A random comment left by a reader on one of those websites devoted to sharing opinions about favorite books sums it up perfectly: reading Incantations and Other Stories today is like reading tales focusing on modern women, yet the book was published in the early 90’s and most of the stories are set in the previous decade. And that quality of being out-of-sync is what makes the collection stand out. These are stories for the most part about women living in the notoriously stifling patriarchal environment of India who refused even then to fully submit. That being said, it is also important to add: compromises must be made.
And it is the points of intersection between full submission to misogyny and patriarchy meet with revolt and rebellion that most of these stories take place. Is this short story collection an example of feminist literature? Absolutely. Does it even begin to ever feel like pedantic anti-male diatribes disguised as storytelling? Absolutely not. The heroines the author has created which populate the stories may be models for a woman of the future that Indian male society would be forced to confront daily, but the story always comes first.
Every reader will their own personal favorite, of course, but relative to the idea of these stories being unified by an overarching theme of feminist ideology, it is very hard to beat “Bahu” out as the cream of the crop. It is the impeccable ideal of the manner in which story takes precedence over politics yet never really allows the two concepts to be anything other than fused seamlessly together. The story is the first-person narrative of a newly married Indian woman who desperately wants nothing more complicated or difficult than to simply spend some time alone with her husband.
This simple desire proves all but impossible to fulfill, however, by virtue of the fact that she is the living embodiment of the proverbial advice that you don’t marry a person, you marry their entire family. Any time spent with her husband automatically also means time spent with both parents-in-law, a sister-in-law, a brother-in-law, and so on. Even a long-for and overdue night out the movies together does not really mean together. In the middle of the film, she breaks free and rushes outside the cinema. On the way back to the movie theater, however, a complete stranger molests her on the street by fondling her thigh and whispering an obscenity. Her reaction is like never before: she runs after him and knocks him upside the head with her bag before rushing back inside the cinema thinking to herself; “I had never done this before, on all those numerous occasions when these disgusting men fingered me.”
Take a second to let that statement sink in. On numerous occasions, strange men have molested her in public. It is a voracious predatory attack that she concludes can only be done so often by so many because “They think it’s their prerogative.” All of this happens within the first two pages of “Bahu” which then continues for another fifteen pages. It is a story about this one particular woman in this one particular circumstance. The story comes to a conclusion with a scene suggesting a finality to those circumstances in which the narrator’s husband, Siddharth, says to her about their living arrangements, “This is the way things are. You have to learn to accept.” To which she responds quite simply, “No.”
There is a connection between the creep on the street and her husband as well as a connection between the creep and her husband’s family and, of course, a connection between the creep and Indian society and its patriarchal expectations of women. One of those connections is that none of them expect to hear the word “No” come from a woman. Or, at the very last, not a woman like the narrator. Indeed, even she, herself, has been complicit since, remember, the entitlement of fondling a complete stranger has been enacted too many times to count before she finally strikes back. Not all the protagonists of the stories in this collection wind up being quite as rebellious as she is, but in the story’s final image of her sitting in a taxi moving forward while her husband fades into the past in the distance behind her, she becomes the heroine of heroines; the woman that those not quite ready to become just like her secretly and silent yearn to be: out of step with their time, but gloriously and wondrously so.
