By the 11th century, south Indian bronze craft had reached extraordinary creative apogee under the Cholas in Thanjavur. The Ardhanariswara, dated sometime during the end of the Chola and the Vijayanagar empires, is a unique bronze work of Saivite art. Siva offers benediction as half-man and woman, a celebration of the hermaphrodite. The sculpture is a metaphor for the harmonious celestial duality of Siva and his consort Parvati. It remains an androgynous icon in which the supernatural and the earthly merge in harmony.
Call it magic realism or what you will, sexual alternateness is a part of the social landscape of the Tamils as much as it is of its Ardhanari iconography. Even today, baby boys are dressed in a frock for the ritual photograph in educated homes, grooms are made up with eyeliner, their hands coloured by marudani or henna on weddings and there is a merry mixing of genders through rituals in an otherwise orthodox society that binds women to tradition.
The eunuch, part transvestite, part unisexual, is a person who is called upon to bless and occupy a ritualistic place in social life. The eunuchs will bless newly born babies, curse curmudgeons who refuse to part with money, act as perverse bullies and mock themselves as much as they do men. Eunuchs from Tamil Nadu making their way to far-flung Bombay seeking anonymity and livelihood are familiar as also the festival of eunuchs that is annually held with fanfare and gaiety in Tamil Nadu much before contemporary gay pride marches were known. The Last Pretence is a novel that focuses on the sexually marginalised and their vagrant rituals, and the sorrow of the gender neuter or the confused. The eunuch remains a symbol of a strange inclusiveness sanctioned by ritual and myth, though held in grotesque repugnance in reality.
Sarayu Srivatsa, architect and writer, better known as the late poet Dom Moraes’ companion, has been hitherto known for her non-fiction. As an aside during her days in Tokyo, the author was known as Mr Sarayu, a blurring distinction of gender and nomenclature, an irony that does not escape the informed reader who delves into this tale of alternate gender. She reveals the inner mindscape of these half-men in this deeply disturbing fictional debut. The Ardhanari is Siva, the young son of a Palakkad scientist Raman Iyer and his distraught wife Mallika, who combats disturbing tendencies of cross dressing, social segregation and sexual confusion in this tale of longing, grief and despair. It’s a sombre and brooding novel peopled by ghosts, disconnected individuals, and where the lines blur between normal and deviant behaviour. Here the dead make their presence felt while the living lead spectral lives. It makes the tale eerie, haunting and poignant of souls filled with abundant passion but leading lonesome sexual lives and their sexual preferences seem to offer no personal solace or gratification, only isolation and seclusion.
The Last Pretence is an eerie, haunting and a dark story spanning generations told remarkably well by Srivatsa who never loses the grip on her characters or the tragic courses their lives take. The story begins in Machillipattinam, a small town of dyers in Andhra Pradesh, where tropical fruit and their lush juices play a part in the progress of the characters’ lives. It is to Srivatsa’s credit that despite not having lived in the area, she brings the place alive with its local signposts and town’s characters. The town, with its dying units, the Hindu-Muslim riots, the swirling waves by the beach, seems real under Sarayu’s controlled eloquence. It halts at the Victorian spook-haunted mansion where, through generations, it seems sexual norms are flouted and incest, lesbian friendships, Freudian affection, heterosexual loneliness and that of the transgendered come into reckoning. The result is sorrowful, painful and poignant.
If protest is allowed, it seems that Srivatsa has held back from offering the solace of laughter and fleeting happiness to her characters. Mallika invokes happiness by forcing herself to giggle even on nuptial nights in the arms of a husband she knows not how to love.
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From the disturbed Mallika who never finds her father’s love and prefers her son Siva dressed as a girl to Kamala the eunuch, the bi-sexual servant Mani, the moody scientist Raman, the butch Nayantara, the characters lead their troubled lives in search of identity. Ammamai, the matriarch, and Munniamma remain human and warm characters in this novel of phantoms seeking their selves despite social dejection and hostile rejection. It is to Srivatsa’s credit that she has turned in a tale of social anthropology and gender issues of south India into a human tale of wanting and belonging.
The novel ends with a body count that makes the general pall of gloom in the tale turn to despair. It isn’t a story about hope for sure, but one of desolation and misery. A heavy read.
THE LAST PRETENCE
Sarayu Srivatsa
Harper Collins
253 pages; Rs 299
