The stranglehold of the past
When it comes to capturing reality, there are no borders. Reality abhors lines. There are only shades that transition between elements. What Krupa Ge has achieved in her debut novel What We Know About Her is a depiction of reality without boundaries. There are only transitions in the form of prose. This novel defies classification; it has no lines. Yet, if you were to ask what it is about, the unequivocal answer would be, “women”. This is a tender depiction of Indian women and their agency. As the protagonist Yamuna comes of age, she must find her place in the world. This is contingent on an exploration of her family’s past, especially its women and their unwilling secrets that form an integral part of who she is.
The novel begins with a train journey. Armed with a love letter written by her grandmother, Yamuna travels to meet her grandfather to stake her claim to her ancestral home against her mother’s. From there on, Ge leaves behind all boundaries as she weaves between the past and the present, between character vignettes and the smells of a home. She flits between the sights of a city and a culture’s treatment of its women, using music and letters to drive her point home. Particularly unsettling is the part where Mrs Alamelu talks about her childhood and of how the women ganged up with the old widows to curse young girls during their periods. As a result, for three months Mrs Alamelu told no one that she had started her period. She took delight in her revenge, coming and going as she pleased, touching everyone and taking part in all the festivities. That is until she was caught by her father who promptly arranged her marriage at the age of 14. Despite being battered by abusive husbands, mothers-in-law, and the vicious breeding organism that is the joint family, Ge’s women are full of tenderness. In a letter to
Alamelu akka, Yamuna’s grand-aunt Lalitha writes, “I think women must offer their love to anyone being tormented by evil Hitlers. We know torment. When were we free? Not in our grandmother’s time nor her grandmother’s... Women have woven sarees, written poems of love and separation as wars raged between kingdoms.”
As Yamuna navigates her PHD on early-twentieth-century music in Tamil Nadu, she unravels the secrets that marred the life of her grandaunt Lalitha, who rose to prominence as a Carnatic musician. Thwarted by unwilling elders, Yamuna soon discovers that courage and rebellion are genetic streaks that she has inherited.
In chronicling the struggles of her grandparents and her grandaunt against the stranglehold of the past, Ge’s protagonist proves that individualism is a generational fight. When her grandaunt tells her grandmother about her husband’s infidelity, they discuss how parents do not interfere in the lives of men the way they do with women. Despite being abused by her husband Lalitha is told off by an aunt when she escapes to her parent’s house. She should have stayed and fixed the problem, she is told. It is when Lalitha travels to Madras to live with her sister and her husband that Ge gives us a picture of a happy household, one with many women and one man, “The sort of house that made little girls happy and did not choke them into feeling inadequate.”
Despite these serious themes What We Know About Her is filled with a surprising amount of levity. Ge suffuses her prose with dark humour. Early on, when Yamuna questions her grandfather about Lalitha’s marriage, he says all he ever remembers are the meals. Given the many mouths they had to feed, they were constantly making food and eating. In another part of the book, Lalitha corrects herself mid-word when she says they were “traveling to Allaha--, ahem, Prayagraj.” Another poignant scene has her grandfather singing Kalyanam, a song about getting married, when Yamuna sets up a coffee date with his friend’s grandnephew.
There is an infectious joy in Ge’s prose especially when she writes about seeing a city anew through a lover’s eyes. When her boyfriend wakes Yamuna at 5.35 am to see the sunrise, she remarks only to the reader, “Who goes to see the sunrise in Madras?”
The only letdown is, perhaps, the few questions that Ge leaves unanswered at the end. Ge has a firm grasp of the epistolary format and the letters written by Yamuna’s grandmother are a potent force within the novel. I once believed that all it took to shake up our world was a wellwritten book. Krupa Ge has shown that it only takes a letter.