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Shashi Warrier

The Feminine Perspective

Women figure largely in the books of this month: they're all by women or about women.

Esther David's Walled City, published by East West Books, at first sight looked good. It's one of the best-produced Indian books I've seen recently: the cover's terrific, the paper's good, and the print, easy to read.

Its contents are almost as good as its appearance, I'm glad to say. It's the story of three generations of women in a Jewish joint family in the walled city of Ahmedabad. Members range from rigorously insular to slightly Bohemian, and growing up amidst such variety causes the protagonist, a Jewish girl brought up in the city, no end of heartache. There's her paternal grandmother, who rules the family with an iron hand. There's her mother, Naomi, a working woman with an unemployed husband, who finds herself at the receiving end of much criticism from Granny for having found work outside the house: none of the other women in the family work. There is her friend Subhadra, who wears a bindi that she herself is not allowed to wear.

Always hanging over the head of the protagonist is the sword of womanhood; women follow rules much stricter than those that apply to men, for men might grow up leave the family, but not the women. There are elements of tragic romance: Malkha, a cousin who falls in love with Joel, another distant relation, is eventually wed to another. The protagonist herself longs for Samuel, a distant cousin, but marriage is not permissible for reasons of consanguinity. Her hopes end, in any case, with Samuel's death.

There are the religious tensions, exemplified perhaps by Emmanuel, husband of Queenie, who has given up his teaching job and turned to Hinduism for spiritual solace. He proposes to the protagonist and is turned down, and later weds a young widow. Emmanuel then converts to Islam to avoid the crime of bigamy, since his second marriage occurs without a divorce from Queenie. Emmanuel ends up dead, killed as he himself has predicted in the middle of the road, during communal riots.

There is the Muslim maid, who has a Hindu name, Mani: Mani claims a dubious history for her name while elders of the family hold that many people have two names, just to avoid trouble in times of communal tension.

It's well written, though perhaps a little pretentious in parts, and it's authentic. There's a strong autobiographical element to this book: I got the impression that many of the people and events in it are for real, which is always a good thing in work of fiction. Certainly a good read.

Kazuo Ishiguro is one of my favourite novelists, and Ishiguro's first novel, A Pale View of Hills, was a bit of underplayed emotion that Ishiguro's more famous work, The Remains of The Day, has: one thing that the Japanese have a common with upper-class English is the necessity of keeping a stiff upper lip, though for entirely different reasons.

In Hills, Ishiguro takes us through the life of Etsuko, a Japanese woman living in England, weighing in her mind the suicide of her eldest daughter Keiko, comparing Keiko's weird life with her own, which is, in many ways, weirder. She has lost her Japanese husband, Jiro, and acquired a British one: she has a daughter, Niki, by her second husband. Keiko's death has come as a dark cloud over Etsuko's relationship with Niki. The narration is set during a visit by Niki during which Etsuko works the cloud out of their relationship.

The Nympho and Other Maniacs, Irving Wallace's collection of biographies of famous -- or notorious, thought not necessarily maniacal -- women, is for the most part gripping reading. Figuring here are women ranging from the courtesans of ancient Greece (one of whom would only make love in the dark although, twice a year, on festival days, she bathed naked in public) through Pauline Bonaparte, one of the sisters of Napoleon (who, when asked why she posed in the nude for a sculptor, replied that it wasn't too cold in the studio!) to Victoria Woodhull, onetime prostitute and advocate of free love who ended up as a candidate in a presidential election in America, then married an English banker and, when she died, was almost 90 and almost respectable.

The story I liked best was, perhaps, that of the woman whose looks attracted a stylish but impoverished member of the British aristocracy. This aristocrat had an elderly uncle, recently widowed, from whom he stood to inherit considerable wealth if the uncle died before he married again. Why not give the old man an obviously unmarriageable mistress, thought the aristocrat, thereby preventing him from marrying again. And what better woman to pass on to the old man than his own mistress?

The plan was executed, though without the woman's knowledge. She was told that the she and the youngster had been invited to stay with the uncle, and when the day came to go to the uncle's place, the nephew was indisposed. The woman went alone, and found herself facing the far from avuncular advances of her lover's uncle. Soon she was aware of the plot, and of her own position in it as the nephew's pawn. She took her revenge by persuading the old man to marry her, and lived in peace with him for some years until she met her last and tragic lover. The woman? Emma Hailton, the woman her last lover, Lord Nelson, thought was the most beautiful alive.

The Giant Book of Dangerous Women is a sort of encyclopaedia of notorious murderesses, going as far back as Agrippina of ancient Rome, who was Nero's mother, and did everything to ensure that her son became emperor. She was eventually murdered by Nero, who turned on her despite the fact that she had seduced him. The other women covered here include the notorious Lizzie Borden, who chopped up her parents with an axe, and Alice Wuornos, one of a growing band of documented female serial killers in America. It makes chilling reading: anyone who thought that Cathy in John Steinbeck's East of Eden was too bad to be true should have to go at this one.

Illustration: Laura Fernandes