Book Review | Women's doubts and decisions, gracefully deciphered

I was roughly halfway through Guilt Trip and Other Stories, a collection of tales by Lakshmi Kannan mainly about the circumstances of women in India, when I began to fret about how to write the review.

Not one of the stories I'd read so far had been meaningful to me. Even though the inside cover blurb had informed me that "the characters try and close the gap between limiting social norms and the desire for freedom to create a space of their own", which gave me the impression that the heroines of these stories would at least try to get their way, I just could not relate to them.

That's because, while the settings of the stories are contemporary, the mindsets displayed within them are not. What, for example, was I to make of the story called 'Dregs', about a female researcher at a university abroad who is emotionally blackmailed by her homesick male compatriots to cook them an Indian meal and then has to hide a portion of the food from them so she'll have something eat herself? Though the woman was furious from the second she understood what her compatriots wanted, she still cooked for them. What purpose did her anger serve?

In the title story, 'Guilt Trip', three young women sneak off from their college hostel to bathe in a holy river. They must hide because their parents would never allow them to go by themselves. The girls have a very happy day, but this is a once in a lifetime opportunity.

In 'The Colour Green', retired women visiting their green card-holding children in the US find to their horror that they've been asked there simply to cook and clean. They rage to themselves, but can think of no way to deal with the problem other than to quietly return to India.

With mindsets like these, most of the stories in the collection that I'd read to that point inspired nothing but frustration in me. So I took a break from Guilt Trip... for a while. And when I returned to it, I had a revelation: That Lakshmi Kannan is a very clever writer.

As straightforward as they seem, the stories in Guilt Trip work on several levels. Having been brought up by parents who saw me as a person and not as a gender, I couldn't relate to many of the tales. But I could, on deeper thought, understand how much my parents had done for me and how much farther I could take it. That's one level of readership. On another level, given the way many women, however apparently modern, bring up their children to assume traditional gender roles, the stories in this book could well open some minds to different approaches. And on yet another level, when women seethe at their constraints, but can't see a way out, some of these stories could indicate a way forward.

The tales in Guilt Trip... seem simple. But there's more to them than first meets the eye.

Guilt Trip and Other Stories
By Lakshmi Kannan
Published by Niyogi Books
pp. 230; Rs 395