Ipsita Chakravarty The first edition of Pride and Prejudice was tight-lipped about its author. By a Lady ran the title page. The first edition of A Pleasant Kind of Heavy and Other Short Stories is as cryptic. Its been written by Aranyani. Aranyani is the nom de plume of a Tamil writer,is all the back cover will tell you. A book of erotic short stories published in India today is treated much the same way as novels in Jane Austens time. Slightly risque,read mostly by women,read in secret or self-consciously in the open. Erotica,or literature meant to arouse sexual desire,still lives on the margins of Indian writing in English,although some attempts have been made to break out,like the ill-fated Electric Feather: the Tranquebar Book of Erotic Stories. Notions of the erotic are fluid. As Balzac pointed out,they depend on the individual as well as the time and culture she inhabits. In Aranyanis stories,the erotic subject is female,contemporary,Tamil,circumscribed by a culture that is repressive and voluptuous at the same time. The stories are charged with the knowledge that female desire is transgressive in such a culture. Sexual release is an escape from these stifling norms. In Tamil Summer,a lonely housewife finds this release through pain. In The Cause of Blindness,a schoolgirl discovers new depths to Shakespeare. In The Courier Franchise Owners Wife,the female orgasm is mistaken for madness. In Triptych,grief unlocks new wellsprings of desire. In A Nice,Polite girl,a Tamil student in Paris decides to question innate assumptions about herself. For each of these characters,the erotic moment is embedded in a longer narrative of the self. Much like Ismat Chughtais famous short story,Lihaaf,explorations of sexuality often occur in spaces identified as the preserve of women. A kitchen,a salon,a maternity hospital,these are turned into chambers of subversion. Its not just in the sexual encounters that the eroticism lies. The stories inhabit landscapes inscribed with desire rain-stung earth,the torpor of summer days,moonlight in a city,salty sea breezes,a rush of flowers. The coded landscapes of classical Tamil love poetry come to mind. There is a lushness of description,a langour in the prose that speaks of sex. But the writer might have stopped at the landscape. Insinuating fruit and velvet boxes come across as amateurish attempts to set the tone. She also trades happily in cliches. The women are curvy and earthy. Once liberated,there is much worshipping of yonis and smoking of cigarettes. In its best moments,the collection is sharp and irreverent,but it lapses far too often into a fussy,narcissistic femininity.
