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Literary Review
Dealing with truth
C.S. LAKSHMI
AT the South Asian Writers' Meet held at London in February, I met Gohar Kordi. As she is blind she had requested someone to bring her to me for she wanted to share something with me. In the course of our conversation, I had mentioned that since my early education was in Tamil, I could count and curse only in Tamil and also do my creative writing only in Tamil. Gohar was from Iran; her father was Turkish. She writes in English and has settled down in England. She told me that as she is growing older, whenever she gets emotional, the words come out in Turkish. She said that this Turkish language being deep within her came to her as a surprise. A very interesting conversation on language and writing ensued.
I found out later that her first book, an autobiographical novel entitled An Iranian Odyssey, had received very good notices. It was widely reviewed in England, Germany and later, in the United States. It was short-listed for the Elizabeth Frink award and the Fawcett Society Book Prize and was adapted for radio and TV. While she was overwhelmed by the response, Gohar felt that while writing about her early life, she had certain anger towards her mother and the treatment she meted out to her as a child. So the mother had come out as a particularly cruel person and the reviewers had responded to this particular aspect and called her mother brutal and cruel. Her friends and acquaintances judged her mother harshly. Gohar began to feel that this was not right and that her intense anger towards her mother had expressed itself in this manner. In the novel her image was that of a villain, a monster, someone entirely evil. Gohar felt that this image was unjust, unreal and distorted. She felt that she had not done justice to her mother as a person. And she wanted to set things right. Now that the anger stored for so long was expressed, it would be possible to see her mother in a different light. She remembered that as a child she had witnessed her mother being beaten by her husband, her younger brother and later by her son. She had been terrorised and exploited by the landlord. She had been married off at the age of 12 against her will and later divorced for not allowing her marriage to be consummated. Her mother was a brave, strong and determined woman, a fighter. She had died at the age of 45 from exhaustion, burnt out by the hardships of life. Gohar wanted to recreate this image of her mother. And that is how she wrote her second novel, Mahi's Story, in 1995, which is about her mother and her struggles. And it is this novel that Gohar gave me as a present.
In the novel, Mahi emerges as a person who is constantly battling for some degree of independence in a patriarchal system that gave husbands and rich landlords the right to treat women the way they wanted. Gohar tells the story of Mahi, creating a world where women support one another and stand by those facing injustice. Women work hard and are sexually tormented by their husbands. Beating a wife is a most common thing. And the landlord of a village demanding the right to sleep with any woman of his choice has to be tolerated. The women weave carpets of their dreams only to be paid a low price by the landlords. But the women form friendships that mean more to them than their husbands. They meet and cook for one another. They take care of a friend's household if she is ill, and care for her children. They help friends through pregnancies and deliveries. They get together and invite old men and women to tell them stories. They celebrate festivals together. They tease one another about their sexual life.
Mahi enjoys teasing young women about their sex life and takes great pleasure in joking about it. But she has one special friend with whom she discusses everything including matters of love and desire. Her friend Khoshghadam is a gypsy who has had a runaway marriage. She teaches Mahi to look at life differently. Together they gather firewood, chop logs, go mountain walking and rock climbing. They go for long walks in the fields and hills to gather herbs, roots and plants and Khoshghadam teaches Mahi all about their healing properties. She often tells Mahi that she must learn to survive during difficult times like the gypsies do. One evening when they are together, Khoshghodam tells Mahi, "Life is not only about men, you know. There is a lot more to life than just having a man to stand by you. We see so little of them, and when we do, it is mainly in the night. It is then that we have to perform our little wifely duty. Let them have it, give them what they need; it will only take a few moments. Then go and enjoy it properly with the person of your own choice." Such sessions they have with each other always end with a lot of laughter.
Mahi needs such laughter in her life, for her life has not been an easy one. The experience of her sister Khadijeh is something that has remained with her. Khadijeh had been a tall and slender girl in love with a man who had gone to fight for the Kurdish people asking her to wait for him. Her own friend Hamideh, who was also in love, had hung herself in protest, when she was forcibly married off to another man. Khadijeh had refused many offers but finally she was also forced to marry against her will. On her wedding night she was brutally beaten and raped and she had let out a cry from her stomach that had shaken the whole house and the cry had been heard in the whole village. After this her husband had divorced her and Khadijeh had gone into a depression and had later become a recluse. The details of this she tells Mahi much later in life but Mahi has heard about her sister in bits and pieces from others. Mahi herself is married off at the age of 12 but she refuses to have her marriage consummated. After this her husband divorces her. And later Mahi is forced to marry Reza, a Turk from a far away village, against her will because "she had brought shame to the family." Although Reza demands his rights as a husband, he is gentle with her and does not force himself on her immediately. But Mahi treats him with disdain and refuses to do the kind of things that wives normally do, like mending his trousers and other odd things. But Reza never loses his temper and he comments jokingly to his friends, pointing to the holes in his trousers, "It is as though I don't have a wife."
There is that constant yearning in Mahi to be free, to be her own self. She has three children who she tries to bring up in the best possible way. But when there is small pox raging in the village her baby girl also gets afflicted. With the best of intentions, Mahi nurses her and to protect her eyes ties the child's eyes with a handkerchief. The child is ill for three months. Three long, grey, hard, winter months. When Mahi takes the bandages off her eyes she discovers that her child has gone blind. Mahi feels devastated but other women help her to face this crisis.
After a while, Mahi feels more and more the need to leave the village and go to a city to live a different kind of life and make a different life possible for her children. She goes to Teheran where her brother and mother are. She is uneducated but she washes clothes in people's houses to provide for her family. In her determination to live in Teheran and realise her dreams, she separates from Reza but soon after, Reza dies. As a single mother she takes a separate place for herself despite her brother's protests and feels that she is finally independent and in control of her life. It is then that she receives a marriage proposal from an educated person whom she also likes. Mahi feels that she can't be thinking of only herself. She had to be sure that the person would be nice to her children. Also she feels that she cannot lose the independence she has gained with such difficulty. Maybe she could talk to the gentleman concerned, suggests the person who has brought the offer. Mahi feels that, that maybe in future. At that point her answer is no. The greatest joy she feels, however, is when there is a family wedding and her mother is happy and she hugs and tells Mahi that all this happiness is because of Mahi for she has done so well for herself.
At the end of the novel one's heart goes out to Mahi. One wonders if she finally married that educated gentleman or did she value her freedom and her children so much that she remained single till her death. One also realises that the little baby girl who went blind with small pox is Gohar herself. Gohar writes in the preface that many people had asked her how she had managed to carry on despite all odds and she began to think that there must have been something positive in her life. And she realised that the positive factor in her life was how she had been valued as a child even after her blindness. Being valued unconditionally by her mother and the whole community must have been the source of her strength, she writes. And she wonders if the source of her mother's strength was the same. Mahi was lucky to have a daughter who decided to write about her mother in spite of the fact that a novel that had portrayed her mother as some kind of a monster had won so much acclaim. For, in the final analysis, writing does not have to do with acclamation but to do with dealing with what one thinks are the truths of one's own life.
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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