Jagged notes

A novel on sexual violence, this story goes beyond questions of victimisation or survival.

Anupama Mohan’s debut novel, Where Mayflies Live Forever, goes beyond newspaper headlines and rape statistics to jaggedly dissect the anatomy of a sexual crime in the language of those affected, in part prose, part verse.

Where Mayflies Live Forever

By Anupama Mohan

Picador India

Pages: 240

Price: Rs.599

The general apathy in most parts of the country towards the birth of a baby girl, the grim reality of female foeticide, and the massive, crippling dowries to be paid off for a protector husband can be traced back to the risk factors in the environment for that gender, and that gender alone. Only man, for centuries it has been held, can protect a woman from another man. Female subjugation, submissiveness, and sacrifice are blithely enumerated as the very foundations of a moral society. Into this gender imbalance are injected all kinds of assaults against women, hushed-up brutalities almost as entrenched as organised crime. An invisible mafia one fears and shrinks from as one’s womanly lot in life.

Once upon a time, Sriveni was identifiable by her thick plait and healer qualities, hanging around as she did with her midwife granny while growing up as a young girl. Soon she is identifiable not only by the crime against her but, possibly, the crime by her. The hair is gone, the old her is gone, and a new Veni springs forth from the ruins, perhaps buoyed up by a thirst for vendetta, sanity askew. Narrated from the points of view of those around her, the format of the novel resembles a case diary: the structure is the closest approximation of a factual account or conjectural versions, like Anukrti Upadhyay’s Daura or T.P. Rajeevan’s Paleri Manikyam.

Like a river

The first-person narrations by those closest to the protagonist reveal Veni, who has vanished from everyone’s eyes, bit by bit. We meet her through those who knew her and loved her, and now miss her, or perhaps know her whereabouts and are keeping it a secret. Her mother misses “Veni’s face and placid smile–she who could still harsh winds, be like cool water on hot days”. We hear her via her husband, who describes her voice “like warm honey, you know, straight from the hive, still throbbing with bee-heart, still coloured with sunlight”.

A still from Siya (2022). | Photo Credit: Special arrangement 

Veni’s trauma is all-consuming, tip to toe: “Because your body is not yours, only the pain is.” Those who consigned her to a nightmarish existence may or may not be punished, but she has now forgotten every step in the universe’s dance. She is only aware that “each sense of her body, every cell of her being, each breath had to be reset”. It is nature, this earth of ours, alone that perhaps can come to her rescue, if at all: the ants, insects, trees, pools, and lakes, the sight of birds moving in “unison, driven by one heart, one soul, one sound, expanding and contracting, swelling and fading, contorting as one body of a gigantic bird.”

Only by a certain delicate system of osmosis there might be some kind of a future for her, flowing inward from outward and vice versa. “Inside her mouth, the water was a deluge of flavours–cool, sweet and earthy, it had the freshness of rainwater and the surprising sweetness of coconut water. But, wait, there was more: it had the quality of quenching.”

In such tellings, Veni is the heroine even in absentia and it is her story that overarches all sub-stories and subplots. The twist in the tale does not segue into an ending, happy or not, but is more like a riverine understanding of the convoluted prologues and epilogues, what happened before, what happened after. Of how this came to pass. The story of a crime against a girl is the story of a village, of mindsets, of conditionings, of those who loved her and those who probably hate her now for what they are sure she brought upon herself by just being there, in the wrong place, for being herself, a woman.

By taking a surgical knife and cutting up the fused intersections and overlaps, Mohan presents a series of snapshots leading up to and away from what happened one fateful day to an ordinary woman in a nondescript location. There is the expected sensitivity to a woman’s plight, but we are also made aware of the dragons she must slay throughout her life. In this book, however, it is the male voices that stand out as they explain their experience of the events. The author gets it almost pitch-perfect.

The hapless husband offers his perspective: “All I know is that I am no god and I cannot forgive or forget. Some days I go mad thinking about what happened, how she survived, why she survived.”

The father’s memories go further back because he instilled in her a deep love for the earth: “All I can say is that this home was hers and she was here, and she thrived here and died inside its walls even when she was alive.”

The accounts of each man as he tries to make sense of the mysterious disappearance of a woman vital to him are extraordinary short stories in themselves.

Even the sidekick of the main villain paints a colourful picture of his master, of the why and where and when and who. His tale is the most reliable and authentic in tone. Annathe, the master, “always had an eye for the ladies, especially after his wife died, although even while his wife was alive”. If the actual molestation is just the tip of the iceberg, here are the roots of it, the water as it freezes at the bottom, expressed in a baritone.

Fiction and films about rape are the most traumatic to pen, depict, read, or watch. The Accused, a 1998 film that fetched Jodie Foster an Oscar, Siya, Manish Mundra’s recent film, and Luckiest Girl Alive, a novel by Jessica Knoll, all come to the crime from different angles. Where Mayflies Live Forever is yet another evisceration of an act that wrecks not just the victim but also the men around her.

Shinie Antony is a writer, editor, and literature festival organiser.

The Crux

• Anupama Mohan’s debut novel, Where Mayflies Live Forever, goes beyond newspaper headlines and rape statistics to jaggedly dissect the anatomy of a sexual crime
• The first-person narrations by those closest to the protagonist reveal Veni, who has vanished from everyone’s eyes, bit by bit.
• In such tellings, Veni is the heroine even in absentia and it is her story that overarches all sub-stories and subplots
• The accounts of each man as he tries to make sense of the mysterious disappearance of a woman vital to him are extraordinary short stories in themselves