A reminder that there’s no such thing as a small story

‘No story is ever small,” said International Booker Prize winner Banu Mushtaq in her acceptance speech, adding that “in the tapestry of human experience, every thread holds the weight of the whole”. This sentiment finds resonance in ‘The Dark Hours of the Night’, a new English translation of Tamil poet and novelist Salma’s acclaimed debut, ‘Irandaam Jaamangalin Kathai’ (2004). Translator GJV Prasad’s rendering seeks, as he notes, to bring the novel to “a newer generation of readers” — and in doing so, preserves its lyrical cadences and political urgency.

At its heart, the novel follows Rabia, a perceptive schoolgirl in a tightly-bound Muslim neighbourhood in Tamil Nadu, but the narrative belongs to many women. Rabia’s life is interlaced with those of relatives, neighbours and friends, all navigating the suffocating architecture of patriarchy. Their stories, though rooted in a specific social and religious context, speak to the universality of women’s confinement — within physical walls, social codes, and inherited beliefs.

Through Rabia’s gaze and in the polyphony of voices that surround her, Salma constructs a vivid gallery of women. There is Zohra, Rabia’s conservative mother, whose submission to her husband’s authority is absolute; Wahida, a cousin whose fantasies of marital happiness crumble; Firdaus, beautiful and spirited, who walks out on her wealthy old husband, discovers desire with a married Hindu man, and pays a tragic price; and Maimun, the child-woman, who leaves her husband after two months only to meet a cruel fate. Nafisa plays a dutiful wife to her much older husband while maintaining a not-so-secret affair; Fathima, abandoned by her spouse, elopes with a Hindu man and is cast out by the community.

Salma makes it clear that patriarchy is not upheld solely by religious elders or the Saudi-returned husband who campaigns to ban women from the cinema; it is also policed by women themselves, their tongues primed to flay anyone who “strays”.

The hypocrisy of sexual morality is glaring: Zohra’s husband’s long-standing affair with his Dalit maid Mariyayi, while exposing the intersection of caste prejudice with gender oppression, is met with a wry shrug, while Nafisa’s transgression is paraded as a moral cautionary tale.

Not all male characters are portrayed in varying hues of black though. Men sympathetic to women’s struggles exist, but they too are hemmed in by the fear of challenging entrenched social codes.

The novel’s power lies in its refusal to glamourise survival or underline the cliche of the hapless, voiceless Muslim woman. Even those who never leave their homes are not without agency. The women are neither saints nor victims; they are resourceful, affectionate, flawed. If the men believe they own these women’s lives, Salma’s answer is as clear as it is subversive: only until the women decide otherwise. But the punishments for defiance can also be brutal. One woman is poisoned by her own mother to protect the family’s “honour”. Another newlywed is left to wallow in the slow suffocation of a loveless marriage, provoking the girl’s mother to wonder: “Was her life so bad that she was already weary of it?”

Prasad’s translation registers the rhythms and rawness of everyday speech and is attentive to the tonal range of these women’s conversations — domestic chatter, whispered conspiracies, and the occasional bursts of defiance.

There are autobiographical traces, too, in the novel. Like Rabia, Salma (born Rajathi) once slipped out to watch a film, only to be berated and later pulled out of school. Married off very early to a relative, Rajathi was denied books and writing paper at her in-laws’ home. Her earliest poems were scribbled in the privacy of the toilet, smuggled out through her mother and sent to publishers.

The journey from Rajathi to Salma, and from there to public life as a writer, activist, and now Rajya Sabha member, was neither quick nor easy. That hard-earned freedom breathes through every page of this novel, and reminds us, as Mushtaq said, that there is no such thing as a small story.

— The reviewer is a contributor based in Bengaluru