Kavery Nambisan handles with deep insight, the anguish of Shari and countless Sharis in post-independent modern India in her novel The Mango Colored Fish. It exerts an essentially feminine argument on marriage; that every girl should be married within that marriageable age and to a highly suitable boy, approved by family and society. If not that girl is looked at as an oddball, a failure. In the patriarchal Indian society, marriage is a phase of initiating Dharma, a part of life’s pleasure, a way of fulfilling one’s social and religious obligations and liberation from being socially condemned. Love is not requisite in marriage. A woman married to have an identity.
In a patriarchal society a women is considered really lucky and happy if she has a good marriage, children and financial security. No one would try and think, whether she is happy with the traditional roles that she has been assigned; whether she is happy in carrying the burden of her family without making any hue and cry about it? Society and tradition, through the role of mother, condition young girls to believe that real life consists of getting married, having children, supporting their husbands’ aspirations while throttling their own. “The tragedy of marriage is not that it fails to assure woman the promised happiness-there is no such thing as assurance in regard to happiness-but that it mutilates her; it dooms her to repetition as routine” says Simone De Beauvoir in The Second sex (502)
Nambisan dissects, analyzes and highlights the kind of freedom young women enjoy and yearn for, before and after marriage in the character of Shari. She focuses on the question of female identity with in the domestic circle of family. It ponders on the question- why can’t a woman be sufficient unto herself, without being tied to the relational self of a mother, daughter and wife? Why not she be regarded as an individual with independent ideas than as an extension of a man? When this acceptance does not happen, fulfillment in marriage becomes a chimera for both men and women.
Marriage is a cliched metaphor and its rejection is an expected expression of revolt by educated women. Nambisan underscores the evolution of thought within educated women in India, especially of the middle-class and the upper middle-class, westernized and modern but standing at cross-roads, as they face the day to day dilemmas between the traditional organized lives filled with role-playing and the western influenced modern life full of excitement and adventure. Nambisan facilitates narration by Shari in a confessional mode and emphasizes myth of beauty, insincerity of upper-middle-class aspirations and an obscure pursuit for meaning in life. There is a radical rejection by the protagonist Shari of the traditional female role and the pretense of happy family.
Nambisan’s narrative style, her idiomatic language, her sensitivity while dealing with the issue of marriage, differentiates her from other writers. While giving different colors like “Mango colored”, to characters’ experiences, she succeeds in evoking different sensations and images in our mind. The characters in consequence bloom and attain colors and shades, identical to life. Her responsive perception and linguistic capabilities make what could have been an ordinary, nerve-before-marriage confessional and quest for identity, into an enjoyable journey for the reader.
The focal point of the novel is on the characterization. Every character himself or herself is a story, and an interesting one at that. Shari finds Gautam, a white collared computer professional, whom she had met in a party, who was the very object of her affection, a source of disgust and suffering now. “I was wondering how I would last the evening when this very good-looking guy came straight up to me …He smiled and introduced himself” (31). After having imagined herself in love with him; now, she starts to doubt her love for him. All the indications that they are incompatible emotionally and intellectually were already visible but it took some time for her to take it in. “You must learn to like them, sweetie” he said in the same way in which he once told me, “you must learn to be less of a prude” (34) She pulls back from the matrimonial brink wracked by anxiety.
Shari seems deprived of
unconditional love from her parents. The disappearance and disintegration of
her surrogate parent’s marriage is a setback for her. It is a crisis that she
has to deal with and come to terms with. When she looks around for role models
to measure her impending marriage with, she does not find any in the marriages
of convenience of her mother, sister, friend or the rocky marriage of her
brother. She does not have a satisfying bond with her mother.
Nambisan delicately portrays, the deeply felt and
suffered rebellion by the female protagonist Shari, against the entire system
of social relationships. But can she be a guerrilla girl or who can say “we are
feminist masked avengers in the tradition of anonymous do gooders like Robin
Hood, Wonder woman and Bat man? She is impelled by the inner need to feel loved
as an individual rather than as a responsible daughter. Shari feels
soul-connection with Naren but is unable to share her grief with him, as she
could share her happiness with him. “Sometimes we would think the same thought
and it was like sipping through one straw” (99). She felt her love for Naren
was good and wholesome but it must have been flawed. If only she could see it,
she could set it right. “But- I fell in love. He loved me too. It was good and
wholesome. But there must have been a flaw somewhere” (234). When she narrates
this to Suren Swamy, the Swamy at the temple, his rejoinder is that she has
seen the best and the worst of life [marriage] at such young age. He comforts
her that few people have the strength to love as her uncle and aunt loved each
other. “You belittle your strength….Forgive” (233). Once she had done that she
would realize that love was never flawed.
Nambisan’s assertion is that female emancipation will be
fully realized only when, rights to the female body is given to itself, right
to its own truth, its right to self-possession. Men accept the body and bodily
response as natural, as part of human identity, as they have been conditioned
and sanctioned by society to do so. Are women’s bodies and bodily responses
less natural? Yash, Shari’s friend is deeply unhappy as she lacks emotional and
sexual fulfilment in marriage. Nambisan depicts the concerns of feminist
theorists such as ‘Showalter’ as they struggle with the emergence of their
individual selves, with their sexual desire, a phenomenon that has swept the
nation. It brings to mind Eve Ensler in The
Vagina Monologues who gives us real women’s stories of intimacy,
vulnerability and sexual-self-discovery.
Shari’s flash of insight into others and herself is a symbolic journey into the inner recesses of her consciousness, of her self. It is an extraordinary self-discovery; richly textured and sensitively perceptive. There is a strong feminist streak, of Shari's life being controlled by others, of her not even being aware of her inner self at the external, everyday level but she is surprisingly sharp and witty, in the pictures and portraits she draws in her mind’s canvass. The ‘inside’ of Shari travels to external places and into different experiences in different times to piece herself together.
Interestingly, Nambisan depicts the suffering and conflict of the modern educated woman caught between tradition and modernity. Shari gradually musters up the courage, for a cathartic emptying of the soul. It comes as no surprise that, Shari breaks off her engagement, after her period of soul searching. She is able to see her way ahead clearly. “What I mean is-everything is going to be fine” (241). She can rely on herself now, to make her own decision. The novel ends optimistically, with Shari sentient to the bird song, sung in a clear, confident note. She stops to listen on her way back home, to meet her family with the news of her cancelled wedding. She would go back to teaching the primary school children. “I stop to listen. When my moment of reckoning comes, I shall know what to do” (241).
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