From Tejimola to Cinderella

My 'Shelf Life' column for November:

Clothes that fit and people that don't: reading Aruni Kashyap’s retelling of a classic Assamese folktale

 

In Aruni Kashyap's story 'Skylark Girl', part of his recently published collection His Father's Disease, a young Assamese man is invited to an international conference at a Delhi-based university. There are other writers there from the Northeast, but Sanjib gets the feeling that they already know their way around—they know each other's names, the editor of the journal, how to negotiate the Mexican items at the conference lunch.

Kashyap weaves Sanjib's experience in and out of the story he has submitted to the conference: a retelling of the Assamese folktale 'Tejimola'. There is no obvious overlap between Tejimola and Sanjib. Her tragedy is of a different order from his discomfort at the conference. And yet, if you read carefully, clothing is crucial to both narratives: clothing as identity. So Sanjib notes how the young men on campus turn up in shorts and the women wear their cotton saris “as if they were in bed till a moment ago”. They are the epitome of ease, while he feels “like that classmate who came to school with long nails and smelly clothes and got bullied”. Sanjib's sense of impostor syndrome is reiterated in a scene from his past that he has turned into a visual metaphor: his only visit to a well-off girlfriend's house, where his tattered chappals seemed to “permanently taint” the gleaming marble floor.

Meanwhile, Tejimola's mother dies in childbirth, and the baby girl is saved and raised by the midwife Aghuni. But then one day Aghuni dies. Soon after, Tejimola's father—a silk merchant called Dhaniram Saud—sets off on a long journey, leaving her at the mercy of her stepmother Romola. Romola has waited a long time for this moment. When Tejimola wants to attend her friend Sokhi's wedding, her stepmother takes out a particularly fine mekhela-sador, “an expensive golden muga-silk dress from Sualkuchi”.

Tejimola is very surprised, because she hasn't known her stepmother to be so generous—especially when she has only asked for“good cotton”. But she accepts, doesn't think too much about it, and sets off with the clothes in a jute satchel. Unbeknownst to her, though, the stepmother has slipped in a piece of burning charcoal and a little rat. By the time the girl reaches her destination, the clothes are half-burnt and rat-eaten. Sure enough, upon her return home, the stepmother uses the ruined mekhela-sador as an excuse to put her to work grinding rice. And then, in one of those scenes of horrific graphic violence that punctuate folktales, she crushes the trusting Tejimola to death with the rice grinder, one limb at a time. 

Buried in the backyard of her own home, the young girl's body sprouts into a gourd-bearing creeper. When a beggar woman tries to pick a gourd, the plant sings out in Tejimola's voice. The stepmother chops it down in fury, but its remains grow into a plum tree—in Kashyap's version, an elephant lime plant. Uprooted and thrown in the river, Tejimola's next incarnation is as a water lily. When her returning father encounters the lily's lament, he coaxes her: “If you are my Tejimola, be a mynah and eat the betel from my hand.”

In Kashyap's telling, the mynah is a skylark and the coaxing is an order. When he returns home, the father takes “a long piece of red-bordered sador”, walks up to the skylark's cage and says, “My daughter, now I command you to take your real form and wear this.”

There is a core idea Kashyap seems to be juggling, of clothes being a good fit—and consequently perhaps clothes as the means that reveal when things are not a good fit. When Sanjib tells his posh girlfriend that his school uniform khaki trousers were the only ones he had before moving to Guwahati, she says “it sounded like a fable”. And in Sanjib's retelling of the classic folktale, the stepmother's too-fine mekhela-sador is a trick, one which Tejimola should have recognised as being too good to be true. She doesn't. She suffers. And she returns to human form by wearing the clothes brought for her by her father.

To fit the clothes you wear is to know who you are. The motif is not uncommon to the folktale. The French Cinderella is identified by her foot fitting the glass slipper. In his pioneering anthology Folktales From India (1991), the legendary scholar-translator AK Ramanujan points out that tales of the Cinderella cycle are told from China to South America, with a central female character being found and lost and found again.

In another Assamese folktale, that of Teja and Teji, the evil stepmother turns Teji into a mynah, dresses her own daughter in Teji's clothes and sends her to the king instead of his wife. “When the stepsister sat at the loom and made a show of weaving, the mynah cried: Whose cloth is it? Who weaves it? She breaks the threads and leaves them knotted.” The king finally notices—a little late, like most men. Like Tejimola's father, he enables the mynah to return to human form, and all is happy again. The story is steeped so deep in the fabric of Assam that the heroine is identified not by the clothes she wears, but the cloth she weaves.

 
Published in The Voice of Fashion, 5 Nov 2019.