The Moving Finger

Nisha da Cunha.  Photo courtesy: epaper.timesofindia.com The Supreme Court's recent verdict decriminalising adultery makes me post this review of Nisha da Cunha's story that was written in 1991 and is narrated from the point of view of the adultress. Nisha da Cunha’s short story “One Summer meeting” is from her collection of stories Old Cypress .Through long lyrical and meandering passages of interior monologue, the protagonist goes down memory lane recalling   the heady days of her tempestuous extramarital affair with a man whom she compares to a sun bird that is vibrant with beauty and movement. The protagonist’s grown up son comes in search of her after years of separation. The story is in the form of a baring of the soul, a sort of confession to the son about the affair that caused the break up of her marriage. In poetic language, the mother recalls the pain and disillusionment of an unfulfilling marriage and the agony and ecstacy of extra-marital love. W...

        Photo courtesy:theweek.in In all patriarchal societies norms for control of male sexuality are not rigid. Men have always enjoyed the right to be polygamous or to seek sexual partners other than the wife. Prostitution is a patriarchal social institution which has usually men as buyers of sexual services from women.   The abhorrence with which prostitutes are treated highlights the double standards of the pervasive patriarchal sexual morality all over the world.  In her short story Padmavati, the Harlot ,   Kamala Das has interrogated the institutionalization of prostitution which reduces the prostitute to a mere defiled body bereft of  a pure heart and soul.  When the story opens it is dusk. Padmavati, the middle-aged prostitute had from morning walked all the way to reach the hilltop shrine she had yearned to visit for the past thirty-three years. She had been selling her body all these years for taking care of her a...

       Image courtesy:nickyskye.blogspot.com Kamala Das’s short story “Letter from Radha” from the collection of stories Sandal Trees is a prose poem on the Radha--Krishna love. Unlike the  Bhakti  poets who celebrate the Radha--Krishna love of the Vrindavan days as an ideal love beyond the norms of traditional courtship and are silent about Krishna’s later desecration of that love, Das, in her story, prefers to interrogate Krishna’s change of heart after he left Vrindavan. She demythifies and demystifies the Radha--Krishna love and shows it to be what it really was—a love that ended abruptly in betrayal and abandonment, a love that left Radha broken-hearted. Das's story shows how cruel a man can be even to the woman he loves.    Krishna,when he becomes a king , man-like, deserts Radha, and she, woman-like, lives like one dead    pining for her beloved for in true love there is no such thing as “getting over it.” Even ...

                                       Photo courtesy:Clip2art.com   Once upon a time there lived in the   garden of a house in London a pair of swallows with their baby swallow. By the time the little swallow learned to fly it was late autumn, the time for the swallows to migrate, to start their long, long journey to a warmer climate. So taking their young one with them they flew away from London city, across France, across the Pyrenees, across Spain, across Morocco, across the Sahara and reached their destination in Africa. When it was time for them to start their return journey the swallow- parents began to talk to the baby swallow about how wonderful it would be in London when they reach the city in the summer, in the sunny month of June. If they are lucky they may find the nest that they abandoned to be in good condition despite t...

The Canadian novelist of Sri Lankan Tamil ancestry, Michael Ondaatje   has won the special one-off Golden Man Booker Prize given to mark the 50 th   anniversary of the United Kingdom’s most prestigious literary award. Ondaatje’s The English Patient , a tale of love and strife during World War II was selected as the best work of fiction from the last fifty years of Booker Prize-winning novels. The 74-year-old author had beaten all the Man Booker Prize's previous 51 winners including the Indians   who were Salman Rushdie     for Midnight's Children (1981);   Arundhati Roy for The God of  Small Things  (1997); Kiran Desai for  The Inheritance of Loss   (2006); and Aravind Adiga for   The White Tiger   (2008). Image courtesy:https.tvtropes.org The Man Booker Foundation had appointed a panel  of five judges and asked each judge to read all the Booker Prize-winning works from a particular decade and choose his/her f...

                     photo courtesy:http://www.nilefm.com   Plogging has become  the latest fitness fad for fitness freaks all over the world. What is meant by plogging? The portmanteau word 'plogging'   comes from a fusion of the  Swedish words plocka upp and jogga which mean picking up and jogging. Ploggers are people who carry trash bags and   pick up garbage  when they go  jogging. Later they throw that garbage into the nearest bin or get rid of it in an eco-friendly manner. Plogging may be an unclean way for you to get fit; but it is a simple and easy way to make  the earth clean.   Littering the earth with non-biodegradable waste like plastic bottles, foam, thermocol, diapers, straws, toffee-packets and wrappers   is a global problem of alarming proportions. It was in 2017 that a simple, yet effective technique to deal with this issue was conceived by Erik ...