Migration, especially in literature, is normally seen as having “the West” as its destination. Migration within Asia, from the less affluent to richer places, appears far less often. Singapore, for example, has had a long history as a trading port drawing in merchants and laborers from East Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. Singapore’s colonial history also left in its wake connections with other British colonies like India—and this link is the core of Prasanthi Ram’s Nine Yard Sarees.
Winner of the 2024 Singapore Literature Prize for English Fiction, Nine Yard Sarees is a short story cycle that weaves together stories of female migrants from different socio-economic backgrounds, at different moments in time, carrying different traditions and burdens, even when they all trace their stories back to the same state in southern India, Tamil Nadu, and all have ended up in the cosmopolitan island of Singapore. Each story in the cycle centers on a character, and each character exhibits a complex inner life that reflects a unique experience navigating the confusing, ill-defined space between societies that migrants tend to find themselves in. Taken together, these interlinking stories make up a rich tapestry that portrays both the tensions and camaraderie that exist within the diasporic community found in Singapore.
Nine Yard Sarees won the 2024 Singapore Literature Prize for English Fiction.
A case in point is the story of Sivagami, a domestic worker sponsored by a Tamil family living in Singapore to come over and work for them. She makes the most of her trip by working for other wealthy Tamil “madams” across the city as well, lending her service to clean their homes, care for their elders, prepare their meals. As she travels from one wealthy area of the city to the next, she notices to stark contrast between her situation and that of those who hailed from the same province in India as her but who belong to a higher social class:
Men and women, white and beige, in various stages of undress, lounged on long reclining chairs. Residents walked their well-groomed canines around the garden. Children jumped into the pools with neon floats around their arms and waists. There truly was a lot to behold in this gated paradise. But Sivagami had no time to linger.
The contrast lies not only in the different migrant realities that Sivagami and her employers live, but also in the difference between her reality and the perception people at home have of her experience. Back in India, debt collectors pay Sivagami’s home regular visits, asking for payback on the money her husband had used to buy alcohol in an attempt to drown out the misery of having sustained a work injury that keeps him bound to a wheelchair. To them, Sivagami is the “rich Singaporean madam”, the expatriate who must be living a wealthy life abroad. Meanwhile, in Singapore, Sivagami ends her long days as a domestic worker, who is paid a meager S$10 an hour, by returning to her small bedroom inside a cramped apartment, where her sponsors host other migrant laborers as well—one of whom sexually assaults her. Sivagami’s migratory life is far from the glamorous vision of life abroad that people have.
Such is the nature of memories—they linger, even as they transform from recollections into stories.
This sense of contradiction between the different diasporic stories, real and imagined, is the book’s center of gravity. Sivagami’s story stands side by side with the separate story of Padma, one of her employers. Padma had moved to Singapore for an arranged marriage, and throughout this monumental shift in her life, she holds on to traditional values as an anchor: she stays with her husband for the sake of her family even after she finds out that he has been having an affair, she wants her children to marry within their culture, she finds it perplexing that her husband’s sister chooses to devote herself to her career rather than to making a family. As another testament to the diversity of diasporic experiences, Padma’s way of holding on to her past and culture is nothing like the approach taken by her sister Prema. In yet another story, Prema also moves to Singapore for marriage,but she met and married her husband of her own accord. If Padma cherishes traditions, Prema is haunted by them. The stories of India that Prema carries over to her life in Singapore do not ground her as much as they caution her against blindly abiding to traditions. She thinks often about the harrowing story of her mother’s older sister, Kamala, who had passed away long before either Padma or Prema was born.
Kamala’s story plays out to the reader in yet another narrative, through the perspective of Padma and Prema’s mother, Rajeswari, as she takes care of her own father, who suffered from Alzheimer’s. In his old age, Rajeswari’s father struggles to recognize most of his friends and family, but the one person he keeps seeing in everyone is his older daughter who died shortly after she was married off. He is haunted by how he stuck to tradition and failed to bring her home even when he realized that she was suffering from abuse by her husband. Rajeswari, witnessing the regrets that plagued her father until his last breath, comes to recognize that she carries this grief, too. After her father’s death, she notes:
For the first time in months, our house is tranquil. No longer is there one to utter long buried names. No longer is there one to unearth pained histories that are better forgotten than remembered. But it all only lasts a fleeting moment. Soon, the rooster’s call starts once again and memories of her rush to the surface, unyielding.
As compact as it is, Nine Yard Sarees holds a rich, border-defying world within its pages.
Such is the nature of memories—they linger, even as they transform from recollections into stories. Prema, who heard of the story from her mother, and who struggled with multiple miscarriages, becomes incredibly protective of her first and only daughter, Vani. She even reconnects with the spiritual side of her culture and prays regularly for the sake of her daughter. In her own story in the cycle, Vani thinks of her mother as superstitious, especially after Prema shepherded her to various spiritual doctors in search of a cure for psoriasis. To Vani, who grows up feeling outcasted in a society that values a flawless, light-skinned kind of beauty, her mother’s frantic efforts to rid her of the marks on her skin seems frustratingly surface-level and backward; for Prema, it comes from a fear of loss that she has inherited from her own mother.
Thus, the cycle continues, memories transmitted from one generation to the next, through stories and actions, through efforts to heal whatever the previous generation had suffered from. Memories do not disappear, they morph.
In telling these tales non-chronologically, Ram emphasizes the unending presence of the past, blurring the lines between generations and between distant locations. The migrants of her stories live in a blurred in-between space—their stories are neither linear nor straightforward nor isolated.
In this way, the form that Nine Yard Sarees takes—short stories told out of time order—highlights how the past and the present, the homeland and the foreign, the downtrodden and the wealthy, all intersect in unexpected and conflicting ways. More impressively, each short story in the cycle offers an intricate portrait of a character and their relationships with other equally complex individuals. As compact as it is, Nine Yard Sarees holds a rich, border-defying world within its pages.