Embracement of Ordinariness and Everyday Life is a post-pandemic aura: A
Postmodern Discourse of a Time-Spatial Boundary of Women's Lives through the
short stories of Shobha De and Juhi Aisin Ghani
Amrita Das
PhD Research
Scholar
Veer Narmad South
Gujarat University
Surat, Gujarat, India
Abstract:
This research paper
presents the everyday concept from the cultural feminist perspective of Rita
Felski. Everyday life has changed both during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.
Irrespective of gender, class, and religion, people confront the new normal
with a shift in the cultural paradigm. It has created an unprecedented
experience for the everyday. But the question that arises here is the nature of
experience. How and in what manner is this everyday making us different?
Needless to say, the concept of ‘everyday’ is a marked feature while discussing
cultural phenomena. With the ‘new normal’, the everyday definition also
received a newness. In the modern era, feminist theorists have come up with a
negative approach to this everyday concept. The mainstream feminists sought to
break the cultural barrier between home and domesticity, where the ordinariness
of life, although rich in context, was deliberately ignored. Through the
theoretical framework of Felski, I want to highlight the newly changed sphere
of this everyday concept with its time-spatial boundary. This middle-class,
non-elite, playful concept of daily life can be a positive phenomenon of
self-discovery. How women’s reciprocation with everyday life through its
multiple attributes brings a new identity concept, and the possibility of it
through the exemplification of the short stories of Indian writers Shobha De
and Juhi Aisin Ghani, will be my point of critical analysis here.
Keywords: Everyday, Postmodernity, Repetition,
Habit, Home
Introduction
Eschewing myself from demarcating the
definition of the COVID-19 pandemic, I want to invest my research in a direct
description of the after-effects of the pandemic life. The years 2020 and 2021
have left society with a new culture where humans are getting habituated to
using masks, digitalization, sanitization, quarantine, and maintaining social
distance. These new parts make a ‘new normal’ culture.
The world becomes impossible to
imagine without this cultural part. The newness of society brings changes in
everyday life too, without fail. The universe has witnessed the pain, trauma,
solidarity, and anxiety of thousands of people. Mentally, physically, and
sexually, the life world turns into its opposite. These notions are not based
on practice and experience alone; literature and literary texts with anecdotes
of mirroring society emerge with the description of those traumatic situations.
The sociologists, literary theorists, and cultural critics grasped these
portions with enamor.
The propositions that come in trend
become the culture with which people learn to live and survive. I think this is
the justification for everyday life. Along with literary texts, various newspaper
articles and media houses proclaimed these aspects of life. The tumultuous part
of everyday life is highlighted by exhibiting its normalcy. But interestingly,
the other side of the coin is kept aloof from elaboration. The other side of
everyday life also exhibits pragmatic, constructive, and undeniable features
that are mostly ignored. This research article would like to delve into the
constructive and aesthetic side of everyday life for women. This new invention
will surely mark some changes in the thought process of knowing and
understanding women, their power, self, authenticity, and identity.
Everyday life
The concept of everyday emerged in the late 18th
and early 19th centuries as an adjective form from the pen of
Romantic writers. From the writings of Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen, a
glimpse of everyday life is found. Jane Austen used this concept to make a
distinction between contemporary and canonical. In literature, the concept of
everyday comes with two ideas: first, it is no more than a variant of the
probable, and second, it is just a looked-over concept of the real possibility
of it.
However, it came at first as a general
concept. Later, its engagement with literature marked its important existence.
In the beginning, the everyday concept was ignored, but with time, it has
gained a place in literature. In literary studies, everyday emerges
conceptually, as stated by Stanley Cavell. This everyday world is always with
us, but it is negligible. We always discover it in a new way, creating an oxymoronic
situation.
I think this discoverable attitude is very
much present in literature, and my study also discovers the traits to be
discovered in everyday life. After Austen, in the writings of Wordsworth and
Keats too, we get glimpses of everyday description. William Galperin says, in
the poems of these two giant poets, ‘a sense of life interrupted, where, in
tacit acknowledgment of what literature has recently discovered, life and
everyday life finally merged (Galperin 8)’.
But before literature with the pen of
social scientist Henri Lefebvre, this everyday concept was introduced famously.
Lefebre's famous book Criticism of Everyday Life is about the
efficaciousness of everyday. He makes a difference between everyday-ness and
everyday and adds the repetition concept in a positive approach. According to
him, “the everyday has always existed, has always been repetitive. It emerges
nonetheless at the intersection of two modes of repetition; the cyclical and
the linear.” (9) The cyclical dominates nature and the linear dominates
rationality. About these two ideas, I will argue in the next sections. The
monotony of modern life is reflected in his writings.
Apropos of this monotonous modern
life, this is significant to mention that in the modern era, this everyday
possesses a negative prospect. The varied form of daily life receives its skillfulness
in the postmodern period. Lefebvre prefers to view culture through the
postmodern lens. This is because postmodernism sets a constructive notion of
ordinariness. To quote from the article “Feminism, Postmodernism and the
Critique of Modernity” of the book Doing Time: Feminist Theory and
Postmodern Culture “This postmodern era, by contrast, involved a breakdown
of foundational truths, an exhilarating liberation of difference and
multiplicity and blurring boundaries between high and popular culture (60
Felski)”. The culture although an old
concept, but its meaning has changed in the modern era. Modern contemporary
scholars tend to consider culture as an unstable affair with disparate
behaviors, perceptions and lifestyles.
Another reason for rejecting modernity
is its aestheticism which is commonly found in elite groups of people. Citing
the example of Dadaism and Surrealism, Felski says, ‘The modern world speaks of
the chaotic workings of the unconscious, the fragmentation of the self, the
unreliability of language, the confused nature of perception (58 Felski)’. The
reason for mentioning the elite class is because Felski opines that modernity
tends to describe the culture of the privileged groups. Contradicting this fragmentation,
postmodernism seems to trace all life aspects in a single thread. To make the
culture approachable all disciplines can convulse and feminism is not separate
from this.
Postmodernism evaluates the positivity of
local and popular culture which is excluded by the ‘universalistic pretension’
(159 Featherstone) of the modern. It tends to be the ignored, undefined,
unnoticed part of everyday life. In the words of Featherstone ‘postmodernism as
enhancing tendencies to transform the cultural sphere which gained a strong
impetus from the 1960s’ (159). The women are not the carriers of the ‘heroic
life’, a term that denotes the opposition to everyday life used by
Featherstone. The quotidian life is the base for the fabrication of the
conceptualization, narratives of life, and definitions of ordinariness.
Everyday Feminism
Feminist theory typically voices up for
equality and sameness. Since its origin, the different waves’ approach towards
liberating women sums up the articulation of various formations. The concept of
everyday is not used much in feminism and cultural studies because of its
abstract philosophical traits. Feminist critics and theorists are not always
treating this concept as a theoretically valued one. According to them, this
everyday concept is a natural order that does not need any philosophical
content to verify. Quoting Mike Featherstone again, ‘…everyday life is the
sphere of women, reproduction and care (162).’
This everyday life is not simply a negative
part of life. It can have its supremacy and significance. It potentiates the
value of women through their everyday acts of resistance. My research
delineates the strata of these findings with a qualitative approach to these
forms of resistance in the Indian context. To find the significance of the
everyday concept, two Indian women writers' short stories are analyzed here.
Literature Review
Nabila Kazmi in her paper ‘Feminist
Resistance Through the Lens of Everyday Lived Experiences of Young Women in
India’ examines the lived experiences of two young women from urban slums in
India who participated in an after-school program focusing on issues of gender
inequality within their homes, communities, and schools. Her article evaporates
everyday life and its narrative against patriarchy. The simple transformation
of the quotidian life, making the household a space of their agency.
No further research has been done as such on
this unique theme. This idea pushed me to work on this and with the theoretical
concept of Rita Felski and her valuable approaches to quotidian lives, I have
worked to find the relevance of this in constructing the agency of Indian
women. Indian women abide by culture and tradition. Disrespecting these is
considered as equal to sinning. Indian women, although very small in number
there who can happily and enthusiastically revolt against their cultural
boundaries. Therefore, this research could be the articulation of those women’s
voices. The voices I have extemporized are of Shobha de and Juhi Aisinghani.
Shobha de is an
Indian novelist and columnist who is best known for the depiction of socialites
and sex in her works. Another writer is Juhi Aisinghani, a very recent writer.
Their books Lockdown Liaisons and Unlocking the Lock down Stories
I have analyzed here to understand the aestheticism of ordinariness. Through
the short stories of these two books, the writers have presented us few women
characters who awaken themselves using their very act of everyday resistance.
To bloom these acts, I have used the framework of the feminist cultural theory
of Rita Felski who is a contemporary feminist theorist of aestheticism,
feminism, modern and postmodernism, and at last cultural theory.
Rita Felski is
an academician and critic, who holds the John Stewart Bryan Professorship of
English at the University of Virginia. She talks about the everyday
aesthetics of women and their life world. Through her lifelong research, she
focuses mainly on a new way of liberating women. But her way is not a
divergence from culture, as culture is an integral part of human life. She
observes that everyday attributes towards a mundane life, taken-for-granted
beliefs, and practices, the sphere of reproduction, towards a non-reflexive
sense and most interestingly it points out the frivolous, playful nature of
others. It’s the activities outside the ongoing institutional domain. It also
talks about heterogenous knowledge.
Contemporary feminists in
their search to find women's authenticity and to establish their identity
contradict these before-mentioned every day attributes. Felski criticizes these
modern concepts stating that this traditional belief system is not always
something that subordinates women. Most feminists believe that this traditional
system should be removed – such as Betty Friedan, and Maria Mies who criticize
the homely concept. Felski in her essays finds aesthetics in the everyday life
of women. Complete research will help us to know that she believes not only
does the contemporary concept or modernity help us to find identity, but rather
it is making humans selfish neglecting everything and incommensurate with the
life world.
The established cultural
phenomenon has a limited focus on the life world. Felski’s innovative
phenomenology, different from Husserl’s’, with its amalgamation of cultural studies
creates a new aesthetic concept. This newness focuses on everyday aesthetics.
Rita in her essay Everyday Aesthetics defines the aesthetic concept of
everyday focusing on the commonplace and quotidian. Her theory conjures up the
concept of repetition, home, and habit and their positive role in making
women's identity.
The age-old concept which is
regarded as a cardinal sin in practice by contemporary theorists accepted by
Felski as an impeccable part of existence. From the chapter “The Invention of
Everyday Life”, ‘A repertoire of background beliefs, sedimented assumptions,
and every day practices turns out not to be the antagonist of knowledge, but
its fundamental preconditions’. (Felski 175) She considers habit, repetition,
and home not as a perennial part of women's lives but practicing these facets
of existence empowers women more.
She looks at these tasks
positively rather than merely commodifying them. She asks for a new
phenomenological method that deviates from Husserl’s and pays attention to the
subtle, multi-shaded form of everyday aesthetics. To prove my point more
impactful along with the framework of Felski I have scrutinized two books that
conveyed the lockdown stories during the covid-19 pandemic.
Felski’s feminist approach
Women possess an affinity with nature. The
lack of proper structural organization, women's language, and their involvement
in writing denied their essentiality in creating their agency from the cultural
perspective of women's subordination. The reality behind this- feminists'
approach to finding the identity of women- is based on a constraint against
those disharmonies. Women’s engagement with everyday life and ordinariness
forms a new language, a new self. Felski says, in the chapter ‘Subjectivity and
Feminism’, “The assertion that the self needs to be decentred is of little
value to women who have never had a self; a recurring theme of feminist
literature is the difficulty many women still experience in defining an
independent identity beyond that shaped by the needs and desires of those
around them” (78 Felski)
Thus, my research tries to find the tale of
the identity of those women who experienced this self from the new postmodern
perspective. But beyond the needs and desires of the shaped feminine theory,
how the identity concept can be explained from the ordinariness of cultural
phenomena wants to get discussed here.
Rita Felski’s everyday concept is associated
with feminism. She desires to make a solace, a connection between these two
concepts. This is because she feels the ordinariness of daily life has
intentionally marked itself as submissive. This space always weakens women. To
juxtapose this age-old concept, she stresses the liveliness of everyday. It is
noteworthy to mention that that this everyday theory does not instruct us to
accept everything of daily life widely; rather it suggests making these habits
transparent and self-evident. These habits are needed to experiment
practically, and logically. Accepting the quotidian logically does not remark
one as non-intellectual, but Felski believes those are ever-intelligent
persona.
Felski considers this everyday as a form of
consciousness. Everyday life resides in the unconscious part which is already
always ignored. It has become a taken-for-grant part of life. She wants to drag
out this so that consciously we can this life. Aesthetically this everyday life
will be enlivened to excoriate. She says this ‘aesthetic encounter is defined
by a distinctive temporality; it pivots around moments of world-disclosing
rupture and shock that are contrasting to the homogeneous and soul-destroying
routines of daily life’ (608 Rita).
The feminist confession notion talks about
not rejecting the traditional but bringing modifications to traditional
concepts. The first-person narratives of these stories confess their acceptance
of tradition not verbally always but by their attitude and actions. Felski in
her early writings about feminism and the development of feminist theories
discusses the various issues from language to individuality, authenticity,
self-discovery, and all that. Her focus and criticism of feminist movements of
emancipation are divided into two sections Bildungsroman and self-awakening.
The latter is a matter of discussion.
Felski in the beginning of her research is
influenced by Henrey Lefebvre. His two repetition concept of cyclical mode
which is represented by women whose words are predominant with nature and
linear is always added on with male culture and male rationality. In the linear
world, everyday practice gets vanished although it is connected with our lives
and becomes a sacramental part of existence. But we ignore this because we are
tending to become modern and rationalized. This everyday is a product of life,
not a stratum of everydayness.
This aesthetic part will rescue the divinity
of everyday life and transform it into a lively texture contrasting
defamiliarization. Felski is one of those radical intellectuals who finds
resonance in the traditional gesture of life experience. The linear modernist
part always tries to be under the limelight to revamp a new rational future but
results in achieving numbness and solidarity. According to Raoul Vaneigem,
modern rationality is a part of ‘seething unsatisfied desires, daydreams in
search of a foothold in reality, feelings at once confused and luminously
clear, ideas and gestures presaging nameless upheavals’ (609)
In the process of awakening, she exemplifies
a few novels where women characters discover their selves by leaving their
homes. It’s a kind of romantic quest. The quest to know the self, finds the
self, and understands the self. This discovery is an awakening of
self-consciousness. To understand the concept that ‘identity is not something
to be worked toward, but a point of origin, an authentic and whole subjectivity
from which the protagonist has become estranged’ (143 Felski). This inward and
individualistic process marks the ‘threshold between two states’ (143) and
invites the romantic theme and structure. So, when it is elucidating
romanticism then the traditions like mythology, nature, culture, and
civilization play a part.
This romantic motif works as a desire to
return to some mythic structure. These motifs Felski disconnects with the
concept of cultural feminism constituting the idea that ‘Romantic feminist
vision is the product of the psychological and aesthetic concept of liberation,
less concerned with strategic means for ending the oppression of women than
with expressing a paradisal longing for harmony fuelled by a revulsion against
the conditions of life under contemporary capitalism’ (147)
Later she favors and speaks in favour of
cultural feminism, the importance of myth, and tradition to value the feminine
culture and to lessen the power of capitalist patriarchal culture. So, a new
approach to feminine subjectivity arises with tradition and culture which is
the failed status of the socialist feminist. This new approach does not
highlight the regressive side of the traditional culture but of modernity and
progress. She evaporates the postmodern cultural assumption critiquing the
Marxist approach that always ‘relegates women to a solitary footnote’ (2 Felski)
The vision of time as “project, teleology,
linear and prospective unfolding” is linked to the universalizing logic of
modernity and the ideology of the nation-state. When they enter historical
time, women consent to the erasure of their specific identities as sexed
subjects” (16 Felski) the feminists after 1968 talked about the alternative
version of time related to the mythical and cyclical. Felski’s focus on this
time concept is worth understanding the ordinariness of lifeworld.
Time, she divides, into three parts –
everyday time, lifetime, and large-scale time. Life is the inculcation of these
three parts. Everyday time is the phenomenological time. How and at what pace our life is going on?
Life-time is the cohesion of everyday life. Large-scale time is ‘the long-term
process of time that transcends the limits of our existence (Felski 18)’; again
time is ‘phallocentrically structured, forward-moving time’ and ‘gynocritic
recurrent time’. Agreeing with the idea of Barbara Adams that the linear and cyclical
nature of time are male and female respectively is a prototypical concept. The
cyclical nature is not wholly attributed to women. This is in belief because
cyclical is natural that automatically demarcates women's sphere.
Everyday life needs to be rethought from the
repressiveness against this. Felski is influenced by the second volume of the
book The Practice of Everyday Life, where Luce Giard and Pierre Mayol’s
descriptions of the everyday lives of women are important. She says, ‘Metaphors
of everyday time are intricately intertwined with metaphors of genders’ (612
Felsski). Lefebvre quotes, ‘Everyday life weighs heaviest on women, they are
the subject of everyday life and its victims’ (612). The quotidian life is a
horror to them, disrespecting the tasks of everyday works of women, and often
women themselves disparaged it. It is not likely that the mainstream feminist's
apprehension of domesticity, and capitalistic subversion of women are
avoidable, but instead of considering this as a traumatic part or
soul-destroying notion, how everyday quotidian part, the repetition of chores
and continuing capitalism can be a strong part of women, I think Felski wants
to theorize that which I also want to prove through the analysis of these two
writers’ writings.
But at the same time, Felski also believes
that linearity and cyclical nature are not apart from each other. Both are
interdependent and based on repetition and ritual. Women also try to develop
likewise rational men in today’s world. Women are trying to be developed and
progressive in rationality, economics, and political fields. Women maintain
both these time schedules by doing both household and office work. But the
unpaid and not recognized works of women in the household cannot imagine their
self-directed future like men. ‘their lives consisted of a series of fragments,
not a carefully choreographed upward ascent(21 Felski).’
Reading modernity through the cultural lens is
a new aspect of knowing modernity where daily life is hidden. Felski focuses on
three attributes of everyday life – Time which is repetition to her, Spatial
which is home and modality is habit. The stories I have discussed here are from
the perspectives of these three attributes. Linear time is a trait of
modernity, of progressiveness which often creates complications in
self-understanding.
To mention Johannes Fabian here whose ‘time’s
arrow’ is masculine and ‘time’s cycle’ is a feminine concept Felski uses to
make her three time-spatial attributes more focused. The trait of repetition
has a connection with tradition and values, so it never marks women as failures
rather it helps to transcend the historical existence of women. Repetition or
routine is considered as a horror as a threat, but Felski argues ‘Repetition is
one of how we organize the world, make sense of our environment and stave off
the threat of chaos. It is a key factor in the gradual formation of identity as
a social and intersubjective process” (21)
Home is a metaphysical concept. ‘Being at
home in the world is an implicit affront to the existential homelessness and
anguish of the modern intellectual’ (Felski 23). As per modernity home has the
anti-home concept. Against the idea that home is considered a boring,
regressive concept, the women in the analyzed stories have made a domain of
finding their agencies. Return to family and familiar beings is badly
criticized, and home is portrayed as a place to celebrate liveliness, cheer up
existence, and fabricate a new identity.
The everyday significance of home is trinocular.
First of all, home is a place, a space for creating familiarities, and of
course this place is created by women. With the reality of home changes, the
reality of daily life. Secondly, home is a place to reflect the social
construction also. Whatever happens in the outside world, home is always the
reflection of that. Thirdly home is a space of power struggle. In each home,
women are struggling either by accepting the struggle or neglecting it. But she
is creating a space for her self-identity. This a place of cathexis of self.
The characters in the stories are found to resonate their cathexes in their
created home. Some politically, some submissively, Some lovingly with kindness
and compassion.
The third one is habit which is not an action
only but also an attitude. All these are very necessary parts of life. This is
the unconscious reality. In the hands of modern theory, this habit becomes an
ideology that is against the authentic life. Habits of dailyness, ordinariness
of daily culture household works such as cooking, rearing taking care, and very
interesting sexuality is also a part of this habit.
Repetition, habit, and routines ‘bespeak
creativity as well as coercion’ (Felski 613) Felski says these are the know-how
attitudes, these are skills to use to control or win the situation. Talking
against the everyday life-world, repetition, habit, and homely nature is so
familiar and smooth that going against this, walking on the opposite side is
quite unfamiliar in the beginning. It needs to spin the mind, rotate the
thought process, and generate new thought processes to accept the attitude.
Most of the articles, and books talk about smoothness but this research paper
is ready to accept the resilient path to show the new attitude, to mark the
quotidian as happening and lively. In the words of Gilbert Ryle, ‘We are often
more worried about people’s competencies than their cognitive repertoires’
(Felski 616)
Critical Analysis
Sobha De, a writer who is well-known for her
boldness in writing has circumnavigated the short stories from her book Lockdown
Liaisons. The novels she wrote like Socialite Evenings, Starry
Nights, and others portray the boldness of women characters, their
modernity, and their sexuality, irreverent views. Her writings have
consistently chronicled her deeply felt socio-political-cultural concerns.
These stories from the book Lockdown Liaisons are not exceptionally
different from her normal writing style. Stories are based on time-spatial
concepts.
Sobha De in her book Lockdown
Liaisons does not talk about the pain and plight much about women like her
contemporary writers. But rather how these situations have empowered women, how
love, the homely nature, and the home abode make women more powerful, and how
everyday life has given them a new way to talk about their identity, she
discusses. It is visible in her writings that tradition is reflected through
her conceptualized modern theme. So here through these stories, I want to show
the stories of those women who are modern, new women of the 21st
century but to find their existence relevant they are grasping their roots.
Their originality is not completely removed from their life world.
The book consists of 24 stories. I have
analyzed within the framework of Felski’s theory five stories here. To begin
‘My Girl friend’s Theplas’, this story is about Aarti who is a representative
of modernity. She is from Gandhi Nagar Gujarat. At the beginning of the story,
we are told by the writer that she spends her days in countries like Tuscany.
She is an ‘enthusiastic bunny’ who is always cheerful in life. During the
pandemic, she initiates charity for needy people. To help the people she starts
making online videos of cooking.
Woman, unlike the other characters of Shobha,
Aarti from this story is ‘pure, naïve and trusting’. She starts a seva mission.
She cooks food and delivers it to needy people. At first, she wants to go to
South America to commence her project, but she limits herself to her city
realizing the poor condition of the people. Her charity is mocked by others,
but her helping attitude never stops. To frame Felski’s theory here the women
do not need to be completely resistant towards the modern approach. But they
are finding solace in their own space.
To
mark this here it is worth mentioning that she starts to make videos in her
western wear, in her ‘bikini top and jeans’ but later this same Aarti turns
into Indian attire after a few days. She clads herself into that attire which
she once regarded as ‘auntyji outfits’ (Shobha 53). Luce Giard says,
‘Alimentary habits constitute a domain where tradition and innovation matter
equally, where past and present are mixed to serve the needs of the hour, to
furnish the joy of the moment, and to suit circumstances’ (e CERTEAU, Geard…
151) Aarti’s deeds to the underprivileged persons are an example of ordinary
culture. She is an example of women’s right value in everyday life. She makes
the usefulness of time, and home as her domain and habit of naiveness is a
positive attitude to uplift herself.
The next story I want to discuss is ‘Stuck’.
The story is about a memsaab named Sweety. She is a memsaab, a modern woman as
well as ‘a perfect housewife’ (Shobha 79). The story is told from the voice of
her husband. The beginning of the story shows the reluctance of Sweety to
engage herself completely with her in-laws' house. Even with her husband too,
she is fed up. She has affairs with another man just to get out of the boredom
of her married life.
But as the story gradually goes on, it shows
how Sweety is adjoining herself with her husband again. She worries about her
home, her husband, her pieces of furniture, and all the material things she has
in her home. She takes care of her husband’s meals, clothes, and other things
when her husband tells her she is the emblem of ‘a perfect housewife’. So, this
story is set in the lockdown period, and the husband wants to get rid of a girl
Ronita. He finds many options without help. Finally, his wife helps him to come
out of the problem. So, it can be said that the new normal helps them to get
reunited again happily with love. Felski already notes that the self-awakening
process is included with love and healthy relationships.
‘Pressure Cooker Romance’, a story is again
about cooking. The pressure cooker works as a good omen for the life of the
protagonist of the story. She can’t cook food; she keeps herself at bay from
cooking. The sound of the neighbour’s house pressure cooker makes her repentant
and angry at the same time. But at last, this cooking part, the pressure cooker
helps her to get romance. So again, with the cohesion of everyday time, she is
represented as a representation of the lifetime with the gesture of love.
The next story is ‘No Chicken Please’. This
story is a prime example of habit which Felski says is not an action always but
attitude too. The story is based on madamji, the main character, an 86-year-old
woman. She is completely alone during the lockdown. She is taken care of by
Ayas. The story introduces her as an aristocratic woman, rich, wealthier who
possesses two maids to take care of herself. At that time, her home is
different and her habits too.
But lockdown solidarity changes her attitude.
She finds cathexes in the kholi of her maid who lives with her drunkard husband
and 10 years old son. The fear of death alone and being lonely in the last days
of her life change her definition of everyday life. She is habituated with a
western-style washroom, clean toilet, and comfortable king-size bed. But in the
house of her maid, she is just using the Indian toilet, normal tea, and a
simple cot. With time she accepts the ordinariness accepting the simplicity and
happiness from that life. ‘Really times are strange’ (De 138)
The last story is ‘A Quest Ends’ where Shobha
de has given the reader the taste of different types of family stories. The
story is about two bankers and their healthy love life. This couple has
everything except a child for which they are dying to. But the story never
presents any glitches between them because of the scarcity of a baby. Rather it
ends with understanding, love, and happiness.
From breakup to being in love with each
other, the importance of love, home, habit, and a saga of everyday life is
again worth mentioning in the stories mentioned above. Love, fighting,
friendship, and enmity are discussed here broadly and eloquently. The daily
life and ordinary household works are specified. Sometimes in a negative
manner, often in a positive approach. The various facets of everyday life from
the perspective of women she has drawn well. Even her stories glimpse the
necessity of figuring out the rituals, and traditional bondages, return to
them, and come back approach. This
approach truly satisfies the nature of everyday phenomenology and makes it a
new social construction to look at. Set in the modern background, the women are
not typical housewives indeed, but during their lonely time, their household
chores help them to come out from the trauma of Corona virus.
‘When everybody is talking about the
uncertainties happening during the lockdown 2020, she tries to show you another
side of it’ (online). This line is about the new very recent writer Juhi
Aisinghani. This Mumbai-based writer through her stories in the book Unlocking
the Lockdown Stories portrays another side of lockdown with a positive air
of spreading love and happiness.
The first story of Aisinghani is ‘Love is in the Air’- This is the story of finding
love in motherhood. While contemporary feminists are criticizing motherhood,
here Juhi through this story is celebrating motherhood. This motherhood is not
only for Angel’s mother for Angel but for the whole nation. The mother earth’s
caring attitude is also described here. Angel’s mother after serving the whole
nation during the lockdown, by helping everyone to come back to their mothers’
laps, says that motherhood is something that gives her a new identity.
Another story ‘Revamping
Together’ is about a relationship between Jay and Natasha. Their love story is
majorly prioritized. How lockdown instead of separating them, which Jay thought
before, bringing them together. Corona virus helps them to get to know each
other again in a new way with time they spend together, in their own abode and
recurring their lost habit of togetherness.
‘The Guy Next
Door’, This story is again talking about the love, the return to love of Anika.
Anika, a small-town girl from Dehradun, comes to Mumbai with lots of wishes to
be an actress. To make her position in the glamour world. She becomes undaunted
and limitless to fulfill her dreams. She chases her dream only and to fulfill
that dream she ignores all her relationships with home and friends. But to
fulfill her dreams, she becomes alone day by day. Her focus diverges and she
loses every hope in the glittering city. But every time her home, her parents
are her only solace. At last, she returns to her friend Sushant whom she
ignores once.
The second last story is
‘Love in Lockdown’, the story of Sarah, a frustrated younger sister of six
siblings. Her frustration is with her life as her childhood is not lively and
for a new life. But she ends up understanding the happiness in the home, homely
love, homely food, and homely atmosphere. She feels secure there. In the new
city, with the new job, she forgets her origin with Mike. Her boyfriend Mike
takes her up to the moon at first. Later he only drags her down from that
fictional world. She comes back to her reality where she understands herself.
She finds herself. Moreover, she learns the most important thing in life which
is love. Love with her own self and love with her family. The importance of
home and homely gestures.
In the stories, we find a glimpse of the
mundane, materialistic touch, and elements of ordinariness. In the first story,
it is the cooking, in the second story it is the motherly love, in the third
story it is the normal love relationship between two lovers. Intentionally I
choose these stories to show the simplicity, and ordinariness which are not
fictional, but rather integrally connected to the deeds and feelings of our
everyday life. Democratization is marked everywhere.
Again, to mention that characters are not
completely traditional or conventionally diagrammed women. But during the
lockdown when the pandemic gulps every life, and relationship, both men and
women comfort themselves in their very own space. Their own culture,
traditions, family and home become their saviours. The story ‘Fortunately
Unfortunate’, is again about cooking’s grandeur. Culinary skills which are regarded as boring,
unproductive, repetitive, and monotonous tasks now become a source of
authenticity. To quote here, ‘Doing cooking is the medium for a basic, humble,
and persistent practice that is repeated in time-space, rooted in the fabric of
relationship to others and to one’s self, marked by the “family saga” and the
history of each, bound to childhood memory just like rhythms and seasons’
(Aisinghani 157)
Thus, the postmodern aspect of everyday life
surely becomes an important facet of understanding the significance and
momentousness of cultural phenomena. This ordinariness is the very own
undeniable nature of our lives. Making this everyday as a noun and persuading
requires multitasking which pays attention to ‘diverse and often contradictory
strands of cultural expression and affiliation without losing sight of broader
social determinants of inequality (206 Felski)’.
Works Cited
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Parrot. The Everyday: Experiences, Concepts, and Narratives. Cambridge
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Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture. New York University Press,
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