Eating Wasp - Anita Nair

Eating Wasps explores the inner workings of the minds of women and illustrates how the world often shoves them to insanity for expressing their desires. The book follows the unlikely suicide of narrator Sreelakshmi, 30, Sahitya Akademi Award winner and a professor of Zoology. Her ex-lover Markose recovers Sreelakshmi's index finger from the funeral pyre and keeps it hidden in a cupboard with a detachable back. Hence, even after death, she is not free. As a child she ate Wasp thinking it to be honey bee and presuming it would be as sweet as honey. When grown up and she is doing research on Wasp, her mother tells her 'Vetalan' - 'Veta' means Hunt, and 'Aalu' means man. So vetalan means one who hunts a man. She adds, frowning and smiling at the same time that she should not go around eating it. Thus begins the story of some other women who are connected with Sreelakshmi's story and the cupboard. Set in Kerala, Nair’s story highlights women with different personalities, who lead very different lives from each other, 10 unique women, their predicaments and triumphs, experiences on eating wasps, and wasps time and again, left to live life as they want untill or unless dead.

There is:
Urvashi, whose drive to find desire outside of marriage which was just a contractual obligation out of mutual usefulness, gets her a stalker.
Megha, a victim of child sexual abuse,
Najma, the acid attack survivor, who goes through so much, with no one coming to help and raising so many questions
Brinda Patel who takes up badminton with her killer Instinct,
The two sisters whose lives are intertwined by a cruel fate
Rupa who owns the resort, thinking of Haris who was as much her friend as a mass murderer in Istanbul,
Liliana, the pussy mouth, who had burnt her bridge and there was only the way ahead,
Maya who had to raise a autistic child-man, sharing same birthday, who moved in with the Kathakali artist Koman and
Subhasini and Narendran from Varanasi


Nair's brilliance lies in the fact that she doesn't merely portray these women as victims. They are flawed human beings with flesh and bones -- and survivors. An evocative and raw story coupled with Nair's impeccable prose make for an intensely intriguing read. Told in the voice of the dead narrator, a ghost who doesn’t find closure and wanders aimlessly, the story takes you back and forth in time. Eating Wasps is neither a light read nor a tome, working as a collection of short stories that move casually from one chapter to another, keeping the reader hooked. "In hindsight, we are all philosophers who know how to separate the chaff from the grain. But while you are in it, the truth of the moment overrides everything else."


It talks about the time when women had to fight to study in a university to the present day when even married women hook up on dating apps. Some stories try to offer a glimpse of the deep-rooted evil of our society through common tales that you may have heard long ago and forgotten. 'This too will pass away' - One of my favorite quotes and story had a place in this book. It was interesting to read that "Three things seemed to rule the world ": Facebook like a village well were daily updates are shared, Twitter an extension of the tea shop where people gathered for the tea and snacks and Instagram the bathing spot in the river where either you looked or where looked at. Today men and women are more together. One vital lesson is "look around you to get a perspective on your life. Sometimes that's all you need to do." Dark and disturbing in parts, it do remind us of Ladies Coupe, Mistress and Lessons in forgetting. With 256 pages this was 11th of 2020