Privileged lives and the recycling of women's woes

It's been raining women authors ever since Arundhati Roy opened the floodgates to nostalgia masquerading as literature.

Roy had a story to tell, but the wannabe writers of unhappy/despairi-ng/lonely/lost childhoods imagine their growing up years to be of eternal fascination for thousands of readers.

Personal reminiscences merit attention only in the case of a celebrity biography or autobiography, and then if they have some bearing on the making of a persona.

But if every woman who has cried over spilt milk decided to write a book, we'd live in a very banal world.

Thrity Umrigar is a case in point. Her Parsi childhood in Mumbai was hardly surreal, ensconced typically in middle class mores, but she looks back self-indulgently at it.

Her memories are made up of chocolate melting on the car's dashboard while her parents quarrelled and she bawled. Of high school dares, of the various cruelties of her mother and the indulgences of her aunt.

Of losing pet rabbits, the first flush of hormones, the discovery of art and books, secret smoking and drinking binges. Of the death of her uncle, and the sense of claustrophobia induced by nosey neighbours.

Welcome, you might well say to Umrigar, to the real world. But the author believes there is a higher purpose to life than living and marrying in Mumbai, packs her bags and flees to America. End of book.

From the distance of the States, she looks back at her adolescent years in Mumbai "faint as a memory, distant as love" with a forced fondness.

What at best could have been a wine-induced, mushy photo-album turning afternoon with women friends is turned, instead, into an autobiographical volume that offers little by way of insights into either the Indian middle class, or India, for that matter.

If Umrigar had felt the urge to re-live her childhood on the PC, it could have been written as a middle for The Times of India, but a book? For all her precious moments, for all the time she is made to feel like an outsider, Umrigar has no right to foist her insipid memories on the unsuspecting reader.

Not that Umrigar's book does not have its moments. She's deft with language, using it like a baton, even managing a poignant, hanky-wetting departure when she's all set to jet.

So much so, you forget that the sensitive girl who's upset by the country's abysmal poverty is only seeking escape by flying away from it, which makes a mockery of her pitiful observances throughout the book.

Escape, in fact, seems the adopted route of our author heroines, and Karim uses it in the same manner as Umrigar.

The only difference is that Karim has more of a story to tell, though even she is unable to rise to the resonances of the countryside where things are simmering to a boil.

Karim's story has all the elements of high drama. A small town where caste factions seethe; where Muslim artisans chisel gods and pillars for a Hindu temple that will replace a fallen mosque; of a woman high-born to a feminist and the rootlessness of her married existence; of her daughter's growing enchantment with a young journalist and, for a finale, an attempted rape in a church, the collision of religions, and a tame twist in the tale.

In the hands of a skilled writer, here is material so gripping, it could become both social commentary as well as archival fiction using current affairs as a background.

Karim, unfortunately, loses that hold. Written through the eyes of several characters, and in third person, as letters and notes and jottings, the tale moves forward jaggedly, and then accelerates pace to the final denouement.

Through it all, like Umrigar's family, the clan and its eccentricities are foisted on the reader ceaselessly, in a devise now as nostalgic as history.

Family eccentricities, in the age of back-to-back television serials, no longer make compulsive reading. Both Karim and Umrigar fail to keep that in mind.

Yet, these books beg the question: Is the woman writer as protagonist finding space for herself on bookshelves through lived experiences? And if so, then why is she willing to let go of the opportunity to explore space and environment and issues of equality and society the way writers of this gender have done earlier? Has the comfort of a privileged existence softened the impact they might otherwise have made as writers? Or is this merely dissolute voyeurism, a kind of vanity writing intended for oneself?

Over the years, women writers in English have carved a sizeable space for themselves. This liberation has gone through various trends, now clearly discernible.

Fiction found its first female voice in Shobhaa De's steamy reads that set off a new genre in Indian writing. This was followed by less explicit, more teary-eyed romance and tales of lost love and, sometimes, triumph.

More recently, translations of works of women writers have tended to pick on the woes of womanhood as the leit motif. And now comes a succession of works devoted to lives of privilege where pain is a thorn wedged in the sole of one's feet.

No matter what background they pitch their personal journeys against, till they find substance in their lives, these women authors' books will remain mere catalogues of self-inflicted agony. Which is a pity, considering how capably they handle their language and ideas.

FIRST DARLING OF THE MORNING

Selected Memories of an Indian Childhood

Thrity Umrigar

Harper Collins

Pages: 294

Price: Rs 295

MY LITTLE BOAT

Mariam Karim

Penguin

Pages: 291

Price: Rs 275