HARSIMRAN KAUR ON  Sep 05, 2023, IN BOOK REVIEW,THE WOMAN WHO CLIMBED TREES BY SMRITI RAVINDRA-FICTION

Rating: 4/5

Every cell in the brain mimics a memory, often as a distorted encumbrance of what could have been a worthy prosody of unbridled impulses. The memory runs deep, imperceptibly adding a fault to our vision; what we actually see now looks different from our past percepts of vulnerability. Ecstatic, and expounding on our new narrative, we feed the memory filled with self-created gestures of smitten follies; yes! We still remember the ‘real’ but a bit of flake and fuel makes life less treacherous, making memory replenishible. 

The brittle bemuses add on to the humor, the sad notes frown but the memory is still there, attached to us like the nagging itch of the revulsed skin. Smriti Ravindra in her debut novel ‘The Woman who Climbed Trees’ prods on the prodigal memory to make her characters look believable in their pursuit of happiness, and foresting them in a ‘past’ to help them to live their ‘present’.

Isn’t ‘past’ a memory, looked at with perspectives to paint these incursions either with strokes of ‘gaity’ or ‘disbelief’? Can we let our memories fall like cracked leaf from the intemperate branch?

In fact what we do our entire life is to climb the tree of our reflection, stepping in fancy on every branch to trick the mind in revulsion of the cascading truth. And what if this bitter trail toils to be a memory? Will it ever whiff itself from the perspiring wrath of unassailed emotions that the truth was an antagonist to?

Meena’s anguish and unsettlement towards her ‘present’ gradually foments a denial to live with it; it becomes a rancid memory of perfidy and obscurity. The open swathes of ‘Darbhanga’ siphon the milky sheet of happiness to which she frequently wishes to squeal on to rather than the imperceptible load of drudgery after marriage that sticks like a beak in the throat. An alien land—the Kingdom of Nepal—infuses a bit of crenellations that make her hang at the ripper’s edge. The scornful mother-in-law beats around the bush assailing Meena of the ‘wrongs’. Meena—her shriveled body often awakens to the absence of love incarcerated by a dismissal husband. She swirls and swerves to find solace in her sister-in-law but the rill of non-affection drowns her desiccated heart. Memories she calls them, collected over time but gradually they become facetious, bludgeoned by a native emotion of reprisal.

Manmohan marries Meena as any dumbstruck soul who in fidgety gets up in the morning and walks unblemished to fetch milk from the dairy. She is his ‘Meena Kumari’ and he breathes and lives by it. A dream of joining the Congress Party in Nepal to styling the limp as a detritus fracture signals the tyranny he feels under the Madhesis vs. Pahadi imbroglio. He is abusive and insensitive—a memory Meena lives by, and the sylph of ‘wondrous killing’ of her husband to the ‘subjugated perpetuity’ demonizes her imperturbable existence.

‘The Woman Who Climbed Trees’ by Smriti Ravindra talks about the consanguinity of the prejudiced hegemony of the ‘big fish’ foiling as a lamprey over the ‘small fish’; men in their dystopic felicitation create self-exculpating webs for women to remain entangled in their lissome and brew an irrevocable decency to simmer a conceivable froth. What about woman to woman negotiation on the culpable indecency of men? Better let the sleeping dogs rest in the bed of heavy-handed lust. All these connections, although ephemeral, stick as a memory illicitly pouched in the unstable hugger-mugger of present ‘hang-ups’.

There is more to Meena; she wanted her babies to die—a beginning to her untendered emotions. Her babies do die because she wanted them to; an imprecation of the spiritless soul. The same soul revivified not because it had to but one can call a de rigueur of repentance. The lived-by babies, ‘Preeti’ and ‘Adi’ too become memories as Meena progresses towards a phantasmagoria of inept predispositions.

The book etches the flamboyant mind of Meena that nestles to live an ambition of delinquent freedom; the clinkering laughter at the cinema hall, the clandestine operation of clasping the key to her husband’s locker and the frequent need to ‘leave’ the idea of belongingness. Is she able to harangue her present ordeal or keep schtum?

Either ways, an eclipse of dissuasion invades her reflection and she becomes a slave to her memories. Meena slowly finds recluse in the bedlam of soliloquies in conversation with intimidating characters to finally turn herself into a beast devouring the beauty of newly found malice.

TAKE AWAY

We carry memories wherever we go. How can we leave them behind? How we dig them often—a comforting suture to create fine lines siphoning the deluge of unbreakable bond.

Meena defines herself by these memories and in the end it eats her to oblivion. Compounded in the bedlam of Nepal’s anti-monarchy revolution, appraising ‘freedom’ as a dominant structure on which Nepal should stand, the book also talks about the ‘freedom of mind’ to help it grow spaciously. Espousing popular ‘folk tales’ and ‘fables’, it creates a continuity of the characters helplessness.

The more the mind is made to live as a parasite and is attacked by perfidious strands, it tends to create a world of its own, immersed in a dream like sequence calibrated by one’s insecurities.