Calculated Chaos: Review of Sucheta Dasgupta’s ‘Ladies’ Night’

A short-story collection—even when it is called Ladies’ Night and features chic women with cigarettes and wine-glasses in the backdrop of a bar on the cover—will, you assume, open itself like all well-behaved stories do, to the reader’s understanding. But instead, what if it daunts you about its blurb with the questions: “Which is your story? What’s your poison?”

To pick up a book as unconventional and thought provoking as this, you will require a strong sense of adventure, the integrity for intense self-interrogation and the fondness for quirks. Be prepared for sharp edges and narrative disruptions. The language expertly juggles the colloquial and the philosophical, the jazzy and the expository, the descriptive and the introspective.

The frame narrative is simple to begin with. Four women with unusual names walk into a bar on a hot summer afternoon and over drinks, decide to tell each other stories late into the night. The women are called Gaunt, Bubbly, Obnoxious and Madame White, and while they appear totally different in temperaments at first, the 18 stories they narrate, speak to and build upon each other with astonishing resonance. Embedded in their thoroughly different plots are similar concerns with the lives of women living in an unjust and brainwashed society.

Spanning generic conventions ranging from science fiction to fantasy, mythology, supernaturalism and folklore, the stories in Ladies’ Night recurrently return to one vital question: is freedom for women truly possible in the world we live in and where exactly do we begin to build its possibilities? This is the quest to which all other quests in these stories are subordinated. There is the constant anxiety, for instance, over women’s invisibility in a man’s world. In ‘Bubbly Dreams about Ghosts’, the narrator says: “To him, in his mind and mine, he is a mirror of my own soul. Hence I am him, none other than his own self. So in his consciousness I stand, effectively nullified, ultimately invisible.”

The cultural consciousness of the Bengali identity and the cosmopolitan plurality of Kolkata are immanent in the subconscious of this collection that boldly tries to demolish neat ideological assumptions. Many a tale questions the identity and individuality of women within relationships of love, marriage and motherhood. The possibility of women’s free expression within so-called empowerment narratives of higher education, migration, technological competence and use of social-media are also interrogated. Whether implicit or explicit, each story offers its particular representation of womanhood against the background of Bengali middle-class ethics and the binary of the good/bad woman.

There is a headiness to these stories that grows on the reader. Once the narrative grammar of the book is mapped, its rapid shifts from realism to fantasy taken note of, and its jumps from the possible to the improbable underscored, reading the collection becomes deft. Each story is meticulously crafted, its open-endedness an essential element of its being. The stories ransack temporality, spatiality, history and futurity in eccentric ways as they mix and match queer names, characters, relationships and structures in the paradigmatic patterns of video-games. The last and master-story, narrated by the bartender, weaves all these different narratives into one surreal thread, leaving the reader to agonise over whether any meaningful escape from this real-unreal dystopia is ever truly possible.

An air of artistic confidence and jaunty irreverence marks this collection which is dedicated “to all the women who live and die for freedom”. Seekers of the well-made plot are likely to be disappointed. But for those willing to be sucked into a postmodern, magic-realist universe where computers and balls engage in technological romance, dead colleagues rub shoulders with the living, and a daughter encounters her dead father in a dog, the stories offer their own rewards of wit, humour, artistic rigour and intellectual surprise.

Admitting these stories into your consciousness will help in affirming the wild possibilities that egalitarian visions of the world afford. The book’s title seems symbolic in hindsight. Given that the four intriguing women storytellers get together on an afternoon rather than at night, the ‘night’ in the title connotes both revolution and promise.

These stories never conform to the comfortable idea of a story. They demand the reader’s committed participation to give them a definite shape in a reformist ideological universe. Every story aspires, to use a phrase from the book itself, to break “the female behavioural mould” and to view the woman question as both epistemology and ontology. The last story envisions an International Women’s Party because “if Tamils can have a DMK, and Dalits the BSP. And TRS was formed to fight for the independence of Telangana, and yet each of these parties can form a government to rule over a diverse demographic because the law of the land is in fact just to all, and they themselves, would have been voted out of power had they proposed anything to the contrary, why not start a women’s party?” In the hands of an alert, perceptive reader, this collection becomes the blueprint of a more equal world.

Mixing fact and fantasy, accident and history, and reverie and activism, Ladies’ Night can be worthily placed beside Begum Rokeya’s Sultana’s Dream. Stylistically, the book’s eccentricity and quirks can be read as a self-conscious literary tactic to beget and engage attention. At a time when feminism and women’s liberation have sadly been declared as passé by many, if these are to still attract attention and action, can it be done through a casual vocabulary or the conventional deployment of literary agency?

No.

Hence, the calculated chaos of Ladies’ Night.

(Basudhara Roy teaches English at Karim City College, Jamshedpur, and is the author of four collections of poems, the latest being A Blur of a Woman)