A Kitchen in the Corner of the House collects twenty-five gem-like stories on motherhood, sexuality, and the body from the innovative and perceptive Tamil writer Ambai.
In A Kitchen in the Corner of the House, Ambai's narrators are daring and courageous, stretching and reinventing their homes, marriages, and worlds. With each story, her expansive voice confronts the construction of gender in Tamil literature. Piecing together letters, journal entries, and notes, Ambai weaves themes of both self-liberation and confinement into her writing. Her transfixing stories often meditate on motherhood, sexuality, and the liberating, and at times inhibiting, contours of the body.
Release date:
September 17, 2019
Publisher:
Archipelago
Print pages:
376
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In a Forest, a Deer It is difficult to forget those nights. Nights when we listened to all those stories. Thangam Athai, it was, who told them to us. They were not tales of the fox and the crow, nor of the hare and the tortoise. No, these were stories she herself had made up. Some were like fragments of poetry. Others were like songs which would never end. Stories which developed in all sorts of ways, without beginning, middle, or end. At times, at night, she would create many images in our minds. Even the gods and demons would alter in her stories. She would speak most movingly about Mandara. Surpanaka, Tadaka, and the rest would no longer remain as rakshasis, female demons, but be transformed into real people with impulses and feelings. She brought into the light characters which had seemed only to cling to the pages of the epics. As if she were stroking a bird with broken wings, with such gentleness she would portray them in words. I don’t know what it was about them – the night-time, or the central hall of that old house where we lay, or the nearness of all the cousins – but those stories still keep circling and sounding somewhere in my mind, like the buzzing of bees. In that house with its old pillars and central hall, I see Thangam Athai in several frames. Leaning against the heavy wooden door. Carrying a small lamp which she has shaded with the end of her sari; placing it within its niche. Serving a meal to her husband, Ekambaram. Pulling on a rope, one foot firmly placed upon the small parapet surrounding the well. Feeding the plants with manure. Thangam Athai had beautiful dark skin. A face without a single wrinkle, as if it had been ironed smooth. Plenty of silver in her hair. There was an old-fashioned harmonium in Athai’s house, worked by pressing a pedal. Athai used to play it. She would play different tunes, from the tevaram “Vadaname chandrabimbamo” to the popular “Vannaan vandaana,” singing softly at the same time. Her long fingers which looked like the dark beaks of birds would fly over the keys of the harmonium as if they were black butterflies. A shell of mystery surrounded Thangam Athai. There seemed to be a deep pity for her in the way the others looked at her with tenderness, or stroked her gently; it was there in the compassion flowing from their eyes. Ekambaram Maama had another wife. He always treated Athai as if she were a flower. Nobody had overheard him address her as “di.” He would always call her Thangamma. All the same, Athai seemed, somehow, as if she stood a long distance away, behind a smokescreen. It was Muthu Maama’s daughter, Valli, who pierced the mystery. What she found out was both comprehensible to us, and yet totally incomprehensible. According to Valli’s mother, Athai had never “blossomed.” “What does that mean?” several of us wanted to know. Valli was old enough to wear a half-sari. “Well, it means that she never came of age.” “But her hair is all white, isn’t it?” “That’s different.” After that we watched Athai’s body carefully. We discussed among ourselves how a body that hadn’t “blossomed” would be. We couldn’t understand in what way her body wasn’t complete. Athai looked just like everyone else when she appeared in her wet clothes, after her bath. When she stood there in her knotted red choli and her green sari, she didn’t look at all unusual. Valli’s mother had said to Valli, “It’s just a hollow body.” We couldn’t make out where the gap could be. We wondered if it was like the broken wing of a sparrow, a hollow that wasn’t overtly discernible. One evening they cut down a huge tree in the garden, which had died. At the last blow of the hatchet, it suddenly slid down to the ground amidst a rustling of leaves. When it was split across, there was a mere hole within. Valli nudged me at the waist and said, “That’s it, that’s hollow.” But it was impossible to compare Athai’s shining dark form with this tree, lying there facing the sky, exposing itself utterly, nothing inside. What secret did that form hide? In what way was her body so different? In the hot summer afternoons, Athai would remove her tight choli and lie down in the store-room. When we went and snuggled close to her, laying our heads against her breast, freed now from its confining choli, she would gather us up in a light embrace. Held within the protection of her breast, her waist, her arms, it was difficult to perceive any hollow. Hers was a temperately warm body. She seemed like one steeped in feelings and emotions. Like a ripe fruit full of juice, a life-spring flowed through her body. And often those vitalizing drops fell upon our own selves. Through her touch, through her caress, through the firm pressure with which she massaged us with oil, a life-force sprang towards us from her body, like a river breaking past its own banks. It was at the touch of her hands that cows would yield their milk. The seeds that she planted always sprouted. My mother always said she had an auspicious hand. Athai was there when my little sister was born. “Akka, stay by my side. Keep holding on to me. Only then will I not feel any pain,” Amma muttered, as we children were being swept out of the room. When we came to the threshold and looked back from the doorway, Thangam Athai was softly stroking Amma’s swollen belly. “Nothing will happen. Don’t be frightened,” she said quietly. “Oh, Akka, if only you too could . . .,” my mother sobbed, unable to finish what she began. “What do I need? I’m like a queen. My house is full of children,” said Athai. Ekambaram Maama’s younger wife had seven children. “Your body has not opened . . .,” Amma wept the louder. “Why, what’s wrong with my body? Don’t I feel hungry at the right times? Don’t I sleep well? The same properties that all bodies have, this one has, too. It feels pain when it is hurt. Its blood clots. If its wounds go septic, it gathers pus. It digests the food it eats. What more do you want?” asked Athai. Amma took her hand and laid it against her cheek. “They turned your body into a bloody battlefield . . .,” she moaned, holding that hand tight.
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