FICTION
A mirror to our times
R. KRITHIKA
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It's like coming face-to-face with the daily news.
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Sikander Chowk Park; Neelum Saran Gour, Penguin, Rs. 295.
ALMOST every day we read of bomb blasts and people dying. Who are these nameless and faceless people?
Neelum Saran Gour's Sikander Chowk Park looks at one such incident. A bomb explodes in Sikander Park killing 57 people. The journalist assigned to cover the event goes on to trace the life of 11 people who die in that blast. Why were they at that place at that particular time?
The 11 people whose lives he chooses to chronicle are ordinary people leading ordinary lives — a retired lawyer with a cantankerous wife, a music teacher with a family of stray animals, an Anglo Indian widow coming to terms with the knowledge of her husband's infidelity, a Dalit girl escaping from an unhappy marriage into an affair with an unemployed Brahmin, an office clerk whose husband suffers from psychiatric problems caused by alcoholism, ... Sometimes the narrative seems jumpy as the story moves from one character to another. None of their lives intersect at any point yet they share a common fate. They all die at the same time, in the same place.
Reading the book is almost like coming face-to-face with what you read in the newspaper every morning. Communal tensions, caste prejudices, infidelity, sexual harassment are all woven in to the stories without seeming out of place or overdone.
At times, Gour's prose seems ponderous and academic especially in the story of Professor Mathur but there are evocative moments as when the professor and his landlady Sakina Bibi have a kind of a duet in translating Hardy's "Darkling Thrush".
There are no answers to the troubling issues of bigotry and prejudice that are raised. The book holds a mirror to Indian contemporary society, warts and all.
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