By Anjana Basu
Review & Description
“Women are not born witches. Life makes them turn that way. If you want the truth of what I say, look at the facts: there are no young witches, no child witches. All the women torn or hacked to pieces in the columns of the newspapers are old. Some of them are not even witches at all. Perhaps just women like me who discovered the gift of a black tongue when everything else had failed them. I didn't know I had a black tongue until all the pieces started falling into place. And not even then."
And so the story begins, from the mouth of Maya, who has learned how to hate and who has grown into a woman old in wisdom though still young in years. A woman who looks back on a time when she was just sixteen, street-smart and sulky, forced to leave the bright lights of the city for a village backwater because she has been witness to the forbidden.
It was another woman who taught her to hate—an unhappily married woman, supremely self-involved and obsessed with her husband. The woman’s former lover, on the fast track to political success, but still clinging to the memory of their youthful romance, now explodes back into her life, propelled by the force of Maya’s “curse.”
And then there’s Maya’s brother, a politician in the making, who understands corruption and violence and little else. His plan is to use blackmail as a shortcut to fortune—and Maya has handed him that opportunity.
Maya looks back on her life and thinks: All those people came together in my life more than twenty years ago. If I had known when I stepped out of the train into the country village where I was being sent “for my own good” what I know now, “I would have tied a pitcher round my neck and thrown myself into the nearest pond. But I didn't know—so the ponds around our village remained flat unsympathetic bodies of water, furred over with hyacinth leaves. Like the one in the city that began it all. If I stuck my tongue out at that sheet of water it would probably reflect black at me. But I don't.”
“Women are not born witches. Life makes them turn that way. If you want the truth of what I say, look at the facts: there are no young witches, no child witches. All the women torn or hacked to pieces in the columns of the newspapers are old. Some of them are not even witches at all. Perhaps just women like me who discovered the gift of a black tongue when everything else had failed them. I didn't know I had a black tongue until all the pieces started falling into place. And not even then."
And so the story begins, from the mouth of Maya, who has learned how to hate and who has grown into a woman old in wisdom though still young in years. A woman who looks back on a time when she was just sixteen, street-smart and sulky, forced to leave the bright lights of the city for a village backwater because she has been witness to the forbidden.
It was another woman who taught her to hate—an unhappily married woman, supremely self-involved and obsessed with her husband. The woman’s former lover, on the fast track to political success, but still clinging to the memory of their youthful romance, now explodes back into her life, propelled by the force of Maya’s “curse.”
And then there’s Maya’s brother, a politician in the making, who understands corruption and violence and little else. His plan is to use blackmail as a shortcut to fortune—and Maya has handed him that opportunity.
Maya looks back on her life and thinks: All those people came together in my life more than twenty years ago. If I had known when I stepped out of the train into the country village where I was being sent “for my own good” what I know now, “I would have tied a pitcher round my neck and thrown myself into the nearest pond. But I didn't know—so the ponds around our village remained flat unsympathetic bodies of water, furred over with hyacinth leaves. Like the one in the city that began it all. If I stuck my tongue out at that sheet of water it would probably reflect black at me. But I don't.”
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