Somewhere near the middle of Ashok Srinivasan’s debut novel, Once Upon a Time , the young protagonist, Brinda Murty, suffers a nightmare. She is blamed for an unspecified crime and sentenced “to be publicly impaled until dead”. A white gown is pulled over her naked body. She is made to walk backwards up to a ‘glassy lava cone rising from a wide, waist-deep pit in the ground’, all around which a big crowd has assembled. Thrust onto the cone such that her vulva is penetrated, she is then slid down the shaft till her insides tear and an “equilibrium” is reached.

This passage and its horror, reminiscent of Kafka’s Trial and In the Penal Colony , are at the centre of Srinivasan’s allegorical tale. The “obsidian needle” on which Murty is executed is the edifice of patriarchy. And Murty, our narrator, can be called the Indian woman. In her, we have no less than a god-woman, an actualisation of all the superhuman expectations that traditional roles have of the Indian woman: she is forever young and beautiful; she loves her father, brother, and mother, despite their failings; she is a receptacle of family lore — even remembering, in detail, events before her birth; her touch heals the sick — whether it be syphilis, or leprosy, or old age; and most importantly, despite suffering numerous harassments, indignities and assaults, her spirit seems to be free from trauma.

Murty is raped thrice in the book. The nightmare comes to her some days after the first rape. Curiously, Srinivasan is never much interested in the aftermath, and renders it such that Murty appears to be taking the rapes in her stride; as if she were inviolable. The third time, after she’s gang raped by a group of lepers, she blankly notes how there is news of a whole colony of lepers becoming whole again. This attitude of resignation towards both her misfortune and her gift isn’t much different from what is expected of Indian womanhood.

Murty’s powers result from the grand irony that Srinivasan has suffused his allegory with. He seems to be saying: “Let me give you the woman you demand.” But once that happens, the horrors that Indian women are subjected to stare collectively at us. It is no surprise, then, that Murty’s ravaging is as excessive as the gifts granted to her.

However, we see in the novel a tension between this pure allegorical power and good old realism. The latter is manifested in attempts to place Murty in a large family, whose members’ travails with both history and personal misfortune are painstakingly described.

It happens in the first third of the novel, dealing with members from the ‘jolly joint family’ of Murty’s maternal grandmother, Nandini. Nandini and her sister, Rukmini, raise their children in their father’s house after disappointments with errant husbands (one is violent, the other goes missing). In fact, the men of the family are all troubled by their freedoms: Murty’s father goes away to America, becomes enamoured of vaudeville and striptease, his defection forcing her mother to join Nandini; Murty’s maternal uncle is aloof and dedicated to academia after his wife self-immolates; her brother is a drunkard; her aunt’s husband starts as a communist and later becomes an entrepreneur.

There are multiple other characters that step in and out. Srinivasan provides no family chart, and following the frenetic shift from one to another is often difficult, especially as Murty, in her narration, sticks to first names, seldom referring to others by their relationship with her. Add to that the list of transients that move in and out of the house, and the many household helps, sometimes existing for no longer than a page or a paragraph.

Being short, the novel is unable to do justice to all the characters. One wonders why Srinivasan burdens us with so many. Surely the plenitude wasn’t necessary for his allegorical purposes. And if he was trying something in the vein of the more successful magical realist novels, in which three generations of characters are described to collectivise an emotive potential in the protagonist (think of Salman Rushdie’s Salim Sinai, for instance; Oskar Matzerath from The Tin Drum also comes to mind), one would call his effort a failure. For Srinivasan employs no perceivable method in allocating significance among his cast. Without a plot (in the typical sense), each interpersonal event loses its causal potential and is left to be understood only through a symbolic reading, which might not always be possible. The other characters anyway pale before Murty’s significance; their sufferings, too, fade away before hers for the reader.

Interestingly, after the 10-page passage where Murty is raped and has the nightmare, this labour with extraneous characters is somewhat let go of, and the allegory takes over. There are a couple of lapses, though; like when Murty names ten of her college friends in a comma-separated list that has no relevance to the reader.

Towards the end, Murty is indeed arrested on suspicion of possessing demonic powers, and the absurd law begins to take its course. One is left dazed by the events that take place, and something tells me that Srinivasan wouldn’t want it any other way. His novel, though unevenly executed, retains the gesture of thrusting irony deep into the anatomy of patriarchy.

Tanuj Solanki’s debut novel Neon Noon will be released by HarperCollins in July

Related Topics