Translator Translated_ A Novella - Anita Desai [3]
One day, in class, her teacher named this very writer whose book lay open before her—Suvarna Devi—and spoke of her as the unsung heroine of Oriya letters. She told Prema, the most ardent student she had ever had, that it was worth learning the language simply to read the work of Suvarna Devi. 'She will not only reveal the sweetness of the language to you but open your eyes to what you don't even know exists here.' So Prema stopped in the bazaar on her way back to the hostel and found this very paperback amid the magazines, calendars and greeting cards with which the so-called bookshop was mainly stocked. She showed her find to the women at the hostel who expressed amazement that she had not known about this writer: they had been made to read her short stories in school—not always with reverence, it seemed. One of the women who stood out from the others because she wore her hair cropped in a place where all the other women had long pigtails or tightly wound and carefully pinned buns, and even wore trousers if she was not going to classes, said, 'Why do you want to waste your time reading Suvarna Devi? You won't get a job at a university if you do. You need to read Jane Austen, George Eliot and Simone de Beauvoir. No university will look at you if you haven't read The Second Sex. Forget Suvarna Devi, read the feminists, read Simone de Beauvoir.' This reduced many of the others to helpless laughter; they tried out the foreign name in many different ways, all of which sounded absurd.
Prema not only read the collection of Suvarna Devi's short stories but returned to the bookshop to see if they had any more of her work. They did not, but in the college library she came across a journal the writer had kept while living in the tribal areas to the south; it was bound in green Rexine and the library flap at the back showed that it had been issued to readers exactly twice in the last seven years. Prema borrowed it and took it back to read in the hostel and found that the journal entries, many of them of an anthropological nature, and the notes on village life in the forest, provided a backdrop for the fiction she had already read but were otherwise disappointingly dry. Prema had little interest in nature or the rituals and ceremonies of tribal society per se and found the notes lacking in the characters and events that had made the short stories so lively and engaging.
She asked her companions at the hostel if they knew anything of the life of this author, so oddly divided between literature and anthropology. 'Oh, she goes to those areas with her husband,' they told her. 'He is a doctor and runs clinics there. Who wants to read about that?' It suddenly occurred to Prema that the writer might live in this very town. She was told, casually, that yes, they believed she did. 'Where?' cried Prema. 'Can you tell me where?' Her mind leapt ahead to that prized objective of any serious student: a personal interview. Besides, such a meeting might create another link to her mother's world. And there was so little time left, she was due to return to Delhi in just a week. Someone told her in which part of the town Suvarna Devi's husband had his practice but no one could give her a specific address. They knew Suvarna Devi's work from their school syllabus but that did not make her a local celebrity: instead, it just made her one of them.
Prema went there on foot one day, after her class, to see if she could find it for herself. It was a neighbourhood rather like a suburb on the far outskirts of Delhi where the city petered out into the dusty plains, a jumble of small bungalows no longer new, many with