The Two-Tailed Snake (Fairlight Moderns, 17)
The effect of war and civil, political and religious unrest on the experiences of children and adolescents continues as a never-ending source of inspiration for writers, and is the basis of much admirable fiction. In the case of The Two-Tailed Snake, the child is the happy, well-adjusted fourteen-year-old Joya Guho, and the troubled times are erupting in North-East India in 1945. Consequently “Joya no longer looked at life through little girl eyes.” And “when memories surfaced, they were bothersome but irresistible. Like scabs that must be picked.”
When Joya is expelled from her school, she loses contact with her friends and more significantly with her father. When her father mysteriously disappears, her life changes. Soon she is forced to work in a garment factory in order to feed herself and her mother while, to appease her grief for her missing parent, she secretly stitches scraps of fabric into a suit for him.
The narrative follows a dreamlike course through a series of events which are never properly explained to the child, who appears to unquestioningly accept her situation. Although the unfolding of the story is given to the reader in an engagingly dreamlike style that matches the approach of the narrative until we reach its positive conclusion, I found its telling repetitive and irritatingly evasive.
