Wicked in her sense of humour, Manjula Padmanabhan is also wicked in the way she plays on her reader’s expectations and in the delight she takes in making her characters experience bizarre situations. Combined with her sharp intelligence, her stories offer the reader exceptional fare.
In the story Three Virgins—that lends its title to the book—both these qualities are on display. While determinedly losing her virginity, the narrator must also cope with anatomy—“It was, as it always is, a shock to be right up close to another person’s face. Perhaps because I am short-sighted, I don’t normally notice the pores on someone’s skin or the precise pattern of small hairs…” This sentence, coming as it does just when the narrator has got into bed with Gai (and the reader expects spicy descriptions ahead), made me chuckle. Poor Gai, lost in his own urgencies, becomes A Body, while our narrator holds on to her mind—“I was conscious and curious. It amazed me, for instance, to be pressed right up next to another being, crushed by his weight upon me…yet knowing nothing of his mind’s interior. It was sublimely unavailable to me, just as mine was unavailable to him...I found this isolation pleasing…my mind was my absolute domain…it could never be invaded or colonized except with my consent. It was a wonderfully liberating realization.”
And that discovery is true of author as well: In each story, Manjula is firmly in control, choreographing the denouement with precision so as to catch the reader unawares, the way a musician lands on sam.
The story Teaser is all about control. Rakesh, whose “power resided in the fork of his pants”, boards a crowded bus searching for the right female target. Manjula creates a tension between what the reader imagines Rakesh will ultimately do, what he usually does, and what actually happens when someone else takes charge. She manages in the end to make the reader somewhat sympathetic to Rakesh, despite knowing he is an eve-teaser.
And if the universality of sexual imagery might seem to be the obvious focus in Khajuraho, it is the irony of laughter across centuries that reaches out to an American tourist.
Such cultural differences are also explored in Stains, Feast and the compelling Hot Death, Cold Soup. In Stains a young American woman confronts the Indian horror of menstrual blood and other prejudices. Manjula does not let the reader off either…the reader automatically assumes Sarah is white until it is made clear she is black, later in the narrative.
Hot Death, Cold Soup, the longest, most accomplished story, is a treat to read. Manjula places the quotidian — conversation at the dining table, three-course meals, cold soup — in the midst of the most gruesome scenario, the intended sati of an American woman.
A European vampire arrives in India, and sustains himself on a Feast of blood, easily obtained. He also discovers a worldview that renders his terrible power ineffectual. That same belief in rebirth is explored mischievously in A Government of India Undertaking.
In both Exile and The Other Woman Manjula uses the Ramayana as a base to imagine both alternate universes and other endings. Her sharp humour creates a delicious scene between thinly disguised television anchor Basra Dott and Mandodari on a visit to Earth.
It is only in The Strength of Small Things, built around a “dowry-murder”, that one feels characterisation has been subordinated to the exigencies of plot.
While three of the stories are from Manjula’s 1996 collection Hot Death, Cold Soup, seven were either published elsewhere or are new. I greatly enjoyed reading all of them.