‘Dechoma and the Women of Mahe’: This novel maps girlhood between beauty and its absence
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For much of Dechoma and the Women of Mahe, young Umaiba is watching women. She gazes at them as they apply surma, worry about how they look, and slip through emotions she cannot yet name. Umaiba is young and waits at the seemingly pearly gates of womanliness, struck by afflictions of comparison, and yet drawn to the all-knowing mirror.
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Written by Fathi Salim in Malayalam and translated by J Devika, Dechoma and the Women of Mahe leans on the tender nerve of the transition from girlhood to womanhood, following Umaiba through the years leading up to her first period. It is a novel of womanhood, womanliness, and women. Around Umaiba gathers an expansive cast of ummas, bellummas, brides, healers, widows and neighbours, each inhabiting womanhood in a plethora of singular registers.
Amid this carnival of femininities, Dechoma presents herself as the most apparent antithesis to womanliness – an ageing woman with dusty feet, paan-stained lips and a stubborn refusal to wear slippers, who becomes the one Umaiba returns to time and again, her presence eliciting comfort and joy. Salim’s novel rests on a familiar tension: the allure of womanhood often arrives entangled with conditions that distort the invitation. Set in Mahe, the novel is replete with the hyperlocal, yet...