San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
‘Bandit Queens’ unable to live up to its promise
“Keep quiet and people will think you a philosopher” goes the ancient proverb. The less you reveal, the more people will want to know.
Geeta, a young Indian woman who her neighbors suspect has killed her husband, unintentionally becomes the focal point of town gossip but also a figure of admiration in Parini Shroff’s novel, “The Bandit Queens.” She neither confirms nor denies their suspicions of her guilt, opting to take on the notoriety of a murderer, rather than the shame of a woman left by her husband.
The inhabitants of Geeta’s village in India lack education and resources, even water and basic sanitation. Any real help often comes at a price, as is shown when Geeta and a group of women in her village are provided with microloans to start small businesses. These well-meaning funds create opportunity for the women but also force a strained camaraderie among them — the terms of their loans essentially require that they become dependent on one another in order to succeed.
They struggle to fulfill their fiscal responsibilities as much as their social ones. Success, such as it is in their village, requires them to work so hard to produce things like jewelry or textiles that they become slaves to their own entrepreneurial efforts. Geeta is no exception — she has little else to occupy her time — and longs to purchase a refrigerator some day.
It is not unusual in the real world for loans like these to be given only to women, and the men in “The Bandit Queens” make a case for why. The husbands here are all deeply flawed, each with various combinations of alcoholism, abuse, neglect and adultery. The wives all fantasize out loud about removing their nose rings, as widows do.
It’s perhaps no wonder that Geeta, unburdened by her flighty spouse, is the source of some envy among the others. It doesn’t take long before one of the wives asks Geeta to help her kill her husband. Ridding themselves of their mates then becomes an increasingly more desirable — and achievable — outcome for the other women, too.
Childless and a loner, Geeta can’t relate to her nattering female cohorts, and I can’t blame her. Though terrible fates have befallen all of them,
they feel like caricatures, discussing little else than the uselessness of their husbands or their self-sacrifice as parents justified by the unparalleled “joys of motherhood.” That they are so insufferable only increases our sympathy for Geeta; who wouldn’t want to envision a future different from the one she has been saddled with?
Alienated from her peers, including her now estranged best friend from childhood, she finds solace in the nearmythic figure of Phoolan Devi, a real-life lower-caste child bride of the 1970s who had endured decades of rape and abuse from a series of men before joining (or, some say, being kidnapped by) a gang of bandits. Phoolan suffered abuse there, too, until forming a gang of her own. She became well-known as the Bandit Queen, and set out to get revenge on the men responsible for her trauma.
Geeta, abandoned and uneasy about ever forming any sort of relationship, romantic or otherwise, takes from Phoolan’s story what she needs — until she realizes she may have been reading things all wrong.
“Geeta had assumed that each time Phoolan embarked on a new relationship, it was a purely strategic move, seeking protection rather than love,” writes Shroff. “Each new man shielded her from the past’s consequences. Such circumstances could hardly spell a choice.”
Or could they? As the book progresses, might Geeta be able to find her place within her community of women? Might she realize that she has been extremely bad at reading social cues and has suffered as a result?
Perhaps, but Shroff ’s narrative was never quite successful in engaging this reader enough to really care about the outcome.
Allison Arieff is a San Francisco writer and editor whose work has appeared in the New York Times, City Lab, Wired, Metropolis and Dwell.