SHORT STORY
Not yet a master
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`Siddharth Chowdhury seems a writer who has yet to touch base with himself. Until he does, he remains an untapped lode with an uncharted destination.'
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CAN an anecdote stretched to its very limits make the grade as a short story? Can self-indulgent passages of literary or cinematic analysis result in a gripping narrative? Can unlinked tales with recurrent names or places as motifs form a coherent whole between covers? These questions rear their heads unasked as one reads Siddharth Chowdhury's Diksha at St. Martin's, a collection of stories earlier published in The Brown Critique, Debonair, The Asian Age, The Sunday Observer and the Tehelka Literary Review.
But short stories are a deceptively simple literary form. Whether set within a real-life city or an imaginary homeland, whether couched as stream of consciousness or as ironic social commentary, their brevity and inherent tension make them tough to master. And few have essayed them with the dexterity of a Chekov, a Maupassant, a Katherine Mansfield, or an O. Henry. Or, within the Indian context, an Ambai in translation from the Tamil or a Mahashweta Devi, rendered from the Bengali.
Siddharth Chowdhury, an editor at Manohar, makes his debut with a distinct edge because of his unusual subject matter. Straddling the "twin cities" of Delhi and Patna, separated by a mere 700 miles, he delves into urban angst, dreamscapes on and off screen, in a voice that is both Indian and contemporary. The writer appears a bibliophile, at ease with Ghalib and Marquez, Jibanananda Das and Bob Dylan, a cineaste deeply devoted to Martin Scorsese and Mrinal Sen, Werner Herzog and Volkar Schlondorff.
His narratives range from the tale of a retired don of English literature who almost gives up on life after his wife's demise to one of a literate, sensitive security guard who loses his mind over slights from the uncivilised upper classes, from a schoolboy who's in a quandary over how to ward off a predatory paedophile in the guise of a moral science teacher to a social revolutionary betrayed by his own wife, from familial pressure that drives a collegian round the bend to literary revenge as marital discord.
Those of the 16 stories that work are distinguished by mental and verbal dexterity, a nuanced exploration of incipient ambience, a surefooted impulse to reach a conclusion. These include "The Leader of Men", "Anecdotage", "Homeward Bound" and "River of Dreams", the latter a two-stream narrative of a servant boy transplanted to an alien urban domesticity that wreaks havoc on him. Or even the subversive wit, the black humour that buoy "The Adolescents", "Outlaws" and "Seraphim and Cherubim", anchoring them to life. Each of these would hold its own in any anthology of contemporary Indian stories.
But what of the rest? Why don't they match up in terms of quality? Even the fact that every boy-man of potential is named Ritwik (heavy with cultural connotations), or occasionally Hriday, fails to propel the stories towards finesse. Could it be because Chowdhury proves indisciplined in his craftsmanship? Or that self-indulgent ramblings are his stumbling block?
Take "The Loneliness of the Short Story Writer", with its Rushdie-derived lands of "gup and chup", its inward-bound mindscape and more adult-than-adolescent anguish, grossly inadequate to the author's intent. Or the post-coital reveries, the slap in the face that results in "Hard Boiled", puzzlingly independent of its narrative trajectory. Or the youthful beauty's decadent musings over her beloved Ritwik, the genius in the making in "24". Or the salute to Scorcese in the title story that refuses to rise above the banal or find a reason for its existence as a story. Or the laboured social conflict rendered without distinction in "A Scene from Class Struggle in Patna". Each of these plots meanders from a definite narrative voice into sudden colloquial stretches, each seems to be on a journey sans destination, each is moulded with an unsure touch. And that is responsible for their lack of realisation.
The book makes one wish the editors at Srishti had wielded their pens more stringently. How did sentences like these pass muster: "You opened the floodgates of my mind and stories, poems, haikus came rushing out like vomit and there were only so many I could mop up; many spilled about everywhere in alcohol and friends and foolishness but I couldn't care less about it then" (pp.107-8) or "The pizza she had eaten before the show sat in the middle of her belly like a big sticky mass of lump" (p. 103)? How could such elemental literary clumsiness have bypassed the scrutiny of both the author and the editor? Only a patient reader or reviewer would wade through such prosaic anarchy.
Siddharth Chowdhury seems a writer who has yet to touch base with himself. Until he does, he remains an untapped lode with an uncharted destination. One hopes he will find his individual niche in time.
ADITI DE
Diksha at St. Martin's, Siddharth Chowdhury, Srishti, paperback, 2002, p.156, Rs. 145.
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