Selvaduri

"Pigs Can't Fly"
Selvaduri, Shyam, in Making a Difference.

Inter-cousin politics - well I know that particular sphere - but the compelling and understated thing that grabbed my attention in "Pigs Can't Fly" was the building up of atmosphere and environment. The narrator of the story gives throwaway details that position his physical place as being in Sri Lanka, giving detailed descriptions of his grandparents' house - not in an exoticized light, but rather through a familiar gaze. The narrator's perspective is not foreign to the atmosphere, and so the reader enters into this familiarity of gaze.

Another fascinating point: the power of clothing as a tool of transformation, which is a very theatrical device as the characters of the story literally become actors within the story, but also functions as metaphor for physical skin - the unchosen inscription of identity on the basis of physical appearance/sex/so on, so forth. The narrator delights in the ability of clothing to act as transformation - while playing bride-bride, he feels the pinnacle moment is the one where he is wrapped in his white sari and transformed into the embodiment of all that is good and pure in the world. Similarly, his nemesis, Her Fatness, attempts to gain and exert power through costuming - first, by embellishing the costume of the groom that has been designated to her, and second through stealing and hiding the sari which has such significance for the narrator. The usage of clothing/costuming as constructing identity aids in the depiction of identity as a fluid structure within the short story, as by virtue of outward apparel, identity becomes mutable. The tension comes when the skin - the physical and undeniable body - is not as easy to shift as clothing. The narrator cannot escape the societal mores connected with being gendered male, and experiences despair at the thought of being confined within an identity not of his choosing, yet never wholly of the identity he has been classified into as he has not claimed it.

The physical body and the costume dynamic is carefully built into the text, coming to a head with the conclusion which depicts the narrator's grim realisation of what the rest of his life has in store for him now that he cannot depend upon clothing to change his identity, to make what he was born as not as important as what he has chosen to be.