The Perfect Woman: Short Stories
By

Bulbul Sharma
UBSPD
Pages:128
Price:Rs 60

This is not the witty and whimsical Bulbul of My Sainted Aunts, skimming lightly over the surface of her eccentric relatives’ lives to reveal the undercurrents of disquiet and disjunction.

The Perfect Woman is a sombre rendering of lives, fraying at the edges, lit up very occasionally by flashes of bleak humour. There’s not much to celebrate here but, for the sympathetic reader, a great deal to mull over as the author gently exposes the disarray that surrounds her protagonists.

At the centre of each story is a woman, held in suspension. Vinny, muzzled by male chauvinism and late motherhood, can bring herself to do no more than watch mutely as her young son perches precariously on the roof of a hotel, knowing he might fall off any minute.

Her relief at the end of their “holiday” is palpable because “she hated other people’s lives touching hers”.

Bulbul Sharma: Exposing fraying lives

Then, the only time Anu’s existence seems to come to life is when she is battered by her husband.

This happens every day without fail, till one day he suddenly drops dead, mid-blow, and she finds the most unexpected release – I couldn’t help wondering though, now that the cycle of abuse was broken, how she would rearrange her life.

Urmilla (a.k.a. Rita) is sanguine about her boss/lover’s benign neglect of her, till she realises that he has transferred his attention to her younger sister.

Bani tries desperately to find her own still centre in the turbulence of her estranged parents’ lives, only to find herself “locked into a soft blackness on all sides, falling into the deep hole” made by her father’s drunken assault on her young body.

Even the title story, ostensibly about a man, is actually about many women, and the Eternal or Perfect Woman that the ageing hero spends his life in search of, a chimera, whom he meets only when he meets his death.

This is violence of the daily, humdrum sorts, and not even Bulbul’s deceptively easy and undramatic telling can mask its horror or avert its dreadful predictability. And as you prepare to register its dull blows, you realise how easily, if you’re not careful, the author can make you believe that this is how most women’s lives are lived.

The most fully realised story in this sombre collection is Toofan, a wonderfully wrought tale of two older women, mother and daughter, living a faded sort of existence together, when suddenly one day a street urchin blows into their home.

He’s a car cleaner, a coolie, a petty thief, a drug conduit, perhaps, a survivor who latches on to Meena, the daughter, and makes their garage his “home whenever he chooses”.

Meena finds a focus for her maternal love in caring for this fugitive, even as her own mother ridicules her for her foolishness.

The accidental manner in which their three lives intertwine and the insecurity of Toofan‘s precarious existence underline the collection’s major preoccupation: the essential solitariness of all our lives, and the ease with which things can, and do, fall apart. Not, as I said, a celebratory book, but a book about life, and as we all know, life’s like that.