In Roy’s Tasher Ghawr, Sujata (Mukherjee) paints a repressed wife of an abuser in the throes of the pandemic; the film has her fluidly snapping from hooking up clothes on a clothesline, cooking food amid sizzles of the stew, and then raucous make-outs in the bed. We see her stoically going about her affairs, and sneaking a break or two, in her dulled existence.
In Benegal’s intense Bhumika, we see Usha (Patil) tweaking her emotional slate, undermining Dalvi’s (Palekar) picking ‘gaze’ and trying to become her own person; she also gives a remarkable performance in Sarhadi’s Bazaar, itself a take on the plight of young brides in a largely ‘patriarchal’ society. In flicking through the pages of Roy’s biting Black River, one is unleashed upon, a world marked by societal contingencies of power, damning religiosity, and bitter concerns of classism.
Again, the woman is bound in the throes; packed into the domestic spaces ill-prepared for her, the vengeful voyeurism in play, the balking masculinities.
Keegan’s Small Things Like These is another spirited piece, almost haunting, which packs not a small punch. A scene in The Big Little Lies has Kidman getting pounded like a lifeless lump against the wall by Skarsgard, marking one of the many moments, when she has to buckle under her husband’s abuse. The show’s characters flirt with their troubled past like Chapman (Woodley), Wright (Kidman) with her abuse-addled present, and Mackenzie (Witherspoon) with the ever-fluky times. It really captures the drudgery of intimacies, the monstrosity of impulses, the megalomania swirling on steam, in the turgid spaces of a house, for instance.
Moving to a bit of history, I was struck by the story of Jean McConville, a widowed mother of 10, who was abducted and later tortured to death by the IRA in 1972 over suspicions of engaging in espionage for the British forces; Keefe has captured the horror of the Troubles quite impeccably in his Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland. Such stories mark the annals of history, with ethno-religious horrors implicating the populace, and stomping down all the unwanted buds. A rather short novel by Manguso tracks Ruthie’s life in an almost autobiographical manner, taking us through ‘queasy minutiae’ of her time in school, her travails in the family, and a quandary, almost like a pockmark, lingering over her throughout. It makes for an easy read, with its share of blistering nausea; which Manguso sews in masterfully. I am impelled to copy an excerpt off the piece, where she talks of the ‘peculiarities’ of her mother’s love for her; ‘but I sensed that she was also trying to see what it would be like to be that unattached to me. She was practicing, to see what it would be like to hurt me, a lot, to show how much she loved me. She had to be careful. If anyone found out that she loved me, we’d both be in trouble. For a while I’d have to suffer, out in the open, the only girl without extra sneakers for gym class, but it was only because my mother’s love was so much greater than all the other loves. It was that much more dangerous, so she had to love me in secret, absolutely unobserved by anyone, especially me.’ (65-66).
As I end, I’m reminded of De’s spicy Snapshots, where in one of the pages, she writes of a brothel-owner Champabai, pointing to the seemingly socio-cultural motifs working in a space.
Taking her cue from imported catalogues and hard-core films, Champabai had shrewdly imported assorted sex games and accessories. But as she never tired of saying, ‘Our men don’t like all this nonsense. They come here for pleasure, not pain. Hitting and beating is reserved for their wives. But anyway, why not keep all this handy – who knows what a man want and when? Why lose business to someone else? And why send our men straight into the arms of some white woman on London.
It was her very original way of helping the Indian economy by conserving precious foreign exchange. Love and how it peculiarly flows around, marking the femininities in its own ‘contentious’ tinge remains a thing of intrigue; trudging the treacherous paths of being her own person or making peace with the scars, stoically taming herself: mockingly acerbic or morbidly austere?
The writer, an avid reader and a political science graduate.
