Sharmila, a second-generation immigrant living in New Zealand with her incredibly patient and loving Irish husband Keith and three adorable sons, is on a collision course. Beset by memories of her dead parents and the mysterious disappearance of her younger, grown-up brother Ramesh, she adamantly refuses to let go of the past.
Meanwhile, her aunt Meenamma, the common thread between India and New Zealand, arrives to help her out, on Keith’s request. Both try hard but Sharmila’s mind gets murkier. She blames herself and her dead parents for Ramesh’s disappearance, which according to her, is inconclusive.
Intercut and intertwining with Sharmila’s angst is Ramesh’s hallucinating world of watchers, readers and authorities. His thoughts, actions and fate unfolding in reverse, dangerously oscillate between clarity and madness. It takes a while to grasp the format here.
Keith and Meenamma are also haunted by affliction, loss and guilt. Meenamma grapples with the betrayal of her own sister, guilt for her nephew and grief for her niece and Keith with the helplessness for his wife.
Mallika Krishnamoorthy’s brilliant debut dispels any romantic illusions one might have about resettlement. It turns the immigrant’s mind inside out revealing fear, dilemma and paranoia through multilayered detour of loss, love, cultural and emotional complexities.
The language of Six Yards indeed flows like silk and is delightfully expressionistic. The time-and place-hopping narrative and the stark visual elements weave beautifully the tails of the sari caught between the red soil of southern India and the grey clouds of New Zealand.
What keeps Six Yards from heading down an overly well-trodden path is the genuineness and unfussy writing besides the vulnerable theme — the finding of the permanently lost.
Six Yards of Silk, despite the sensuous name and the enigmatic cover, is not a book you can curl up with on a rainy noon for it haunts you deep with a lingering dampness, dark and bleak long, after the rains subside.
— sivasubbusundari@gmail.com