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Kanya and Other Tales THIS is a collection of Amreeta Sen’s works, carefully picked out from her many publications in The Statesman, The Times of India and The Tribune. Amreeta Sen, journalist, writer, mother, and above all, woman, brings in all the sensibilities of the manifold roles that she has played in her life into the pages of this book.
However, the reader is not to get spooked into believing that this is a collection of rampantly feminist work. It’s absolutely not. The stories, articles and poems selected, catch Amreeta in different moods, sometimes tranquil, sometimes angry, sometimes giggly and girlish, sometimes the quintessential Bengali babe and sometimes tongue-in-cheek, wickedly humourous. The collection begins from the year 2000. It’s contemporary that way, but Amreeta is as comfortable exploring the times of the pharos in Egypt, where a wife makes the choice to marry her husband’s slayer, as she is talking about the beautiful child bride in a village in Bengal, Putul, and her relationship with her deformed and much elder husband, Sanat Da. Incidentally, to narrate Mallika, the story of Putul, the author employs the device of blank verse. Amreeta is playful at some places and fey at others. The Throat and I is the story of her own throat. It’s a capricious throat that has a mind of its own. It will force her to wrap it in scarves and stoles even in the sweltering heat of humid Calcutta, or else, go on strike! Amreeta just loves the mythical unicorn. In fact, she’s the author of The Secret of the Unicorn, a fiction on the lives of unicorns, for children. In this anthology, too, she can’t resist adding a short story about her favourite fabled creature in a story, Summer of the Unicorn. Her feminist facet comes through strongly in a lot of the stories chosen here, but perhaps Sita’s Silence would be the reviewer’s personal favourite. Here she explores Sita, not as we believe her to be, the shy, retiring, chaste woman who never questioned her all-powerful, ever-just husband. Here Sita is a woman who thinks. She knows her Rama to be a deeply insecure person, who cannot tolerate the idea of her even looking at another man, not even her younger brothers in law! Amreeta’s Sita has a voice, "I always answered back and suffered. I could never keep quiet. Sita was never silent. If she had been, she would have still remained Ayodhya’s Queen." Dirge is a requiem written in the form of a letter to her friend in New York, who dreams of coming back to Calcutta. The author discourages her, mourning the passing away of Calcutta. The city she would be returning to, was Kolkata: "Gnashes of ugly buildings frame the skies, glitzy shopping malls mock the ghosts of stately emporiums, soon even New Market will go ... ." Kanya, the last section in the anthology, is another piece in blank verse. It is seemingly simply written, but the message it carries hits the reader straight between the eyes. Kanya is a dialogue between Mr Biswas, a travelling salesman and father of Anu, and Lord Janaka, father of Sita and Urmila. Eons down the timeline, the two fathers are having a dialogue. Both their daughters suffer the same fate of being subjugated by the men in their lives, men who force them to leave the security of their homes and hearths. Sita finds her last abode in the bosom of the Earth, and Anu, leaves her child with her parents and hangs herself. So, many thousands of years apart and yet both women suffer the same fate! Nothing has changed for the Indian woman. The book contains a total of 40 pieces, and each is different from each other in thought, feel and experience. Amreeta does not believe in wasting words, so each piece is finely edited, tightly narrated, no words wasted, and that’s all the more remarkable because she sticks to tight editing even in her whimsical and narrative pieces. Kanya is
interesting in the disparate vignettes that it offers the reader. The
buffet is laid out. The reader can sample it all, or pick and choose
whatever he/she fancies.
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Malini,
the publishing house that published this book, and which was a
magazine for women to begin with, endorses Amreeta, declaring, "Malini
strongly believes that a woman’s worldview is far more mature,
selfless and considerate compared to a man’s worldview and
ideology." Thus, establishing what one may expect in the book.