So All Is Peace is a story of twin sisters – Layla and Tanya, who were anointed the ‘Starving Sisters’ when they were found to be starving in an upper middle class gated apartment complex in Delhi. Their news became instantly sensational and nobody could figure out what had caused two educated, beautiful women to starve themselves.
Here are some excerpts from Vandana Singh-Lal’s book, So All Is Peace, that highlights the feelings of alienation that the girls experienced while living in a big city.
Living in Delhi, Layla and Tanya were taught to avoid places where women felt vulnerable to inappropriate glances. Tanya remembers,
“With our carefully controlled outings with Mamma and Papa—shopping only at the malls, going to school in the school bus and to college in university-special or U-special as they are called; never going to any religious festival or a fair or any place where there may be crowds and the potential for a stampede (which was almost every place in Delhi)—our experience of groping fingers and lascivious glances was almost non-existent and we entered the territory that came with being a woman in Delhi or perhaps anywhere in India, unprepared, naked and woefully unarmed.”
*
Soon after their parents passed away, Tanya recalls an incident when feelings of loneliness gripped her, and she couldn’t discuss her harrowing experience of sexual assault with anyone around.
“Like sparks flying out of a short-circuit, it spewed out stray thoughts that I had nobody to share with, pieces of conversations that I could not have, bits of passages that nobody was present to hear, tears of sympathetic neighbours that had no place inside me, whispers of curious onlookers that I could not hide away from, the buzzing and sparking and searing and the absolute emptiness of a house where every room was still filled with the paraphernalia of the living but where everything had died.”
*
With Tanya relocating to Andhra Pradesh, Layla started dating Deepak. He often came to their house because,
“In a country where everything takes place outside in the open, where people bathe, eat, pray, sleep, shit, fight, play, kill and die on the road, the only thing that does not and that cannot happen on the road is love; the making of it, the display of it, or even the allusion to it, except in the larger than life film posters. But the posters too remain coy, allegorical, metaphorical. No kissing is allowed on the roads of the country, no holding of hands, no looking for too long into each others’ eyes either. So Layla had to find a place for them to meet and a relationship; a veneer however thin or translucent or unconvincing.”
*
Raman, the award-winning journalist, who has been tasked to write about the ‘Starving Sisters’ had begun to have strong feelings for Tanya.
Although he had spent relatively short time with her in person, he had devoted long hours to her mentally, analyzing the smallest of her gestures and the tiniest of inflictions in her voice ad-infinitum, and something in her had suggested a kind of depth that he was not used to encountering. Now he has been provided with some more clues about what exists behind her vulnerable tarsier eyes, and he is excited. This is a new challenge. And yet. Wouldn’t it have been easier if she did not have this other side? If she could have been enfolded within the narrative that was furiously being woven about her with the help of disparate threads—some real, most imaginary—but all being accorded the same amount of space and value as if the difference between the fake and the real does not matter anymore as long as everything could be fitted into an easily explained, easily propagated, easily digested world.
*
The gated societies of Delhi often have Residents’ Welfare Association (RWA) that have rules for visitors, especially males. When Deepak had moved in with the twins, Layla was regularly pestered by the head of RWA – Mr. Deol, to submit Deepak’s identity documents. Mr. Deol explained,
“We made the rule that we could not allow any overnight male visitor in any all-women household until they handed over his passport copy and gave us in writing what relationship they had with the man. I personally went to tell the sister that and to give them a copy of the notice. You know, the sister had looked at me very strangely then.’”
Pick your copy of So All Is Peace, to read how the shocking events unfolded in the starving sisters’ lives.
