The pain and the anguish and the fear of a woman who has nowhere to go has to be dealt with. And this is expressed through the words of a daughter in this story.
In her story “The Cure,” in her collection of stories from the book “Junglee Girl”(1995), Ginu Kamani writes:
“What kind of food did he like? He probably loved chilies, and I would have to learn to like them as well.
Would his mother choose to change my name, giving me a new identity as the lucky young bride? “
A very young girl fantasizes about marrying her driver, who is kind to her, and she already knows the things she will have to accept as part of her marriage-the supremacy of the husband and the mother-in-law over her self. The situation of the mother- in- law is clear. She has to retain her stronghold in the family situation, the only power structure she knows.
The opening lines of Manju Kapur’s novel “Difficult Daughters” (1998), reads like this:
“The one thing I had wanted was not to be like my mother. Now she was gone and I stared at the fire that rose from her shriveled body, dry-eyed, leaden, half-dead myself, while my relatives clustered around the pyre and wept.”
It is the first line that hits you in the face. No daughter wants to be like her mother, she thinks she is different, will be different. The unhappiness of the mother is visited upon the daughter early in life. It shows in the mother’s eyes, in her watery smile.
The contemporary writer still continues her search for identity, her definition and place in a patriarchally skewed society. The woman’s protest, so evident in my writing before and even now, is because the woman is still trying to make a statement of self.
A WOMAN’S CRY
I am sometimes bowed down
by my long hair,
and my bosom.
My tits and tresses torment me.
Maybe if I
Cut them off
I could stand up straight
And tell the world:
Look at me
I am a human being
Just like you.
Not
Just a woman.
-Abha Iyengar, 2001, (It’s About Time Writers Reading Series)
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