The Moving Finger

                      Love means never having to say that you're sorry, says Erich Segal in his  Love Story.  But this needn’t always be true. Love also means having to say that you are sorry. My little Blackie, I am sorry for letting you go, for not trying hard enough to get you back. Why did I let you go? Your only fault was that you loved me too much.        What can I say about a two month old puppy who walked into my life in the most unexpected manner? That she was black in colour with patches of white? That she loved carrying away and chewing my slippers, driving me mad in the process? That she loved lapping   up bread soaked in milk with her eyes closed? And above all, that she loved me so much that she couldn’t bear to let me out of her sight? I do not remember the date or month or even the year. It may have been...

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...