Rosarita, Desai’s newest novel, is the story of Bonita, a young Indian woman from New Delhi who has come to San Miguel, Mexico for Spanish immersion courses. One day in the Jardín, she is confronted by the woman Vicky who becomes The Stranger and later, The Trickster. The Stranger claims to have known Bonita’s mother, Sunita. Except, The Stranger calls her Rosarita. Rosarita, insists The Stranger, was once a great artist who had travelled from India to learn from the great painters of Mexico.
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In my family, caste was mostly a far away concept. As an adult, I am trying to constantly interrogate my positionality within my Indian identity and that includes acknowledging the privileged aspects.
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When over 1 million indentured labourers left the sub-Indian continent to work in the British colonies of the world, they had to redefine their cultural identity…
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What’s great about cinema though – lest you thought I wasn’t going to mention books versus movies – is that it has helped to diversify this aesthetic of storytelling. So I was especially thrilled when I first came across Biren Nag’s Kohraa, (‘The Fog’) a film from 1964 which is an adaptation of Rebecca the novel by Daphne du Maurier and film by Alfred Hitchcock.
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In Meera Syal’s semi-autobiographical novel, Meena Kumar is the only Indian girl in the former British mining village of Tollington. While her parents wait in vain for their daughter’s sudden and definitive metamorphosis into the model Indian girl, all Meena wants is to be a Tollington wench.
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Like any respectable Indian family, the Shantis didn’t use the house kitchen, they cooked in their garage.
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Granted, the cartoon sidewalks are usually spotless apart from the occasional pile of leaves and errant chewing gum, but that doesn’t mean it would have been any better if they’d taken their shoes off. Feet on books? No. Just, NO.
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I would argue that we were raised to see the best parts of our culture and that some of it was made visible via Bollywood. However, this was a world we visited rather than took at face value as the life we should be expected to lead. It is that which has allowed me to hold these films dear whilst still being critical.
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Last night around ten o’clock, Jess drank a mug of Horlicks with a Hershey’s Kiss dropped inside, scavenged from an expired bag she found in a cabinet. It was white and fossilized by now, but with some vigorous stirring, she managed to melt it into a blob which she ate at the end with a vanilla cream wafer biscuit.
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Lifting the Veil is a title which carries implications spanning across western and eastern traditions. Consider the image of the veiled bride, a female figure condemned to lifelong possession. The veil is lifted to reveal the bride, for the pleasure of the male gaze. But in this collection of short stories, Ismat Chughtai turns that trope on its head.
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