Mistress

When travel writer Christopher Stewart arrives at a riverside resort in Kerala to meet Koman, Radha’s uncle and a famous kathakali dancer, he enters a world of masks and repressed emotions. From their first meeting, both Radha and her uncle are drawn to the enigmatic young man with his cello and his incessant questions about the past.

The triangle quickly excludes Shyam, Radha’s husband, who can only watch helplessly as she embraces Chris with a passion he has never been able to draw from her. And, as Koman’s life story unfolds, it captures all the nuances and contradictions of the relationships being made and unmade before his eyes.

Anita Nair

lives in Bangalore and Mundakotukurussi, Kerala. Her books have been translated into more than twenty-five languages. She is the author of The Better Man, Ladies Coup, The Puffin Book of World Myths and Legends and the editor of Where the Rain is Born: Writings About Kerala.

Anita Nair's q & a

What sparked The Mistress?
I had a great love for the Kathakali music known as padam. It would have rested there if one morning, about six and a half years ago, I hadn't walked into work to see a kathakali dancer in full costume in the reception area.

Bundled up in a SUV, he was being taken from one ad agency to the other as a living rate card... I didn't know how the dancer was received in the other agencies but in the one I worked in those days, there were sniggers and giggles... he was an object of ridicule more than anything else and my heart went out to him... I probably felt more wretched than him. He was playing a role after all. The irony being that a Kathakali performer has so very few opportunities to don his colours will accept anything that comes his way. Be it standing as a prop for a detergent or playing the fool for a candy advertisement or being a walking gesticulating rate card.... This trivializing all that is sacred about art, how could I remain immune to it? How could I not address it?

Where and when is the novel set?
Mistress is set in a small town in Kerala by the banks of a river called
Nila. The period is contemporary and would be 2002.

Do you have a favourite character in the novel?
Yes, my favourite character in the novel is Shyam.

What's your favourite children's book and why?
My favourite children's book is the Wizard Oz. It is one of those few
books that allows the reader to come up with whole new interpretation of the world around us with every reading.