Becoming Woman
The women at the centre of Gracy’s stories all upset the status quo with their desire, fear and lust
Gracy’s stories play out in a landscape of superstitions, haunted houses and yakshis. A thin, permeable film waves between the real and the imagined, and the writer shifts as easily as mist from one side of it to the other. Sometimes she builds a world and events around her characters and sometimes her characters simply rage with envy, paranoia, fear and lust over a page or two, leaving emotional debris as jagged as the pieces of a shattered window. Whether the turmoil is internal or external, plenty of actual violence takes place.
The title story, ‘Baby Doll’, is perhaps among the calmest of these narratives, barring the melodramatic laments of a mother who wants to lock her daughter
away from reality. The girl has crossed the physical threshold of childhood but her infant mind is not yet armed for the risks of womanhood on the other side. There is an allegory featuring two lizards on the wall of a hospital room, talking of life, death and enlightenment. The nugget of wisdom the male imparts, discovered at such a high cost, is a truth the female lizard has always known and she hitches a ride to the world outside to find out something new. Gracy brings life into even inanimate things, creating a tragedy out of two rabbits made of seashells. She plays with blasphemy in ‘The Parable of the Sower’ and in ‘Panchali’.
Just as compelling as the stories is the bit readers often skim over—the translator’s note and the Q&A at the end. Fathima E.V.’s longish note gives us some much-needed context. Gracy wrote contemporaneously with the rise of Pennezhuthu in Malayalam literature. Fathima describes Pennezhuthu as a “shared preoccupation with a woman’s perspective, agency, sensibility, a distinct ‘maternal’ language...” But this writer ploughed a lone furrow, wary of being labelled or limited as a feminist writer in such a misogynistic space and staying aloof from politics or activism. That is pointed out in the translator’s note as well as in Gracy’s own words in the interview that follows.
She also embraces the solitude of the female writer, a situation that seems almost quaint now, when writers are expected to hustle their own wares in an increasingly clamorous marketplace instead of locking themselves up to write again.
Such well-articulated endmatter tempts the reader to go back and read the stories all over again. Not so the footnotes, which are a clumsy intrusion. The wise reader will swat them away and in each story keep her eye on the woman (or girl) at the centre of the arena—whether innocent of the fight ahead, or aware but helpless, or armed and thirsting for blood. ■
—Latha Anantharaman