Eating Wasps: Stories for rebel girls

Book: Eating Wasps
Author: Anita Nair
Publisher: Context
Pages: 256 
Price: Rs 599

The first thing that draws you to Anita Nair’s Eating Wasps is the graphic book cover. This writer has no qualms about being one of ‘those’ who judge a book by its cover – book covers are, after all, an art form in themselves. 

The title is explained early on in the book. Sreelakshmi craves honey and eats a wasp mistaking it for a honey-filled bee. Later, when her grandmother offers her a jarful, she happens to not like it. “It was sweet and heavy, and coated my tongue with the taste of the wasp, I thought I would gag and throw up, but I forced myself to swallow it. I never ate honey again.”

Eating Wasps has the stories of 10 women narrated by Sreelakshmi – the ghost of a zoology lecturer and Sahitya Akademi Award fiction winner, who describes herself as “Kerala’s Virginia Woolf”. Having killed herself one fine Monday, Sreelakshmi is still stuck in the mortal world because her ex-lover Markose stole a piece of her index finger after her cremation. 

These 10 women, whose lives Sreelakshmi navigates through, are currently staying at a resort in Kerala called Near the Nila – which also features in Nair’s 2005 book Mistress (Eating Wasps also includes guests appearances and mentions of characters from Mistress: Radha, Shyam, Maya, Naveen, and Koman). How does she do that? She is simply transported from one to the other. 

Nair’s 10 protagonists come from different parts of the country, backgrounds, religions, castes and class. Urvashi, a smart and promising political journalist, is at the resort to get away from an extra-marital affair she has left far behind, but the man hasn’t. Najma, who works at the resort, has never been forced by her mother to wear a burkha, but falls prey to an acid attack. She is rebuilding her life – not letting the accident define her and emerging a winner. There’s the heart-wrenching story of Megha, a young schoolgirl who yearns for the affection of her bus conductor, someone she calls Uncle, until he unceremoniously showers it on her. Theresa and Molly – two sisters who are fighting battles and seeking redemption; and Liliana from across the continent who is apparently at the resort for a dance residency, but in reality, to escape the shame thrust on her, form other characters in the book.

Even as Sreelakshmi narrates each character’s story, readers get a look at her own life. Interestingly, Sreelakshmi’s character is based on a real woman, a lecturer from Kerala called Rajalakshmi, who mysteriously took her own life in 1965. 

Online stalking, acid attacks, child sexual abuse, loveless marriages, ambition, online bullying are some of the issues that these female protagonists are dealing with in their own way. Nair’s novel is about women who like to write their own narratives, are unapologetic about it, and fight it when society blames them for crossing the proverbial lakshmana rekha. It offers a respite from the impossibe standards women are expected to adhere to. It’s a book where the characters could be your girlfriends – you sit down with them after a long day and curl up with their stories of pain and longing. You listen to them and you know: you are not alone.