JOIN USHe writes like a disciple of Marquez and Rushdie run amok. His characters grow with us, and we light up or despair with their ups and downs.
As also with the prepubescence, adolescence and waning of place and history. His story also consumes other stories along the way — tributaries, flashbacks and offshoot characters with their own little sagas — much like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. They interweave and glower; caress and part like mating snakes, spewing passion and poison in equal measure.
Eka Kurniawan must be the most famous name writing in Indonesia today. Like his illustrious predecessor Pramoedya, his narrative follows the oral tradition, with many references to characters from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. And yet, behaviour and relationships dig in deep and dirty, touching raw psychological cores, as in the most explicit post-modern dark novel. “One afternoon on a weekend in March, Dewi Ayu rose from her grave after being dead for twenty-one years.”
That’s how it begins. The noise of her rising wakes up a young shepherd, who pees in his pants and runs helter-skelter with his sheep. It’s a horror show for the neighbourhood when they realise what’s coming up. This weird resurrection sets the expectations on the right track, which is no track at all, and when Dewi gets home to find her last daughter is probably the ugliest human around, after having mothered three most beautiful girls, we realise it’s time to wrap up all expectations and keep them aside, and flow where the story takes us.
The ugly one is named Beauty. That beauty is a wound that men keep festering, hurting it more and more, but that beauty is also wounding, could be as much a synopsis as that it is the story of Dewi Ayu, the most famous prostitute in the area, and of her family and their bizarre relationships; or that it’s a long and fantastic history of a fictional place called Halimunda, set amidst real historical events unfolding in Indonesia.
Dewi is the beautiful product of incestuous love, part-Dutch, part-Indonesian. Her parents, half-siblings, run away from home; her grandmother jumps off a cliff. The history of Halimunda, told through effects of the 350-year Dutch colonisation, three years of Japanese occupation, the rise of Communism, and then, Suharto’s slaughter of the Communists, forms a backdrop for the story of Dewi and her children, each from a different father.
Telling stories against the backdrop of a violent history, placing the rape of land alongside the criminal subjugation of its people, is traumatic for the reader. Bitter fiction cannot be endured as bravely as bitter reality if catharsis isn’t visible like a light at the end of the tunnel. Kurniawan leaves no stone unturned in his depiction of human cruelty and degradation. The reason why the reader carries on, turning the page with interest, is Kurniawan’s ability to tell a story well, right down to its psychological, spiritual roots. And his sudden sparkling sense of humour.
Dewi is taken prisoner by the Japanese along with others. Their sordid prison life is described in unblinking detail. Later, a few girls are culled out and taken to a luxurious mansion where they’re fed and treated well. The other girls are horrified when they learn the reason for this happy makeover: they’re in a big brothel for Japanese officers. But Dewi takes it in her stride, just as she’d learnt to cope with the rigours of jail, even advising the others on how to make the best of the situation.
The brothel’s madam, Ma Kalong, has a backstory too. Once, when she tells soldiers to make love ‘as if you were in your very own home’, one of them retorts, ‘That’s ridiculous... All I’ve got at home is my mom and my old granny.’ Humour pops up at unexpected moments. This, and the interest we invest in each character keep us rapt through evil and pain, filth and sadism.
Also, the sheer inventiveness. A town full of dreaded Communist ghosts. A moneylender who freely distributes her sexual favours. A feared general vanquished by a chastity belt that can only be opened by chanting a mantra. The most beautiful princess elopes with a dog. Pigs turn into human. Dogs devour people. Mysterious deaths and an unexpected killer. Dead people slip in and out of the proceedings. The graveyard is a major setting, its young keeper bringing together spirits and their loved ones until one such exercise brings him love. There are love stories that go nowhere, legends of matchless beauty and its elusiveness, fatal attractions & wild promises, undefeatable warriors, and unbearable love.
Annie Tucker’s award-winning translation is also responsible for our enjoyment of this very ethnic narrative. It may be a long time before we come across so many words that we can devour with so much ease.
Beauty Is a Wound
Eka Kurniawan
Translated by Annie Tucker
Speaking Tiger
2016, pp 470, Rs 499