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For much of Dechoma and the Women of Mahe, young Umaiba is watching women. She gazes at them as they apply surma, worry about how they look, and slip through emotions she cannot yet name. Umaiba is young and waits at the seemingly pearly gates of womanliness, struck by afflictions of comparison, and yet drawn to the all-knowing mirror.
Written by Fathi Salim in Malayalam and translated by J Devika, Dechoma and the Women of Mahe leans on the tender nerve of the transition from girlhood to womanhood, following Umaiba through the years leading up to her first period. It is a novel of womanhood, womanliness, and women. Around Umaiba gathers an expansive cast of ummas, bellummas, brides, healers, widows and neighbours, each inhabiting womanhood in a plethora of singular registers.
Amid this carnival of femininities, Dechoma presents herself as the most apparent antithesis to womanliness – an ageing woman with dusty feet, paan-stained lips and a stubborn refusal to wear slippers, who becomes the one Umaiba returns to time and again, her presence eliciting comfort and joy. Salim’s novel rests on a familiar tension: the allure of womanhood often arrives entangled with conditions that distort the invitation. Set in Mahe, the novel is replete with the hyperlocal, yet remains starkly universal in its depiction of girlhood.
In Salim’s novel, womanhood is encyclopaedic, populated by beauty creams, surma, glass bangles, and an ever-expanding cast of women. “Monch”, or beauty, dictates and haunts, promises and allures. It explains why the beautiful Shahitha is married and giving birth despite being the same age as Umaiba, while the monch-less Ayishtha resigns herself to a life of “anam stew of moringa leaves”. Umaiba’s umma and bellumma discuss monch with a vigilance that betrays a fear of how easily it can be lost, taking one’s dignity with it. An insult from Sebitha, the village’s adorned widow, is feared, while a compliment from Beetha, the unmarried healer, is prized above all; monch structures social legitimacy, determining who is admired, who is remembered, and who can afford a little arrogance.
Unsurprisingly, this labour of acquiring and maintaining monch is often exhausting, most of all to a young girl, Umaiba, who oscillates between wanting to be desired and rebelling against aesthetic markers. Despite its oppressive facet, Salim views monch through the eyes of a young girl, treating it as it seems – elusive yet rewarding.
Salim’s Mahe is also haunted by “bejaar”, yet another term that might mean anxiety or worry but expands into a social structure. The novel presents a delightfully complex relationship between these two socio-aesthetic categories and the affective worlds that they create. In the absence of beauty, distress – social, emotional, financial and mental – awaits. It hovers around the unmarried, the neglected, the overlooked and the unlucky, attaching itself to lives that have slipped beyond the promises of monch. Bejaar is perhaps better understood as a social condition, a state of being stranded outside the circuits of admiration and desire that organise the village.
Together, monch and bejaar form the emotional grammar of the novel, structuring how women are seen, valued and spoken about. Umaiba’s coming-of-age unfolds between these two poles: the allure of becoming visible and the fear of becoming forgettable, yet the novel repeatedly pushes these terms together and apart.
For all its preoccupation with monch and bejaar, the novel’s most memorable figure remains Dechoma, who represents a figure that seems to stand partially outside monch and bejaar. She drifts in and out of its pages with dusty feet and an obstinate refusal to wear slippers, quietly resisting the aesthetic order that governs so much of village life. While other women are discussed through beauty, marriage prospects and reputation, Dechoma seems to attract Umaiba’s attention for reasons the young girl herself cannot fully articulate. She is not the most beautiful woman in Mahe, nor the most tragic, nor even the most eccentric. Yet she remains strangely unforgettable while occupying only the edges of the narrative.
The structure of the novel unfurls as a constellation of wives’ tales. Though Umaiba remains its emotional centre, each chapter introduces another inhabitant of the village, gradually assembling a collective portrait of womanhood. Together, these portraits gently present the contradictions shaping womanhood – admiration and resistance play in step with each other through a girl’s coming-of-age. Salim’s achievement lies in her refusal to resolve these contradictions. Instead, she allows them to coexist, producing a portrait of womanhood that is capacious enough to contain both the allure of monch and the freedom represented by Dechoma.
Afrin Badhar’s elliptical illustrations make a home in the uneasiness of womanhood – thick lines curve and flow to present the paraphernalia and emotions of a Muslim woman’s life in Mahe. J Devika’s translation preserves the novella’s densely local texture, retaining Malayalam words without flattening them into explanatory glosses. Terms such as monch carry meanings that exceed their closest English equivalents, and the translation wisely allows them to remain productively unresolved. In doing so, Devika preserves the social world of the novella on its own terms. Like Umaiba herself, the reader learns gradually, absorbing the rhythms, vocabularies and desires that animate the women of Mahe.
Dechoma and the Women of Mahe, Fathi Salim, translated from the Malayalam by J Devika, Bloomsbury India.
