Today we are initiating a new permanent Reading Life Program centering on Short Stories by South Asian Women. We will include in this program Short stories written by women set on The Indian Subcontinent and stories by writers who self identify as of South Asian ancestory. We hope to post on classic writers as well as authors just starting out. We are seeking suggestions.
In the nearly ten years in which i have maintained The Reading Life i have never seen as much attention given to a debut Short story collection as that given to White Dancing Elephants by Chaya Bhuvaneswar. So far i have posted on three of her marvelous very creative stories, all have death as a core factor and deal with the interaction of persons of Indian background with western countries. The title story involves a miscarriage, another an Indian father’s impending murder of his mentally handicapped daughter. Another story takes us to the horrible Bhopal Chemical plant disaster in which over 30,000 died.
I have just finished Reading The Anatomy of Criticism by Northrup Frye. He talks extensively and very learnedly about the various ways in which myths are used to structure literary works. In all three of the stories I read prior today we can see Bhuvaneswar very profoundly use ancient Indian myths not only as part of the rhetoric structure of her stories but she shows us how people retreat into deeply rooted ancient archetypal myths to help with the otherwise unfathomable aspects of their lives. She overlays the ancient myths with modern reality.
I will quote a bit from Frye to try to clarify my meaning.
“We have, then, three organizations of myths and archetypal symbols in literature. First, there is undisplaced myth, generally concerned with gods or demons, and which takes the form of two contrasting worlds of total metaphorical identification, one desirable and the other undesirable. These worlds are often identified with the existential heavens and hells of the religions contemporary with such literature. These two forms of metaphorical organization we call the apocalyptic and the demonic respectively. Second, we have the general tendency we have called romantic, the tendency to suggest implicit mythical patterns in a world more closely associated with human experience. Ironic literature begins with realism and tends toward myth, its mythical patterns being as a rule more suggestive of the demonic than of the apocalyptic, though sometimes it simply continues the romantic tradition of stylization.
In today’s story, “The Orphan Handler” In just a few pages we see Bhuvaneswar exemplify the romantic implied to overlap mythic patterns on human experiences in a fashion very suggestive of the demonic. As the story opens a new van full of girls is brought into the orphanage to have them all branded with a hot tattoo iron.
“At dawn, another van with girls comes in and Sister Agnes takes them onto the back veranda, branding them with a tattoo iron and threatening them not to scream. Then she checks for scabies and lice, wearing non-latex hypoallergenic gloves. Then she leads them, even the ones who are weeping quietly, into a vast gay room with bright-colored streamers and balloons and glittering signs spelling out birthday greetings, even though not one of them has given us their real birthdays or names. Then she initiates the change that is our little spiritual secret: the transformation of orphaned girls with special powers, the powers to change into wild creatures of various kinds, into future housekeepers, grounds cleaners, toilet scrubbers, perhaps a secretary or two, or God-fearing wives. After the birthing rite come songs, a ritual that never fails to irritate Mother Superior Devi. Before erecting this orphanage-cum-vocational school, Devi had been arrested for drug trafficking in Kamathipura, where prostitutes lived and where indeed she was involved in heroin. In jail, she learned to read the Bible and took orders as a nun. Now she gives us orders and sporadically allows us to watch a blue movie or two, just to remind us that God accepted her because of, and not in spite of, where she had been, and how blind we would be to think that anything we ever did would be beyond his Love.”
The story is narrated by an orphanage worker in charge of new girls, seventy years old, she entered the orphanage at sixteen. They are ritualistically given new identities. If the girls have parents she sends letters to their parents saying they have died. She prefers girls in filthy clothes as experience has taught her that their parents won’t look hard for them. In one heart breaking line she tells us that once and a while a troublemaker of a mother shows us looking for her daughter. Sadly they often are branded. (I am assuming branded women are not acceptable as wives.)
The woman profits when concerned parents, thinking their daughters have died, send items to be included in their funereal arrangements.
“Mother Superior Devi can smell women who change—and the girls, the special girls, with powers to transform into animals, well, many of them inherit this capacity from their mothers. Girls in grey are easy fish: calls are cursory, inquiries disinterested. It isn’t even grey that they’re wearing. It’s filth, their clothing washed if you can call it that in refuse-tainted water, in puddles that slum dwellers make do with for small ponds. There is a smell on these girls that is distinct, not just a smell but a texture—the unwashed clinging even to the newly-washed, the smell of their hair still rank though it is combed and gilded with flowers. Only the transformations astound me. At night, manacles aren’t enough. Mother Superior Devi has gone into deep pockets, money retrieved from her former lucrative life, to build tunnels and dungeon rooms equipped with chains and cages and even one exhibit with rocks and grass where girls who become panthers can be contained, where the wildness of these girls can be transformed in changes more powerful and still more devastating than their earliest age, around age five or six, when they first must have discovered that as girls, they had a secret; when they first sounded a different voice, thrilling to them in its forbidden and unexpected grace. What was it like when you discovered you could roar? I asked a beautiful fourteen-year-old girl-cub-lioness one time, a girl whose eyes were golden brown and her hair matted from life in the slum. But by then she had already been branded and subdued. Doubtful that she knew anymore what to answer; grateful she’d be, shortly after, for how the Mother made her forget, helped her attain a quieter, more durable violence.”
The nuns have license to sexually enjoy the girls and indulge in same sex activity but she is too old for that now.
I see the story as overlaying very ancient myths about female sexuality onto a very cruel setting. The story is set Mumbai, in a world far from the glittering prosperity of the multinational corporations, elegant mansions and five star hotels but we can be sure some of the owners of the corporations, hotels and mansions have helped make Mother Superior Devi Rich. Branded girls don’t work in The front of elegant establishments but maybe a few lucky ones scrub the floors.
You can read “The Orphan Handler" at the link below
Publisher's webpage on White Dancing Elephants
Author's Webpage
Chaya Bhuvaneswar studied Indian poetic traditions with the support of an NEH Younger Scholars grant and as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, concentrating in Sanskrit. She has received a Time-Life Writing Award as well as a Yale Elmore Willetts Prize for Fiction. Her short stories have been anthologized in Her Mother’s Ashes 2, and featured on the Other Stories podcast. An Affiliated Fellow in Writing at the Boston University Center for the Study of Asia, she lives in Newton, Massachusetts. She is a practicing physician.
Oleander Bousweau
Mel u
Chaya Bhuvaneswar studied Indian poetic traditions with the support of an NEH Younger Scholars grant and as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, concentrating in Sanskrit. She has received a Time-Life Writing Award as well as a Yale Elmore Willetts Prize for Fiction. Her short stories have been anthologized in Her Mother’s Ashes 2, and featured on the Other Stories podcast. An Affiliated Fellow in Writing at the Boston University Center for the Study of Asia, she lives in Newton, Massachusetts. She is a practicing physician.
This sounds like a powerful short story--thanks for the link! I look forward to your new project, Mel.
ReplyDeleteYes, this is getting such a lot of publicity. I'm sure I'll get to it eventually. In the meantime, like Suko, I'm interested to follow your new project. How exciting!
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