Assuming that pubs had always looked like pubs, dark even during the day, music drowning other sounds, you imagine the two women in the story inside one, solving crosswords, bored. Vicky’s was their permanent pub, so largely present that you remember the pub’s name more clearly than the women’s. The year was 2001 when the internet was still making its way into our computers and Facebook was still three years away. But if someone had taken a serious look at the figure that the women made, it would have been them – Lavanya and her friend, the narrator – who founded the equivalent.
At least, that’s what Nisha Susan’s title story in her collection of shorts tells us. Women who forgot to invent Facebook and Other Stories, she calls the book. Instinctively, you imagine Nisha, the journalist who founded Ladies Finger, as one of the women inside the pub she’s written about. In the story, it is Lavanya who starts off writing down names of everyone they knew and drawing lines between those who had slept with each other. In an hour they had a messy sex map full of crisscrossing lines, crossing countries and continents.
We were not too wrong in our assumptions. Says Nisha, “The two girls and the sex map story is a friend and me in Pecos. We made the map and we were hysterically laughing. Then after that it became a joke and a metaphor among people I knew. X and Y are separated by two people on the sex map. JUST TWO!”
If only, they had gone on to create a website for it.
All 12 stories are knotted to technology in one way or another. There will be the constant presence of a laptop or a phone or blogs playing characters you hardly notice, for that’s how much technology has become a part of your life.
It was also a theme Nisha was interested in, and told her editors at Context about. She already had a few stories written here and there, which were dusted off and polished for the book. By February, they had a book, ready to be printed.
All of the stories didn’t jump out of old pubs she visited. Some just evolved from stray thoughts. “Often, it's just thinking of what would happen if a person I knew in one life and a person in another life met... like the mother and daughter in Missed Call (another story). Their essential personalities are based on an older woman and two younger women I knew in Delhi. Everything else is about pushing and pulling at the plot and trying to figure how each would have reacted.”
The Missed Call she mentions is an endearing one, if you are the kind who finds feminist old women endearing. Especially at the most unexpected corners of the world. The woman lives in West Delhi with her two sons and daughter. Radha, the daughter, is the one with the missed calls, but quite a contrast to her mom with the fixed mind. Even as other young women of Radha’s age are married off as teenagers, what her mother offers is money for education that she will somehow make. Radha would rather be married off with a dowry. Your interest therefore falls on the mother, who after an unfortunate accident that broke her back, has the time to recollect her eventful past – condemning a father who failed to support a daughter, eloping with a man she loved, throwing him out when he later proved disloyal and uncomplainingly raising three children by working for it. She is not the sacrificial textbook mother who gives away her hard earned money for the whims of a silly daughter. She is, as we said, very endearing.
Marriage, in Nisha’s stories, isn’t exactly top priority. There might be buildups on relationships but marriage is a line that passes you by if you don’t pay attention. “My friend CK Meena, the journalist and author, observed that ladies are doomed after marriage in my short stories. When I was putting the book together, this is something I'd noticed. And I thought, uh oh, a pattern. Then I was like whatever, it is what I believe. That work has a good chance of helping you find yourself and that marriage is a good way of losing yourself,” Nisha says.
Interestingly, there’s more focus on female friendships. In the title story, it’s Lavanya and the woman narrator. In Trinity, the next story, it is the friendship of three women going astray. In Teresa, one woman is fascinated by another, who is the dead wife of the man she married! When other characters try to hurt her with remarks on the husband’s and his first wife’s relationship, you can’t help feeling, 'what do they know'.
“Honestly, I didn't think about it much. It reflects the relationships that matter to me. I am still close to girls I knew when I was 10 and 15 and 20. Meaning I speak to them once or twice a week. I have a lot of male friends and they matter to me but they are friends I made as a working adult. In general, I place a lot of premium on how friendships affect your life,” Nisha says.
Nisha / Photo credit: Paromita Vohra
Female friendship has not been entirely ignored before, Nisha says, and cites examples - “Margaret Atwood’s Cat's Eye. Or Elena Ferrante’s works. Popular fiction. Commercial women's fiction. Romance. Mysteries... the stuff that women write and read is full of women's friendships. It's great.”
Nisha has featured male leads in two stories, and both times the characters came out creepy. One is a psychopath and the other is an insensitive ass. Nisha enjoyed it fully, she claims.
She names the latter as one of her favourite characters, along with Dakshayini of How Andrew Wylie Broke My Heart, one of the final stories. She also “loved the Singer (of The Singer and The Prince) and the younger boy in Missed Call, the one with the fish tank.”
Nisha also obviously loved creating Malayali characters and stressing on the language every so often. So you hear about one character speaking to another in Malayalam, a second character having an accented Malayalam, a third one not using it at all.
“I am deeply tickled by being Malayali. I love it because it comes with so much entertainment paraphernalia. Perfect idioms for every occasion. Cinema, comedy, of course. But also a population who 'po' when you say 'va’. The essential grumpiness, 'I refuse' tendency, the suspicion of pretensions... I mean, what's not to love,” Nisha says.
There is more to it. She wants her characters’ language identity and caste identity to be perceptible to the reader “because in life these things affect how we function in the world, how other people see us, our opportunities and windfalls.”
Even as they are engrossed in their world, outside realities pass them by. In the story Gentle Reader, it does more than that. It creates a very familiar world of hatred on the internet, comments after abusive comments thrown on someone in the name of religion. A book, an opinion, intolerance and blind hatred – all calling out from the story like an annoying reflection of the world you live in.
Through all of it, there’s also partly unintentional humour. Nisha’s book is therefore very real, even among all the internet lives it exists in.