Benign Ghosts in a Bloodless Drama

 

In Alice Sees Ghosts by Daisy Rockwell, ghosts flit across the pages and in a whimsical departure from the prevailing norm, these manifestations mean no harm. There is nothing of the gruesome or the grotesque here even when skeletons tumble out of the closet in somewhat cliched and entirely bloodless fashion. Their purpose is to largely help out in legal matters related to property disputes and annuities. As anyone who has had dealings with the law in any capacity or even those who haven’t are probably aware, the law is an ass (Dickens!) and takes forever to fumble along in clumsy, corrupt, inconvenient and incompetent manner to a mostly unsatisfactory conclusion. It is probably why the author decided that ghostly intervention is just about the only thing that can grease the wheels and smooth the process along somewhat.  

Few things in our troubled world have the ability to inflict trauma the way blood relatives can. Rockwell attempts to explore this premise vis-à-vis a protagonist who returns to an ancestral home that is coming apart at the seams to be with her grandmother who is on her deathbed and mother, a raging alcoholic. Of course, it is not the property alone that is crumbling, and death brings in its wake, pain and long – buried familial angst which refuse to resolve themselves even with the help of perfectly competent psychiatrists and friendly ghosts. In fact, there is a psychiatrist in the picture, and he is painfully aware of his inability to help with mental unravelling of a certain nature, realizing that there is little to be done except go with the flow and play along even if it means feeding the most delulu notions.

“He lacks facility with descriptive language” a character says of another but that is not an issue for the author. The narrative is imbued with a certain fluidity and otherworldly character that makes it easy enough for the reader to engage with this dreamlike landscape and its assortment of quirky characters who like the ghosts are bloodless. Alice herself is a waif who wafts across situations and handles most obstacles or difficulties by flat out refusing to handle or even acknowledge any type of unpleasantness. Heck, she won’t even read the newspapers because they carry reports about non – existent weapons of mass destruction to justify a war and other unpalatable evidence of harsh reality. Instead, she gets by like a fragment of a dream fortified by regular intakes of tea with cream, sugar and shortbread cookies.

The book touches on issues like aphasia, bigamy, being gay when it was not acceptable, and even “neocolonial accumulation of wealth from decolonized places” but like its heroine is a little too refined and therefore reluctant to dig into anything that is not without grace or charm which means it is content to coast, carefully avoiding complexity, sharp edges and dirt. At the conclusion, love and blood ties win out over festering resentment. Which makes sense. In a dream populated by ghosts.

This review was originally published in TNIE Magazine

A Bonafide Feminist Classic

I’ll go right ahead and write this down: Khadija Mastur’s “The Women’s Courtyard” is one of the most satisfying novels I have ever read. It is elegant, poignant and utterly unputdownable. There is much to be said about Mastur’s simple, frills and frippery free style of storytelling and Daisy Rockwell deserves a shout out for doing justice to this manuscript which has been translated from Urdu (Aangan). 

Aliya finds herself securely sealed within the suffocating confines of her home, relatively safe from the troubles of a world in turmoil with the final stages of India’s struggle for freedom playing out and the partition looming ahead. But she is all but cut off from an outside world with its endless possibility for one who dreams of self – sufficiency, and left to keep her hopes alive amidst the broken dreams and carnage of conflicting ideologies evidenced by her extended family.

The protected environment she has grown up in proves insufficient to the task of shielding her from the trauma of losing her beloved elder sister Tehmina and dear friend, Kusum to suicide when they invest too heavily in the possibility of heady love and romance in the otherwise arid landscape of their lives only to be left utterly devastated. These episodes leave her with no faith where romance is concerned, especially since she is also an appalled witness to the marriages of her mother and aunt, to men who are more wedded to their politics. Aliya is horrified by both the anger and pettiness of her mother as well as the emotional ruin her aunt is. Yet, with a wisdom that belies her years, she is filled with compassion, has a reservoir of good sense and never ceases to care for her tormented loved ones, choosing to learn from their mistakes while teaching herself to shield herself from the pain wrought by irredeemably bad judgement.

Interestingly enough in this cloistered space, reserved for women, men who are related by blood seem to have right of access and given a surprisingly free hand to romance, stalk, molest or manipulate their cousins. There is Safdar, who loved Tehmina to death, Shakeel who has little qualms about stealing from his cousins, and Jameel who refuses to take no for an answer. Aliya is adamant when it comes to rejecting Jameel’s love for her, despite a certain physical attraction, fully aware that he has wronged another cousin Chammi, writes middling poetry, hasn’t distinguished himself in the professional sphere and is a little too much like the other men in her life given to sacrificing their women and children on the altar of their politics.

Love triangles are usually tedious affairs but the prickly one between Aliya, Chammi and Jameel is beautifully realized. The book is radically ahead of its time in giving us a heroine who adamantly sticks to her guns when it comes to resisting patriarchy even when enforcers pressure her with the prospects of love and marriage, which Aliya realizes are both likely to entrap her more surely than the chains she has been struggling against all her life. Mastur doesn’t spare the women who enable sexism either. Aliya’s mother in particular is a gut wrenching example of a gender traitor. A magnificent book that depicts the bitter battles women fight, far from the battlefield.