IndiaStar Book-Review: Chudamani Raghavan's Yamini.

IndiaStar--A Literary-Art Magazine --Book Review--   Yamini by Chudamani Raghavan (translated by Vasantha Surya) MacMillan India, 1996 70 pages, Rs. 45   Reviewed by Sunil Khushalani [Editor's intro: Sunil D. Khushalani is a final-year resident in psychiatry at New York University. He received his medical degree in Bombay.]     " Everything just has to be taken as it is. Why does fire burn? Because that's the very nature of fire, the essence of its being. There was nothing more to it than that! Fire cannot be cooled. If you want to cool it and pour water on it, it will not cool, it will just go out. " These lines to me are the essence of Yamini, the central character of this novella, by Chudamini Raghavan, set in Madras between the 1950's and the 1970's. Yamini is described as a dark-skinned girl, who loves the night, and who loves nothing more than solitude. She is self-sufficient since childhood, to the point, that she loathes any interpersonal interaction. Perundevi, her mother finds this incomprehensible, and can't fathom this for her child, a different reality than the one she has experienced -- one where each person finds relationships gratifying, and looks forward to marriage, having children, as if that were destiny. ButYamini is listening to a different drummer. According to her mother, on seeing a child, " that ambrosia like emotion would banish all her angularities! She would get straightened out!" But time has something else in store. Saaranathan, her father, is reluctant to go against her wishes, as the very thought of marriage sends Yamini into a rage, but finally gives into Perundevi's tour de force. "After that," as the author states, "there were only calamities." Vasantha Surya, the translator of this novella, succinctly notes, " Oppression is rarely confronted, perhaps because it isdifficult to pinpoint any individual as an oppressor in a complex socialsituation where everyone is also a victim." Everything isn't as dark and painful. In fact, Geetha dawns into this family, exuding her brilliance, and shocking her family with herquestioning and startling energy. When she begins to talk of moving closer to God, something snaps inside her grandmother, her biggest fear assumes monumental proportions -- she fears that she will lose her granddaughter and history will repeat itself. In desperation, she cries out, " I'm just an ordinary woman, Lord! My eyes can't take in all the eccentricities! Why can't another ordinary creature carry on where I and my ordinariness leave off? Why deny me my fulfillment?" She vehemently tries and tells Geetha, " That bond, that closeness-being companions to each other. All that is very important." It's an intricately woven tapestry, where one can see that pulling one thread is surely bound to exert a force on the rest. The novella is introduced as romantic in style, "an intense daydream about psychological deviance, not an analysis." The analysis is left aside as if it were "an insoluble riddle made up of blank stares, a locked door." Darkness and light, like that of the passing days, manifest themselves in many guises, literal and metaphorical. One just wishes that the introduction had not given away the suspense. MacMillan has introduced this novella as one of a series of translations from the corpus of fiction Indians have created after the Independence. It stands out with its simple, yet elegant, design and carries a generous helping of footnotes that make many regional differences comprehensible. As an Indian reader from another region, I saw that although we are all different, there's a lot that binds us.