Mythic women and accidental friendships

Though the inner worlds of the women in Namita Gokhale’s Life on Mars are battlegrounds, her characters are never victims, even in their most pitiful states

- Pranavi Sharma

n Namita Gokhale’s Life on Mars, the women speak as if they have nothing left to lose. Or perhaps they've simply grown bored of politeness.

Across 16 stories divided into two parts, Gokhale writes women who stagger through marriage proposals, viral fevers, God, bureaucracy and desire. It is not just that they are ordinary, it is that Gokhale trusts their ordinariness to hold meaning. She trusts their stories to bend and reflect the tragicomedy of living in a society that never quite knows what to do with women who think.

Take Savithri, the protagonist of Savithri and the Squirrels, who introduces herself with a nonchalant bombshell: “I am one of the five Panchkanyas.” The invocation is as layered as it is ludicrous; absurdly sacred.

The Panchkanyas — Ahalya, Draupadi, Kunti, Tara and Mandodari — are figures from Hindu mythology, revered despite (or because of) their sexual complexity. But Savithri? She works at a matrimonial agency, possibly faked her resume, and feeds squirrels as a form of religious praxis. The juxtaposition is not meant to amuse (though it does) but to shake loose the reader’s assumptions about what it means for a woman to be mythic in India.

Savithri’s “gajra of fresh mogra flowers” and her thin braid channel some inner theatre. “You North Indians don’t even know the difference between Italy and idli,” she spits at the narrator, furious that her name, Savithri Subramaniam, is so often mispronounced. “Subramanian is not a Subramaniam,” she says, as though identity itself might rupture over a vowel.