering her writing down to one slot or another makes it even more delightful. The magic in her stories has me believe that the author sits at her desk with her palette of emotions and paints them on paper, using stinging sarcasm for highlights.