Nine Yard Sarees: A Short Story Cycle

By Prasanthi Ram
Fiction/Ethos Books/Paperback/272 pages/$23.76/Books Kinokuniya
5 stars

At 272 pages, Singaporean writer Prasanthi Ram’s debut book of fiction might not be sized like an epic, but her sprawling narrative certainly packs the punch of one, relating the saga of diasporic life in sensuous, succulent detail.

Through 11 interlinked stories and nine female narrators, Nine Yard Sarees follows generations of a fictional Tamil Brahmin family as their lives are dispersed from Kalakad in Tamil Nadu to primarily Singapore, but also Sydney, New York and Connecticut.

Its cast of rotating protagonists take turns to tell their stories. At its core, there is the serene Rajeswari Iyer, who finds love at an ashram soon after her husband’s death; the imperious Padma, her daughter, who has trouble raising her own children according to Brahmin traditions; the stoic Prema, Padma’s sister, who struggles with her daughter Vani’s sexuality.

Ram also enlists voices from outside the family proper – a domestic cleaner, a cool auntie who chooses singlehood – to create multiple counterpoints of privilege, belief systems and paths that speak to varied experiences of love and hurt as and between women.

The author styles the book as a “short story cycle”. That is, a book with linked stories that can be read independently or as a whole, a notable example of which is the Canadian Nobel laureate Alice Munro’s Lives Of Girls And Women (1971).

There is, however, a compelling case for reading Nine Yard Sarees chronologically as a novel in nine voices.

With each story, a new voice is added to an existing musical line as it culminates in a chorus that revels in harmony as much as it does in dissonance. With each story, the reader’s sympathies shift and, for example, a pair of siblings’ mutual perception of the other as the favoured child can both find truthful expression even as they appear contradictory.

Men appear in the book, but the author focuses on showing her readers the women who turn up for – but also hurt – other women. Her book is an ample rebuttal to Rajeswari’s father, who pronounces: “Daughters are born to wring us dry like rag cloths and then leave us.”

It is a rebuttal full of heart, as her prose is spellbinding and accumulates a world of detail around the everyday objects and places of women’s lives: homemade ginger mango pickles and broken papadum, a cascading saree “woven right out of a mulberry cocoon”, the motherly gestures one sees at Sri Mariamman Temple.

Before The Rooster Calls – the longest story in the novel which brings the timeline to 1969 – is also the most searing, with its backstory of hitherto hidden traumas. This single narrative line is so intensely sustained that one could glimpse in it the seed of a linear, although perhaps more conventional, novel.

But Ram refuses the imperative to tell the diasporic story through a single viewpoint and strives instead to create, as she writes in her author’s note, an “egalitarian space” in her fiction. Readers are all the better for it, for this novel is one that sings and swells in all its polyphonic glory.

Quite simply, this latecomer is one of the best debut books of Singapore fiction in 2023.

If you like this, read: Sembawang by Kamaladevi Aravindan, translated by Anitha Devi Pillai (Marshall Cavendish, 2021, $20.09, Amazon SG, go to amzn.to/3RWJ7az). This work of historical fiction tells the little-known stories of Tamil and Malayalee men and women who worked at Sembawang Naval Base.