Powered by Love and the Kosi River

At one instance in Gulabiya, the despair of one of the protagonists, Balesar, caused by the scorching heat, vanishes as he thinks of the love of his life, Gulabiya. His relief is also your relief as the reader. You can feel the tormenting heat, and yet be calmed down by Balesar. Written by Dr Abha Purbey and translated from Angika by Shivangi Pandey and Tejaswi Rawal, Gulabiya is a story of two lovers set in the hot floodplains of the river Kosi near Bhagalpur, who have their share of joys and struggles, unfurling within a society riddled with issues of class, caste and patriarchy.

The book brings you happiness and a sense of wholesomeness when Balesar and Gulabiya go from a couple yearning for each other to framing their own little world. Concurrently, it sets you up for the grim reality of this unequal society. The beauty of the book lies in its nuances and subversions. How Balesar plays along when women flirt with him. How he misses his walks along the Kosi because he is engulfed by work... How the sun tires him, and Gulabiya’s thoughts come to his rescue, and how their love for each other comes to be symbolised by the banana farm they grow together.

As I reached the end of the book, I only wished to see them live their everyday lives a little more. For it calmed my own anxiety around love.

The love depicted in Gulabiya is full of agency. It is not something that happens to characters. It is something they choose to enact. Their love is full of action, even in their waiting. Nothing can pull Gulabiya and Balesar apart until they choose to go away.

Purbey presents labour in its raw honesty. Women work more than men do. She shows how land ownership and loans act as tools in the hands of Patel Babu, the landlord, and Bhumi Babu, the loan shark, who conspire to ruin Balesar’s farms. They devise a plan. Everyone joins them, including Gulabiya’s brother. The book shows how power is legitimised and realised in ways that are at times difficult to perceive.

The story goes up and down and cuts between timelines. We get to see Gulabiya as the whole person she is towards the end of the book. Gulabiya, in the first few chapters, is the woman who does her job at the farm and brings joy and love to Balesar. Her farming knowledge comes to the fore while bringing their banana farm to life. She works harder and smarter than Balesar. Balesar knows this too.

We see her fierceness and courage when she condemns her brother for his cowardice and Patel Babu for his cunning nature. She uses all her power, knowledge and resilience to get to the love of her life. She takes on the men, her husband, her brother and Patel Babu with an honesty and wit that surprised me. She is powered by the strength of her love and the anger of the inequalities she has been put through. At this point, I must admit that I often miss seeing the multitudes a person can inhabit, something that Purbey makes look so easy through the character of Gulabiya.

Gulabiya, at times, reminded me of Kali and Ponna from Perumal Murugan’s One Part Woman and how the only thing that keeps them going is the love they hold for each other. Reading the book from miles away from the Kosi River does not make me a stranger to the story - for countless times, as a Chennai- and Delhi-based woman, I was taken by surprise by how everything felt more familiar than I thought it would be. The more I read through the life of Gulabiya, the more I felt this could be me, too. It reminded me of the numerous arguments I have had with people closest to me, regarding how I should dress, behave and fashion my body. Reading Gulabiya was also a welcoming reminder of how very distinct places, be it Tamil Nadu, Delhi or Bihar, may also carry ‘strange’ affinities. For Gulabiya’s yearning for love is how I yearn for love too.

I picked up the book only out of curiosity about Angika as a language. And with the hope that it would help me know about a place I did not know before, and introduce me to new people. The English translation left me with the wish to read the original in Angika and meet Abha Purbey to know more about the real-life instances that may have shaped this book. The book unsettles you. You may get anxious and seek a happy ending. The couple’s lives steer you in many directions. You turn pages. The suspense continues. You wish for a closure that is as soothing and hopeful as the Kosi River is in the book to Balesar.

Note: The Kosi River, often called the “Sorrow of Bihar,” flows from the Himalayas into the fertile plains of northern Bihar. It is a powerful, unpredictable presence that embodies loss, resilience, love and renewal.

About the Author

SA Sneha is a Chennai-based journalist. She writes on gender, culture and the myriad experiences and encounters that shape places, cultures and identities.

Cover design by Studio Em and En

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