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The Woman who Thought she was a Planet and Other Stories THIS book of short stories struck me as something of an oddity until the realisation that the common denominator of the entire collection was the treatment of the world outside earth — the universe, the galaxy, space. The writer emerges as an astrophysicist who attempts to offer her readers a perspective into outer space in the form of short stories.
As one reads the other stories, the metaphorical interpretation becomes more acceptable. Hunger, the first story in the collection, is about a female protagonist, Divya, who unexpectedly comes to acquire a superhuman gift of premonition, of sensitivity and anticipation, all because of the death of an old man who lives in her building. This interpretation emerges out of Divya’s need to defend herself against the pressures of public life. Towards the end of the story, we hear that "she continued to read her science fiction novels because, more than ever, they seemed to reflect her own realisation of the utter strangeness of the world. Slowly, the understanding came to her that these stories were trying to tell her a great truth in a very convoluted way, that they were all in some kind of code, designed to deceive the literary snob and waylay the careless reader."If there is a clue to how these stories ought to be read, it is surely here. Thirst follows Hunger in the journey to prodigious heights as a woman explores her sexuality by turning into a serpent. On the day of Naag Panchami, Susheela becomes wild and rids herself of her emptiness by cohabiting with snakes. Another theme, then, in the empowerment of women, if not on this earth, then in a different matriarchal world; if not as women, then as planets or prelapsarian snakes. Here is a possible representation of women as primeval nature belonging to a cult hitherto unexplored, and thus undominated, by men. The idea of the subjugation of women carries into other stories such as The Tetrahedron in which Maya surmises about the insignificance of life "against the unending mystery of the universe". Each day that Maya watches the tetrahedron, a kind of spaceship, that plants itself on a Delhi road, she waits for a nameless, formless "something", a meaning that might emerge from "the projection in our space of a more complicated, multi-dimensional object" symbolised by the strange creature that might release her from being bound to her snobbish fiance. And the three-dimensional meaning does unfold as she begins to experience an unused-to time and place. As Keshav explains to Padma in The Wife: "What is real, and what is not real — all the universe gives us is raw data. We make realities out of words `85 words in our minds and on the page." Other stories like Conservation Laws are more complex and, to my mind, hardly classify as stories. It is a fantasy where the moon becomes a residential complex for science graduates and professors, who are really aliens of some sort. An interesting concept, no doubt, but not engaging as it becomes too scientific for ordinary people. The stories indicate either some suprahuman quality which is part of each one of us or, on the contrary, convince us of our inalienable quality as human beings. Since virtually all characters are hard to define, we are left wondering whether Susheela, Maya or Divya contain a world of imagination within them or have access to alternative worlds not visible to the ordinary inhabitants of earth. Ultimately, it is "words in our minds and on the page" that can sift reality from fantasy. In the terrain of "speculative fiction" — a term used by the author in her Afterword — we can inhabit "what cannot ever be, or what cannot be as yet".
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Predictably,
I gravitated towards the story which gives its title to the collection:
"The Woman who Thought she was a Planet." This is a story of a
woman who announces to her bewildered husband that she is, in fact, a
planet. Just like that! What is it that motivates her new insight of
herself? Her self-perception is not an ordinary hallucination. The lady
can fly and, what’s more, contains within herself tiny "insectoids"
that are "clamouring for a new world". She says to her
husband: "I wish you would agree to be colonised." One would
think an oppressed wife seeks wish fulfillment by overpowering her
husband through the metaphor of colonialism. The story does, after all,
end with the "insectoids" marching into the husband’s
terrified mouth.