Black Tongue

Anjana Basu

Description

Set in contemporary Communist-ruled West Bengal, Black Tongue explores the story of a young servant girl and her employer whom destiny brings together in an intricate dance of love and hate. Street-smart and sassy, 16-year-old Maya has aspirations beyond her means. Then, she disappears. Amrita, Maya's employer and a social worker, is charged with her death. The ubiquitous Party also begins to investigate the murder, a murder that turns out to be not quite what it seems. Maya believes that her black tongue has wrecked Amrita's beautiful world. Hate simmers in her. Amrita, in a bid to save herself, turns to ex-lover Paresh, the minister's right-hand man. Maya's brother, Naren, a cadre worker, sees an opportunity to make a fast buck in her disappearance. Is this part of a sinister, bigger plan? Or are they shielding somebody? Through the novel, Anjana Basu, explores the contradictions that connect middle-class Kolkata and its urban slums with rural West Bengal. As the events unfold, the story looks askance at a strange, but recurrent socio-political phenomenon typical of West Bengal: pre-modern superstition existing in the interstices of an enlightened political apparatus.

Sujets

• Political
• Women
• Party (canción)
• Bengala
• Calcuta
• Contemporary history
• Communism
• Kolkata
• West Bengal
• Woman
• Politics
• The Women
• Calcutta
• Bengale-Occidental
• Family
• Contemporary
• Party
• Saga
• Bengal
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Roli Books
• Date de parution: 01 mars 2007
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9789351940630
• Langue: English

Extrait

About the book
Set in contemporary Communist-ruled West Bengal, Black Tongue explores the story of a young servant girl and her employer whom destiny brings together in an intricate dance of love and hate. Street-smart and sassy, 16-year-old Maya has aspirations beyond her means. Then, she disappears. Amrita, Maya’s employer and a social worker, is charged with her death. The ubiquitous Party also begins to investigate the murder, a murder that turns out to be not quite what it seems. Maya believes that her black tongue has wrecked Amrita’s beautiful world. Hate simmers in her. Amrita, in a bid to save herself, turns to ex-lover Paresh, the minister’s right-hand man. Maya’s brother, Naren, a cadre worker, sees an opportunity to make a fast buck in her disappearance. Is this part of a sinister, bigger plan? Or are they shielding somebody?
Through the novel, Anjana Basu, explores the contradictions that connect middle-class Kolkata and its urban slums with rural West Bengal. As the events unfold, the story looks askance at a strange, but recurrent socio-political phenomenon typical of West Bengal: pre-modern superstition existing in the interstices of an enlightened political apparatus.

BLACK TONGUE
Anjana Basu was born in Allahabad and studied inLondon. She works as an advertising consultant inKolkata. When not churning out copy she writesshort stories and poems and travel pieces for journalslike Travel Plus .
Anjana has a book of short stories and a novel to hercredit. The BBC has broadcast one of her shortstories and her poems have featured in an anthology.She has also been published in The WolfheadQuarterly, Gowanus, The Blue Moon Review,Australian Short Stories and Recursive Angel . Recently,she was published in Canada’s The Antigonish Review .In 2004, she was a Hawthornden Fellow.

CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR CURSES IN IVORY
The long novel that tells the “story of mothers anddaughters, pujas and pearls, arranged marriages, officeromances” is a sensitive and skillful piece of writing. Thelanguage moves from crisp Anglo-Bengali dialogue tothe poetic prose describing life and poetry of oldLucknow. The style includes the weaving of flashbacks,at different points of time, into the narration. All in all,it is a novel to remember.
– The Statesman
Of the new writers who have debuted this year AnjanaBasu holds great promise because of her style, herlanguage and the tale that she unfolds through thesinuosity of her writing. Anjana Basu’s novel is called Curses in Ivory . It is a gripping tale spanning threegenerations of a Bengali family with a focus on thewomen.
– Deccan Herald
Basu’s tale unravels leisurely. The narration too is gentle,for it does not torture with needless soul-twisting as thefamily saga comes tumbling out of its tin trunksaccompanied by the necessary skeletons that give the taleits tangy layering.
It is a story that has probably been recounted in smokyliving rooms, but as a book, it lifts the veil on an elegantwriter whose only curse is that she may be called upon torepeat the performance.
– Business Standard
The novel Curses in Ivory does centre around a curse, butit is a tale of marriages, romances, jewellery, pujaceremonies, careers and traditions.
When is someone making this book into a movie?
– Sunday Tribune


ROLI BOOKS
This digital edition published in 2014
First published in 2007 by IndiaInk An Imprint of Roli Books Pvt. Ltd M-75, Greater Kailash- II Market New Delhi 110 048 Phone: ++91 (011) 40682000 Email: [e-mail] Website: www.rolibooks.com
Copyright © Anjana Basu, 2007
All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic, mechanical, print reproduction, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of Roli Books. Any unauthorized distribution of this e-book may be considered a direct infringement of copyright and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Cover Design: Mihir Chanchani Cover Photograph: Diptanshu Roy
eISBN: 978-93-5194-063-0
All rights reserved. This e-book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated, without the publisher’s prior consent, in any form or cover other than that in which it is published.

For all those men and women whose stories are echoed here. Lives, and in some cases, deaths.

Acknowledgements

T he Hawthornden International Writers’ Retreat for giving methe time and space to work on the manuscript and for openingup a world of wonders.
Tom for being his supportive self as always. Rahul for his ‘tippytoes’.
Ananya for her gallant attempts at cover photography and a pairof broken spectacles.
Renuka and Susan for their belief in the book.
Prologue

W omen are not born witches. Life makes them turn that way. If you want the truth of what I say, look at the facts: there are no young witches, no child witches. All the women torn or hacked to pieces in the columns of the newspapers are old. Some of them are not even witches at all. Perhaps just women like me who discovered the gift of a black tongue when everything else failed them. I didn’t know I had a black tongue until all the pieces started falling into place. And not even then.
We are not proud of our gifts. Pride is dangerous unless you have the strong-armed power to support it. A battalion of young men with smuggled machine guns whom you can let loose at night to make your predictions of disaster come true. Men who obey your commands without question or regret. Or a rich thakur husband with izzat four centuries old, who can unleash death and destruction if one of his subjects just looks at him in the wrong way. A woman with a black tongue is nothing unless she has men behind her.
Otherwise she exercises her gift in secret, utters the dreaded word in anger in the dark. A black curse whispered on a black night that goes straight from her mouth to God’s ear. If she does not do this, then the same dark night can bring her destruction. Actually why night? The burning noon can explode in flame and consume her. How many times have you read of women being stripped and dragged through the fields till the skin is raked off their bones and the blood spatters the growing corn? Ten men dragging a woman half their weight till the screaming thing they drag becomes nothing human or recognisable, not someone’s mother or wife or grandmother, just a thing that has to be killed.
And behind them, egging them on, is a witch-finder. She can be a she – a powerful she with a tongue so black that it is hard to withstand its power. But her tongue she says is white and she uses it to protect. Nirmala Barui is one of them. Very pleasant for a witch-finder – she has kajal around her eyes, lips that she reddens with paan juice and a flower tucked in her sleek oiled hair. You can hire Nirmala to find you a witch if you pay her enough – I don’t know what she charges but her witch-finding has bought her a colour TV and her son-in-law a new lorry. She’s the most successful witch-finder in the whole of Midnapore, she says, and I believe her. We’ve drunk tea together often and she’s boasted of her accomplishments while showing me her new teacups. ‘It’s so easy. You just have to have the gift.’ The teacups had come to her from the money she got for hunting down a witch in Patharpratima. That one was seventy-five, a grandmother whose three grandchildren had died one after the other. The doctor said it was malnutrition, chicken pox, a virus, but everyone in the village knew better, it was witchcraft. However, the men said, let us be fair, let us have a trial. So they tied the old woman to a pole in the middle of the village in the burning Jesthya sun and sent for Nirmala.
I’m told her technique is very impressive, unlike that of many other witch-finders. She has to wait for the auspicious hour when she will cast the bones and blow the conch. ‘I must be fair,’ she said, sitting at the foot of the pole along with the villagers, while the sun drew the life out of Nanibala. She cast the bones three times and got, she told me, the same answer. The old woman was undoubtedly a witch. So they left her tied to the pole for three days without food or water – no violence, Nirmala told them, do not raise your hands to her, who knows what will happen till the sun, that May sun, did the work for them.
Yes, you have to have the gift. A gift for hatred. I don’t know how Nirmala came by the gift or why she uses it against other women, but I do know that a woman taught me how to hate. She is the one who put the black into my tongue. Oh, a very different woman from all these. She lives in the city, in a tall house with a tall husband and a son. She has a red Maruti car as bright and shining as a tomato – no, she had a shiny red Maruti, I had sat in it once, twice, I’ve forgotten how many times. Had – the Maruti is gone now. I don’t mean to say that things are different in the city. The difference is only on the surface – you have witches and witch-finders in the city too though they don’t always react in the same way there.
She had everything, this woman, while I had nothing at all. And she took everything from me – my home, my future. All she left me was my life. In a village that would have been enough to doom her – if I had been powerful enough. I would have summoned a witch-finder and said, ‘She is a witch, she has cursed me.’ But in those days I didn’t know any of this. I sat in my place of exile and brought her face into my mind and thought of all the things that I wished her, one by one.
This village, our desh, is a