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In fact, Basu is fair and sympathetic to women and does not, at
any time, get sentimental. Basu has also been successful in
capturing the changing atmosphere in the families and times of
the four generations of women. She portrays the changing times
as well as the changing values and the roles of the Bengali
women. By and large, her women are strong and highly
individualistic characters and not merely pale shadows of their
men. In fact, the men, though fairly dealt with, are not painted
in such minute detail as Basu’s women characters who are
vibrant and alive.
How much of the
misfortune that befalls the women in Upendra Kishore’s family
is a result of the ancient ‘curse’ is debatable. The
problems that beset the women can be logically explained but the
protagonists feel that their marital and familial problems arise
because of the curse of the Goddess. The beautiful Hansabati,
blessed with a loving husband and two daughters, Regina and
Queenie, has to bear the cross of a retarded son who grows to
adulthood. Regina abandons her husband and turns from a placid
Bengali housewife to a woman demented with rage when she
discovers the macabre death of her sister-in-law, Brishti.
Queenie, of the lovely aspect of which she is so proud, is
forced into purdah by her domineering mother-in-law.
Sreya, Regina’s daughter, discovers the true meaning of the
curse when she opens an old ivory casket. For her, there is
liberation, finally, when she corrects a terrible wrong done to
an innocent woman.
Basu has a
pragmatic wit, dark at times, but hard-hitting. "So
appropriate: death, blood and divorce. Death was a kind of
divorcement after all and if John Donne had not said it, he
should have." And "Deaths. All deaths in the end were
the same death. Fragments of yellowing paper with scrawls of
laundry lists, bazaar lists, letters written and unposted.
Screws of medicines that in the end had failed."
Basu’s literal
translations of Indian idiom into English, however, jar.
"What was it they said about marriage? That it was like a
large indigestible sweetmeat. Everyone died longing for a taste
of it and when they tasted it, they just died."
The stories of the
lives of the women are inextricably linked with each other.
Pragmatic about the curse they live with, yet, as Sreya says,
"There was no-one else to blame for the insanity and I
found the responsibility hard to bear. Ma lost hers (innocence)
and I inheriting that curse turned it on my own marriage in
imagined rage."
The novel Curses
in Ivory does centre around a curse, but it is a tale of
marriages, romances, jewellery, puja ceremonies, careers
and traditions.
When is someone
making this book into a movie?
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ONE
can actually identify the women in one’s own family with those
portrayed by Anjana Basu’s family saga, Curses in Ivory.
The story is a multi-layered, richly textured tale of three
generations of women who live under the shadow of an ancestral
curse. The curse was cast on Kamala and Upendra Kishore’s family
because Kamala, blessed with the beauty of "the Mother Goddess
in person`85unfortunately did not match him (Upendra Kishore) in
modernity" and would not unveil her face to open scrutiny. On
Upendra Kishore’s forcibly unveiling her in public "to mark
the end of purdah in our family. A step into modernity and
progress", she felt "stripped and naked", slapped
Upendra Kishore and disappeared forever. To add to Upendra Kishore’s
injury, the face of the Goddess Durga, unveiled soon after on "Shashti",
resembled that of Kamala and so, in his rage and frustration, he
smashed the idol into smithereens and thus the Goddess’s curse
descended on the family.
