Basanaheena
Geetali Borah
Believed to be the first Assamese novel on female desirelessness, told through the diaries of five women and the writer who can no longer tell where their stories end and her own begins.
Full Synopsis
Megha — Meghkrishna Kashyap — works at an NGO to earn a living, but her true passion is writing. For years she has kept five diaries, each with a different coloured cover. Each holds the life of a woman who lives without sexual desire. Blue is for Joyee, first seen lying naked on a cold stone, its chill seeping into her like an old pain. Red is for Awori, yellow for Bandita, green for Kanta, purple for Dalimi Pegu. Through these women the novel explores frigidity with unflinching frankness: the body that cannot respond, arousal won at great cost, pleasure that never comes. It also captures the silence of a society that has no language for any of it. As Megha writes, the line between author and character dissolves. Sometimes she steers the women; sometimes they steer her. Then COVID-19 arrives and Assam locks down. The silence Megha always craved turns suffocating, and she sinks into a depression she cannot name while the crisis empties ordinary households around her. Her diaries lie shut, and she can no longer tell where her characters end and she begins. Then Kanta sits beside her and accuses her. Kanta at least tried to live and to wake her own body. Megha, by contrast, has hidden inside her diaries and accepted bodilessness as the truth. The woman without desires whose story most needs telling may be the one holding the pen. Believed to be the first Assamese novel on female desirelessness, Basanaheena is a daring modernist work whose fragmented narration mirrors the lives it depicts. It is threaded with Sappho, Rumi, Lorca, Akhmatova, Borges and Neruda, placing a story from Assam in conversation with world literature's long preoccupation with the body. It also stands as a record of the pandemic years.
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Geetali Borah is a popular Assamese novelist, short story writer and journalist. She is counted among the leading contemporary voices in Assamese literature, alongside writers such as Arupa Patangia Kalita and Juri Borah Borgohain. Her fiction keeps returning to experiences that society prefers to leave unspoken, especially women's lives lived at the margins of the body, the family and social acceptance. Basanaheena extends her commitment to writing the body, and the silences around it, with honesty and formal daring.
