Secrets and Silences of Girlhood and Womanhood | T. Alma Poinamei

Review:  Fear and Lovely by Anjana Appachana. Penguin Random House India, 2023.

Anjana Appachana’s first novel Listening Now was published in 1998. Twenty-five years later, its sequel Fear and Lovely was published in March 2023. The sequel continues some of the concerns from the first book such as the themes of gendered listening, female solidarity forged through gossip and secrets, and the bildungsroman of the female character. The structure of the second novel also follows the blueprint of the first: the plot progresses through different characters’ points of view that intersect and overlap. 

Fear and Lovely’s central character is Mallika (the precocious daughter of Padma whose bildungsroman was traced in Listening Now), who loses three days of her memory, following which she is diagnosed with mental illness. Considering it a taboo and a hindrance to a good marriage, her mother and her aunt, who Mallika is insistent on referring to as her second mother, go to lengths to cover it up as TB. 

As in her first novel, Appachana emphasises the importance of female friendship. Solidarity is forged through gossiping sessions and keeping each other’s secrets. Mallika’s understanding of society comes from listening to the older women in the family and her female friends. Her relationship with her two ‘mothers’ and grandmother allow her to grasp the inequitable nature of a heteronormative marriage from as young as the age of thirteen. Additionally, listening to and watching her female friends grow into diverse personalities within different familial contexts allows her to assess the imposed models of girlhood and womanhood in a predominantly Hindu society. Mallika is the ideal listener, sometimes appearing as a stand-in for the readers: “The best thing about listening to people’s stories was that I didn’t have to talk. Those who spoke to me were the storytellers, and my ear (my sympathetic, fascinated, cornucopia-like ear) was their page” (9). However, Appachana does not just stop at listening as a solitary burden but demonstrates how Mallika, the listener, also needs a listener. The secrets that Mallika carries manifest in physical ailments that include a migraine, a miscarriage, and memory loss. She observes retrospectively, “for all the love we bore each other, we had no idea of each other’s silences. We didn’t even understand our own” (10). Appachana’s foregrounding of secrets often referred to as “silences” also extends to the male characters. While Listening Now offered very limited perspectives of the male characters, the sequel delves into the intricate thoughts of Mallika’s closest male friends, Randhir and Arnav. The writing propagates certain stereotypes of gendered speaking in that, their narratives are peppered with phrases like “fucking dead” (294) and “bloody” (296) amidst superficial conversations about Swedish cars (378). A male friend also tells Mallika, “I’m a guy, Mallika. Guys aren’t good at corresponding” (325). Despite this, Appachana is also careful to reveal that underneath their veneer of ostensible machismo, they carry secrets they do not find a listener for. Through their narratives, Appachana dissects the attributes of masculinity that they are expected to live up to in an Indian context.     

While the first novel is set in the aftermath of the Independence, the second is set in the heart of the Emergency. College students talk politics with an idealistic fervour at parties and family dinners. However, national politics simply serves as a backdrop while the politics of the home take center stage. Mallika’s aunt, Shanta, is keen that Mallika learn the adages of domestic politics that she has acquired through her own marriage: “idealism without money was fatal to wives. But when idealism was borne aloft on money’s radiant arms, oh, how brightly it shone” (363). Appachana’s writings are unequivocally and unapologetically about women and domesticity. The arguments surrounding this genre of ‘women’s writings’ tend to focus on how they do not contribute to the discourses of the postcolonial nation, with some critics adopting a defensive tone in arguing for the relevance of this genre despite eschewing political concerns. This consistent burden placed on postcolonial Anglophone novels to talk about the nation and its historiography limits the discourses that can contribute to the ‘woman question.’ Appachana remarks on this in the novel when Mallika says, “If you wanted to talk about justice and injustice, truth and untruth, right and wrong, then talk about politics, talk about the Emergency, not about women, for heaven’s sake” (56). As was the case in her first novel, it is through the conversations among women that the readers are confronted with women’s lived reality. When Mallika’s friend, Prabha attacks a man on a bus for sexually harassing her, she is assailed by various responses: her parents chastise her, younger women advise her to ignore it in the future and her male friends find it hard to believe that this is a regular occurrence. But, with her female friends, Prabha feels understood and encouraged for her response to the incident.        

Appachana also touches on ‘Indian thinking’ or ‘Indian philosophy’ about mental health, marriages, homosexuality, and individual desires. While ‘American thinking’ would appear to be posited as the antithesis, the actual critique is directed at a society that cannot accommodate non-conforming women and the changing ideals of a younger generation.        

Listening Now subscribes to the “post-Rushdie tradition” (Majumdar 211) of “old-fashioned” (Mukherjee 2007) domestic novels akin to that of Anita Desai and Shashi Deshpande. In a lot of these novels, the female characters begin their journey towards autonomy through a break from marital relations rather than parental authority (Abel et al. 12). However, in Fear and Lovely, Mallika’s bildungsroman begins by defying parental authority. The defiance also happens spatially when she leaves for America despite the reluctance of her two ‘mothers’. Besides this shift, the novel remains a nuanced portrait of women and the intricacies of domestic life. Through the foregrounding of women and the quotidian events that shape their social ontology, Appachana portrays a crucial facet of India’s postcolonial reality. 

Notes:

1. Josna. E Rege writes that Appchana’s works are not “shoring up a disintegrating discourse of nation… but are exploring the possibilities of coming to terms with the past in new ways” (367). Meenkashi Mukherjee, in her review for Listening Now writes, “… to ignore the nation and the backdrop of history when a good part of the novel is set in the fifties needs a certain amount of defiance in the current climate” (2007).

Works Cited 

Abel, Elizabeth et al, editors. The Voyage In. The University Press of New England, 1983. 

Appachana, Anjana. Listening Now. India Ink, 1998. 

—. Fear and Lovely. Penguin Random House India, 2023. 

Majumdar, Saikat. “Far from the Nation, Closer to Home: Privacy, Domesticity, and Regionalism in Indian English Fiction.” A History of the Indian Novel in English, edited by Ulka Anjaria, Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 207-220.  

Mukherjee, Meenakshi. “IndiaStar Review of Books: Listening Now by Anjana Appachana.” IndiaStar, 28 January. 2007. https://web.archive.org/web/20070128063638/http://www.indiastar.com/mukherjee2.html

Rege, Josna E. “Victim into Protagonist? ‘Midnight’s Children’ and the Post-Rushdie National Narratives of the Eighties.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 29, no.3, 1997, pp. 342-375. 

Themreichon Alma Poinamei is a PhD student at the Department of English at the University of Hyderabad. For her PhD project, she is working on Indian Women’s fiction.

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