Editorial Books Music & Art Travel Profile Humour Women & Society Column Reflections Health Poetry Prev Issue Next Issue

Excerpts From Nani's Book of Suicides - By- Sunny singh SUNNY SINGH was born in Varanasi. She received her education in various parts of India and the world. She has worked as a journalist, teacher, and as a management executive for multinationals in Mexico, Chile and South Africa. For the last four years, she has been writing full-time. She is also a playwright. Her first play, Birthing Athena, focussed on evolving relationships and the price of ambition in post-liberalisation India. The Times of India described the play as "an intensely cathartic experience." Her first novel, Nani's Book of Suicides, had been recently published by Harper Collins Publishers India. Described by the Hindustan Times as a "first novel of rare scope and power," the novel explores the cultural identity of an Indian woman through a fund of myths, family lore and contemporary reality. Her second book, Single in the City: The independent woman's handbook has just been released on Dec 22, 2000 by Penguin India.

Read a review of this book at:

Read a Preface of Sunny Singh's second book:

The novel, Nani's Book of Suicides, has a triple narrative, dealing with the life of the grandmother, the grand-daughter/narrator, and a third that deals with myths based on stories that the grandmother recounts. Here are three extracts, one from each section. They don't give away the plot but simply give a taste of the novel. Hope this is interesting.

Sunny Singh

ONE:

My grandmother, the witch, is hydrophobic. She can swim across and back the Ganges just where it curves into Benaras and is the widest. When I was younger, and lighter, she would let me ride her back. I would hold on tightly to her neck and try to breathe through the wet veil of her white cotton sari which invariably tangled around me, leaving my grandmother free to streak across the waters like the many river porpoises that frolic in the early morning sun. She can cavort in the river like a dolphin, but not a drop of water has passed her lips in the last twenty-three years.

She is Amma, mother, to everyone, young and old, to family and strangers. As a child I thought Amma was her name, though now I know it isn't so.

My grandmother, the witch, is tiny, under five feet tall and fragile looking. Over the years, her wavy hair has thinned into a straggly, snowy knot that is perpetually hidden under her sari. Age has softened her knife-edge features and weariness is now a permanent resident around her tightly clamped mouth. Her dark eyes still flash fiercely, and if you look closely, you can see the glowing coal that has rested in her belly for the last twenty-three years.

For the same number of years she has been chasing me, searching me out with her flashing tigress eyes that bore through my skull and pinion my thoughts, hounding me with the overwhelming weight of her traditions and tales of family honour. Unrelenting in the face of my pleas, my defiance, my hatred for her, she follows me, seeking me out over the continents. She and her band of gnarled wizened harpies.

"Listen to me," her voice whispers in my head cutting through my headphones, shattering the magic of Macalpine's perfect guitar riff. The harpies join her, screeching out stories of horror that plague women of our family. Padmini, Draupadi, Meera "Listen to us, we tried running away. There is no escape." I can see my grandmother, the witch, grin wickedly, gleefully, from across the seas. Once again, she has found me even though I didn't send her my address or phone number. "Yes, Nani, of course, Nani. I'm coming home, Nani," I whisper back, frantically trying to think of another far away land to hide in.

She thinks she has caught me and her eyes fill with affection. She believes that she can still sift through my thoughts with the same ease as when I was a guileless little girl. In her blind confidence, she forgets that I have been running and hiding from her since I was five, ever since I discovered her true self. That afternoon, twenty-three years ago, she had thought I was playing in the garden, believed that she was alone in the house.

The day had been pleasant, the sky littered with the white dishevelled clouds only seen in the northern plains during October. I had been climbing the mango tree, hoping to find a baby fruit waiting to grow by next summer. When the blue rubber thong on my slipper came off, I nearly slid all the way down the trunk. When I grew up, I would never own a single pair of white and blue rubber slippers that went thwack against the floor when you walked. I wished I could throw the horrid fluorescent slippers away but, of course, my grandmother would know how to fix them. She always did.

"Nani," I called softly, almost whispering as I walked into the house. She would get so angry. Stupid child, always ruining things! Tucking my skipping rope around my head the way Rajput women in comic books wore their odhnis, I walked barefoot through the silent rooms, holding my noisy-slapping slippers in my hand.

"Nani," I tried wheezing asthmatically, shoving my t-shirt against my mouth and nose, knowing that she wouldn't scold me if I choked and spluttered enough. "Nani!" I stopped abruptly behind the door to my uncle's bedroom. My grandmother, the witch, stood by the bed, her back to me, her head pressed against my uncle's pillow.

"So what has he dreamt of now? Oof, again of that makalu girl Suneeti at his college. Come now, how is he doing at his studies," she commanded the cotton-stuffed bundle in her arms. I watched from behind the curtain as she coaxed her son's secrets from the pillow. "Oho, so he is hiding firangi magazines. Aha, that is a good friend of his. So he dreams of going away. Well, we mustn't let him."

Frightened, I crept back to the garden, knowing that I had to get away from her witch's prying eyes. That very night, I gave up my pillow ("it makes my head hurt. See, it's all lumpy.") and started sleeping on a rolled up shirt. In the morning, one shake of the rolled fabric and all dreams would fly out and disappear into the mist.

As I grew I taught myself to sleep with lying dreams, silly tales that Nani could not believe even if she gathered them up from the shining stone floor. "Make up stories when you sleep," I would chant incessantly to myself, thinking of nothing. I was learning to save my dreams for waking hours.

Grandmother was furious with me. "This child is unnatural," she told my mother when my parents came home for their annual visit. My mother asked me strange questions. Of course, I was happy in Benaras. Where else could I live. I didn't like dreaming when I was asleep. Then, stupidly, naively, I told my pretty mother my secret of dreaming in daylight.

"Of course, she is no trouble; besides, she is my own blood," my grandmother, the witch, soothed them when they offered to take me away with them. She did not like being defeated, I think. Or even fought, as I found out when my parents disappeared at the train station again. The witch has listened to my mother's pillow and soon she began to intrude into my daylight dreams.

"Wake up, the milk has boiled over. Why don't you pay attention? Go and talk to your cousins or your parents will think I have made you an introvert." She and her harpies chased me, frightening me in my sleep, harassing me in my waking hours with their madness, hoping to make me give up my secret thoughts and fancies. That was when I started to run from them, hoping to find a place far from their whispers.

My grandmother followed me then as she does now. She changes her tactics, retreating strategically, advancing when least expected. Even ten thousand miles away, over three continents and two oceans, her voice finds my ear, probing my thoughts, whispering her unwanted advice, tormenting me with stories of times gone by.

She is a woman of many names, I have learned. Perhaps one name is too short to contain her life. She has worn and discarded many over the years, letting her father, her husband, her children name her again and again.

TWO:

Mexico was safe, Sammie decided, throwing up additional smokescreens of an exotic language, strange cuisine, odd geography. What else could you say about a land that shook itself every so often like a vain woman rearranging her hair? Staying in the hothouse orchid-filled town of Cuernevaca, she decided to go on to la gran ciudad, the D.F., the capital. She liked the security and warmth the megalopolis offered, the bright lights that blinded the vision, the dark underbelly that could hide a girl like the wing of a mother hen.

Sammie thought the city was cheerful despite the tragic serenade of the mariachi, believed that the inhabitants were happy in spite of their poverty, imagined that the city was alive and breathing under the stifling layers of concrete and stone. Despite the thick purple smog that hung over the surrounding volcanoes, Mexico City was filled with flowers. What a strange image of a megalopolis! Mornings always clung on mistily late into the day, the afternoons were always bright and cheerful. "Perfect weather for roses," a familiar voice whispered in her ears even as she found a Fellini-esque residence in Colonia Roma.

The house had been built in the twenties and decorated in the local variation of the art deco style with vivid blue and white tiles on the ceilings, luminescent stained glass windows and doors, and pale ivory and gold wallpaper. Mexican homes never seemed to have plain lights. Families, couples, friends gathered under grotesque, splendid chandeliers; lonely hearts and singles huddled in the city windows next to tall art deco black lamps or strange gilded angels and infants suffocating on light bulbs stuffed into their mouths. Her rooms too glowed in golden lights from bouquets of fluted glass tulips. Sammie's rooms had no flowers, if you didn't count the pale ivory lilies that curled across the ancient baroque wall paper or the brocade roses that twined up the velvet curtains of her French windows. The windows overlooked the street and could not be kept open. From the cantina below, a wily, sickening smell of frying salchicha would invade the apartment in an instant, leaving the dying air of gentility cowering in the closet. But there were flowers in the streets, in the churches, in the arms of bedraggled children who instinctively zoomed in on the newly-infatuated beaus. "Buy one for your girl. Roses for true love, she will love you forever. Roses, roses, rositas frescas." Women wore large bouquets in their hair, smelling strongly of plastic and floral essence, blue roses with a vanilla scent. Floral shirts in subtle yet brilliant colours coyly concealed gold chains across the tanned male torsos that crowded into bars, cafes, nightclubs.

"One big, fantastic, rose garden," Sammie whispered to the voice in her ear. "A huge garden, fluttering in a storm that can't destroy the blossoms. If you could only see this." Briefly, she wished she could send home pictures and letters filled with news of this amazing new playground. But the moment passed and the old fears returned. Witchcraft could make the garden disappear, turn the vast valley of twinkling lights into a barren wasteland. Once again, the witch would prune and fertilise and water, and finally turn Sammie's garden into an alien thing. With her cunning, loving whispers, she could tell Sammie that she would care for it and then determinedly change the blooms into something of her own.

Sammie had to love this garden alone, breathe in the smothering fumes, the charred putrefying air filled with scents of cooking, exhaust, roses, cheap sensual perfumes, without letting the witch know. Shut off the voices, Sammie reminded herself, losing herself in the cream and orange queues. "Listen to us," they called after her. "We know all about being free, about making your own decisions. Let us help," they clamoured as Sammie concentrated on the dull hum of the printing press deep in the claustrophobic basement. "I am Shakuntala, Kaikeyi, Urvashi," they screeched even as Sammie scowled in effort, listening to the news editor assign stories to the team. "Kuwait…peace talks…in Salvador…guerrilla in Morelos hills…the last of the Latin American political courtesans on her deathbed…this kid boxer Camacho looks quite good." She was succeeding, drowning out the banshees, or may she had just come far enough to block out their meaningless cajoling and exhortations.

THREE:

The fight is to be held in a gym, in a kind of portable ring set in the midst of a basketball court. The fighters, as usual, are young boys who are going to box their way out of poverty. They have grown up boxing in the streets, and they fight to the finish in these barely legal rings. Don't try talking sense to them or pointing out the scores of battered faces that muscle out the clientele in the city's salsa bars and lug the bricks for yet another hotel on Avenida Reforma. Their flat mestizo faces are closed against any hint of disappointment, their slanty Indian eyes brighten with the dream: look at Macho Camacho, or that Leon guy from Sinaloa. They have everything, mano: the cars, the dope, the girls. And every little boy from the ghetto comes to the boxing ring with the same dream.

I am relieved to meet our burly photographer at the door and follow him through the all-male audience that is betting frantically, swigging mezcal and tequila. Oye morenita, ven aca; mamacita, mueve te. The catcalls make me nervous, and I move closer to El Negrito, who puts his arm protectively around my waist. The whistles and comments from the crowd cease at once. I am with someone, and someone who looks rather mean with a wild machete scar running across his dark face, a shiny lighter shade of jagged electric bolt stretching from his left temple to the jawline.

Finding our seats at the ringside is quite easy. We have to just look for the chairs taped with little white cards with Prensa in gothic script flowing across them. Amazing, I find myself thinking as we settle in, the Latin spirit thinks of everything to catch a woman's attention. In English, or even in my own language, shouting out at a woman's dark complexion would be derogatory. Dark skin isn't beautiful; certainly not desirable. I don't even think there is a nice way to talk about less than alabaster complexions. Just look at the reams of bad poetry we churn out to rosy cheeks and pale foreheads. But here, in the land of the terrible conquista, the construction workers yell out for me, call out to la morenita, the dark one. A single word squashes four hundred years of racist imperialism and glows with glamour and sensuality, of sultry tropical afternoons and all kinds of ripe, succulent things, bringing to mind the wild dusky sirens who lead good Christian conquistadores away from their colonial duty.

I can feel the male gaze on me, turning briefly from the empty ring to focus on my body, penetrating through the black jacket and jeans that I hoped would be sufficiently unsexy for a boxing tournament. The air smells of leather and dust, and something vaguely like medications, and perspiration. That's the most dominant note in the perfume that covers us: male sweat, bitter, acid, strong and burning but with a cloying undernote of musk. And even further hidden is the sweet base note of excitement, and adventure, and solitude; a delicate male fragrance much like antiseptic soap and forests at dusk.

El Negrito is pointing to the betters, the men who give the dream to the barrio youth. Men with sleek moustaches, and shiny black hair who support the boxing gyms in the poorer sections of the city. Dressed in suits bought in Brownsville malls, flashing gold jewellery on their ears, and fingers and necks, they lure the little boys to the fight. If you knock everybody down we'll pay your way to Las Vegas and you can fight the big boys. They smile vacantly at nobody and squint at the ring, shutting their coke-glazed eyes against the spotlights.

The ring before me is empty, the contenders' corners in dark shadows. Soon there will be two men fighting…For what? My woman's mind refuses to understand the sport. For next week's food, for a broad who laughed at your hopeful face when you showed up with flowers bought cheap at the corner, for a chance to fight a tougher opponent in a week's time.

The spotlights are focussed in a wide circle on the board floor, waiting for the referee who will step in and check the combatants' gloves, and their waistbands and shoes. This isn't the televised match, sanitised on ESPN for family viewers, and boxers often get knifed in this arena. Just as they end up critically injured and brain dead when the good fight is fought to the finish. I am concentrating hard on recording everything for the story, and dutifully noting down El Negrito's character profiles of the managers, the trainers, the big betters, the next champions.

A slight figure steps slowly into the circle of light in the ring and a hush seems to descend on the crowd. I look up from my notepad. Not the referee as I had been led to expect, but a woman, a beautiful woman. What are you doing there, I scream out at her, shocked to see her bright sari in this strange land. Horrified that she has chosen to step into the ring just before the match, terrified that she will soon be dragged off, or worse, caught amidst the punches. She laughs at me and at my fears. No one else seems to have noticed her, or perhaps there is no one in the gym to see her.

Her feet are clad in soft leather slippers, the kind that people wear in the small old paintings at home. They rub against the wood and make a strange shuffling sound, punctuated by the soft tinkling of her anklets. She looks up at me with her eerie, knowing eyes and scolds, "You wear silver on your throat. Don't you know that this metal is not worn above the feet?" Of course I know, which is why I wear it on my throat, my ears, my fingers.

Her beauty is spellbinding -- skin soft and translucent, her large eyes glowing with barely concealed passions, her features even and arresting. Her hair is long, I can see, under the silk that covers her head, and arranged in complex coils. A delicate fragrance of jasmine and sweet feminine sweat seems to cling to her. She smiles at me and her mouth seems to split like a heavy sweet fruit to reveal two rows of white seeds and a red rich core within. My breath catches in my throat. She is not pretty, or even glamorous, and too petite for real elegance. Even under the heavy silk folds, her curves are too full for the current norms. No, she isn't sexy at all but she makes me gasp and flush with just a quick glance. She is sexual in some primordial way. Her sex is not just a trophy or even a weapon but her entire essence. It clings to her like an invisible presence, warming her flesh into a subtle blush and reaching out to those who come before her. And she holds me entranced and shy, bound to her flashing smile and her heady scent that suggests that she has just come away from lovemaking.

Recognition comes like a body blow. There has only been one woman like her; a siren who could enchant five husbands, who could start a war, who could sacrifice her children for revenge, who could cool her fury only with the blood of her enemies.