The Bonesetter's Fee and Other Stories by Rashida Murphy

The Bonesetter’s Fee and Other Stories by Australian author Rashida Murphy is a collection of short stories that span a childhood in India and adulthood in Australia. The evocative stories in the first half of the book transport the Indian diaspora reader to a distant but still intensely familiar Indian landscape. They capture the unique cadences and life rhythms of a past era in that country. The interiority of homes and domestic landscapes features pre-eminently in the stories. Memory is a powerful trope in her writing. The domestic landscape that emerges through her writing is suffused with the joyous conviviality and haunting hostility of familial figures. The interior world of family lives takes the foreground in her stories while the outside world of the era looms quietly in the background. The characters’ beliefs, attitudes and behaviours form the prism through which the influences of the outside world on the domestic family universe can be observed and understood. The interface between exterior and interior worlds is a very powerful and productive site of literary creation in the field of Indo-Anglian literature. Murphy’s writing dwells delicately on this terrain. There is both nostalgia and a critical rationality in her treatment of the past, a willingness to both embrace sympathetically and confront critically. 

Superstitions and alternative belief systems relating to health and wellbeing come in for critical scrutiny. The spectre of the foreboding astrologer with dire prognostications and predictions of doom looms over the inner life of the family in one story. A planned consultation with the eponymous bonesetter in the titular story sparks fierce debates within the family about the merits of going to alternative orthopaedic practitioners. The figure of the itinerant but authoritative man – from traditional healer to astrologer to gemstone merchant – features prominently. This is an interesting and familiar figure in Indian literary works, whose influence on the inner sanctum of the family home may be peculiarly impactful, threatening, destabilising or benign. The forces of conservatism argue that these uncanny authority figures with their enthralled local following and traditional imprimatur for practice must be respected and the family must abide by their dicta. Those opposed challenge the sway they have over others and the wisdom of subjecting one’s health and wellbeing to their ministrations, if not surrendering one’s fate to their whims. The tension between traditional and modern belief systems characterises the animosity between characters. Where opposition to tradition is overruled and conformity with traditional belief systems upheld by authority figures within the family, there is limited opportunity for an individual, let alone a child, to assert her right to bodily and spiritual autonomy. Instead, the opposition takes the form of inner defiance, an inner protest against one’s coerced participation in traditional practices. When one doesn’t have the right to refuse and must conform with the prescribed actions, one compels oneself to go through the motions physically but rebels internally against the strictures. Murphy evokes that defiance through humour and bathos in this collection of short stories. Stories ending with a twist of fate, an ironic outcome or a reversal of fortunate serve as a kind of vindication or conduit for closure. 

Murphy’s stories also focalise children’s voices and their ability to make sense of the world through shared meaning-making processes. Siblings become sounding boards for ideas and interpretations of the complex messages that adults seem to unwittingly send them and each other. The complexity and uncertainty of the adult world is broken down into more sensible bits, sometimes revealing the absurdity and pettiness of that world. The children’s world then becomes a site of a sensible reckoning with reality, a circle of clear thinking within the cluttered domestic realm. Unencumbered by the psychological constraints and prejudices of the adults, the youth can sometimes see things as they really are and dare to explore things the adults would not countenance. In one story, a group of itinerant bandits comes to live outside the child protagonist’s home; her father is their lawyer and they have nowhere else to go for the duration of their case. The bandits and their families set up a makeshift camp in the garden of the family home and stay there for an extended period of time. The threatening proximity of the bandits feels intolerable to the mother but the kids are curious about them and on the sly discover among them a world of exotic cooking and self-sufficient living. There is humour in the juxtaposition of the ordered domestic world of the family with the nominally disordered presence of the outlaw outsider on their periphery. The child’s perspective cuts through the ordinary interpretation of this juxtaposition and sees what lies beyond. There is humour too in the ultimate analysis of this situation: “I don’t know if the legal representation was successful, whether Dad made any money or if the bandits continued to be career bandits or changed paths and became respectable homeowners.” 

On the other side of this narrative technique is the perspective of the mother, a mother in a different era and different country, Australia, but nevertheless a parent experiencing all the fears and frustrations one might experience when confronted by a brave but truculent child and the vagaries of a sometimes-unsafe world. The child’s derring-do provokes emotional responses in the mother, which serve as a kind of redemptive counterpoint to the reactions of the mother figure from the stories set in India. There is a discoursal movement back and forth between the characters in these different eras and locales, offering glimpses of reconciliation, resolution and understanding. One of the most powerful stories in the collection, ‘Being Calamity Jane’, captures twin moments of calamity occurring on the same day – the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US and the dissolution of a 20-year marriage in the life of the mother-protagonist in Australia. The global outrage at terror and the images of devastation playing on repeat on the news form the backdrop for the personal calamity in the life of the protagonist. Rather than overwhelming the protagonist, the confluence of calamities, global and personal, strengthens her resolve, reinforcing her belief that she can emerge through the ruins of this moment and honing her protective feelings about her daughter. There is a calm resolve in the authorial voice that gently illuminates the inner strength of the mother in this story, whose tenacity and resolve stem partly from wanting to be the best and freest version of herself for her daughter’s sake. 

The Bonesetter’s Fee and Other Stories traverses a great journey across time and space, both geographical and psychological. The Western Australian setting of the concluding stories is a setting of calm reflection, dependable friends and sometimes-foolhardy adventure. There is a kind of settling in of the authorial voice in the latter stories. Murphy brings a wry humour and sense of unflappable resolve to the narrative voices in the book. It is a particularly gratifying read for a diaspora reader. Murphy is calm and measured in her retrospective assessment of the domestic adventures and misadventures of the past. She is also considerate and reflective in her treatment of the matured parent-narrator living in Australia. There is an elegant closing of the loop of migrant experience in the work.