Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows by Balli Kaur Jaswal
When 22-year-old university drop out Nikki signs up to teach a writing course at a local Sikh temple in London she was just looking for extra money to supplement her job in a pub. What could be so hard, helping a group of widows who want to learn how to write stories?
It turns out that many of these women actually can’t write, let alone write stories. They’re barely literate because literacy hasn’t been necessary in their lives. But boy, do they have tales to tell and they want to share them with each other. Nikki, a Punjabi-Sikh-British girl finds herself in charge of a group of white duputta clad widows (white being the color of mourning for the Indian community) who tell stories of love, lust, sex and romance. They feature secretly bold women who know all about desire and aren’t afraid to express it; they are stories about pleasure and satisfaction and longing; and maybe about experiences that were once real and that now, as widows, they will never experience again. Hai Ram as my late mother might have said, OMG.
Author Balli Kaur Jaswal has penned a novel that is charming, revealing and poignant. The book is set in Southall, one of the first neighborhoods in London that housed the immigrant Indian community. When I was growing up in London, Southall was where you would go to eat authentic Indian food and buy Indian clothes. This was way before the days of chicken tikka masala being declared the national dish of Britain. It was an enclave and no doubt full of many women who were brought to a strange country at a young age, after an arranged marriage, who led a life that was circumscribed by the men in their lives – fathers, husbands, brothers.
Nikki is the antithesis of these women, a progressive, British born Punjabi Sikh, who lives on her own, smokes, drops out of her law program and lives above a pub where she works. That is so many strikes against her, as far as the community is concerned, I’m not sure where to begin! She is the classic first generation child of immigrants, struggling with the push and pull of the different lifestyles she is navigating. Meanwhile her sister Mindi, an accomplished nurse, is ready to embark on the path of an arranged marriage, an anathema to Nikki, and confirmation to their mother that Nikki is on the wrong path.
Perhaps taking on this teaching job at the gurdwara (a sikh temple) in Southall is a stop on Nikki’s road to redemption, despite the skepticism of the woman who hires her, Kulwinder Kaur. . Or maybe not. When Nikki realizes that many of the women are illiterate she is mad at being hired under false pretenses. When they start recounting their erotic tales she is flabbergasted. Soon she sees that telling these stories is vital to these women. However, it is clear that their sessions must be kept secret not just from her boss, Kulwinder, but also from “the brothers” Southall’s version of the morality police, a group of self-appointed men who feel it is their right to keep the women of their society in check. There is also a parallel story about the untimely death of Kulwinder’s daughter Maya, all tied up with honor, of course that is eventually revealed thanks to this group of women.
Apart from writing a thoroughly engaging novel, Jaswal has shone a light on a group of women who are the most hidden or disappeared, widows. India is the society where the ritual of sati, the practice of a widow throwing herself on the funeral pyre of her husband was common place until banned in the mid nineteenth century. Even so the status of widows has been seen as second class, with widows ostracized or neglected by their in-laws, lacking status and money, and for whom the possibility of re-marriage is negligible, regardless of age, since she is viewed as bringing bad luck.
The women in Jaswal’s novel often married young, extremely young. They have no status and many are poorly educated. There is an unbridled liberation to their stories, but also a longing and a desire to be heard. They are unconcerned about discussing their stories on the bus to class because “nobody eavesdrops an old lady chatter. To them it’s all one buzzing noise. They think we’re discussing our knee pain and our funeral plans” says one of widows, Arvinder. These women really are invisible in their society.
Sexual experiences that they knew nothing about when they entered their marriages are clearly something they have learned. But these women have been so sheltered, they don’t even know the words for their private areas and hence the use of a lot of euphemisms for their most intimate parts – for men and women – manhood, shaft, aubergine (British for eggplant), danda (Punjabi for stick), womanhood, bud, silken folds, pulsing knot. It’s funny and endearing actually.
At first Nikki is embarrassed and horrified “I’m running an erotic storytelling workshop for Punjabi widows.” But as a feminist activist she comes to realize that these women are on their own journeys of discovery, and she understands the instinctive nature of storytelling, that precedes literacy “sex and pleasure are instinctive right? Good, satisfying sex makes perfect sense to even the most illiterate person. You and me, we’re just used to seeing it as an advanced invention because we learned about it after we learned the other basics – reading, writing, learning how to use a computer, all of that. To the widows, sex comes before all that knowledge.”
What these women have lived with is a sense of shame when it comes to their own desire. As one of the women asks herself “Why was she ashamed? Because she was supposed to be; because women, especially at her age, did not ask for these sorts of pleasures.” What most of them want is for their voices to be heard, at least amongst themselves. By telling their stories these women “had started one quiet rebellion.”
If you yourself are embarrassed to be seen in public with a book that has “Erotic Stories” in its title, don’t be. This is no Fifty Shades of Grey. This is a book that is about women who find an outlet to express themselves, to use their voice and to validate themselves and their feelings. You will come away with a great insight into the experience of Indian immigrant women (that is probably applicable to other immigrant groups too) and you will rethink how you look at and interact with all the older women in your lives.
BEFORE YOUR READ:
LENGTH: 307 pages
GENRE: Fiction
THEMES: sex, marriage, immigration, mystery
COMMITMENT: A thoroughly engaging book with profound insight in the lives of some immigrant women.
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