The world in a matchbox

They say you should not judge a book by its cover, but it is hard not to. Mahesh Rao’s One Point Two Billion has a brilliant cover, a flat white surface chequered with visual icons representing the 13 stories in the book. Each icon looks like a matchbox cover, much like the ones we used to play with in the ’80s, making trains and other toys out of these varied markers of identity, of a nation full of different and differentiated parts represented in these collectible bits.

In this respect the designer, Jonathan Pelham, has excellently captured the strengths of Rao’s storytelling — the sharp, precise beauty of writing, the powerful nostalgia of a semi-socialist India that has all but disappeared, and a new order that has not quite emerged.

The 13 stories in this book are ordinary stories made extraordinary in the telling. Much like the country of 1.2 billion that they represent, the stories and characters do not really seem to have much in common with each other, apart from leading lives of mostly quiet desperation and a certain sadness that snakes around their lives.

The surface calm shimmers with the things glimpsed underneath; unarticulated longing, jealousy hidden like a knife, dissent unexpressed. In almost every story the perceived calm is broken by some act of violence, whether an actual bomb going off in a marketplace, or a confession of forbidden love. Rao takes the desperation, the quiet and the violence, all of it, and serves it up with a delightful mix of empathy and wry insight.

The first of the stories is possibly the most brilliant. It is the story of a chronic worrier managing a yoga centre outside Mysore, and it is written so splendidly, told so well, that it overshadows the rest of the collection. It is not that the rest of the collection is mediocre in any way, the stories are so good that they leave you with an ache after having read them. But much like that other, absolutely splendid collection of short stories, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, by Daniyal Mueenuddin, one story outshines the rest. In the case of Rao’s collection it is because in the first story he gives full rein to a lovely sense of humour that is far more restrained in the other stories.

Rao inhabits the spaces he writes about almost effortlessly. Each story mentions the state or town it is set in only in passing, but the backdrop is important in each one, and not interchangeable in any. You have a has-been movie villain in Bombay who both clings on to the fame of his past, and wants to move beyond it; an old woman interred with the rest of her village in a camp somewhere in Naxalite Orissa; a hollow-chest, timid young teacher in Kashmir enraged at the administration for trying to appropriate language; a young son coming to terms with his mother’s descent into insanity after losing her husband to a bomb blast in Assam. The shallow world of films, police brutality, the complicity of the state, is specific to each setting and Rao seems comfortable in every one of these places.

Interestingly enough, the weakest (or not as strong) stories are the ones set in an urban milieu. The story of the young, bored housewife on holiday with her self-centred husband in Pondicherry, and the one of the young Delhi girl whose dislike of her step-mother-to-be ends in tragedy, are the only two stories in the collection which seemed rather run-of-the-mill. And, somehow, the story of a daughter from an elite, landholding family in Rajasthan does not quite grip in the same way as the others, although the almost casual excellence with which Rao conjures up characters remains.

Rao has a gift for voices, articulating with ease the anguish of an old, retired man in love with his son’s wife as well as the confused emotions of a young pahalwan -in-training. Each story, whether written in first person or third, has a distinctive tone that is unrepeated. Almost as if the narrators inhabit different worlds. Even more admirably, never does the narration or voice seem forced, even in the couple of less-than-brilliant stories.

One of the marks of good writing, one could argue, is leaving the reader wanting more. In the case of One Point Two Billion , almost each story feels like it could be turned into a full-length novel you would be glad to read. It can also be argued that a good writer leaves you wanting more, and in that Rao has succeeded most assuredly, and has set a very high benchmark for his next work, one that we anticipate with much delight.

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