An anthology with four poems and seven short-stories, The Homemaker book is available on Amazon eBooks.
I was Editor. Here is my Editor's Note:
A taxpayer is disgusted with the maggots infesting his muddy lawn, and wishes for flowers or vegetables to take its place. But he is learned enough to know that he would rather whack himself on the head with a spade than stick it inside grass. Therefore, he delegates this task to the maid, the gardener or his country bumpkin cousin (whoever really, as long as they can toil in damp soils and six-legged things) to get the job done.
At this point, depending on their disposition or general acquaintance with gratitude, the taxpayer either lauds this worker to high heaven, assumes their entire existence as pointless, or alters his praise for the subaltern into such self-centred moral pontification, that Gayatri Spivak starts hiccupping in another corner of the world.
Let us understand the point of this analogy. Let us, from the very start, sedate, euthanize, and put ten feet of soil above the taxpayer and, with him, put to rest this absurd notion that a homemaker ought to either be glorified or taken for granted. They do not. The former alienates said homemaker (and, indeed, the entire home!) into thinking that no one else can climb their pedestal. The latter is a careless affront to the point-person for food, clothing, and shelter.
Let us, then, dispense with the snobbery and the romance.
Homemaking is a job. Some do it out of the wholesomeness of their hearts, some out of necessity—much like other jobs. The fact that it is often not paid is a problem with market forces, not with the integrity of homemaking. However, as some of these stories and poems will verily show us, shaping murukkus, loading clotheslines or helping aged matriarchs use the washroom are jobs that appear mundane only from the outside. In the human heart, the passions they generate can range from raging tempests to elysian streams.
In this anthology, the simmering emotions of the institutionalized housewife, the impulses of the insecure feminist, the plight of the pivots and levers of our world, or the captive whose turnkey is their own memory, have been narrated in such a wonderfully elliptical, chaotic, sublime and slippery manner, that it may only have come from authenticity.
It has been my pleasure to fine-tune these stories. Along the way, it has also been a privilege to interview thought leaders in academia, corporations, literature, media, military, publishing and spirituality—all of whom, piece by piece, liberated ‘homemaking’ from its flimsy constructs of gender and domesticity. Advocate Flavia Agnes taught us that the plight of Indian housewives is too human an issue to be political. Captain D.K. Sharma taught us how powerful the impulse to protect one’s motherland may be. Awais Khan’s bestseller wised us to the miseries of the Lahori elite womenfolk. I could go on, but instead, I will only nudge you to finding these discussions on Facebook—free interviews that really should be behind a paywall.
Armed with their perspectives, I end with a humble request to the noble reader: in your travels, kindly do not do the disservice of equating the protagonists of these stories with goddesses or asuras. The homemakers of the world are hardly the extensions of some Sakta tradition. Nor are they femme fatales hatching a conspiracy of ideology. They are, in equal parts wonder and mundanity, creatures of nature.
And whatever is more human with that?
Masklessly yours.
Neil Nagwekar
Date of publication: 28 October 2021
Comentários