This is my take on the whole man-eater thing--what is so wrong with the label? When women are in a position of utter and abject powerlessness--their father, their brother, their home, their prospects of a life beyond these decaying walls have all been removed from their control--when everything is taken away, what is left is exactly one thing-image, and perception.
Khushi clings to the concept of their lineage, but to me, this one is so much more useful to have, as young nubile women basically unprotected in rural India! Man Eaters, Manglik-- these terms make the sisters actually dangerous, and not just vulnerable--it is a powerful restorer of their image. And if the image is dangerous, if it is a ward against the evils of the lusting men just outside K House...why should the label be termed as negative?
I feel for Kashi, and for her sister. But somehow, both have come across as creatures of magic well before this whole tragic fated spin on who they can and cannot be with. I cannot see them as the ordinary women who will cook and clean and know how to tend to a regular man's little home.
The term man-eater, too, is loaded--i wonder if you used it deliberately as opposed to the much more common image of the feminine seductive charmer?
Because both these women are..well, they aren't ordinary, are they? Everything about them is a little bit..extra. Their poverty is heightened, their beauty if unreal, their lives are on the extreme edge. Be it romance, attraction, or tragedy--they don't live by half measures, so their men can either rise to that extra dimension like Arnav is doing, or die into meek oblivion like Pallavi's accident prone fiance did.
Because for me, Pallavi is just as magical, right? The magical veena music, the power of the tune/playing that wove through ASR's mind some chapters back,? Its not a normal reaction to music by a pragmatic businessman, and hers was not a normal hand on a veena.
And now, we have, aside from her natural extra-ordinariness, the snake protected vedic- cursed Kashi.
Neither are the normal women you take home to mother. Both are imbued with the tragedy of their bloodline, and both have grown up in a way where they cannot really be true, normal mates to normal men. Educated in subjects that are...different, behaving in a manner that is at once unnaturally submissive (to daddy dearest) and ferociously masculine...They cannot make a normal man feel..normal.
So they ARE man-eaters--because no ordinary man can just show up and claim such extraordinary women. Isn't that, it itself a kind of power?
Edited by napstermonster - 11 years ago
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