A hard time with snakes

YOU have heard of American Born Confused Desis, Now wait for the literary equivalent that arrive trailing Ph.D.'s in Lit Crit. and English studies from obscure universities in the American mid- West. Or those writer wannabes who have spent many a summer on the creative writing trail learning to dredge their newly liberated souls into neat sentences, paragraphs, plots, sub-plots that can finally be packaged into a novel. They are called American Bred Confused Diasphorians. They do not write. They wallow. They do not imagine, they embalm the past. They leave, only to return.

For every tough minded Bharati Mukerjee who might say, "Cut the roots, forget that old hag the Mother Country, she is a tough bitch who will not let her children go" or words to that effect, there are others who return with a trans-Atlantic whine and a whimper to celebrate all that they imagine they have lost.

Nirmala Moorthy, journalist, short story writer and novelist does the mystic India number in spades. If that were all she did, one could well forgive her for her racy breathless narrative that throbs and pulses its way in that time honoured tradition known as "women's weekly fiction". In its purest genre, it would appear as a serial in those women's magazines that used to be printed in England and sent to entertain the wives of planters exiled in some mist shrouded estate. Its essence was suspense. The heroine was invariably pitted against the elements, in darkest Africa, driest Australia, or intoxicating India. She had to deal with voodoo, snakes and scorpions, the natives who were always threatening to rise, malaria and the "Man in her life" who was just as hard and unforgiving as the countryside. As compensation, there would be the kind doctor, just a jeep ride away, waiting with penicillin, or quinine tablets and a weak cuppa tea, a good self improving hobby such as painting water-colours and the loyal ayah hovering in the dark cool recess of the verandah. Since devotees of the memsahib chronicles had to wait with bated breath from one week to another before they could find out their heroine had managed vanquish the forces of darkness, the general story line could meander as gloopily as our own soap sagas do today.

Moorthy's narrative has all these elements, but with loads of American attitude. So, her heroine Eleanor is not just a White Caucasian female, who is tossed into darkest Kerala, but a person of mixed race, both American and Indian, who is also an orphan, with a previous marriage and one girl child, Patricia, with pretty green eyes. This naturally adds to the "Aha!" factor when she marries Suren, the archetypal strong man as hero. Suren at first is described as clever, with "a sharp incisive mind that had topped the class at Harvard", he is kind, handsome and a great lover at an al fresco picnic on the grass, way back in America, when they first meet.

Sure enough, as the plot thickens, Suren, makes a play for Patricia, Suren's transformation from perfect gentleman when they are in America to sex obsessed brute, when they settle down in Kerala, or from suave stock broker in New York to snarling coffee planter in Wynad, is one of the more brazen leaps of the willing suspension of disbelief that the reader is expected to make. Of course, one of the most enduring myths that surrounds the lives and loves of planters is that they spend their time impregnating the plantation workers, while supervising the picking and garbling and grading and hulling and washing and drying of the coffee berries. Moorthy is diligent in documenting both activities. You could well pick up tips on how to grow Monsooned Coffee, while Suren is busy with yet another tribal girl. Moorthy cannot decide whether she is filling in chapters for a Lonely Planet guide to Kerala, doing her bit for the anthropological role that she has decided she must also fulfill to explain the "Status of women in Kerala" because it is good to get the feminist angle in these days, or whether she should be getting on with her story.

Indeed, it is probably completed wrong to describe Eleanor as the heroine of the story. It actually starts with the recollections of a young woman called Meena, who feels the weight of a sacred arm band in the shape of a serpent that she wears around her upper arm. It has been given to her by her Mother, Devika, who is described thus in the opening lines of the book. "Everyone loved her mother - slender as a bamboo, pale skinned; the whisper of her footsteps like falling rose petals; her voice hushed as the night wind in the treetops". Devika is also much in demand at social functions as a speaker, because naturally she has been a gold medalist in her time. This probably accounts for her somewhat stilted manner of talking to her daughter. For instance, when handing over the arm bracelet, she lectures Meena on the status of women in Kerala, on the matrilineal system of ownership, the Chera dynasty that was the Golden Age and ends with the account of

Hippalus, the Greek who discovered the secret of the monsoon winds - "For six centuries they brought us silver and gold coins, and fair skinned slaves from the Mediterranean. They returned home laden with pepper and teak; pearls and precious stones. We had a bond so close that Cleopatra of Egypt tried to send her son Caesarian here to the city of Muziris to save him from Octavian's sword." She whispers, in her best guidebook manner. we are actually meant to see the story reflected through the eyes of Meena, who is, in fact, one of the more charming creations of the author. She is warm and spontaneous in her reactions. She forms a natural link between the various layers of the society that Moorthy tries to describe, going from the adults to the servants, from Calicut where she lives with her parents to the coffee estate where her Uncle Surean takes his family, once they decide to settle down.

Moorthy, however cannot keep the story on an even keel. It turns and twists uneasily between Eleanor's predicament, which is much more real since she is the one facing the life threatening choices and Meena's confused recollections. In between Moorthy's anthropological observations about the caste system in Kerala, the hostility between at Nambudiris and Nairs, the lowly place of the Untouchables, which must all seem like good strong stuff to her American audience, she persists in making comments about fair and dark skins in a manner which, in any other culture, would brand her a racist. For instance, when Devika, the mother hears that her beloved brother Suren has come back from American with a foreign wife, we are told, "Meena watched her cheeks pale from crimson to alabaster in a matter of seconds".

Devika's son, Param, who, for some mysterious reason that is revealed at the end, is her favourite, is described as being "tall and fair skinned, with a shock of black curls spilling over his eyes." He also had cheeks that were "as pink as apples from Kashmir."

When Eleanor attacks her canvas (she is an artist in her spare time), we are told, that her palette knife had laid an arc of color, "on the virgin white of the canvas." Meanwhile, the tribal or Paraiya girl, who appears on the estate, is dark and sensual. "Some powerful emotion made the fine, somewhat flattened, nostrils flare. And then the smoldering hate in the enormous black eyes hit her like a punch in the nose". This duality between black and white, the dark forces of the East, of matriarchal power, against the sanity of the West, the male world, of reason, of enlightenment that forms the basis of so much of the literature of the canonising gaze does not seem to even enter Moorthy's frame of reference. But perhaps, this is because we are expected to look at the scene, as she looks at the tribal girl, through the eyes of Eleanor.

This being the case, perhaps we should not complain at all about the coiled serpent of the title. Eleanor really has a hard time with the snakes. If she is not having a tete-a-tete with a King Cobra in a deserted old temple, ("When he raised his hooded head and looked at her in the eye, she saw him ... He was at least seven feet long and filled the entrance of the latticed enclosure. He was the largest cobra she had even seen"), she is getting her fill of sudden snake attacks, myths about snake, the secrets of the power of Kundalini and so on in a manner that might even make Stephen Spielberg blush. Cheer up Eleanor, who knows with so much sex and serpent lore sloshing around in the dark and tropical forests of Wynaad, you might soon become an archetypal Spielberg heroine yourself.

GEETA DOCTOR

The Coiled Serpent, Nirmala Moorthy, Clocktower fiction, U.S., (distributed by East West Books Madras Pvt. Ltd.) Rs. 175.

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