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Book Review
Short story anthology in translation
ASHOKAMITRAN
INTIMATE MOMENTS AND OTHER STORIES: G.S.Balakrishnan; Edited and translated from the original Tamil by G.B.Prabhat, Kriyator in association with Westland Ltd., 571, Poonamallee High Road, Aminjikarai, Chennai-600029. Rs. 195.
In 1946, the author of this book G.S. Balakrishnan met the reputed Tamil writer Pudumaipittan in Thiruvananthapuram when a young boy came to them with a movable figure made of matchsticks and asked for some money. Pudumaipittan asked Balakrishnan whether he could make a story of the situation. “Mini and Mohini” is a story in this collection of 27 stories and it tells about a robot fabricator whose obsession with making a robot Mohini slowly estranges his beauti
ful and talented wife Mini from him. On the day she walks out of his home, he accidentally activates the remote control device of the robot and it clings to him tightly. Of course, the robot looks like a beautiful girl. Unable to move or unclasp the robotic hug, the man waits with his eyes fixed on the door for someone to come and press the remote and release him. This story is worthy of his compatriot writer Sujatha Rangarajan, who has likened Balakrishnan with Tamil writers of yesteryears, namely, Kalki, S.V.V., Devan, Savi and Nadodi. He is as intelligent and innovative as Sujatha in his ability to create short (and shorter) stories with well-defined plots, climaxes and resolution. He wrote the robot story around 1993 and says it took him four years to write. This, in a sense, is his tribute to Pudumaipittan, and also to Sujatha.
Entertaining
His stories generally have women trusting and womanly in the traditional Indian manner, while his men are given to gallivanting ways. The stories have a variety of setting – locked lift with two former lovers caught in it, a man with a resolve to renounce the world suffering an air crash, his vision gone and only a young boy as the other survivor. There is a story of Vasco da Gama adopting a Calicut girl as his daughter only to lose her to the lechery of one of his soldiers. A story in nurses’ quarters which won him a prize for the best humorous story in a contest. There is also a story in which AIDS puts an end to a novel-writing effort of an otherwise faultless doctor. As the doctor dies with a wish that someone persuade the actress who was the carrier of the dreaded thing to more people, she dies! The stories are enjoyably tricky, sometimes shocking but are all entertaining.
The translator G.B. Prabhat (who is the author’s son, and himself a novelist) has done a remarkable job of choosing these 27 from a collection of nearly 500 stories and rendering them competently in English. Balakrishnan’s stories may not haunt the reader and make him lose sleep but they are certain to entertain everyone. There is a story having a dig at overly orthodox Brahmins. A bachelor sends away a priest who had come travelling nearly a hundred miles to perform the bachelor’s father’s annual ceremony. Reason, the priest had clipped off his tuft. Years later, the priest encounters the man again, now married, and who is garishly dressed and sports a formidable pair of sideburns. The man explains that it is all because of his wife. The priest asks him in reply, if he could make such compromises for his wife, could he not bear a poor priest’s wife asking her husband to have a cropped head.
The book is produced in an eminently readable manner and it must be said that there is not a dull moment in its 172 pages.
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