SHORT FICTION
Stories from two realms
ANTARA DAS
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While the stories of the surreal are clichéd, the realistic ones have an earthy appeal.
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The Dark Side, Sathya Saran, Anthem, an imprint of Manjul Books, p.205, Rs.195.
The twin realms of the surreal and the very real constitute the backdrop to The Dark Side, a collection of short stories by Sathya Saran. While that piece of information serves its function as a gripping teaser on the blurb, the ec
lectic platter of the 21 stories inside barely manages to live up to those heightened expectations.
Down a beaten path
Saran describes the surreal, in the preface to her book, as “something beyond the real, or it could be the mind itself, bending in ways not normally bent, to experience that which is not normally experienced.” Venturing into such unchartered waters, however, demands a certain degree of originality, a rigorous application of the imagination in order to create the nebulous domain of experience that defies the conventional. Sadly for the reader, Saran treads the beaten path, relying on familiar, time-tested props characteristic of tales of unease and horror.
So while “Rendezvous” is set against an all-too-familiar and none-too-scary backdrop of a moonlit graveyard, “The Seven-Cornered Table” deals with the mystery associated with a table acquired in the flea market that necessitates recourse to a séance to unravel its past. The baleful creatures of the night, too, dutifully appear: as blood sucking vampires in “A Good Wife” and a beautiful woman with a Transylvanian wolf for a grandfather in “Night Train to Glasgow”. While these standard stock-in-trades still manage to hold attention, stories like “A Bicycle for Two”, where Saran tries to grapple with the tricky concept of time travel, exhibit an uncertainty that tends to mar its overall texture. Saran explains in the Preface that the last mentioned story was “written to order” to form the base for a film that ultimately failed to materialise, which might explain the discomfiture that is rather apparent in the story.
Better written
In contrast, the stories comprising the “very real” have an earthy humanity that makes for better reading. Drawing from the familiar strains and stresses of urban, middle class life, stories such as “Smoke Rings”, “A Sunday Evening” and “Last Supper” trace the demands that collapsing relationships, failed marriages and divorce make on humdrum, day-to-day existence. Stories like “Diwali Promise”, which deals with a 13-year-old girl desperate to return to her mother from the foster home she is growing up in, are quite convincing in their depiction of emotional turmoil, with even the sentimental overtures not being too over-the-top.
Best of the lot
“A Toothful Tale” can perhaps claim to be the most entertaining and delightful story in the collection, generating both humour and suspense in the antics of an old aunt who has to ensure the safety of certain valuables on the train on her way to a wedding. The language, too, appears more nuanced and subtle here, without any hint of triteness and banality.
Many of the stories in this collection have already appeared in popular magazines through the 1980s and 90s. The author regards the book as the sort one would read on a train journey or on a rainy day, so there is not a great deal of complex or sensitive probing that the reader might expect. After all, one cannot be too fastidious about what one reads on the train.
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