Book reviews often depend on the affinity of the reviewer. The complex text of Indian femininity and feminism is not an easy phenomenon to be codified by any language of art and the art of the written word is no exception. R.K. Biswas’s Breasts and Other Afflictions of Women is a sensational draw for sure. Will it be Indian English’s answer to Eva Ensler’s Vagina Monologues? was the first question to come to my mind. Breasts both as a metaphor for the female existence and a leitmotif of feminine and feminist art is replete with interpretations and abstract associations one can make with the concept of the ‘bosom’, much like the concept of the ‘womb’, hence this collection of short stories by R.K. Biswas makes the reader expectant.
The very first story in the collection, ‘Breasts’ is loaded with irony. Ila, a woman supposedly in her sixties is a breast cancer survivor with her mastectomy done, ‘he reached out with his right arm, careful not to touch the place where her breasts used to be…’ writes RK in the story. The tragic paradox is that Ila gets a call from a stalker who claims to be a fellow traveller of Ila and was letching at her lactating breasts!!! Ila, a woman with no breasts gets a crank call for her breasts. The irony apart, the story in itself is a vignette from the modern life of a woman. Crank calls and stalkers are a very common phenomenon in modern lifestyle. Hints, at people sharing numbers too soon with strangers are all snippets from contemporary life of social media and smartphones.