Witch-hunting
may be a rural pastime these days, but there are still wiccans all over
India who can be recognized by the blackness of their tongue. Every
single foul prediction of theirs apparently comes true, so beware!
Author Anjana Basu's "Black Tongue" is an articulate depiction of
domestic hysteria, of conjugal bliss soured by retching realities, of
Eden erased.
Amrita Sinha, a social worker in West Bengal, is uncomfortable from the
start by the easy insolence of the new maidservant, a chit of a girl
with sly, sly eyes who is there to look after her son, Rahul. Soon the
women are mortal enemies and paranoia overtakes the paranormal.
Barely servile, Maya steals more than oranges from Amrita's household.
As husband Arka seems to increasingly find no time for her, Amrita is
convinced of serious hanky-panky by the little she-devil in her house.
But even dismissal does not get rid of the girl as she returns to haunt
Amrita with her "death".
Is Maya dead or not, will Amrita's ex-lover Paresh help her without any
tangible returns, can Arka understand what his wife is all about as she
slips deeper and deeper into incoherent corners and converses in a
make-believe world?
Says the book's blurb: "The story looks askance at a strange but
recurrent socio-political phenomenon typical of West Bengal: pre-modern
superstition existing in the interstices of an enlightened political
apparatus."
Basu wields her pungent pen with the right amount of ink to the last
drop. The narration is smooth and sprinkled with Bengali truisms and
social stigmas. There are socialites lurking among the social activists,
Commie truths popping up, 'bhodrolok' watchers of the vote-bank and
village idiots, a marriage sundered by mundane chores and maternal
madness that peaks under a crisp Dhakai palloo on a particularly hot
summer day.
The maid-memsaab equation in the urban context is one fraught with an
uneven balance of power. Cities make slums and slums help the city run,
spewing up large quantities of manpower. Ghosts of sewage and silt loom
large under the neon lights and guilt scatters all about when politics
rears its dirty head.
The novel's needle carries its thread without a hitch until Maya starts
to talk. The unclogged vocabulary, her perfect, almost author-like grasp
on the past and her sudden analytical abilities clash with her previous
characterization.
Amrita, Arka, Rahul, Paresh-da, Maya and her brother Naren could all be
people one meets some time or the other. In highlighting how
extraordinary events happen to ordinary people, Basu sutures the gaping
wounds of fact with fiction.
Even the prologue, for which Basu won an online prize in 2005, reads too
silky-smooth to catch up with the rest of the story, which is slightly
rustic and raw in pace. It is not so much that Maya's take rambles but
that it sounds like another tongue altogether. Her gush forces - rather
than clicks - the links to black tongues and witchcraft. Both are fine
pieces of writing but somehow separate from each other.
Despite this disparity in voice and the duality of speakers, "Black
Tongue" puts up a fine image of Kolkata today with its urban-rural
turmoil. The pages make it easier to understand the churnings inside
present-day Bengal, a place where Nandigram can burn and Rizwanur can
die.
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Witch-hunting
may be a rural pastime these days, but there are still wiccans all over
India who can be recognized by the blackness of their tongue. Every
single foul prediction of theirs apparently comes true, so beware!