Dear Reader,As a Bengali, I am often asked whether I love fish and mishti doi. Sneering silently at such clichés (I like neither), I mutter to myself that if one is compelled to generalise, a proclivity for nostalgia should rather be considered foremost among the identifying characteristics of a Bengali.This I recognise in myself. If I steadfastly refuse to look back, it is, I know, a reactionary response to having legions of Bengali friends and relatives for whom dewy-eyed reminiscences about their familial or collective pasts, with sympathetic tsk-tsks from appreciative audiences at appropriate junctures, constitute the acme of dinner-table conversations. For me, these are like psychedelic trips—comforting, heady, but one where you typically misunderstand all you see, as the Beatles did while gambolling in their strawberry fields.The word “nostalgia” comes from two Greek words: nostos, meaning homecoming, and algos, denoting pain or longing. Although nostos is used in Odyssey and is said to be the hope keeping the hero afloat through 10 years of getting tossed about on rough seas, “nostalgia” is a neoclassical construct. However, there are times when Odysseus does seem to be stricken with violent bouts of nostalgia as we understand it, such as when he weeps on Calypso’s island, gazing out at the sea, dreaming of home.Yet, if Odysseus’ sexual and emotional behaviour during and after the journey is anything to go by, there is something phoney about his professed desire to return home to his wife, Penelope. He not only sleeps around during the voyage but also gets the travel itch again as soon as he is home in Ithaca. A lost sequel to the Odyssey described his further journeys, in the course of which he got another wife, sired her son, and was ultimately killed by the son he had in secret with the sorceress Circe. So much for fidelity and nostalgia.No wonder Joyce found in Odysseus the archetype of the rootless modern man, forever wandering, running away from himself and from the home where he thinks he can find himself. However, if the very concept of home is illusory, doesn’t the idea of pining for it endlessly seem a silly indulgence? This is why nostalgic jaunts always put me off.I am eager to see what Christopher Nolan makes of that old fox Odysseus in his adaptation of the epic (although if Zendaya is Athena then I am the queen of England). As far as retellings of the Odyssey go, I think nothing can quite match the brilliance of Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad. It centres Penelope so that we get to hear the story from the perspective of the long-suffering wife of the hero. What made her wait for 10 long years for her husband, with no direct communication from him and travelling bards singing of the good time he was having with goddesses and nymphs? Was it love, devotion, wifely loyalty?In Atwood’s version, she is loyal but also perfectly clear-eyed about her husband’s character. She remains faithful to him not because she has no options—she is actually spoilt for choice, with about 120 strapping young men asking for her hand in marriage in Odysseus’ absence—but because she has no illusions about romantic attachments of the kind that made her illustrious cousin Helen elope with Paris and start a war. In The Penelopiad, Helen is a clawed cat, and her savage put-downs for the plain Penelope are straight out of Desperate Housewives.If Odysseus is distinguished by his metis—a Greek word meaning cunning, sagacity, and adaptability, qualities that are the opposite of the brute force (and stupidity) that Greek heroes are associated with—so is Penelope. The two are perfectly matched in their intelligence. In Homer’s time, to praise a woman as a smart hero’s equal in wit must have been a huge compliment, and Penelope is an unusual woman. She manages Ithaca as a king, not as a king’s deputy, in Odysseus’ absence. And she gulls the suitors, successfully defeating their attempt to take over Ithaca by marrying her.What distinguishes Atwood’s Penelope is her astute assessment of the people and forces around her, including her crafty husband and the wily gods. Of course, her clarity of thought is compounded by the fact that she is dead in the novel’s present and, as a shade narrating the story from the underworld, has a deeper insight into the past. But even in life, she is remarkably unillusioned.Her wisdom is also peculiarly feminine—intuitive, experiential, practical. For instance, she says this of her grumpy teenaged son, Telemachus: “Once they’re taller than you are, you have only your moral authority: a weak weapon at best.” After the grand union of husband and wife following 10 years of separation, she has this to say of their catching-up session on the marital bed: “The two of us were—by our own admission—proficient and shameless liars of long standing. It’s a wonder either one of us believed a word the other said. But we did. Or so we told each other.”But The Penelopiad is not just about Penelope. It also brings to the foreground the 12 handmaidens who are hanged quite arbitrarily by Odysseus once he has returned and killed Penelope’s suitors. Atwood gives them a choric voice, which alternates with Penelope’s narration. They too are dead, but even as ghosts they have not forgotten the wrong done to them—and they make sure that we remember it too.In Odyssey, only one among the 12 handmaidens is named, perhaps because they are only collateral in the hero’s epic quest to re-establish his identity after the Trojan War. However, the description of the way they are disposed of would raise anyone’s hackles, suggesting that Homer was not unaware of the injustice in their killing. “As when long-winged thrushes or doves get entangled in a snare... so the women’s heads were held fast in a row, with nooses round their necks, to bring them to the most pitiable end. For a little while their feet twitched, but not for very long” (Odyssey). We note the comparison to thrushes and doves; the last sentence is so precise and graphic, that it suggests unvoiced emotions by its very sparseness. We are compelled to ask: can a man who kills helpless young girls be called a hero?Odysseus’ ostensible reason for murdering the girls was that they had slept with the suitors. In The Penelopiad, they are raped by the suitors. They cannot complain because they are slave girls with no rights. They do tell Penelope, but she too is helpless to stop the abuse. But she soothes them, conspires with them, shares their tears. They are like the daughters she never had, acting as her eyes and ears in the palace. If Penelope sheds copious tears after Odysseus’ return, they are not so much tears of joy at his reappearance as tears of grief at the girls’ deaths.The magic of a mythic story like The Odyssey is that it yields new meanings every time we read it. Modern readings of Homer have focussed on the surrounding cast of the epics, who suffer as much as the heroes but get no glory, in their lifetimes or thereafter. These are the women—from queens to slaves—as well as the foot soldiers, cooks, sailors, heralds, and the nameless people of fallen kingdoms. While Homer does not shower long adjectival phrases on them, as he does on the male heroes, he leaves enough hints to suggest that he too thought of them.For instance, in Odyssey, when Odysseus meets the ghost of Achilles, the dejected spirit laments: “Do not speak soothingly to me of death, glorious Odysseus. I would rather follow the plough as a thrall to another man, one with no land allotted him and little to live on, than be king over all the perished dead.” In short, it is better to be a slave than a dead hero. In an epic justifying the deeds of supermen to lesser mortals, this is an exceptional admission as well as a resounding affirmation of life, with all its privations.Yann Martel’s latest novel retells the story of the Trojan War from the p.o.v. of a common soldier, Psoas. He is the “son of nobody” who gives the novel its title. Here, the heroes are just background noise. The real story belongs to the merchants, for whom the battle for glory is a business venture, and to the ordinary warriors, who fight fear, lice, fleas, and nostalgia before dying like flies. Bhavya Dore writes a sharp reviewof the book in the latest issue of Frontline. Do check it out.One of my all-time favourite poems is Tennyson’s “The Lotos-Eaters”, based on an episode from The Odyssey. During his wanderings, Odysseus’ ship arrives at a beautiful island, full of bursting flowers, slow waterfalls, balmy winds, and golden sand. It is the land of the lotus-eaters, who get themselves high on narcotics and loll around, forgetting everything. Odysseus’ men want to join the islanders, but, of course, the selfish hero won’t let them—who will row his ship if they go? Tennyson’s poem is their protest song, and I cannot agree more with what they say:Death is the end of life; ah, whyShould life all labour be?Let us alone. Time driveth onward fast,And in a little while our lips are dumb.Let us alone.On that cue, I will leave you alone. I will be back soon with more.Till then,Anusua MukherjeeDeputy Editor, FrontlineCONTRIBUTE YOUR COMMENTS