The Girl Who Wanted To Fly

The girl who wanted to fly They told her dark-skinned birds must not be allowed to fly. So Lakshmi decided to do something about it, says C. Y. Gopinath

THERE WERE FOUR SARIS in Lakshmi's going-away-forever suitcase, each one hand-picked to match God's mistake. Lakshmi still remembers them vividly — one yellow with brown dots, a blue floral, a white floral, and a light purple. They had been deemed to be best matched with the dark colour God had applied to Lakshmi's skin. Entirely the wrong colour, according to many people, who took the matter quite seriously. Her father called her Karuppi (Blackie, in Tamil), and doubted whether any man alive would accept what God had painted black and dismissed. Finally, when it was becoming clear that all roads led into a snakepit, Lakshmi began to ask questions. Questions were not new to her; she had been hearing them all through childhood. There were many wise women in the family, grandmothers and aunts who had learnt that their light was safest when hidden from male view. They kept private journals, wrote poetry, danced like gazelles and sang like mynahs, but made sure no man noticed. They knew men perished easily when challenged. Her great-aunt Ranganayaki maintained a detailed private diary of her introspections, couched in careful grammar so that no reference bore any resemblance to any male living or dead: He says he wants you to walk nicely . But how can you, when he is also holding you by your hair? He says he wants you to eat well — but his hands are around your throat. Ranganayaki's inflammatory thoughts were cremated with her, but one diary escaped the holocaust, and it became fuel to Lakshmi's own smouldering fire. All around her were men with loud voices and whips, holding down their women with sneers and derision. Her own mother, a woman with a voice like silver, was not allowed to sing in public. Her grandmother, Lakshmi Patti had taught herself to read and write, and was an extraordinary versifier and translator of Tamil. She was

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capable of catching wisps of meaning in one language and rendering them in the colours of another. But her gift was treated as an anomaly that would disappear if left alone. Lakshmi, named after her grandmother, knew she would disappear if she didn't get away from the snakepit. After graduating from Bangalore, she declared that she would like to continue studying at the Madras Christian College. Her father stirred uneasily; he knew instinctively that his dark-skinned daughter was leaving forever. Her mother frowned too, giving her husband solidarity, but later she booked the rail tickets to Madras and bought Lakshmi four saris. As the train pulled into Madras, mother whispered to daughter, "Now all of Lakshmi's dreams will come true." Lakshmi didn't have dreams, she had plans, and one of them was to never again be in a position where someone could say to her Now, my girl, you should behave in such-and-such a manner because I am related to you. She had seen, up close, the tyranny of the well-wishing elder male. Her strategy was clear-cut — don't tell them how your life unfolds, and they cannot tell you how it should unfold. She was perhaps the only one who did not think of her actions as rebellion. "I only thought of it as doing what I wanted to do," she told me. But she soon discovered that the airs of independence did not blow much cooler. Lakshmi was judged to be a corrupting influence on children at a school near Cuddalore where she worked for eight months. Finding Moral Science presumptuous and full of baggage, she began to make children think for themselves. She refused to stand with the herd and sing an ode to the statue of a trustee's daughter. Word spread that Lakshmi was evil, wayward, not safe to be free. She was asked to take her wisdom elsewhere. I suppose it was only a matter of time before the anger began to flow out of her pen. Chiragugal muraiyum (Wings will be broken) was one of her earliest stories, and it held up a mirror to the subjugation of one human being by another. Relationships preoccupied her, the dynamics of the sticky webs that grow and break between people, and the ways in which communication severs links, denigrates, fragments, discolours. The characters in her stories did not accept established conventions, they experimented with them. They were iconoclasts, rule-breakers, full of quiet irreverence and anger. Writing under the nom de plume of Ambai, she became known for the temperature of her prose. Her first collection of short stories, also called Chiragugal muraiyum, was published in 1974, and went unreviewed for 10 years. Her unflinching statements

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about human relationships were too blunt for most. One reviewer wrote, "When you read Ambai's stories, you think 'Thank God I didn't write them.'" Ambai was shaking her society's fundamentals, and no one was enjoying it. In the process, she was also making the past pay its dues. My mother, her crime, another collection of short stories, emerged. And in this one, she seemed to exorcise the black-skinned demon from her life too. "I don't believe people should behave the way I want," she said. "But I do believe that I should behave the way I want. I don't believe in God or religion, and I am not a difficult or rude person. But I do not want to be controlled by anyone." Lakshmi has always been fighting to bring some angry inner conflagaration under control. Her anger was against those who judge the soul's quality by the skin's hue; against herself for seeing her own body as something that others should accept first; against society for flinching away from its own murk; against those who clip wings and wound birds. But when I see her today, my cousin, after all these years, then I understand that without solitude, we cannot fight. We must confront our demons, and we must make the demons look at themselves, using word or wit or song or diatribe. Then peace comes to the soul. Lakshmi today is married, incredible but true, to a film-maker who understands the importance of flying. She has made her peace with those she once left behind, and the blaze is now a furnace. The broken wings have mended, and Lakshmi's energies are now going into what she says will be her life's work, called Sound and Picture Archives for Research On Women. Ironic, I think, that the acronym spells SPARROW.