~ Song of the Cuckoo Bird, by Amulya Malladi ~
In 1961, an 11-year-old girl called Kokila arrived at an ashram in a small town in Andhra Pradesh. Girls were married young in those days, but only moved into their husband’s house after puberty. In Kokila’s case, her parents had died a month after she was married, and so she was taken into Tella Meda, the ashram, to wait until she menstruated and could move into her in-laws’ house. Puberty came, but Kokila refused to leave, and the novel follows the next 40 years of her life in the ashram.
In Tella Meda, Kokila discovers a world largely of women. The ashram exists because of Charvi, the young guru, whose saintliness had been identified at birth by her father. Her father, Ramanandan Sastri, is the patriarch of Tella Meda, a teacher and writer who believed in independent living, equality for women, and a life unbound by tradition, but did not necessarily practice all that he preached.
The other inhabitants of the ashram are all people who have no other options, which in this context means that they are mostly women without husbands or children to support them: abandoned girls, widows, women who had been barren after marriage.
There is also a floating population of men and women who stay at the ashram for a week or a month, sometimes every year, sometimes just once. Each visitor touches the lives of the residents and brings other perspectives into the novel. Vineetha Raghavan, a scientist and old friend of Ramanandan Sastri’s, is single, unmarried, and doesn’t believe in Charvi’s spirituality. Mark Talbot, an American photographer, breaks a heart in the ashram, but leaves with his own intact.
Each chapter covers a year between 1961 and 2000, and starts with a couple of notes about India’s history in that period. There are huge political and social changes in India during these 40 years, but they are seen, fittingly, through the eyes of the ashram residents only in terms of the effects on their own lives. In 1971, India is at war with Pakistan, and rumours fly around the small town, but the bigger excitements are Chetana’s drunken husband and the pregnant woman who gives birth in Tella Meda.
But even Tella Meda is not immune to technological change. The first advent of TV, the refrigerator, computers … each new change is desired, and resisted, by the residents.
The characters in this novel are distinct, flawed and human. The inevitable irritations and annoyances that emerge within a small group of people living in close confinement are laid out very nicely, and the conversations have a pleasantly natural tone.
The author refrains from letting social moralizing take over the novel, but makes it clear that for most women, marriage is the best option. When Kokila chooses not to go to her prospective husband’s house:
“You have to go, Kokila,” Chetana warned, suddenly serious. “Here you will have no life. There you can have a husband, children. You will have your own home.”
Years later:
As a woman [Kokila] had begun to realize that by choosing Tella Meda she had rejected a respectable life as a wife. By choosing Tella Meda she had condemned herself to live on the sidelines of society.
Another character, Lavanya, is beautiful, remained single, and worked as an airhostess for decades, but is described as “amounting to nothing” (p8). The other unmarried women characters long for husband and children. Even the successful scientist Dr Vineeta Raghavan suffers from “stunning loneliness” (p41). There are plenty of miserable marriages in the book, and the single women survive reasonably well, but the implicit conclusion is that a satisfactory marriage and children are the only real source of longterm happiness. Whether this is a reflection of the society and time in which the characters live or the author’s convictions is something for readers to ponder.
Malladi writes in a straightforward unpretentious style, and her strength lies in the story and dialogue rather than descriptive writing. Some of the sentences are quite awkward.
“Desires that had been unknown were unravelling within her”.
By giving her a present, Ramanandam Sastri squashed Kokila’s hope in the promise he had made to her that she wouldn’t have to go if she didn’t want to.
There are some jarringly anachronistic phrases — Renuka had become “ornery” (p274), “losers like Padma” (p331) — where tighter editing would have helped.
This book will not satisfy readers who are looking for elegance, subtlety or complexity of language; here the pleasure is in the story, the ripples of daily and seasonal life and the tides of birth, relationships and deaths.
‘Song of The Cuckoo Bird’, by Amulya Malladi. Ballantine, New York. 2006
This review was first published on the now-defunct SAWNET (South Asian Women’s NETwork) website in 2006
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