Contemporary Authors

‘Inheritance’ by Balli Kaur Jaswal

BY Peter Pierce
There was no distinctive literary voice in Singapore till after the painful break with Malaysia in 1965. Then, among others, emerged the novelist Catherine Lim and the poet, academic and literary godfather Edwin Thumboo. Now, in the latest generation, a new yet polished talent has arrived with Balli Kaur Jaswal’s long-gestated novel Inheritance. Written while Jaswal was on a fellowship at the University of East Anglia and originally bearing the haunting (and better) title ‘When Amrit Returns’, the book traverses Singapore’s history from 1970 to 1990. Jaswal documents “the loss of the old island: the swampy earth and twisting bark, the constant hum of mosquitoes”, “the night of the race riots”, the spread of “Singlish, that foul dialect of common Singaporeans”, the Social Development Unit for matchmaking university graduates, and the rise of the <> that cracked down on “littering and rule-breaking”, gays, protestors, durians on trains.

In the foreground of Inheritance is a Sikh family, originally from the Punjab. Its tormented patriarch, Harbeer, came to Singapore to serve with the British armed forces, as did many of his compatriots. His lost wife makes ghostly “secret visits” to him. His elder son, Narain, dismissed from the army under suspicion of homosexuality, took an engineering degree from a provincial American university, but was called home to care for his younger sister, Amrit. For Amrit, “thoughts made noises too”, and she feels “a teeming hunger for somebody – everybody – to touch her”. Her increasingly reckless behaviour traps Harbeer and Narain in their flat, waiting until “she eventually runs out of places to go”. Jaswal’s complex, sympathetic but unsparing portrait of a bipolar personality is the highlight of the novel. Amrit has suffered a “disappearance of the spirit”.

The conservative third child of the family, Gurdev, endures predictable travails as he tries to adapt to Singapore’s social changes. His three daughters’ demands for independence tax him, so that he is reduced to complaining: “People in my position are grateful because we knew instability.” One daughter retorts that Singapore is “a showroom … It’s not real. It’s so competitive.” These are familiar criticisms of the place, but Jaswal has embodied them in a sometimes desperate, always intimate family drama, and she has done so without passing political judgement. The system of the state is facelessly oppressive. Jaswal’s concern is with the suspicions and ambitions alike engendered by life in Singapore in the 1970s and 1980s. With Inheritance, Jaswal makes a debut of an <> not yet matched by the quality of its prose, but we are <>

PETER PIERCE
Peter Pierce is a professor of Australian Literature at James Cook University. He is the co-author of Vietnam Days and the editor of The Oxford Literary Guide to Australia.

BOOK REVIEW
The stories may be erotic, but this novel tells frightening truths about Punjabi lives in Southall
Balli Kaur Jaswal’s diaspora fiction is ruthlessly real under the gentle guise of sex, romance and crime.
The stories may be erotic, but this novel tells frightening truths about Punjabi lives in Southall
Balli Kaur Jaiswal / Image courtesy: Jaiswal
Apr 29, 2017 · 09:45 am
Shireen Quadri
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Widows, draped in white, can – and do – have deep shades of desire too. Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows: A Novel by Balli Kaur Jaswal, set in England, deals with the contours of their lust, longing and secret sexual fantasies.

Having spent their lives in the shadow of patriarchy, doing myriad chores and duties largely assigned to them by men, they have accummulated untold stories mirroring their colourful inner lives – in sharp contrast to how they are widely perceived, as drab and dreary people.

This novel – film rights have already been bought by Sir Ridley Scott’s Scott Free Productions and Film4 – sets out to lift the lid on the seemingly regular lives of people in general and women in particular in the Punjabi community in London’s Southall, which is variously described as the “mini-Punjab” and “Little India”. Despite – or perhaps because of – living in the West, most Indian communities here strive to protect their “sacred culture and tradition”. In some instances, they guard their “honour” at the cost of their loved ones who even lose their lives in the process. Jaiswal tears into the internal and private affairs of this community with relish exposing a seamy underbelly of deprivation, desire, and despair.

Enter the outsider
At the centre of the narrative is Nikki, a British citizen born to Punjabi parents who had migrated to the UK. She is a minor rebel by the traditional standards of her family, a modern Punjabi girl who wants to live her life on her own terms and marry by her own choice. She leaves her parent’s house to live independently, takes up a day job at a pub and, to augment her earnings, takes up an evening job teaching creative writing to Sikh widows. Here she meets her boss, Kulwinder Kaur, who has been living in a depressing cocoon of her own since her daughter’s death in mysterious circumstances.

<>, as the title suggests. <>

Early in the novel, we meet the Punjabi widows who are Nikki’s students – Preetam Kaur, Tarampal Kaur, Sheena Kaur, Manjeet Kaur and Arvinder Kaur, among others. But far from being a sorority of Kaurs, they turn out to have their own distinctive stories, with one particular element in common for most of them: a lack of fulfilling sex with their husbands before they became widows.

Hired, ostensibly, to help them write stories – with a vague idea of an anthology – Nikki soon discovers that she has been tricked by her boss into teaching the group how to read and write English, for most of them are unlettered. She does her best to teach them the alphabet for starters, but the widows, catalysed by Sheena, have a very different idea: they plan to compose stories, which Sheena will transcribe.

To Nikki’s surprise, the first story narrated in the class turns out to be about suppressed desires finding an outlet, with explicit sex scenes. Nikki isn’t sure if this a good idea, which offends her students:

“We’d be invisible in India. I suppose it makes no difference that we’re in England.”

“Just because our husbands are gone, we have plenty of experience with desire, we talk about it all the time too.”

“We’re widows. We don’t have any more contact with men. We aren’t allowed.”

The life of a widow
The widows have no choice but to use this route – their lives are under constant moral surveillance, as is Nikki’s. For example, Brothers, a group of young, unemployed men who consider themselves Southall’s morality police, patrol the temple grounds and remind people to cover their heads.

Why must these widows become “de-sexed” creatures after they lose their husbands? Why must they live in a permanent state of mourning? Why should they be expected to forget about physical desire and turn to spirituality? These questions are at the root of the novel, and the erotic stories become the widows’ statements of rebellion, going on to have a transformative effect on their own lives as well as those of Nikki and of the larger Punjabi society in Southall, which has been sweeping its own repressive ways of living beneath the carpet.

The erotic stories of the title appear in some detail in the novel, each with its own flavour and theme of sex: marital, pre-marital, extramarital, honeymoon, same-sex, and more. The widows tell bold and stimulating stories with fervour and, refreshingly, a dash of humour – for instance, they insist on using the names of vegetables for body parts.

Through and around these stories, the lives of the widows come through. There’s Manjeet, who had a difficult time finding a suitable husband owing to a prominent mole on her face. She finds one, but eventually he leaves her for a nurse and she finds comfort amidst the group of widows. There’s Sheena, a young widow who has chosen to live with her ill mother-in-law.

There’s Tarampal Kaur, one of the most mysterious characters in the novel, who keeps the suspense intact till the end. Her husband – many years older than her – was the temple priest, in whom the devotees would confide their secrets and dilemmas. Before his death, he shared the information with Tarampal, who has decided to cash in on it.

There are Arvinder Kaur and Preetam Kaur, the mother-daughter duo who have a tiff as the mother accidentally reveals the secret of her own extra-marital affair in the early years of her marriage. For all of them, and for others like them, life is a state of repressed existence, as Erotic Stories… reveals in the course of taking its crime-thriller plot to a conclusion.

Jaswal’s handling of the controversial issues is deft and she employs an inventive technique to tell her story, without creating the bitter aftertaste of telling unpalatable truths.

Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows: A Novel, Balli Kaur Jaswal, HarperCollins India

Shireen Quadri is a marketing and communications professional who has worked with several publishing houses. She is founder and publisher, The Punch Magazine. On Twitter and Instagram, her handle is @shireenquadri.

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SUNDAY CHRONICLE, SHELF LIFE
Crossing the ‘taboo’ line
DECCAN CHRONICLE. | CRIS
Published Mar 26, 2017, 12:16 am ISTUpdated Mar 26, 2017, 6:55 am IST

Author Balli Kaur Jaswal explores the erotic fantasies of widows in a fictional anthology set in Southall.
Balli Kaur Jaswal
Balli Kaur Jaswal
When Balli Kaur Jaswal told a relative the title of her new book, he asked, “Exotic Stories for Punjabi Widows?” and she corrected, “Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows.” He sighed and said, “Fine. I’ll call it Stories for Punjabi Widows.” Similar thing happened when she met a friend and her Punjabi fiancé. He nearly choked on his drink hearing the title of the book and when he recovered, said, “Well, that’s... uh... certainly a niche market.” Balli shares that she enjoys telling people the title of her latest book and watch the quizzical look form on their faces. Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows is her third novel, and once again she has brought a Punjabi girl into her book, like Amrit in her first — Inheritance, and Pin in her second — Sugarbread. “Identity is a major theme in all my works, and I haven’t strayed far from Punjabi female characters because there’s still so much work to do in telling their stories,” explains Balli and adds, “There is so much responsibility placed on the women in our communities because we believe that the family’s honour rests on their shoulders — that itself is a fascinating idea. It inspires many conflicts and plot threads.”

Her latest book revolves around a modern-day Punjabi woman, Nikki who finds herself in the familiar streets of Southall (West London, England), teaching creative writing to barely literate widows. As Nikki gets closer to these women, she also learns some dark hidden truths about them. The idea for the novel came from Balli’s numerous visits to Southall also known as ‘Little India’. “I was really fascinated by this Punjabi migrant enclave where so many traditional values and customs were preserved, yet it is in Britain, which was so different culturally. I became especially interested in what it was like to be a woman in such a setting, and it occurred to me that the widows were the most invisible women in this society. I wanted to give them a voice and an opportunity to express desires that were traditionally denied to them when they were ‘somebody’s wife’.”

Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows by Balli Kaur Jaswal Rs 399, pp 320 HarperCollins India
Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows by Balli Kaur Jaswal Rs 399, pp 320 HarperCollins India

Balli recounts meeting a friend’s grandmother while researching for the novel. “We didn’t get to the topic of sex unfortunately. I did ask her how she felt when she met her husband, how long she was allowed to remain at home after her wedding before having to join him in his village (she was barely a teen when she got betrothed, so she stayed with her parents until she was of a suitable age). I remember thinking afterwards that she seemed sort of reminiscent and sad when she was recalling her story. There were so many pauses which seemed meaningful and full of emotion. It was a humbling lesson for me to stop imposing my own views and emotions onto these women. My protagonist Nikki also learns a similar lesson when she confronts a group of very conservative widows who are tentative about joining the class, and she ends up scaring them off.”

In her book, there is also a group of highly conservative young men called the ‘Brotherhood’, who have appointed themselves the moral police of the community. That of course, has a lot of relevance in India now, with many incidents of moral policing reported across the country. “Men have always policed women in Indian families, which is already problematic and misogynistic, and it’s rather disappointing that they’ve taken the extra step to organise themselves outside of their family structures too. So many strides have been taken in a positive direction for women’s rights in India, and then you have this backlash of scared men who can’t see outside themselves. It shows a sort of brazenness that comes from being threatened by women, and what women are capable of doing. Even within the families, it’s a lot of misplaced fear. I wish those men would recognise that there is nothing powerful or brave in what they’re trying to accomplish. Brave and good men recognise their privilege and use it to accomplish equality, not to widen the gap.”

Inheritance by Balli Kaur Jaswal
Reviewed by Emily Laidlaw

28 JAN 2013
Perhaps one of the most exciting trends in OzLit lately has been the renewed focus on South-East Asia. The success of Emily Maguire’s Fishing for Tigers (Vietnam), Ruby J. Murray’s Running Dogs (Indonesia) and Laura Jean McKay’s upcoming Holiday in Cambodia prove Australian readers are finally looking beyond regional economic ties and beginning to show interest in their neighbouring cultures. And about time. Now Singapore is given the spotlight in Balli Kaur Jaswal’s richly evocative debut, *Inheritance.

The storyline is fairly simple. Between 1970 and 1990, a Punjabi family wrestles with both the unexplained loss of its matriarch and the aftershocks of Singapore’s independence from Malaysia. The social and historical upheaval is subtly woven into the family’s decline, and manages to avoid the clunky factual exposition that can mar this genre.

Having spent part of her youth in Singapore, Jaswal has a nuanced understanding of the small city-state and its claustrophobic environment: ‘the air was still and humid, a constant heavy breath’, while ‘the drilling and clanging of construction’ provides a soundtrack to Singapore’s ongoing physical redevelopment. Jaswal also celebrates the island’s diversity – its mix of Tamil, Malay Chinese and British influences – and, in doing so, adds texture to a place some Westerners might lazily describe as a melting pot, instead of the boiling pot of class and heritage Inheritance shows Singapore to be.

There are no twee sentimentalities or easy resolutions either. Produced during a writing fellowship at the University of East Anglia, Inheritance displays <> by state control. Or in this case, the tight, inescapable bonds of family, which can be just as oppressive. A tender and enlightening read.

Emily Laidlaw is a freelance reviewer