The Dreams of a Mappila Girl, the memoir of B.M. Zuhara, the first Muslim woman writer from Kerala, has been translated from Malayalam by Fehmida Zakeer

In the preface of her memoir, The Dreams of a Mappila Girl (translated from Malayalam by Fehmida Zakeer), B.M. Zuhara, the first Muslim woman writer from Kerala, makes it clear that ‘my native place of Tikkodi is never far from my mind; it follows me in my dreams and hovers in my mind while I am awake.’ Her ancestral home, Kizhekke Maliyakkal, would evoke much wonder among the people of her village and even outsiders, appearing as a character in many of her writings. The architecture of the house is described in great detail, providing the reader with a sense of what large ancestral homes of Mappila Muslims in Kerala were once like in the 1950s and 60s — each space and object named and organised in its daily functionality. The main hall, the naduthala, led to the nalukettu or the central courtyard surrounded by rooms. Periyagams were passages that led to the verandahs. Thinnas or raised platforms were located at the far ends of the verandahs — some for women where they ate or prayed and others for men.

The kitchen and food, a woman’s complete world in those days, is re-created in special detail: the grinding stones (ammi), mortars, firestoves, iron griddles. Traditional breakfasts constituted puttu (ground rice steamed with coconut) or pathiri (bread made from rice flour). Night meals were always pathiri with curries rotated on a daily basis — onion, dried fish, drumstick leaves and egg curry. When the children grumbled about the unvarying fare, omelettes or bulls-eye eggs were added to the menu. There were special breakfasts meticulously cooked for men — wheat dosa, tomato roast and oats for the author’s maternal grandfather, Valippa; egg roast with pathiri or puttu for her father, Uppa.

With Valippa’s sudden death that is witnessed by many of the family members present, a whole tradition comes to light. The author, known as Soora in childhood, undergoes shock intermixed with disorientation. Just five years of age and the youngest among eight siblings, she is overwhelmed when the house is suddenly thrown into chaos, with thick crowds gathering both inside and outside. When one of the several maids asks another if she should continue making pathiris, she is rebuked with the words: “Stupid girl, stop making the pathiris. Who do you think has passed away just now? You cannot even imagine how great he was. The uncrowned king of the land is lying motionless in that room.”

The after-death rituals include throwing away all cooked and uncooked food. According to tradition, the widowed grandmother, Ummama was mandated to spend four months and ten days in her deceased husband’s room, with doors and windows closed, forbidden to see unrelated men, and with a temporary toilet specially constructed for her use. Visiting relatives, including a dominating woman relative, could stay on anytime between three days to four months.

The decline in the financial status of the family following Valippa’s death has been very subtly portrayed. There is a suggestion that the coffers were empty at the time of his death, despite him owning acres of land. Unlike during her father’s days, when she was treated like a queen, Umma is portrayed sweeping the yard along with the servants, gathering leaves to be burnt for use as fertilizer for the money-yielding coconut grove. In Umma’s mind, there is the threat of government takeover of their land, and the increasing difficulty of realizing paddy payments from cultivating tenants. She tells Ummama, ‘We will not be able to survive only by selling coconuts….The only way forward is to educate our boys. There are no opportunities in this town. I am telling you, we should be thinking of moving to Kozhikode.’ Another small indicator: Umma would forbid her children to queue up for payasam (rice/lentil pudding) when served on special occasions in school, where their classmates were mostly children of servants or farmers. She would make the dessert for them at home. But things changed as times changed. There is also the loss of the special family identity of the Kekkele house when Soora and her siblings move from their village school to the high school in Payyoli. It is on the first day of the new school that Soora is made to announce her name in class. Diffidently, she says: Zuhara.

Throughout the memoir covering her life from the age of five to twelve, Soora is either teased by her siblings or scolded by Umma for being readily prone to tears. Though as a child Soora shows signs of non-conformity, insisting before her derisive brothers that she wished to study to become a lawyer, it is to Umma’s views and actions that she is most bound. Efficient, far-thinking, adaptable and dedicated to the family, Umma’s views are also deeply traditional and constantly surrendered to Allah’s will. One of her first admonitions to Soora is: ‘Women don’t have to be highly educated to accomplish something in life. Pray to God to give you a smart, rich and educated husband and when your prayers get answered, that will be your achievement.’ On confiding her discomfort on this issue, it is from her high school headmaster that Soora gets the reassurance: ‘By the time you grow up, things will change. You should study hard and become someone who makes a difference in society’.

The Dreams of a Mappila Girl
By B. M. Zuhara
Translated by Fehmida Zakeer
Yoda Press, Sage and Select, 
pp. 211, Rs 550

Umma also has a mission: Soora should learn how to recite the Quran with correct pronunciation before the onset of puberty (bhoolookhakal). Umma’s reasons seem both orthodox and pragmatic: when Soora marries and her in-laws realize she hadn’t read the entire Quran, they would hold Umma responsible. If they were to move to Kozhkode, there would be no one there to teach her the Quran, so she would have to stay behind in the village home. While Soora frequently chafes against restrictions imposed upon girls, including her mother’s belief that she should be married by age 15, she bears her resentment in silence and out of an uneasy fear. Her words are poignant: “Little girls were subjected to enough restrictions already. What other boundaries was puberty going to draw around me? The fear kept me awake at night, sometimes even causing me to snap out of my sleep.” Soora is not able to mount real resistance to her mother. Yet her anxiety and tension on this score is somehow also the reader’s – an empathy in the understanding that all that Soora can do is be aware of her feelings, feel them in their intensity, and hope for the tide to turn, when awareness will bring clarity and the capacity to make informed choices.

An incident which gives this memoir its edge of transparency is something that happens in the immediate family. Soora visits her much older married sister Ummitha’s home in Kozhikode. This is preceded by her visiting another family which, though large and extended, is generally integrated and not overly rule-bound. On the other hand, her sister’s house is modern, rule-bound and culturally well-exposed. First there is the acute discomfort of adjustment, and then her sister’s pointed lack of welcome as the family is to leave on a holiday to Ooty the next day, there being no space in the car to accommodate Soora. Anguished, Soora leaves for her home with the caretaker the next day, her anguish leaching into both Umma and Ummama. Yet the child is excited for she has been able to borrow from her nieces her own age, books written by the famous author Vaikkom Mohammed Basheer – the books being his personal gift to the family. But, later when Soora gets admission to Providence school in Kozhikode, it is Ummitha who resists Umma’s protests against Soora attending this school because its uniform involved wearing half-skirts, succeeding in pacifying her mother by seeking special permission for Soora to wear a kurta-churidar.    

It’s her chequered marriage that leads Umma to be pivotal in making decisions on behalf of the family. Uppa, Soora’s father as an unmarried man with a tempestuous nature, had obeyed a strong inner call and left on a Haj for Mecca and Medina without informing his family. He spent almost six months there under difficult conditions. The religious impulse remained strong in him through daily prayers and recitations, even when his life was riven by land disputes involving incessant court cases, including cases against Valippa. This led to him paying inadequate attention to agriculture, leasing land to sharecroppers, his family’s share becoming less certain with time.

When one of her older sons accuses Umma of living in her father’s house despite Uppa having built three houses, Umma reminds him: ‘Your father built a house using the money he got from selling a coconut grove that used to give us a thousand coconuts at one time. He sold highly priced land in order to build three houses. Even then he couldn’t pay off his loans. If we had that land now, the income from it would have been sufficient to sustain us.’

Though as readers we don’t learn much about Soora’s relationship with her father, there are fond descriptions of her brothers: Achu’s teasing boisterous ways; Kunhika’s tricks with engineering skills, but also his rendering help to her with maths in which she feels excruciatingly deficient; Gafoor’s conviction that he would only study art, lending his own strength to coaching her for her interview to Providence school, and accompanying her for it.

Perhaps the most poignant description is of Soora’s step-uncle, Mammad — Ummama and Valippa’s son (Umma being born from Valippa’s first marriage) — who, as a graduate student, suffers a sudden mental breakdown, becoming severely unstable. Confined outside to one of the office rooms with a caretaker, his behavior is schizophrenic and occasionally violent. Methods from contemporary forms of treatment to religious men had all been tried, but unsuccessfully. Especially poignant is the end: neglected by his caretaker, he wets his bed, suffers chest pain and high fever. He is washed and taken inside to sleep on the thinna. Umma and Ummama sit beside him through the night, reciting the Quran. It is this constant recourse to prayer and trust in the divine that informs the lives of the women throughout the memoir, as also a co-existence that must prevail among family members.

Zuhara has written novels and short stories and has been a columnist in regional newspapers. In 2008, she won the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award for her contribution to Malayalam literature. She has also been the recipient of the Lalithamibka Antharjanam Memorial Award, the Unnimoy Memorial Award and the K. Balakrishanan Smaraka Award. Her novels Iruttu and Mozhi and novella Nilavu have been translated into Arabic. Nilavu has also been translated into English as part of an anthology titled Five Novellas. Zuhara has herself translated Tayeb Salih’s Wedding of Zein and Naquib Mahfouz’s Palace Walk into Malayalam. Her new novel Pennungal is forthcoming.

Zakeer, the translator, is a writer and translator from Kerala. Her short stories have appeared in several prestigious international literary journals and anthologies, with several shortlisted in Asian short story competitions or receiving honorable mention. An anthology of stories titled Keeper of Secrets is forthcoming.

This book could not have been easy to translate. It has a plethora of local terms for which there is a glossary at the end and a list of kinship terms in the beginning. This does slow down the reader as one needs constant referencing to keep the thread. Yet, it begins to root one in a bygone culture which had its own strong specificities. The translation has a seamless quality inspired by Zakeer’s own empathy for a tradition that once prevailed. Though the memoir does not have the drama of conflict and upheavals, it does what a good memoir does: invoke memories with detailed imagery and realism; with feeling and authenticity in ways that makes a reader empathize with a life once lived.