MUSINGS:

Why always woman?

by Padma Edirisinghe

I had just finished the book titled New Short Stories and then gone on to wonder on the title. It was misnamed, I concluded. Short Stories on Women, would have been a better title for all the main figures in the tales were women. Like the rats in Hamlin they came in all sizes and shapes but the denominator was always a female.

ibn Battuta Pic.intelligenttravel.nationalgeographic.com

To make a long story short, we will select one woman among the lot who had captured the author's attention. She was a street walking one and of course a female. Men can street walk for miles, yet are not subject to the shackles of law. This woman however just stood out, not a delicate beauty who would cossette herself in the burly hands of a male. More masculine than feminine. She was even moustachioed and large red heads pimpled her face.

As far as looks go, she was zero. But human propensities are so unpredictable for she now stood before the Judge facing a charge of prostitution.

Guilty

Was she repentant? Not at all. She just glared at the Judge as though to insinuate that he was to blame.

"Do you admit guilty to this offense committed under the black Kelani bridge two weeks back?" Kalu Paalama was the word used in the Sinhala medium book.

"No. It is she who is to blame."

The woman dishevelled her dress and showed all. Not only the Judge but the whole court was horrified along with the female constable who had chaperoned the woman. She now busied herself arranging the offender's clothes while it took some time for the bristling body hairs of the Judge to subside. These had reacted by the impetus of the woman's shameless behaviour.

But he was determined to retaliate.

"One year for going against accepted morals that contaminate family life. Another one year for public indecency".

Terrible

I felt just terrible after reading that and some other stories , most of which vilified the women. If not for the female kind, I could not help thinking, many a writer, creative and otherwise will be at a loss for subject matter.

But I could not give up my mania for reading. At least one book per week, be they only of one gender or of two genders or just genderless.

Now The Early Travellers of Ceylon came in handy. This educative book will no doubt contain some soul edifying stuff and not matter that makes you want to throw out not only the food just taken but even the dear bowels that have faithfully stayed with you since birth.

This book will emanate the fragrance of goodness by not focusing attention on immoral women. Or better still, I mused with treachery to my own sex, if they are left out altogether. For, accounts of them can begin in all innocence but drift on to vile stuff.

But these famed traveller-writers cannot be bracketed into the genre where much is made of women gone astray.

Romantic

But yet they too, at least most of them like to roost on the female kind. Take Ibn Battuta for example. Even author Hulugalle names him as a romantic writer. No wonder, for he marries not one woman but several in Maldives, just because the laws of matrimony are very lenient there. That is what he writes. This leniency made him cohabit with local women and then leave wife and children back on land, while he wandered to other countries across miles of oceanic water searching for more adventure in his bachelor freedom.

The women he left behind would take his offspring to the sea fringe and show them the route the father fled.

Of course he wrote and wrote. And even otherwise, in ways other than physical attraction, Batuta was observant of women in a sort of intellectual way too. He noted their dress and mannerisms and concluded that they could end up the best life partners, for they looked after you very well. And just made nonentities of themselves after marriage.

In fact they never ate at the table with their soul mates. Battuta, narrates with tongue in cheek that the husband never knew what his wife ate.

Discrimination

At least he would go down in history as the first writer to peep into the world of female discrimination. He unveils some other curious facts about omen. In this country of contrasts, the sovereign is a female who is half dressed, that is that she covers herself only from the navel downwards.

Even the head now fully covered is totally bare! But the last truth bares you full in the face. For most writers it is ALL WOMEN.