Reading While Nursing 8 (Early October)

 Jyothsna. If Wishes Were Aeroplanes. Notion Press, 2019.

If Wishes Were Aeroplanes reimagines Jane Austin'e Persuasion in a contemporary Indian setting. It features a feminist heroine, a university lecturer of English literature in a women's college in Delhi, India, and narrates the journey in which she was torn away from, and returns to, her first love over a span of fifteen years. 

It is a wonderful read that putting it down was almost an impossible mission. I snatched time here and there while nursing Y in my arms to read, and sometimes Y would have to pound hard at the dinner table when the spoon of weaning food was suspended in the air while I was too engrossed in the reading. 

As a romantic heroine, Anahita Rathorn is unique and charming in an intellectual manner. She argues and she reasons; she gets angry at injustice and she weeps; she is strong and tender. She empathizes with others and influences whoever in her vicinity. She makes decision and follows it. 

The story brings together the abilities to love and to be strong in a woman, a statement of practical feminist views that women can be both caring and wise. The cliched stereotype of feminists in popular media is usually more than pleased to dichotomize these two abilities in spite of the fact that their oppositions are mere social construct. As the story stages women of several several generations, the narrative tableau weaves together these women who mature over years and explore their ways in their respective struggles. Their lives are knitted together to conflict but their individual colors thrive. No matter  whether they consider themselves to be feminists or not, they lead the life by the spirit. The male characters are equally impressive that most of them are supportive rather than protective to their partners, and most of them also learn to care and to be affectionate, an important message to be carried and respected in a world in which gender-equality is about the well-being of both man and woman. 

Jyothsna's wry sense of humor and wit are irresistible. One of my favorites is "you can take the teacher out of the classroom, but you cannot take the classroom out of the teacher."

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I came to know Jyothsna when we are doing our doctorate degrees in the UK. I went to see her performing a story in an event to empower women on the International Women's Day, the same event in which I recited some of my own love poems the year before. I was absolutely overwhelmed by her charisma and the strength of her performance. Over the past decade, though being far apart in different places, she has been a moral support to me in many struggles concerning a woman academic. I have also started to develop a more concrete view of feminism, a life and moral saving dose I need. Geographical distance has rendered our communication electronic, but she is for sure more than an email to me.