About the Author

Kavery Nambisan – The Life of an Authoress and a Surgeon

A new line of Indian writers have made a distinct mark of their own on the contemporary literary
scene. Many new authors like Aravind Adiga, Chetan Bhagat, Sarita Mandanna, together with
the known old warhorses like Vikram Seth and Amitav Ghosh have been a revelation to the ever
changing face of English literature in India. One such name is of Kaveri Nambisan, who has,
quite surreptitiously though, made a mark in the world of literature.

Her Early Years and Personal Life

Kaveri Nambisan was born in the beautiful coffee and spice district of Karnataka, Coorg. She
studied to be a doctor from St. John’s Medical College, and later went to England for her FRCS.
When she could not find peace in England, she came back to India to work in the rural sector.
She is a surgeon and she’s carried her medical skills to remote places like Mokama in Bihar,
which is a dacoit infested place.

She went on to work in other rural areas in Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, and Karnataka. She even
won the Tata Excellence Award for her contribution as a doctor in the state of Tamil Nadu. She
was first married to Dr. K. R. Bhatt, who was her colleague at St. Johns. The marriage ended
after 18 years of togetherness and a daughter, Chetna.

She then married a well-known poet Vijay Nambisan. Currently she is working as a medical
advisor at the Tata Coffee Hospital in the Kodagu district of Karnataka, her birth place.

Her Work and Recognition

Kaveri set foot in the writing business through a magazine for women. She, however, did not
continue with it as she could not find a forte in it. She found her calling in writing stories for
children. She even won the UNICEF CBT award for her children’s story titled ‘Once Upon a
Forest’, which even made it to television.

She then transcended into the realm of serious writing when she wrote the book ‘The Truth
(Almost) About Bharat’, which Penguin India published in 1991. The book revolved around a
span of three months in the life of Bharat, a medical student and his journey.

It was written from a male’s point of view. The other books written by Kaveri are ‘The Hills of
Angheri’, ‘Mango Colored Fish’, ‘On the Wings of Butterflies’, and ‘The Scent of Pepper’.
Kaveri writes voraciously on health issues and also against female foeticide.

She also participates often as an active member of the Association of Rural Surgeons of India.
She was given the honor of being invited to the University of Iowa under the fellowship of the
International Writing Program. Her novels were read in colleges of repute in the US, including
universities like Cornell, Yale, Berkley, and Columbia when she visited the country.
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She also managed to collect adequate donation for her association. Her recent book, ‘The Story
That Must Not Be Told’ was chosen for the Man Asian Literary Prize in the year 2008. Currently
she is working on a non-fiction project by Penguin India, titled ‘Why Should Health Be a Luxury
Item?’

Book Review: The Mango Colored Fish by Kavery Nambisan

Kavery Nambisan handles with deep insight, the anguish of Shari and countless Sharis in post-
independent modern India in her novel The Mango Colored Fish. It exerts an essentially
feminine argument on marriage; that every girl should be married within that marriageable age
and to a highly suitable boy, approved by family and society. If not that girl is looked at as an
oddball, a failure. In the patriarchal Indian society, marriage is a phase of initiating Dharma, a
part of life’s pleasure, a way of fulfilling one’s social and religious obligations and liberation
from being socially condemned. Love is not requisite in marriage. A woman married to have an
identity.

In a patriarchal society a women is considered really lucky and happy if she has a good marriage,
children and financial security. No one would try and think, whether she is happy with the
traditional roles that she has been assigned; whether she is happy in carrying the burden of her
family without making any hue and cry about it? Society and tradition, through the role of
mother, condition young girls to believe that real life consists of getting married, having
children, supporting their husbands’ aspirations while throttling their own. “The tragedy of
marriage is not that it fails to assure woman the promised happiness-there is no such thing as
assurance in regard to happiness-but that it mutilates her; it dooms her to repetition as routine”
says Simone De Beauvoir in The Second sex (502)

Nambisan dissects, analyzes and highlights the kind of freedom young women enjoy and yearn
for, before and after marriage in the character of Shari. She focuses on the question of female
identity with in the domestic circle of family. It ponders on the question- why can’t a woman be
sufficient unto herself, without being tied to the relational self of a mother, daughter and wife?
Why not she be regarded as an individual with independent ideas than as an extension of a man?
When this acceptance does not happen, fulfillment in marriage becomes a chimera for both men
and women.

Marriage is a cliched metaphor and its rejection is an expected expression of revolt by educated
women. Nambisan underscores the evolution of thought within educated women in India,
especially of the middle-class and the upper middle-class, westernized and modern but standing
at cross-roads, as they face the day to day dilemmas between the traditional organized lives filled
with role-playing and the western influenced modern life full of excitement and adventure.
Nambisan facilitates narration by Shari in a confessional mode and emphasizes myth of beauty,
insincerity of upper-middle-class aspirations and an obscure pursuit for meaning in life. There is
a radical rejection by the protagonist Shari of the traditional female role and the pretense of
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happy family.

Nambisan’s narrative style, her idiomatic language, her sensitivity while dealing with the issue
of marriage, differentiates her from other writers. While giving different colors like “Mango
colored”, to characters’ experiences, she succeeds in evoking different sensations and images in
our mind. The characters in consequence bloom and attain colors and shades, identical to life.
Her responsive perception and linguistic capabilities make what could have been an ordinary,
nerve-before-marriage confessional and quest for identity, into an enjoyable journey for the
reader.

The focal point of the novel is on the characterization. Every character himself or herself is a
story, and an interesting one at that. Shari finds Gautam, a white collared computer professional,
whom she had met in a party, who was the very object of her affection, a source of disgust and
suffering now. “I was wondering how I would last the evening when this very good-looking guy
came straight up to me …He smiled and introduced himself” (31). After having imagined herself
in love with him; now, she starts to doubt her love for him. All the indications that they are
incompatible emotionally and intellectually were already visible but it took some time for her to
take it in. “You must learn to like them, sweetie” he said in the same way in which he once told
me, “you must learn to be less of a prude” (34) She pulls back from the matrimonial brink
wracked by anxiety.

Shari seems deprived of unconditional love from her parents. The disappearance and
disintegration of her surrogate parent’s marriage is a setback for her. It is a crisis that she has to
deal with and come to terms with. When she looks around for role models to measure her
impending marriage with, she does not find any in the marriages of convenience of her mother,
sister, friend or the rocky marriage of her brother. She does not have a satisfying bond with her
mother.

Nambisan delicately portrays, the deeply felt and suffered rebellion by the female protagonist
Shari, against the entire system of social relationships. But can she be a guerrilla girl or who can
say “we are feminist masked avengers in the tradition of anonymous do gooders like Robin
Hood, Wonder woman and Bat man? She is impelled by the inner need to feel loved as an
individual rather than as a responsible daughter. Shari feels soul-connection with Naren but is
unable to share her grief with him, as she could share her happiness with him. “Sometimes we
would think the same thought and it was like sipping through one straw” (99). She felt her love
for Naren was good and wholesome but it must have been flawed. If only she could see it, she
could set it right. “But- I fell in love. He loved me too. It was good and wholesome. But there
must have been a flaw somewhere” (234). When she narrates this to Suren Swamy, the Swamy at
the temple, his rejoinder is that she has seen the best and the worst of life [marriage] at such
young age. He comforts her that few people have the strength to love as her uncle and aunt loved

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each other. “You belittle your strength….Forgive” (233). Once she had done that she would
realize that love was never flawed.

Nambisan’s assertion is that female emancipation will be fully realized only when, rights to the
female body is given to itself, right to its own truth, its right to self-possession. Men accept the
body and bodily response as natural, as part of human identity, as they have been conditioned
and sanctioned by society to do so. Are women’s bodies and bodily responses less natural? Yash,
Shari’s friend is deeply unhappy as she lacks emotional and sexual fulfilment in marriage.
Nambisan depicts the concerns of feminist theorists such as ‘Showalter’ as they struggle with the
emergence of their individual selves, with their sexual desire, a phenomenon that has swept the
nation. It brings to mind Eve Ensler in The Vagina Monologues who gives us real women’s
stories of intimacy, vulnerability and sexual-self-discovery.

Shari’s flash of insight into others and herself is a symbolic journey into the inner recesses of her
consciousness, of her self. It is an extraordinary self-discovery; richly textured and sensitively
perceptive. There is a strong feminist streak, of Shari's life being controlled by others, of her not
even being aware of her inner self at the external, everyday level but she is surprisingly sharp
and witty, in the pictures and portraits she draws in her mind’s canvass. The ‘inside’ of Shari
travels to external places and into different experiences in different times to piece herself
together.

Interestingly, Nambisan depicts the suffering and conflict of the modern educated woman caught
between tradition and modernity. Shari gradually musters up the courage, for a cathartic
emptying of the soul. It comes as no surprise that, Shari breaks off her engagement, after her
period of soul searching. She is able to see her way ahead clearly. “What I mean is-everything is
going to be fine” (241). She can rely on herself now, to make her own decision. The novel ends
optimistically, with Shari sentient to the bird song, sung in a clear, confident note. She stops to
listen on her way back home, to meet her family with the news of her cancelled wedding. She
would go back to teaching the primary school children. “I stop to listen. When my moment of
reckoning comes, I shall know what to do” (241).

Source: https://peporoni.blogspot.in/2013/01/book-review-mango-colored-fish-by.html