In the microfiction “Compromise,” RR Menon takes a fresh approach to indirect dialogue. We are given what’s said as well as what’s unsaid, what’s intended as well as what’s unintended. The narrator and her mother are presented as the central figures of the story, but two additional characters lurk in the narrative’s margins, the brother and the matchmaker. —Court Harler
The matchmaker to my mother: She needs to compromise but doesn’t exactly say what the compromise is or what kind of compromise. She lets it sit and stale like the laddoo I once had to give up for my brother when there wasn’t enough, its rotund head plucked away from my hands and delivered to my brother’s.
My mother to me: Get used to it and she doesn’t say what it is as she doles out more chakli for my brother and wipes her oil-slicked hand on her hair. Then she disappears the way the cricket bat from my cupboard did before my last match with the girls’ cricket team. Just emerging in the kitchen, her one hand making the sabzi, the other rolling out rotis before switching to adding tadka. Like Durga ma with many limbs.
My mother to me: Don’t listen to those Western ladies and she makes a face of swallowing a whole laddoo when she hears the words independent and modern.
My mother to herself: Western ladies can say what they want. When will she learn she needs to be a good, wholesome gulab jamun to find a good husband, good in-laws.
My mother to my mirror image: You don’t look like a gulab jamun. Your skin isn’t glossy or sweet-smelling or anything. And you don’t behave like one.
When the matchmaker brings the rejected marriage proposals, my mother lies crushed and powdered on the sofa, fly-swatting them away.
That’s when I know what compromise is. Watching the matchmaker and my mother gather the bits of laddoo into a bowl, and shoveling it into the bin.
RR MENON is a Dubai-based writer. Her work has been published in The Disappointed Housewife, Mythic Picnic, Tiny Molecules, Bending Genres, the Bath Flash Fiction anthology, and elsewhere, and nominated for Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, and Best Microfiction. Her middle-grade fiction, Chandu and the Super Set of Parents, has been published by Fitzroy Books.
Featured image by Luna Dai, courtesy of Unsplash.
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