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Literary Review
Understanding violence
C.S. LAKSHMI
THE well-known writer Amitav Ghosh, speaking in a recent function in Mumbai, said that as a writer he often wondered if it was possible to write about violence in a non-violent way and his constant effort was to make it possible. It was sometime after this that I chanced upon Yuma Vasugi's novel entitled Raththa Uravu. The novel was published sometime in December 2000. What induces one to buy the book is the unusual cover. It has a black cover with Raththa Uravu written in red letters and there is a mosquito seated right on top of the letters as if sucking blood. "Why a mosquito?" one wonders, for one would understand the title to mean blood relationship. And then there is that mosquito casually sitting on those red letters. It is only when one reads the novel that one realises that the novel is talking about relationships where there is a real spill of blood and situations when the very blood curdles and these are every day occurrences in the family depicted in the novel. Another person's blood is spilled and sucked as casually as a mosquito bite, but with immense violence.
Yuma Vasugi is a poet and illustrator and this is his first novel. The novel does not have an introduction by any important writer nor does it have a preface by the author himself. It does not even have a blurb telling you about the book and the author. It is a novel very quietly released and reading the novel is an experience in understanding violence that women and children endure within the family. After a while one begins to feel that the novel may be entirely autobiographical but written with unusual restraint in terms of handling the situations of violence. The main family the novel talks about is one situated in a village with three brothers living in different portions of a family house with the mother living with one of the sons. The family with whom the mother lives is the family in focus in the novel. It has three brothers (one of whom dies right in the beginning of the novel leading to the first incidence of violence in the novel) and an elder sister in her teens whose constant activity seems to be one of protecting her brothers from a violent father. The sister's name is Vasugi and the novel is dedicated to her. She is a young girl herself but she takes upon herself the immense task of creating a future for her brothers within this violent household. She goes looking for them when they are late in coming back home, she irons their clothes with a warmed up vessel and sees to it that they don't remain hungry.
The kind of battering of women and children the novel talks about is something unimaginable. A woman being chased on the streets in the village yelling out to others to help her and being beaten senseless by her drunken husband while the others watch till she drops down; the woman's husband looking for constant tools for battering — now a lamp with a sharp edge and now a fish tail lying atop the bamboo support of a vegetable creeper, drying in the sun getting to be tight and sharp as a whip. And when the tail of the fish is thrown on the bamboo support to dry and is taken out every now and then to be oiled and prepared, the women know what it is for. The horror of living day after day awaiting violence to occur at any moment, not knowing if one might be the victim oneself fills the novel like a recurring dream. Every now and then, very often after a very physical, violent happening, the novel breaks into a dream very poetic and sensuous, describing helplessness, pathos and tragedy, crying out to a mother to come back, wanting to cross a river and drowning in the river. The dream contains all the violence of a given situation but it sits veiled in metaphors and images. Slowly when one unravels the various elements of the dream one seems to hear the cry of the woman being battered, and feel the distress of the young girl who has taken it upon herself to protect her brothers.
The grandmother in the family is a cunning, conniving one whose only goal is to have her position in the family secure, for she has also gone through the journey of violence and feels that unless the same is meted out to other women in the family her life would remain unfulfilled. Men who decide not to work and who lose money also get treated badly in this family. Like the brother who takes voluntary retirement from the army. He always brought home gifts. When he loses money, his wife and children regularly beat him up and finally he hangs himself. But what the family expects is that nothing should be talked about. The women are publicly beaten and humiliated and the whole village knows about it but a woman is not expected to complain to anyone, least of all the police, about it. The mother of Vasugi does just that. She goes to the police and her life and that of her children is never the same after that. She goes away to her parental family for a while but her children live in constant dread of violent punishments and their silent calls to their mother take the form of dreams.
The most touching moments of the novel are, the one where Vasugi tries to talk to an alcoholic father dying of cirrhosis of the liver and the other one of her trying to swallow glass pieces to commit suicide. Vasugi begs her father to let them go away to their mother. She feels that the man who is dying has softened up enough to listen to her. She tells him about how the others treat her and how she has to slave for others. She chokes when she tells him about the brothers, one of whom has just recently been beaten violently by the father. As one reads one feels that the man would now atone for all his violence and listen to his daughter. But the very next day he gathers enough strength to beat her up for daring to speak. Vasugi deciding to die thinking of her brothers, even while she is powdering a brandy bottle on the grinding stone is another touching moment. Her thoughts are on her brothers and about how one of them was hung upside down from a tree by her father for the alleged crime of plucking a mango from the family mango tree (the grandmother complains that he plucked the mango whereas the boy has picked it up from the ground) and how the other always sleeps curled up like a snail, ever fearing punishment, wetting his pants in his sleep.
The novel contains many tender and humorous situations of children playing, their attitude towards the adults, and the family relationships of others in the village. These situations are hemmed along with all the abuse and foul language and blood and tears in the novel. The women in the novel manipulate, connive, plan, and use so many methods of survival and sometimes some people succeed. For the mother and her sons and daughter, the relief comes from not human efforts within the family to discover love, but through death of the drunken, violent husband and through the family cheating them out of their property because, after all, the woman had dared to go to the police and did not deserve any family property. The woman goes back to her brothers and then the children discover a new life. Along with her brother, the young girl begins to go to high school in a violet colour skirt and half-sari uniform. At the end of the novel, the young boy through whose eyes the story is told sometimes, eagerly distributes drama notices printed in many colours, of the play in which his uncle is involved. His elder brother comes running with his school bag and jumps into the cart in which the younger brother is sitting. The younger brother sees his elder sister Vasugi coming with her friends and he waves out to her. Smiling, she begins to walk towards her brothers. It is almost a dream-like ending with no melodrama. After all that violence, Vasugi's smile comes like the first welcome drops of rain after a hot summer.
C.S. Lakshmi is an independent researcher and a writer. She writes in Tamil under the pseudonym Ambai. She is the founder-trustee and director of SPARROW (Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women).
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