More Ayyos from Ambai

The first novella, Wrestling, is about a singing couple and how they keep jockeying for power. The man “wins” outwardly most of the time, but he knows that she knows and the story ends at a moment of advantage for her. The second novella, Unpublished Manuscript, is about a clever, sincere writer-publisher whose husband, a substance-abusing poet, beats her up and dashes her typewriter against the wall. She leaves, with her baby daughter, to make a new life in Benares. The daughter finds her life story and reads it. Mother and daughter bond anew on the banks of the all-dissolving Ganga, while the father comes to bad end in a government hospital back south.

The story, A Deer in the Forest, was apparently written as a sort of tutorial for A.K. Ramanujan in Chicago back in 1992. It is de rigeur for Katha: the barren aunt, always sweet and helpful to everyone in the family, tells the children a story about a deer that re-contextualises its life in the forest. The personal analogy is predictable from a mile away. Ambai’s essay then looks at how women writers in Tamil treat their spaces: their body, their homes, their minds. Or rather, how these life basics are controlled and denied by the natural enemy, Man. Every word is true to life.

And alas, every word has been heard a million times before in the same impressionistic story format, with the same heavy hand in contriving “subtlety”, in as many languages as ten years of publishing regional fiction can garner. The lexical items vary: chombu for lota, kalkandu for mishri. But the stories? Rarely, unless it’s someone nuanced like Madurantakam Rajaram in Telugu, Basheer and Zacharia in Malayalam, Pudumaipittan in Tamil, Pritam and Paul in Punjabi, or Haider in Urdu.

Usually one grumbles at the poor quality of translation in English. Here, however, it’s obvious that the translators — a formidably qualified team — have done a valiant job, but are tamped down by the limitations of their material.