The long and the short of it

In her introduction, editor Mini Krishnan begins by saying this anthology is put together by someone “who has always looked for the best story never told.” And I begin reading hoping this is true, because some stories have remained untold for a reason. They might have been written by someone incredibly well-known and respected but miss the mark somehow, and lack what the author’s better-known stories brim with. Apart from Chetan Raj Shrestha’s ‘The King’s Harvest’ (first published alongside the also excellent ‘Open and Shut Case’ in 2013), which remains enjoyable reading many times over, the first few stories did disappoint.

Mahasweta Devi’s ‘Seed’, originally in Bengali and translated by Ipshita Chanda, sharp and pertinent as ever, lacked some of the urgent narrative drive of her other work. I struggled through details of land ownership, and money yields and exchanges, background details of field labourers. It felt at times more academic treatise than short story. Nirmal Verma’s ‘Signs’, translated from Hindi by Pratik Kanjilal, was also on the disappointing side. Having read and loved most of what he’s written, his clear, concise prose, his sharp psychological insights, seemed less developed, the characters less drawn. What also didn’t work for me was the shift — too abrupt — between third-person and first-person narrative. If a long short story provided space, as Krishnan’s introduction says, for “excellent characterization as well as propulsive narrative action”, Bolwar Mahamad Kunhi’s ‘Period of Mourning’ lacked both. This Kannada tale of a household in mourning, particularly focusing on the young widow, seemed to meander along without direction.

From the next story onwards, though, the anthology sings.

Habib Kamran’s ‘Bulbuls’ is that rare short piece of fiction that transforms, like good poetry, a wholly quotidian event into something much beyond itself. The narrator, while sitting out in his garden, observes a pair of bulbuls building a nest, and we follow the progress of these winged creatures through the season and the next. The question at the heart of the story is, should he intervene? When the cat hunts, and the rain pours, and food is scarce. How much should he help? How much should he let them be? For “help” can go either way. Once he saves the nest from a feline hunter. Another time, because of his intervention, one of the bulbul fledglings gets lost. Yet he becomes their “self-appointed” guard. Given the story was originally written in Kashmiri (and translated by Neeraj Mattoo), the question works at more levels than one enclosed within these leafy environs. I was riveted; following the trials and adventures of the birds with a concern that utterly surprised me.

KR Meera’s ‘The Deepest Blue’, translated from Malayalam by J Devika, seems to still preserve its original linguistic music. From the start, the narrative voice is feistily irreverent. “Chaste wives (in the satisavitri mould) and strictly monogamous men (in the maryaadaapurushottam mould) are advised against reading this account. I will not be responsible for any breaches of morality that may result from reading it.” Because this is a tale of desire and adultery but one that is told in a tone of almost cosmic, godly proportions. While hunting for a house, our narrator and her husband encounter a sanyasi living alone in a place they’d like to purchase. Except she falls immediately, incredibly, deeply in love with him, and pursues him despite the day-long distance that keeps them apart. When they finally spend the night together, in a grove of njaaval fruit outside the sanyasi’s house, they are “two beings who’d sought each other since birth”. Yet the voice is what captures you. The one that trips playfully between the real and fabricated. “What one writes after experience — that’s fiction. Experiencing what’s written — that’s life. That’s the inconvenience of life. And the freedom of fiction.” Shripad Narayan Pendse’s ‘Jumman’, translated from the Marathi by Shanta Gokhale, is also a gem. More scathing in its tone than Kamran’s ‘Bulbuls’, it tells the tragicomic tale of Jumman, the goat, who belonged to the cruel and stone-hearted Jotya. This could easily have been a clichéd story of how he became a changed man because of his friendship with the creature, but Pendse pushes it further, ultimately making us question how, where, and why we find our gods to worship.

Waryam Singh Sandhu’s ‘The Fourth Direction’, translated from Punjabi by Nirupama Dutt, one of the shorter long stories in the collection, closes in on one night at a station where three passengers miss their train to Amritsar. It’s set at the time of the Sikh separatist movement of the 1980s and Sandhu skilfully builds tension and suspense around their predicament, during a time when “no one is safe”, and “times are not like they used to be”.

I did wonder at a point whether Krishnan should have considered collecting stories for the anthology under a “theme”, and eventually was glad she hadn’t. They have commonalities, of course. They’re taken from across the country, and written originally (apart from Shrestha’s ‘The King’s Harvest’ ) in “regional” languages. They’re mostly longer than usual “short stories”. And perhaps, I thought, this was enough. That there was special pleasure in not knowing what the next story might throw up, or where it would be set, or what the themes might be. And this is how we encounter stories, and how they exist in our lives, in a glorious, riotous jumble, and to that this anthology does immense justice.

Janice Pariatis the author of The Nine-Chambered Heart

COMMENT NOW