A Kitchen in the Corner of the House

A Kitchen in the Corner of the House collects twenty-five gem-like stories on motherhood, sexuality, and the body from the innovative and perceptive Tamil writer Ambai.

In A Kitchen in the Corner of the House, Ambai's narrators are daring and courageous, stretching and reinventing their homes, marriages, and worlds. With each story, her expansive voice confronts the construction of gender in Tamil literature. Piecing together letters, journal entries, and notes, Ambai weaves themes of both self-liberation and confinement into her writing. Her transfixing stories often meditate on motherhood, sexuality, and the liberating, and at times inhibiting, contours of the body.“Women and the seemingly infinite variety of restrictions they labor under are the focus of this wide-ranging story collection by the feminist Tamil writer Ambai. While the details are specific to India, particularly the south, the themes are universal — pregnancy, motherhood, domestic labor, politics, playing second fiddle to men, even (as in the title story) inconvenient architecture.” — Alison McCulloch, The New York Times

Ambai "evokes in sensuous, vibrant prose the colors, flavors, and sounds of Indian life in a collection of 21 stories translated by Holmström. . . Fresh, graceful stories create a palpable world." - Kirkus Reviews

"I am astonished and moved by the deep wisdom of these stories, the clear-eyed tenderness and humor. Ambai is an explicitly feminist author, concerned with the lives of women, yet her expansive stories never feel didactic, just true." — Shruti Swamy, Electric Literature

"Ambai's stories explore the nuances of personal relationships, complex networks of emotions, and mingle themselves insightfully." - The Telegraph


"A Kitchen in the Corner of the House, translated by Lakshmi Holmström, by Ambai — pen-name of the Tamil author-activist C.S. Lakshmi — introduced me to a South Indian Alice Munro or Katherine Mansfield." — Spectator

"Ambai's stories...are boldly experimental, pointing to the real source of the best Indian fiction in the vernacular languages. She makes use of polyphony, fragmentation, and multiple persepctives, and her translator succeeds in capturing her technical virtuosity." - Times Literary Supplement

"Unglossed and unrepentant, (Ambai's stories) range over rakshasis and the Ramayana, over the film music of S.D. Burman and the Hindi songs of Pankaj Mullick; they dip into the intricacies of Carnatic singing ... Ambai’s style is efficient and fluid, with a quick poetry about it that gracefully lays the world down ... A Kitchen in the Corner of the House bodies forth a full roster of psychologically rich characters, glittering and wearied souls that breathe upon the page like the last flickering light of a candle. At the end of the collection, you’re left with the impression that Ambai is a dreamer of imperfect dreams, and a writer of perfect sorrows." — 3AM Magazine

"Ambai has created an inspiring collection of female characters who study and have sex. Some wish to be mothers, some do not. These women do not merely long for existence beyond their husbands and brothers and fathers; they achieve that freedom. Holmström’s translation emphasizes the energy Ambai must have included in the original Tamil, and she also manages to bring the sounds of Tamil to an English-speaking reader." — The London Magazine

"Ambai's short stories place experiences in a shared space and invite us to evaluate life as we know it...They shatter the narrow confines of a perceiving mind that makes everything its own and instead spread toward a wide horizon. " — Perumal Murugan

"Ambai brings to bear upon her tales the weight of her knowledge of the mythic, literary, and Puranic...A felicity of language and the easy flow of words make the translation a pleasure to read." - The Hindu

"Ambai excels in making physical movements parallel the progression in her stories...Lakshmi Holmstrom has been able to settle down so comfortably with the psyche of Ambai, that her translations of the latter's Tamil writings have the easy flow of the original." - Deccan HeraldAmbai's short stories place experiences in a shared space and invite us to evaluate life as we know it... They shatter the narrow confines of a perceiving mind that makes everything its own and instead spread towards a wide horizon. That is precisely why Ambai's stories are at once the unique and distinctive voice of modern Tamil literature as well as the common voice of a shared world.
— Perumal Murugan
We might consider Ambai's short stories as the first expressions of female anger. They depict a world of womanhood that experiences sadness at the recognition that life's sufferings are also uniquely its own. Ambai writes with nuance and a keen sense of aesthetics.
— Sundara RamaswamyC.S. Lakshmi, writing under the pseudonym of Ambai, is a feminist Tamil writer. She was born in 1944 in Tamil Nadu, and grew up in Bangalore and Mumbai. Her works include In a Forest, A Deer, Fish in a Dwindling Lake, A Meeting on the Andheri Overbridge, The Purple Sea, and A Night with a Black Spider. Her short stories portray the reality of women's lives, communicating their silence through words. She has worked on research projects such as: The Face Behind the Mask: Women in Tamil Literature. In 1988, Lakshmi founded SPARROW (Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women) a non-governmental organization for documenting and archiving the work of female writers and artists. About the translator: Lakshmi Holmström translated short stories, novels, and poetry by the major contemporary writers in Tamil. Her most recent books are Fish in a Dwindling Lake by Ambai (2012); A Second Sunrise, poems by Cheran; Wild Girls, Wicked Words, a translation of poems by four Tamil women (2012). In 2007 she shared the Crossword-Hutch Award for her translation of Ambai's short stories, In a Forest, a Deer; and she received the Iyal Award from the Tamil Literary Garden, Canada, in 2008.In a Forest, a Deer
It is difficult to forget those nights. Nights when we listened to all
those stories. Thangam Athai, it was, who told them to us. They
were not tales of the fox and the crow, nor of the hare and the tortoise.
No, these were stories she herself had made up. Some were
like fragments of poetry. Others were like songs which would never
end. Stories which developed in all sorts of ways, without beginning,
middle, or end. At times, at night, she would create many images in
our minds. Even the gods and demons would alter in her stories. She
would speak most movingly about Mandara. Surpanaka, Tadaka,
and the rest would no longer remain as rakshasis, female demons,
but be transformed into real people with impulses and feelings. She
brought into the light characters which had seemed only to cling
to the pages of the epics. As if she were stroking a bird with broken
wings, with such gentleness she would portray them in words. I
don’t know what it was about them – the night-time, or the central
hall of that old house where we lay, or the nearness of all the cousins
– but those stories still keep circling and sounding somewhere in my
mind, like the buzzing of bees.
In that house with its old pillars and central hall, I see Thangam
Athai in several frames. Leaning against the heavy wooden door.
Carrying a small lamp which she has shaded with the end of her
sari; placing it within its niche. Serving a meal to her husband,
Ekambaram. Pulling on a rope, one foot firmly placed upon the
small parapet surrounding the well. Feeding the plants with manure.
Thangam Athai had beautiful dark skin. A face without a single
wrinkle, as if it had been ironed smooth. Plenty of silver in her hair.
There was an old-fashioned harmonium in Athai’s house, worked
by pressing a pedal. Athai used to play it. She would play different
tunes, from the tevaram “Vadaname chandrabimbamo” to the popular
“Vannaan vandaana,” singing softly at the same time. Her long
fingers which looked like the dark beaks of birds would fly over the
keys of the harmonium as if they were black butterflies.
A shell of mystery surrounded Thangam Athai. There seemed to
be a deep pity for her in the way the others looked at her with tenderness,
or stroked her gently; it was there in the compassion flowing
from their eyes. Ekambaram Maama had another wife. He always
treated Athai as if she were a flower. Nobody had overheard him
address her as “di.” He would always call her Thangamma. All the
same, Athai seemed, somehow, as if she stood a long distance away,
behind a smokescreen. It was Muthu Maama’s daughter, Valli, who
pierced the mystery. What she found out was both comprehensible
to us, and yet totally incomprehensible. According to Valli’s mother,
Athai had never “blossomed.”
“What does that mean?” several of us wanted to know.
Valli was old enough to wear a half-sari. “Well, it means that she
never came of age.”
“But her hair is all white, isn’t it?”
“That’s different.”
After that we watched Athai’s body carefully. We discussed
among ourselves how a body that hadn’t “blossomed” would be. We
couldn’t understand in what way her body wasn’t complete. Athai
looked just like everyone else when she appeared in her wet clothes,
after her bath. When she stood there in her knotted red choli and her
green sari, she didn’t look at all unusual. Valli’s mother had said to
Valli, “It’s just a hollow body.” We couldn’t make out where the gap
could be. We wondered if it was like the broken wing of a sparrow,
a hollow that wasn’t overtly discernible.
One evening they cut down a huge tree in the garden, which had
died. At the last blow of the hatchet, it suddenly slid down to the
ground amidst a rustling of leaves. When it was split across, there
was a mere hole within. Valli nudged me at the waist and said,
“That’s it, that’s hollow.” But it was impossible to compare Athai’s
shining dark form with this tree, lying there facing the sky, exposing
itself utterly, nothing inside.
What secret did that form hide? In what way was her body so
different? In the hot summer afternoons, Athai would remove her
tight choli and lie down in the store-room. When we went and snuggled
close to her, laying our heads against her breast, freed now from
its confining choli, she would gather us up in a light embrace. Held
within the protection of her breast, her waist, her arms, it was difficult
to perceive any hollow. Hers was a temperately warm body.
She seemed like one steeped in feelings and emotions. Like a ripe
fruit full of juice, a life-spring flowed through her body. And often
those vitalizing drops fell upon our own selves. Through her touch,
through her caress, through the firm pressure with which she massaged
us with oil, a life-force sprang towards us from her body, like
a river breaking past its own banks. It was at the touch of her hands
that cows would yield their milk. The seeds that she planted always
sprouted. My mother always said she had an auspicious hand.
Athai was there when my little sister was born. “Akka, stay by
my side. Keep holding on to me. Only then will I not feel any pain,”
Amma muttered, as we children were being swept out of the room.
When we came to the threshold and looked back from the doorway,
Thangam Athai was softly stroking Amma’s swollen belly.
“Nothing will happen. Don’t be frightened,” she said quietly.
“Oh, Akka, if only you too could . . .,” my mother sobbed, unable
to finish what she began.
“What do I need? I’m like a queen. My house is full of children,”
said Athai. Ekambaram Maama’s younger wife had seven children.
“Your body has not opened . . .,” Amma wept the louder.
“Why, what’s wrong with my body? Don’t I feel hungry at the
right times? Don’t I sleep well? The same properties that all bodies
have, this one has, too. It feels pain when it is hurt. Its blood clots. If
its wounds go septic, it gathers pus. It digests the food it eats. What
more do you want?” asked Athai.
Amma took her hand and laid it against her cheek.
“They turned your body into a bloody battlefield . . .,” she moaned,
holding that hand tight.