Whore by Kuzhali Manickavel
Reviewed by Farah Ahamed
Mind, Memory and Music in Kuzhali Manickavel’s ‘Whore’
There are many reasons why I enjoy Kuzhali Manickavel’s writing; most of all for its humanity but also for her experimentation with tense, point of view, and irrealism. In her work, the reader slips in and out of different versions reality, one moment feeling intensely connected to the characters or narrator and the events taking place, but at the very next, estranged and bereft.
In her story ‘Whore,’ Manickavel explores how an emotional experience, music and memory are intertwined. At one level the story appears to be about the narrator’s experience of being sexually harassed for a month by a stranger on a bus, but it is much more than that.
The first three lines of the story begin with, ‘I will,’ which suggests that Manickavel’s narrator is talking about a future event. However, we realise from the tone and the precise and minute details shared, that the incident has already happened. The effect of this blurry distinction between past and future leaves the reader speculating about what exactly happened to the narrator. At the same time, the reader also recognises that this is exactly how we cope with trauma. We try and process it through fear, denial, guilt, shame, anger and if we are lucky, we may even get to recovery and resistance.
The first line of the story starts with the unnamed, female narrator directly addressing an unknown stranger in the second person, ‘You.’ The tone is conversational, but as the story unfolds, it becomes increasingly unsettling. The narrator says, ‘I will meet you on a bus.’ This is followed by a second line where the narrator says, ‘I will be thinking of the Pulveli song from Aasai when you will come up from behind and put your hand on my hand.’
The Pulveli song is an upbeat, happy song. I did not understand the Tamil lyrics, but as I listened to the melody while I read the story and wrote this essay, I was struck by the incongruity of the tune with the subject matter of the story. But while contributing to magnifying the overall horror of the narrator’s experience, it also subtly emphasised that the narrator, even though she was terrified, was a survivor and a fighter; the rhythmic, positive musical vibe is a background to the narrator’s sharing what happened to her shows that the writing is in fact an act of courage and resistance.
To return to the story, the third line reads: ‘I will not realise what you are doing until your hand is on the side of my breast and you are whispering ‘sexy whore’ into the back of my neck.’ This is a familiar story to which many of us will relate and we are put on our guard. We realise the story is bound to trigger our own painful memories. We might even think of stopping and not carrying on with our reading, but the narrator’s tone is compelling and we keep going.
The narrator’s shock is heightened by the fact that how she imagined the harasser would look, is not how he does. Instead of being ‘dark and dirty with red eyes,’ he has a ‘scrubbed face, white teeth and clean hands,’ and it is only because he has the cheek to wave at her, she knows who he is. The Pulveli song is mentioned again at the end of the first paragraph: ‘Everyone will laugh at this and I will laugh at them while the Pulveli song runs in a loop inside my head.’ In the narrator’s memory, the Pulveli song is now forever connected with the harrowing experience of being assaulted on a bus by a stranger.
In his novel, ‘Remembrance of Things Past,’ Proust examines the aesthetics of how the mind receives and forms impressions of music, whether heard for the first time, or recognised from the past. He explores what we recognise when we hear a tune, what we associate with it psychologically. For him the answer lies in memory. He says, ‘the mind assembles something that is no longer pure music but rather design, architecture, thought,’ which allows the actual music to be recalled. And to this list we can also add experience. For Proust, music recalled in one’s memory is tainted because it has become invested with private thoughts and significant emotional experiences. Similarly, for the narrator in Manickavel’s story, the Pulveli song can no longer be a joyful tune enjoyed solely as a pleasurable musical experience, but one she will always associate with being called a ‘whore.’
In ‘Whore,’ which also feels like a song or poem with four stanzas, the narrator tells how she tries to escape from reality and find comfort in the familiarity of the Pulveli song. She says:
‘When I can no longer tell myself these things, I will stare out of the window with the Pulveli song in my head and think that you are right, I must be a whore because I am letting this happen.’
Even though the traumatic memory is associated with the Pulveli song, listening to it somehow also provides her solace. This is reassuring, until we find it is only temporary. In the penultimate paragraph, she says:
‘I will dream of you…. People will laugh and pull the children out while the Pulveli song plays in the background.’
The Pulveli song haunts her; it is a trigger and she has no control over whether it could elicit an involuntary memory while she is awake or asleep. Nor can she restrict the memory – if she replaces the Pulveli song with another – every time she hears the new song, it will remind her of the Pulveli song and the associated experience. There is no escape.
In the final paragraph of the story the narrator says:
‘After a month, it will be over.’
Is she reassuring the reader, or is she still addressing the stranger, or is she talking to herself? We aren’t sure. But there is the same confidence in the short sentence that was apparent at the beginning of the story. However, as we know with Manickavel, nothing is certain, everything is constantly shifting. And so the self-assurance is short-lived. The next, much longer sentence, conveys nervousness and fear both in words and syntax:
‘You will disappear and I will panic each time I see someone who looks like you.’
Simple words, arranged with a metric lyricism, to capture the narrator’s anxiety and dread – is also familiar to those of us who know of similar experiences.
One line on, the narrator says, ‘I will have the national anthem as my ring tone.’ The Pulveli song is has been replaced with the national anthem. What is the narrator trying to do? Can one erase a memory so easily? Does it mean every time she hears the national anthem she will have no recollection of the bad memory? Or will it always be a reminder that it replaced the Pulveli song in deliberate attempt to forget? The mind cannot be relied on to keep memories separate.
Manickavel’s choice to write the story in the future tense was to show how the narrator tries to convince herself that she will be able to erase the episode from her mind, while at the same time showing the impossibility of trying to control memory. The narrator says:
‘I will tell myself that it is no big deal, that I’ll forget all about it one day. Sometimes this will make me feel better.’
But we know this is impossible. There is no forgetting. The edifice of memory is continually evolving, being assembled. As Proust said, ‘Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.’ Every time we remember something in the present, we further the memory through our current thoughts and emotions and then lay it down as an updated version. Which leaves us wondering; what exactly happened to the narrator when she was harassed? What was the psychological impact of it on her? Is she telling us exactly what happened? Or just how she remembers it? Reality is often worse than what we remember.
Manickavel has a tight control over the structure of her story. It reflects the passage of time, four paragraphs and four weeks, as much as she emphasises the slippage of it. The song, the experience, time and memory – are carefully layered into the story, just as they are constructed in the mind.
Manickavel’s story vividly depicts the trauma of being sexually harassed in a public place. It also explores the ability of our minds to conjure up inner worlds. She shows how memories become associated with songs to give them personal relevance. She illustrates how a melody and an important emotional experience combine to form a memory. And she demonstrates the similarities between two ever-present fears: that of encountering the harasser unexpectedly and the threat of an involuntary memory creeping upon you suddenly.
And what overall impression does the story leave on the reader? Will you ever be able to listen to the Pulveli song without recalling the groping stranger on the bus whispering ‘sexy whore’?
Read Kuzhali Manickavel's 'Whore' in Out of Print 18, March 2018
Reviewer Farah Ahamed’s story Dr Patel, featuring the eponymous character, appeared in Out of Print 20, September 2015 and A Man of Talent , also about Dr Patel, in Out of Print 40, December 2020.
#Premise features Ahamed's review of Kuzhali Manickavel’s This is Us, and This is Us Outside.
