My book Daughters of Kerala

      Carole Hayes, my sophomore year English professor, compared the main characters in four stories to Emma in "Madam Bovary"-- "The Lullaby of Dreams,""Rosemary," "A Rest House for Travellers" and "Ghare Baire." The women in these stories live the dull realities of everyday life and no longer in love with their husbands, are looking elsewhere for affection and romance.

       In "Lullaby of Dreams" the lead character, a woman doctor, a business man’s wife and mother of a child, is infatuated with a young college student who is a family friend and dreams of him day and night. One day she tells him that she loves him more than she loves her husband, child and mother. But he says he is sad about their love because it is not free. He leaves the house saying, “If I stay here, snakes will entwine my feet.” That night while she embraced her husband trying to imagine that she was in the arms of her friend,the young man was sleepless and crying into the pillow.

       Rosemary falls for the neighbor, Thampuran, a member of the royal family. He speaks in a sing-song fashion about plants and flowers talking in their own language and how we can hear them if we listen. The day he dies Rosemary thinks, “Today, nature will wear all its ornaments to say farewell to Thampuran.” While she is paying respect to his body she can hear thousands of harmoniously blended sounds coming from somewhere. As she is getting into the jeep to go back, suddenly raindrops fall on the windshield. That makes her think “nature has cooperated fully in Thampuran’s sendoff … She feels like a lover who has realized her love.”

       Malathy in ‘A Rest House for Travellers” feels that she is just her husband’s “housekeeper, nothing more, except for social occasions… when she is an adornment.” Her husband has “more important work” and no time to spend with her. That is the main reason for her to fall in love with Santosh, another guest at the Rest House who pays a great deal of attention to her. But Malathy decides to stay in the marriage for her own reasons. Finally, the husband learns a valuable lesson from his latest research with black monkeys: “To the male monkey nothing is more important than his mate,” he tells Malathy and hopes it is not too late to make up for the past neglect. However, “the sense of guilt and embarrassment in his voice was not sufficient to melt the frost of her detachment.”

       The housewife in "Ghare Baire" (98) has sex with a married man who is a family friend. The double standard of the man comes through loud and clear when he responds, “I’ll kill her,” to the question, “Can you imagine your wife Usha sitting with another man like this?” His image in the mirror was not smiling. May be such things always happened, though no one dared to write about them. But these are stories written in the 80’s and 90’s and writers were no longer reluctant to write on such topics.

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