Autobiography of an unknown Englishwoman

In 1987, when Irish rock band U2 released an album called The Joshua Tree, nobody took notice. It was just another album from just another bunch of musicians. Also, it was released at the same time as Michael Jackson’s Bad, which went on to sell 29 million copies.

Only a couple of months later did the music-buying public began to take notice: The Joshua Tree was slowly growing on people, and soon they began to love it, and later treasure it.

Psyche Abraham’s From Kippers to Karimeen is something like The Joshua Tree: initially, it appears dull, but it grows on you. You’d think that a woman who’s had three husbands and a couple of live-in relationships would have led an exciting life. Apparently, that was not the case.

You hate her at first: how can you fall in love with another man while being married to the man of your dreams? How can you sleep with a man and bear his child, all the while waiting for your boyfriend to join you in another country?

But life, as they say, is not simple. You could be forgiven for thinking that this book is an apology for nymphomania. Actually, it is not. It is a sensitive memoir, fair to everyone concerned, and most importantly, it is not even an exercise in megalomania.

From her first husband — a Bengali advertising man caught between the constraints of a typical Kolkata joint family and his love for her — to her last (the famous cartoonist, Abu Abraham), Valerie Ann’s (Psyche’s original name) was a life of as many ups as downs.

She had to cope with a mother who had suffered a lot at the hands of her husband, a father who ignored the family, and a society which accepted her but never quite made her its own.

This book has no literary pretences, far from it. It is just the autobiography of an unknown British woman who comes to India because she loves the country, and makes it her own. “I no longer feel at ease in the country of my birth,” she writes. “I don’t fit in.”

Just as well. All her husbands were Indian, and therefore, so were all her true loves. Psyche may never write another book, but the amount of material that is packed into this one might, in the hands of a fiction writer, produce half a dozen novels.

From Kippers to Karimeen:
A Life Psyche Abraham
Athena Press
274 pages Rs672