In the Convent of Little Flowers
The first of her three full-length novels, The Twentieth Wife, thrust Indu Sundaresan onto the firmament of notable young writers of Indian origin. This latest slim volume is her fourth published work, and, her first short story venture. Sundaresan is a storyteller and the stories contained in "In the Convent of Little Flowers" naturally develop themes that challenge the perceived progress of main-stream India with subjects often considered taboo.
The stories hold your interest from the get-go. The first story, 'Shelter of Rain', is heart warming. An American couple from Seattle adopts Padmini, a six-year-old girl living in The Convent of Little Flowers, run by Sister Mary Teresa in Chennai. The nun is really Padmini's aunt, her perima-big sister to her biological mother. The aunt is visiting US to attend a conference of Catholic nuns in Seattle and gets to meet Padmini. While waiting to receive her aunt at the airport we see Padmini going through a range of emotions, from anger to mild curiosity.
The nine stories in the book have an undercurrent of pathos in all but two. Of these two, "Key Club" depicts decadent, high-society Madras (now Chennai) and "The Chosen One" makes claim, perhaps, to sci-fi genre of sorts, a la Highlander. The themes in the other stories run a gamut of situations from social injustice to social norms - inhuman and unacceptable at best.
Three of the stories have tragic ending. In one, a father and mother, advanced in age, jump to their deaths from their Mumbai flat when their only son forces the father to sign their flat away to him which leaves their future totally at the son's mercy. Another is the story of a twelve-year old girl married to a sixty-two-year old man who dies a year later. She is sacrificed in an old-time, legally prohibited, Sati ritual in which she is cast to the funeral pyre of her dead husband; her forty-two year old "step son" sets fire to the pile of woods. The third is the story of a Hindu lady in love with a Muslim man. They are caught when they try to elope, are tied to wooden posts and publicly stoned and burned. You question whether these atrocities still happen in the twenty first century. The sad answer is, yes, they certainly do.
Three more stories, one of a peon whose out-of-wedlock grandson poses emotional and social predicaments, another, that of a couple in a retirement home, and yet one more in which a mother of two discovers her latent lesbian leanings, complete the storytelling. Pathos pervades in all the three. Almost all story endings make you uneasy, and all make you think.
When you are finished reading the book, you cannot but ask yourself the question: why is India this way? If, in a span of forty or so years, starting with Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" to the election of a black president, the US can change its ways for the better, why can't India?
Again Sundaresan is a storyteller first and foremost. If she can make us ask these questions, has made us uneasy in the end, she has earned her keep.
-- Chaks Srinivasan
I had read all three historic fictions of Indu Sundaresan and when I started reading her latest short story collection, In the Convent of Little Flowers, I was pleasantly surprised that it portrayed a wide range of social themes on the dark side of human relationships in Indian households. The stories get deeper and sinister - describing the emotional struggle of an adopted child Padmini from the Convent of Little Flowers meeting her biological mother's sister after 20 years in the U.S, to selfish and ruthless behavior of Bikaner driving his parents to their death in Three and a Half Seconds. They also cover spousal exchange in Key Club and lesbianism in Hunger, taboo topics that are never addressed in an Indian setup. The periodic "Sati" happening in remote places is generally an item in news media and after reading Indu Sundaresan's short story, The Faithful Wife, has suddenly become etched in my brain
It took me a little while to digest each topic and to move on to the next story which made me dwell on it even more after I finished reading. One is struck with Indu Sundaresan's style of handling the details of human struggles of ordinary people with special situations - some of these are situations I would not have encountered when I grew up in India some 40 years ago.
In all the stories in the book, Indu Sundaresan has created characters and portrayed the details of events that one is left with a heavy heart imagining the scenes. I would highly recommend this book to mature readers.
-- Vatsala Srinivasan
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