Shobha Rao

So just days after reviewing Stone Mattress by Margaret Atwood – I have another collection of short stories to tell you about. An Unrestored Woman a very powerful collection, first published last year in the USA, this new paperback edition apparently timed to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the Partition of the India into what is became the separate nations of India and Pakistan – perhaps that is a coincidence though I suspect not.

“We leave. We leave the places we’re born, the show more places we’re meant to die, and we wander into the world as defenceless as children. Against such wilderness, such desert.”

For all the stories in this collection take the ramifications of Partition as their theme. However, not all the stories take place in 1947 – in fact Shobha Rao’s stories show how the effects of Partition continued to be felt many, many years after the events surrounding Partition itself.

There are twelve stories in An Unrestored Woman, six pairs of linked stories. This pairing of stories is particularly clever, allowing us an alternative viewpoint – the two halves creating a more complex whole across the two stories. Shobhan Rao writes beautifully of displacement, love, ambitious seduction and revenge. Characters commit murder, take on cross gender identities, embark upon perilous journeys and suffer horrible abuses. I found many of the male characters to be either thoroughly unpleasant or cowardly weak. It is probably unsurprising that it is generally women and children who suffer the worst abuses, rape, coercion and abduction feature. I didn’t find Rao’s writing to be in any way gratuitous – there was a sensitive, understanding to her depiction of these terrible events – an honesty.

In these stories; we meet women trapped into early marriages with men who treat them as objects. Those sold into the sex industry, and the unrestored women who having been abducted during the violent upheaval of Partition – are forcibly returned to the homes where they are no longer wanted. We meet a child who makes a miraculous escape when a train is attacked, an elderly man with dementia confusing the past with the present. A woman in 1990s America meets an elderly Englishman who served in India during Partition, and a young man working for the Indian Geographical Society, takes the opportunity to advance his romantic aspirations when he goes to a village to survey the border between India and East Pakistan.

“He returned an hour later and told her he’s secured passage for her on a bus headed for a nearby camp. It was set up by the Indian government, he said.
‘For what?’ she asked
‘For items that are useless.’ He said ‘Like you’”

The collection opens with the title story An Unrestored Woman in which Neela, believing the husband she never cared for is dead, finds herself briefly in a camp for ‘Refugees and Unrestored Women’. Here Neela meets Renu, and for the short time they are together, the two are inseparable. In The Merchant’s Mistress, Renu is an ambitious servant, seducing both her master and mistress, on her way to a better life.

Jenkins working for the Imperial Police in the story of the same name, finds himself falling dangerously in love. Fifty years later we meet Jenkins again working as an apartment building doorman in the US, in Unleashed. A young woman turns to drink when she uncovers a terrible betrayal. In her misery, she recalls her childhood and adolescence in the company of her sister.

Blindfold tells the devastating story of a child stolen for the sex industry and the carefully plotted revenge the girl visits upon the cruel madam who has held her hostage for years. In the The Lost Ribbon, we have a Hindu woman ‘recovered’ from her Pakistani captor, who makes an unbelievably appalling decision.

A young cartographer in The Opposite of Sex, is desperate to marry the daughter of a wealthy local man, he realises that moving the dividing line between what will soon be East Pakistan and India through the village, he can effectively ruin the father of the girl he dreams of marrying, and so improve his own chances of winning her. Many years later, that young man’s boss Alok Debnath is now an elderly man suffering from dementia in Such a mighty river. As Alok goes in search of a local prostitute whose services he has used regularly, his mind keeps returning to the past when he was first married to his beloved late wife. Unknown to him, Alok is vulnerable and in danger.

“My wife comes into the room, shutting out the sun as she closes the door, and lays the wad of bills on the table in front of me. I can’t look at her. I want to feel shame but I only feel a thin pleasure, like a fine layer of skin, puckered and white and soulless, floating on cooling milk. On another shore, perhaps, the desert has an ashen end; and forests are merely silent folded wings. On that shore poverty doesn’t have an animal stink. And when we touch the face of another, we draw onto their skin a moonlit path, and not the metallic rust of our weakness and our fear.”

During the upheaval of Partition, a married couple embark upon a journey to Mirpur Khas in The Road to Mirpur Khas. The impractical, naïve husband frequently annoys his much sharper wife. Having had the meagre store of money stolen on the road the wife is forced to prostitute herself to aid their journey and their very survival. In the The Memsahib, set I think some years before the events of 1947, a young sweeper becomes obsessed with the imperious daughter of the British family in whose home he and his mother serve. When his attentions are shrugged away, he decides upon a peculiar and terrible revenge.

In Kavitha and Mustafa, a train packed with refugees is attacked, the passengers robbed and beaten, a Hindu woman and a Muslim boy manage to escape by helping one another is a desperate bid to survive. In Curfew, the granddaughter of that boy – now grown up, and living in Britain – goes on holiday with her husband. The couple are still struggling with a terrible grief, their marriage itself at risk.

There is a relentlessness to these stories, but there is also a lot that is beautifully observed and compellingly told. Rao is never sentimental, there is an honesty to her stories which goes some way to telling the rich, complex story of two historically and geographically linked countries. show less

This well written compelling novel is a grim tale about how destructive and dangerous life is for the poor village girls of India. Shobha Rao carefully does not assign our two main characters a religion suggesting a wide spread practice and custom dictates that they will be virtually slaves, chattel. The story ends in the United States to remind the reader how often practices in this country reinforce and join with those in India in often barbaric tragic ways. This book will be an eye opener show more to the ill informed and a reinforcement to those who have knowledge of the plight of so many Indian women and hopefully will bring some urgency to mending this problem..

Quotes: (page152) “The first one was this: she couldn't stay here. It wasn't an obvious thought, not to her. Since Poornima's father raped her, she'd flounder in something like life, but not life itself. A veil had fallen when he'd held his hand over her mouth. A fadedness, too, had fallen, when he pried her legs open. A branch had snapped---a branch from which all things grew, from which every banana, every hope, every laugh sprouted---when she looked into his face, and, in a small way, seen her friend's. After that, what did it matter where se lived, or ate, or breathed her lesser breathes? What difference would it ever make? So that now, when the thought came to her that she needed to leave, she realized, with surprise, that she was beginning to live again. That it did matter. That this again was life.”

(page 249) “But now, standing at the window of an empty apartment, in Seattle, holding an empty glass, Poornima laughed, half mocking, her lips trembling, her eyes growing hot, and she thought, How foolish. How foolish we were, how foolish you were, she bristled, to think you could protect me from rain. Against such a thing as rain. As if rain were a knife, as if it were a battle. And you, my shield. How foolish you were, how stupid you are, Poornima thought, nearly weeping with rage. With anger at Savitha's ignorance, her infuriating ignorance. To find herself in this place, passed like a beetle between the hands of men. Don't you see, we were never safe. Not against rain, not against anything. And you, she railed, all you thought to do was huddle under that indifferent tree. As if, against rain, against my father, against what remained. All we had to do was stand closer. Stand together. As if, against rain, against fate, against war, two bodies---the bodies of two girls---were greater than one.” show less

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! What the hell!! After reading this book I wanted to punch things, scream into the void, yell at passersby. I wanted to RAGE!! I still feel a deep pit of despair in my belly when I think about this book. This will eat you up from the inside and make you feel. If you're triggered by rape, violence, sodomy, and enslavement take a long hard pass on this book. The book is told from two perspectives, that of Poornima and Savitha; two young show more Indian girls trying to survive poverty in rural India. Poornima's family is a little better off and her father hires Savitha to help run the loom since his wife his past. When the two girls meet they become each other's first and only friend. Suddenly the world has potential. All that changes however when Savitha is brutalized one night; her innocence stolen. She runs away in grief and in shame and the two girls spend the entire novel trying to escape from their horrible situations and find each other again. There is an arranged marriage for Poornima which results in an abusive husband who horribly disfigures her face with a pan of burning oil. She escapes only to be taken in by a brothel to run their books. While there she discovers that Savitha had been there; having been sold into sex slavery. The book is one big cat and mouse game of horror. It's beautifully written, but chills you to the bone. You just want the best for these girls! Why is the world so cruel!?!? Please read so we can discuss and cry about it over some drinks. I need a friend. show less

I never wrote a review when I finished this book last year, but it was not because the book failed to leave an impression on me. The opposite is true. Girls Burn Brighter is a beautiful book, despite the disturbing plight of poor Indian girls/women portrayed. Even now, a year after having set the book down, some of the horrifying, vivid descriptions continue to haunt me. GBB describes the close friendship between two poor, young girls in India, who, once separated and married off (chewed up show more and spit out), become the objects of cruel, vicious abuse at the hands of both men (mostly) and women alike. I winced throughout most of the book, which felt like an authentic collection of testimonies describing an array of depraved actions taken against women in India. Obviously not all women in India suffer as these two young heroines, but the plight of impoverished and vulnerable, helpless women is acutely felt. The two young girls/women learn to survive the inescapable hell into which they have been thrust, as so much garbage, never losing hope of becoming reunited. Fortunately for the faint-hearted (me) there is a healthy dose of deus ex machina at the end of the novel which combined with the actions of one (reluctant) "righteous" man in Sodom, helps to alleviate some anxiety and pent-up emotion. show less