The Bridal Pyre: Nainam Dahati Pawakah

I am allured
I am enchanted
I am detained
I am haunted
O Let it all be red
red like this vermilion sky
O let me color it all with the blood of my heart
and the tears in my eye
O let me color it like the vermillion sky
Have you seen the sky so vermillion before??
Have you?

It was indeed a beautiful twilight that Meera had lived in a long time. The sky appeared like someone scattered a box of vermillion on it. But this vermillion had nothing as scary, as haunting, as suffocating as the vermillion she has just washed off her head, that washed down her face like a jet of blood, similar to the blood that flushed out, in between of her legs just a couple of months ago.

People often ask me, why I chose Meera’s story for my first book? Why not a love story like most of the authors of my age. They ask me, is Meera someone I know? Someone close to me? I laugh.

Meera is indeed very close to me, I know her, like I know myself. Meera, is you, me and every other woman I see around myself. Meera is not one woman, she is a compound of all the woman I have come across in my life. Meera’s life, her personality, her sufferings, have something that every woman, Indian or otherwise, have faced, at least once in her life time. I wanted to put an end to this suffering.

I know writing a book is not a step strong enough to end the plight of the average Indian woman, but my power is limited. All I could do is write a story. But Meera is not a weak soul like Avantika.

“I have seen such strong men cry like babies while getting a broken bone fixed. How are you bearing with this pain so tranquilly?” asked the doctor.

“May be I am not a man, but what made you think that I am not strong?” Meera thought. She is strong indeed.

I had a few characters in my mind when I started writing The Bridal Pyre: Nainam Dahati Pawakah. But I didn’t have the entire story carved out. But while I was writing this story, I would meet one woman every day, who, I believed had something in her that Meera should have.

An average Indian woman is the epitome of patience and tenacity, I know that. I have witnessed this numerous times in numerous ways. But her patience knows a limit too. And when the bounds of her patience are disturbed, only the heaven knows what hell she can break. She doesn’t have to be a protagonist of a war, she can be just you and me. But she can do things beyond people’s perception of hers.

‘Don’t touch me anymore, Abhi. I will be sullied, I will be stained, I will be dirty…”

No, she didn’t say this to a rapist. She shivered as her husband extended his arms towards her to offer help. Her fatigued body had no strength to clean itself again. She had just washed his child out of her body. That day she was quiet, still coming to terms with the loss of her only hope for survival. But she didn’t dig herself deep into this blow. She rose up and raised her voice in a question, the first and only question she ever asked to her husband, the father of her unborn child.

Avantika Debnath“How on Earth did I even conceive? How did I conceive staying with an impotent bastard like you?”

Meera is a personification of my idea of a regular woman. I was tired of watching the unrealistically naïve and benevolent women in the daily soaps. I was like, who are these women? I haven’t come across such deities in my 30 years long life. I need to put forward the real challenges a woman faces in a third world country.

Meera’s challenges were real. Her trauma was real. Her mistreatment at the hands of her husband, her in-laws, police departments, lawyers, judges, political leaders, goons, social workers, media houses, every bit was real. All these were incidents that I had read in papers, seen in news, heard from near and dear ones. And then I weaved them into the texture of Meera’s life, in The Bridal Pyre: Nainam Dahati Pawakah.

Grab your copy of The Bridal Pyre: Nainam Dahati Pawakah to know how Meera fought back, how she strived to bring justice to her side, or whether she at all got it. Mind it, this is not a Bollywood movie where the end is always happy, this is not a Shakespearean play where the end is always tragic. The Bridal Pyre is life, and what turns life will take, we can only guess.

The Bridal Pyre is available at http://tinyurl.com/q4b375e (Flipkart.com)

http://tinyurl.com/pn2rmht

http://tinyurl.com/p4md962