Love like a thorn

Meera’s language is lush and rich with metaphor, often going back to images and memories to extend their meaning for the characters.
For representational purposes
For representational purposes

Love isn’t fun and games. It digs into you, breaks off and poisons you. You may think time heals the wound, but love, unexpectedly, sprouts out of the closed wound, rendering it bleeding again.

This is the love of KR Meera’s The Angel’s Beauty Spots, not the innocuous, breezy love of Bollywood movies.

Nor are the women the cardboard props they’re limited to in most fiction. Here, it is a woman’s world, and love is both the lifeblood and the nemesis of the characters.

The slim volume has three novelettes. The first, ‘The Angel’s Beauty Spots’, begins with the killing of Angela at the hands of her jealous ex-husband.

From this gruesome beginning, we roll back to Angela’s life poised between her helplessness at the hands of male-dominated society and her spirit that seeks love where it can be found. In this lonely life, her children are her support.

After Angela is gone, the children are seen merely as responsibilities by their families, their own feelings disregarded.

Meera chronicles how a life built up with spirit is torn apart in an instant.

The second story, ‘And Forgetting the Tree, I…” tells us of Radhika, who comes face to face with a long-forgotten lover, Christy. Although their relationship was rocky, Radhika is unable to put it behind her, and is still attracted to the man. But Christy is even now demanding, and Radhika finds herself drowning again in the same maelstrom of emotions that destroyed her life the last time.

The third story, ‘The Deepest Blue’, has a homemaker yearning for deeper love—and finding it outside her marriage, in a man who can never be hers.  

Meera’s language is lush and rich with metaphor, often going back to images and memories to extend their meaning for the characters. She writes from deeply inside her characters’ souls, showing us the world as they experience it. Because of this, even in a book as short as this one, the world feels deep and lived in. This is not a Kerala that’s in any travel brochure of the state—it’s as heartfelt as our own hometown. Nor are these textbook stories. There are no happy endings, and no quick solutions. But in an emotional tangle as dense as this world’s, what can one expect?

It’s something of a shock to realise this book is translated, so smoothly does it flow. J Devika, the translator from the original Malayalam, has done a brilliant job, as with Meera’s other books. May she continue to do so.

For readers who like their fiction deep and intense, and their characters real, The Angel’s Beauty Spots is a short, essential read.

The Angel’s Beauty Spots

By: KR Meera
Publisher: Aleph
Pages: 136
Price: Rs 399

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