Passion, unplugged

Akshaya Kumar

Stories generally tend to allegorise, but in Sharanya’s stories the body and its ‘ox blooded’ desires are let loose like ‘a hurricane of wild horses’ without any overt moral or metaphysical sense of destination. In the process, the horizon of cultural expectations is defied with a vehemence of an unfulfilled lover. The narrative protocols take a back seat, allowing the writer to describe her fierce love-forays without any pre-tension. In the collection of more than 25 stories, each bristles with a surplus of sensuality.    

   Written with confessional gusto and autobiographical authenticity, the stories of desire simply rebel against the language and aesthetics of social correctness. Marriage, with all its hypocrisies of life-long fidelity and irrevocability in relationship, turns into a crass joke, an act of mimicry, a casual pretense to hoodwink those who approach relationships in normative terms.   

The high priestess does everything, from undergoing bouts of ‘epic sex’ to guzzling wine with a fleet of current and ex-lovers, but she never marries. She likes her ‘fights dirty’, her ‘vodka neat’ and her ‘romance anachronistic’. 

  As a hagiographer of heart, she clamours to be ‘sky clad’, uncontained and unbridled. She seeks her lover to be a ‘banyan tree’ — ‘A man who’s a forest unto himself with conspiracies of birds, and secret blossoms, and shaded places; a matrix generous enough for the world’. Forest is her metaphor for unconditional, all-consuming love; the glass menagerie is her counter-metaphor of made-up love in the city. What she wants ‘is a beloved — to be beloved’. Beyond, the binaries of home-sex or hetero-sex, what these stories script is a non-gendered love.  

 The form that these tempestuous sex-stories take is extremely irregular. Some of the stories, particularly those, which lack action, tend to acquire the form of philosophical musings. Some stories of relatively longer length catalogue memories of love-encounters, sans any easy sequential arrangement. Sweetness, Wildness, Greed takes the form of travelogue in which the storywriter as protagonist treks along the tribe of honey gatherers deep inside the forest. In a story, nine postcards dispatched from Pondicherry border constitute the narrative description. Conchology is another experimental narrative in which the character of some Sarala Kali, a fisher woman is drawn through a series of disconnected impressions and memories.  

Neither mythology nor history informs the narrative vision of the writer; the body remains the locus of her experience and expression. Occasionally, she does deal with an unavoidable Gandhi or an equally compelling image of Parvati, but it is the politics of sex that she targets to expose in the construction of myths.  One more monkey is rather impishly added to Gandhi’s pantheon of three monkeys. The fourth monkey has its ‘hands over its crotch’. 

The Gandhi Quartet now stands for ‘Not seeing, not listening, nor saying, nor doing’. The culture of abstinence is juxtaposed with the personal credo of carnality and indulgence.  

Even as these stories surprise, shock and startle with the frankness of expression, there is an element of unmistakable self-indulgence. The writer fails to impersonalise. Also because the stories largely hinge around the acts of physical intimacy — their limitations and over-reach, the collection does not offer the required range of emotions for the reader. The stories seem to echo each other, at times generating a feeling of over-reiteration. The nonchalance explicitness with which the young author describes her sexual spree does however constitute the new baseline of morality.