Short Fiction
A cocktail of styles
KALA KRISHNAN RAMESH
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There are little stories within stories, sabotaging the narrative.
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For the most part, he writes with the easy lightness of cross-referential village gossip, taking readers into casual confidence.
Smell of an Evening, Suresh Menon, Yeti Books, 2006, price not stated.
SURESH MENON'S Smell of an Evening, a collection of nine short stories, isn't uninteresting. On the contrary, these stories, "born out of an expatriate's attempt at reclaiming himself from the ruins of dismembered memory", may be a little too interesting.
If you are wondering how that can be, take a look at this: "The Thalla's cows grew in force. One day she died unaware in her sleep. The herd left the Kavala and never came back. The jackfruit tree in the middle of the road, which had no leaves on its lower branches, thanks to the herd's onslaught, would blossom no more, and remained alive but dead thereafter."
Menon marks with equal significance the thalla (old woman), her herd, the jackfruit tree, its lower branches, its urge to flower, its aliveness and its deadness, thus breaking the first rule of readable writing — to always privilege some characters, events, and feelings over others, so that they path the reader to the place the story is going to. Instead of which he's given them all the power to speak and each wants to tell a story.
The quick flow of narrative, the deliberate trot of plot, the tense intensity of feeling in all stories, are repeatedly broken by the appearance of some new character with a story of almost equal, if shorter significance, which we don't want to hear because we are caught up in the other story.
Thus in "Murder in the Memory" — perhaps the best in the collection, the story of the sexy Maimoona (is the name a tribute to O.V. Vijayan's heroine of Khasak?), slavishly loved by childhood friend Dasan, lusted after by the tailor, ravished by the village Adonis and finally stabbed to death by the rejected Dasan is disrupted by the stories of old women and their cows and the trees that the cows destroy! This happens in all nine stories.
Interesting stories
More's the pity, because all the stories in Smell of an Evening, with the definite exception of "Companions"(which has all the hallmarks of bad Malayali writing — the intellectual pretension, the mistaking of oratory for story telling and the politically-aware talk) are interesting.
Perhaps this comes from Menon's cocktailing of styles. For the most part, he writes with the easy lightness of cross-referential village gossip, taking readers into casual confidence, but sometimes he talks with the heavy intensity of allusive magical realism (or its bastardised easier version, part surreal, part other things). "He thrust a broken bottle into the Gangster's throat, who gently collapsed on the floor and died. The lover wiped her face and put on red lipstick. She rushed to snatch the bar girl away from the Captain's companion, and the two floated out of the tavern. They took away bits of cloud in their hands."
Dubious claim
I don't know if the blurb's implied claim, that Menon`s characters and milieu make him a more genuine Indian English writer, is admissible. True, he writes about "persons who do not speak or think in English" as opposed to "the recent crop of Indian English writers who use the ruse of an English-speaking narrator/ protagonist", but most of us are yet to meet villagers, even the literate, politicised Kerala kind, who can live in such a conscious world.
Smell of an Evening is nicely produced — it's a Yeti books publication, with a pretty cover (Netra Shyam's illustrating capacities have improved since her days of gawky news magazine illustrations).
One looks forward to more of Suresh Menon's writing, hoping that in the meantime, he will have got rid of the storylets lurking in the shadows waiting to sabotage the real stories!
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