Wooden Cow

Was Ammani a ‘kept woman’ or was she the one who kept the men who pleased her?

In the words of Gopali, the talented singer, who kept her in homely comfort, ‘She wants to make love to everyone in this world…only she is human, all of us are animals.’ Bruce, her Yankee boyfriend who returns after soldiering in Vietnam tells her: ‘You might have slept with two hundred people…But you are a very, very pure person… without dirt, a creature without stain.’

Ammani is an aesthete, an intellectual, a radical, completely amoral…She can be bought, but she is not for sale.

Through Jankiraman’s toughly poetic sensuous narrative emerges the Brahmin girl from rural South India, a character few readers will forget.