BackBook Review | Multi-part harmonies
Book Review | Multi-part harmonies
PremiumStrange worlds: Ambai’s stories often feature women in Mumbai. Abhijit Bhatlekar/Mint
There is much truth to the contention that many Indian stories cannot be told in English. But at least, as this collection by Ambai proves, they can be translated.
Ambai is the pen name of C.S. Lakshmi, a historian, feminist, and the current director of SPARROW (Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women) in Mumbai. She writes in Tamil, and as the stories here prove, is something of a translator herself, within the space of her stories. In Fish in a Dwindling Lake, her protagonists, all female, go on journeys, find their bearings in polyglot cities, negotiate life and fortune with people who speak different languages, and end their narratives with more questions than answers.
Some of the women in this book belong to a rural world, bound by tradition and patriarchy, while others have lived long lives, sometimes travelling the world, sometimes making their homes in small three-room flats. Many stories take place in Mumbai, where Tamil-speaking women acquire new neighbours, find themselves talking to strangers, and discover that they, themselves, are strangers in the oddest of ways.
Still others are told in Tamil Nadu, as narrators find themselves going back in time, remembering mothers, midwives, childhoods and marriages. Rather beautifully, though, most stories happen in both locations.
Fish in a Dwindling Lake is an important story, and one of the longest in the collection, but its sentimentality runs contrary to the bracing, open-ended spirit of several other stories here. In general, this happens to be true of the longer stories, where an unexpected ending colours the whole narrative in retrospect. In Ambai’s hands, it isn’t as cheap a trick as it can sometimes be, but on the whole, I preferred the choppier slice-of-life stories, which drop us into the middle of a character’s internal monologue and pause, rather than bring about an end to the tale. Several of the Journeys are terrifically well-paced and full of quiet, unspooling tricks of character and insight. There are stories like Kailasam, about an unrequited love, where pathos and romantic tragedy are used to moving effect.
Lakshmi Holmström’s translation brings smoothness and delicacy to most of the language here, awkward in brief instances (and one can imagine the translator’s dilemma in trying to decode, say, famous Tamil film songs, or rapid exchanges in Tamil and Hindi in the original stories) but non-intrusive and instinctive through most of the text.
Ambai’s author biography says that she writes about love, relationships, quests and journeys. The stories in this collection prove how much the first two resemble the last two, at least in the way they are recollected. She writes bitter stories with unusual compassion. Perhaps this is why we are left with the impression that the characters in this book are not happy or unhappy—only watchful, thoughtful, and constantly looking forward.
IN SIX WORDS
In big cities, women in translation
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