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Major Themes of 'The Collector's Wife'
Major Themes of 'The Collector's Wife'
Phukan’s gamut of writings unfold atrocious incidents like the mass killings in Assam
during the students’ agitation movements, the violence of the banned outfit ULFA, the
TADA terror, the always newly devised land-framing policy, the migration of the outsiders,
to name a few. In ‘The Collector’s Wife’, for character like Nandini—the SP’s wife, death is
what one perceive to be true as they are not sure whether the person they are looking for is
dead or alive. They are willing to take either version depending on what they perceive.
Coming from a place like Parbatpuri validates their identity as victims. Parbatpuri is a small
town “surrounded by hills on three sides, and bordered by the vast expanse of the Red River
on the fourth.” The place has something about it.
The town’s cremation ground stood beside the road as it straightened out. The
people of Parbatpuri had, decades ago, subtly had their revenge on their colonial
masters by making sure that the smoke from their funeral pyre rose up in the
direction of the DC’s house…Still, when the occasional cholera or gastro-enteritis
epidemic raged through Parbatpuri, the mourning relatives of the victims felt, even
in their grief, a sense of subtle satisfaction that disease-ravaged bodies were being
cremated at the very feet of the one person who was supposed to be responsible for
the well-being of the district. All attempts by successive DCs to shift the cremation
ground to another location had met with firm opposition by the town’s
leading citizenry, whose unity at such times was surprising, given the discord that
raged between them on most other occasions.
Poor baby. Deprived of not one but two fathers in one go, biological and adoptive, killed at
almost the same instant. She had been a fool, she thought hazily, to have imagined that she
could get away with it. That it was going to be okay. That she could carry one man’s child,
and expect another to be the father. Her audacity must have tempted Fate, who, in a fit
of irritation, had decided to destroy both men…She realized that her cheeks were wet. She
hadn’t been aware that the tears had come. Tears for two men. One who had died, not
knowing that he was going to be a father. And another who had been prepared to be a
father to an unborn child, not his (Phukan: 348-49).
Violence, as entrenched in the double deaths, can also paradoxically reveal the sphinx as
having no secret at all. However, such an act shifts identity to another elaborate surface. The
closet herein can be the entire space of the society, not at all impervious to sight. Time and
again, this old closet are always emptied out for new contents. The closet structures death as a
violent law. The multiple secrets in the text are confined in sealed compartments, in exquisite
cabinets, and within a private chamber that boasts of a ritual of intimacy. But are such
ingenious preparations to secrecy enough to conceal the identity of these characters?
Moreover, secrecy, encrypting, and enciphering are various forms of surface patterning that
are characteristically ambiguous. The intricacies of these signifying practices seem to
acknowledge, in different contexts, the desire to hide and reveal.
In The Collector’s Wife, the concept of death is imbued with strong significances.
Rukmini, in The Collector’s Wife, upholds the viewpoint that in order to know what living is,
one must negate it. In the similar vein, we can say that the measure of a thing is the effort
made to destroy it. Hence, death is a signifier with a varied and characteristically paradoxical
function at work.