When he said, ‘Translation is like a concubine,’ everyone clapped their hands and applauded. It looked like all of them knew a lot about concubines.”
That’s a character, a male Bengali writer, holding forth in one of the stories in Ambai’s A Night with a Black Spider, translated from the Tamil by Aniruddhan Vasudevan. The man who says this is supposedly being humorous, but the underlying satire is unmistakable. Who is the subject of this satire? Writers who get translated? Translators? Or the readers?
Many such questions came to my mind as I was reading this collection of short stories. There were a few stories that made me very aware of the fact that this was, indeed, a translation. There were the usual linguistic questions and reservations that surrounded a couple of stories. Thankfully, I quickly overcame those to sit back and enjoy Ambai’s world.
Stranger shores
The stories that delighted me were the ones placed in everyday moments we sometimes fail to notice: In family, food, love and laughter. In language and longing. Ambai, the pseudonym of Dr. C.S. Lakshmi,
whose work has been translated and anthologised widely, says in the Introduction, “It is in the constant struggle to know which is story, which is life, where does life end and story begin, that writing happens.” The stories that worked for me capture this struggle or process.
Interspersed through the book is a journey series, eight of them simply called ‘Journey 12’, ‘Journey 16’, and so on. There was something comforting and familiar in all of them — maybe because most of us living in India, belonging to a certain generation, have travelled by train. And train journeys have inspired so many tales. I was reminded of my own experiences when I have watched fellow travellers and wondered, who are these people? Where do they come from? Where are they going? Are they happy?
Railway stations, bus stations and airports bring together a sea of humans. There’s the jostle, the shove, the cursing. But though we are strangers, we offer one another an occasional smile or greeting. When on the same train or plane, we are all headed for the same destination. We are all united by that journey.
In one such story of a journey, the main character is shaken by the death of a fellow passenger and comforted by a complete stranger. In another, we see how a child takes to an elderly woman on a bus in Mumbai. In yet another, a group of travellers has lost a suitcase of jewellery and money.
Food is central to many stories. The colour, taste and fragrance of a dish trigger nostalgia. Tamil culture and notions about it also recur in some stories. Torchbearers of so-called tradition make for interesting characters in stories like ‘Burdensome Days’. Bhramara, the lead character, and his world of music and freedom are overshadowed by culture politics and hypocrisy. We come across a song she refuses to sing for a movie produced by her husband. The lyrics are hilarious. The black humour works well, even in translation.
Male: Sweetly, sweetly, you talk to me
Here’s the price for the pleasure.
Sing until I melt with you
Dance until you are disrobed.
Female: Sweetly, sweetly, while you talk
Shivers of pleasure I will give you.
Meltingly, meltingly, when you sing.
I will dance, my clothes falling.
Moon to devour
Women are evidently and expectedly the pivot around which the entire collection works. Stereotypes concerned with marriage, feminine identity, love, career, are all broken as in most of Ambai’s work. In ‘Moon to Devour’, Suguna goes through an abortion because the father (an artist) refuses to stand by her. One day, she receives a compelling letter from the same man’s mother.
“… please separate these things from each other: art-artist, night-moon, day-sun, sound-music… Tease out even woman-motherhood. Yes, that too. It is a hallucination that makes them appear inseparable.” It is a stirring passage in many ways.
I read somewhere recently that writing has no gender. True in many ways. When a piece of fiction or a poem makes you think, your or the writer’s gender ceases to matter because the writing has succeeded. In that sense, this collection belongs in your bookshelf.
A writer and literary journalist, the author’s first book of poems, Nine, was published in 2015.