C. Marriage: Authority to Her Own Body and Divorce as Transgression
Ammu lives a life as a housewife in the tea plantation estate in Assam. Two years after the marriage, she gives birth to Rahel and Estha, the twins. The four seems
to live a perfect life of a young family: two smart children, a beautiful housewife as a mother, and a managerial office employee as a father. However, as time goes by,
Ammu starts learning negative points of Baba’s personality. First of all, Baba is a mythomaniac. It is elaborated in the quotation below:
There were things about him that Ammu never understood. Long after she left him, she never stopped wondering why he lied so
outrageously when he didn’t need to. Particularly when he didn’t need to...When she confronted him about these things, he never explained
or apologized. He just giggled, exasperating Ammu to a degree she never thought herself capable of p. 19.
Besides being a mythomaniac, Baba turns out to be an acute alcoholic. In page 19 it is stated that “...Her husband turned out to be not just a heavy drinker but a full-
blown alcoholic with all an alcoholic’s deviousness and tragic charm p. 19.” In years that follow, when Ammu looks at her wedding photograph again, she realizes
that her groom is drunk while marrying her. Later, looking back on the day, Ammu realized that the slightly
feverish glitter in her bridegroom’s eyes had not been love, or even
excitement at the prospect of carnal bliss, but approximately eight large pegs of whiskey. Straight. Neat p. 19.
Even he is drunk when Ammu is in a labor to deliver Estha and Rahel. He does not stay in the delivery room. The quotation below shows how Ammu has to
fight her labor alone: In November, after a hair-raising, bumpy bus ride to Shillong, amidst
rumors of Chinese occupation and India’s impending defeat, Estha and Rahel were born. ...Ammu checked them for deformities before
she closed her eyes and slept. She counted four eyes, four ears, two mouths, two noses, twenty fingers and twenty perfect toe-nails... Their
father, stretched out on a hard bench in the hospital corridor, was drunk p. 20.
As the time goes by, his alcoholic behavior not only has affected his family but also has affected his career. In the fourth year of their marriage, Baba’s drinking
goes worse that he skips working hours. Eventually, the tea estate plantation manager, an English man named Mr. Hollick, summoned him. In a friendly
managerial manner, he threatens Baba to sack him. Mr. Hollick can make exception to keep Baba employed only if Baba let Ammu stays in Mr. Hollick’s place and gives
him sexual service. Over coffee Mr. Hollick proposed that Baba go away for a while. For
a holiday. To a clinic perhaps, for treatment. For as long as it took him to get better. And for the period of time that he was away, Mr. Hollick
suggested that Ammu be sent to his bungalow to be “looked after p. 20.”
It is mentioned that Mr. Hollick often demands sexual service from the tea- pickers he fancies. As the consequence of this manner, the tea-pickers give birth to
light-skinned children whose well-being in neglected although they are allowed to live in the tea plantation area p. 20. His incursion to Ammu is the manifestation of
his superiority as an English of a higher official rank to the Indians of the lower rank. Ammu, enraged with this arrangement, refuses to go to Mr. Hollick’s place
and gives him a sexual service as a substitute for her husband’s undisciplined attitude. However, her refusal is a silent, speechless one. Her rage emerges because her
husband has the ability to see her as a possession that can be used as a substitution. She said nothing. He grew uncomfortable and then infuriated by her
silence. Suddenly he lunged at her, grabbed her hair, punched her and then passed out from the effort. Ammu took down the heaviest book
she could find in the bookshelf—The Reader’s Digest World Atlas,— and hit him with it as hard as she could. On his head. His legs. His
back and shoulders p. 20. This crisis becomes a habit. Although Ammu refuses to help his transfer in the
first time he proposes this plan, Baba still tries to persuade her. His constant failure in
persuading her turns him into a bully. Ammu grows a disgust and anger to her husband.
This fell into a pattern. Drunken violence followed by post-drunken badgering. Ammu was repelled by the medicinal smell of stale alcohol
that seeped through his skin, and the dry, caked vomit that encrusted his mouth like a pie every morning p. 20.
At last, after 4 years of marriage, Ammu takes her children and her belongings back to her parents in Ayemenem. She decides to finally leave her husband because
his violent bust has included the children p. 20. After the divorce, Ammu believes that for her, life is done and there is no
more dream to fulfill p. 19, 20, 21. At the age of 22, Ammu has made a fatal failure that cost her self-confidence and the will to live a life in a burning passion that is
usually possessed by a young woman. Here it is seen that Ammu still has the agency to make decisions although she
is already married. Compared to Mamachi and Kalyani’s submissive attitude towards their husbands see subchapter C of chapter III, Ammu’s attitude towards her
husband can be considered a transgression. Ammu’s refusal to using her body as a reimbursement to her husband’s lousy manner at work is a sign of waywardness, but
also a sign of her possession over her own body. Indian women are often dispossessed from the luxury of having authority to their own body. Seizing her
authority to her own body is considered as a transgression, since as a wife she has to
obey whatever her husband says. Her choice to divorce also requires bravery. Divorce means losing her legal
standing in her husband’s house, while she already lost her legal standing in her parents’ house upon marriage. Therefore, to file a divorce means she will lose her
legal standing anywhere. However, to divorce is also a transgression in which she has her own idealism about how a marriage should be.
D. Coming back to Ayemenem: Transgressions from Familiy Values
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