Blogger's Note: Well, students from MCC, especially those of you who did your Part II English in the Day Stream would be familiar with the very first poem that you had to do as part of your III Semester Programme - She by Lakshmi Kannan aka Ambai, a Tamil feminist writer. The poem depicts the emotional and psychological sterility of the woman at home, and her lack of self-expression in a patriarchal society. Ambai has now come out with her latest book titled A Meeting on the Andheri Overbridge, with her crime-solving protagonist Sudha Gupta.
Ambai talks to Jerry Pinto -
On Mysteries and Detective stories in Tamil Fiction –
On Her foray into Detective Fiction –
On Literature - Literature as a means for social change
–
On Writers - A Writer and her righteous anger –
On Women - ‘A woman who knows what she wants will know
how to extract the space for that’ –
Ambai (C. S. Lakshmi) has a new book out. A Meeting on
the Andheri Overbridge (Juggernaut) is a collection of three longish short
stories, translated by Meenakshi Subramaniam. What marks the difference is that
these are detective stories, all starring Sudha Gupta, Mumbai resident, mother
of one, employer of one (Stella), wife of one (Naren). This marks quite a
change from what one expects from Ambai. Excerpts from an interview:
The literary
origins of the detective story go back right up to Oedipus Rex, we are told,
where the king must find the sinner/ criminal who has transgressed the moral
order. Is there a similar lineage in Tamil fiction?
I think all epics
and classical texts contain mysteries, for life abounds with mysteries. Kovalan of
Silappadhikaram is beheaded for a crime he did not commit. Kannagi comes to the
court of the Pandyan king to prove that the queen’s anklet with pearls was not
stolen by her husband. She dramatically breaks the anklet and rubies spill out.
Then there is the mystery of whose son Karna really was in Mahabharata . There
is the abduction of Sita in Ramayana and the search for her. And there is the
mystery of who Lava and Kusa really are. The interesting thing is that no one
is really a sinner or a criminal but everyone is caught up in the eddies and
spates of life.
The formal
demands of the short stories you generally write are quite different from the
demands of form in the detective story. Did you find reconciling the two
difficult?
The demands of
form are different, but since I was not really writing a crime fiction in that sense I did
not find it too difficult to tell a different story. Every story one writes
demands a certain way of being told. Actually, I found it very interesting for
I had to make sure I did not make any factual errors in small matters. For
example, in ‘The Paperboat Maker’ a person has to be followed. He is in a car
and is taking the Sea Link route while the person who is following him is on a
motorbike. Motorbikes are not allowed on the Sea Link route. So I had to make
him take the Tulsi Pipe Road and also roughly calculate the time it would take
for him to take that road and follow the person after he gets out of the Sea
Link route. These are small things but they matter. I have heard this about Marquez;
I think he mentioned it in an interview. He wrote a story about a train and the
crucial event in the story happens at a particular station. He gave the story
to Fidel Castro to read and Castro told him it was an excellent story but that
particular train did not stop at that station. For me, these things matter in
all the stories I write. I make sure that I don’t talk of a tree in bloom when
the story is happening in autumn. But in a story of this nature, such facts
become crucial.
In your opinion,
is literature a means to social change? There are many issues that your stories
deal with — sexual abuse of children, the denial of women’s rights in old age.
I don’t think
literature can lead to social change. Literature can touch upon issues that a
particular author feels strongly about. I don’t think it can lead directly to
any change. I think writers, like many others, are not creatures who can retain
their righteous anger all the time. When Kiran Nagarkar gave a talk on Bedtime
Story, he said something which I always recall. Talking about writers and how
callous they can be, he said: “In truth, I had also become conscious of the
fact that there is something worse than callousness, an outburst of righteous
rage which subsides just as easily as it had risen.” It is wrong, I think, to
think of writers as architects of society. They are as vulnerable or egoistic
as anyone else. When I received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the
Toronto-based Tamil Literary Garden group, I said in my acceptance speech that
“literature’s seminal concern does not lie in its depiction of ‘truth’. Rather,
its interests lie in the relationship that we have with what we perceive as
truth. That the nature of this ‘truth’ is constantly altering in our life is
the real truth. Literature is about giving a language to this experience, at
times explicitly and at others, holding back.” The changes you want to see in
society must be done through activities that can encompass literature but must
go beyond it.
Sudha Gupta has a
family that is kept well
and truly in the background. Naren is a
shadowy figure and her daughter has a walk-on part, represented by notes and
comments in passing. Stella, on the other hand, is a well-developed person who
even gets her own romance. I ask this because classical detective fiction
generally presented the detective as without a family: Hercule Poirot has only
Captain Hastings and Miss Lemon; Miss Marple is a spinster; Gervase Fen is a
bachelor; both Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin seem to have no visible families;
even Sherlock Holmes only has a shadowy and distant brother.
That is a good
question. I normally like situations where women would be able to do many things within a
familial situation, whether it is their marital family or parental family. I
like to think that no extraordinary space is needed to do what you want. A
woman who knows what she wants will know how to extract the space for that from
within the family. “A room of one’s own” is a kind of a dream for both women
and men, at least, in India. I grew up in a family which had no individual
bedrooms and I am still in a house where I have to create space — sometimes
fight for it! — to sit down and write. We can’t run away from a family to do
the work we want. We must stay in a family, if necessary, and change the family
as an institution. I have spoken of once attending a literary conference abroad
where I was told that an Indian male writer had spoken poetically about how
stories alighted on him like the morning birds that arrive when he opened the
window. When asked to comment, I said that it’s a beautiful metaphor but one
needs a window to open and the time to open it. Most women, especially in
India, must make the family the miraculous space to work from. Coming to Sudha
Gupta, I felt the need to make her work seem as normal as any other work a
woman may choose to do. I did not want her to be a lone hunter for she is not
dealing with crime as such. As to her husband and even daughter, it is possible
that they may emerge as full-fledged characters in future stories!
Jerry Pinto is a poet and novelist.
Excerpted from Sunday Magazine, The Hindu, 06 November
2016, Chennai Edition.
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