But a complex formal puzzle is announced in the Author’s Note: ‘The chapters in this book are marked with a number and an alphabet. The alphabet marks its own absence in the chapter whereas the number is a more conventional ordering. And in embarking on this book, you are invited to follow either the numbers or alphabets and you will stilll be reading the same book…’
Suman Nath, Riziya, and Tahirul, are all sensitive, intelligent, and thinking individuals who are victims of the social structures that they question but fail to surpass. Religion is not a matter of spiritual sublimation, as Riziya and Suman would like to believe, or a matter of juridical authority, as Tahirul would like to believe. It is twisted and deployed for politically motivated ends by the residents of Sadnahati.
After this delusory incident for the first time nobody notices the change in Pauloma’s behaviour and however much she tries to confess to her husband that there was another world in the vessels, no one really cares about her irrational beliefs. Soon she is drawn to the storeroom once again and now she is transported to Cairo in Egypt where she lives as Princess Rabiya Abdi. Set during the period of the cultural revolution in Egypt during the 1950s, Rabiya is exposed to another world when her husband brings in an outsider, a bohemian painter from London, to draw her portrait.
Rohini, Malini, Malathi and Paatti are as shackled by their own upbringing and values instilled in them since childhood as they are buffeted by the winds of change and an awareness of what it means to be a woman in a patriarchal set up. There is no doubt that the ‘times they are a-changin’ as Bob Dylan sang. Yet there is a sluggishness with which it does exact a heavy price on women, leading to mental imbalance, loss and despair.
‘Rajmao: The Queen Mother’ traces the journey of Komola whose motherhood confers on her the identity of being Purobi’s mother, and it is in the attempt to fulfil her duties as a mother that she attains the grandiose name of Rajmao but only after paying a terrible price for it. ‘By the Clock’ introduces us to Ghori-Koka-Aita and the tyranny of the grandfather’s clock which becomes a metonym for the authoritarian presence of her husband.
Mendonca’s memoir unfolds the joys of having an eminent poet as one’s father, and at the same time, the unhappiness of growing up in a broken family. She remarks that he was overjoyed at her birth and called her his ‘best poem’. He named her ‘Kavita’, which means ‘poem’ in Hindi. According to Mendonca, he was a loving father to his three children, two daughters and a son—Kavita, Kalpana and Elkana.