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SHORT STORIES

Things start going wrong after Marian succumbs to a forbidden temptation and tries on the dress made especially for her eagerly-awaited 10th birthday. A viper lurking in their Eden-like garden is killed and the tales surrounding it grow, blurring the lines between truth and fiction. The birthday dress is smeared with bloodstains left from what the little girl imagines is divine retribution, for she has just stepped, ignorant and unprepared, over the threshold of puberty into an altered reality that terrifies her.

Fearing punishment, Marian trashes the dress and watches remorsefully as the maid is dismissed for theft. Her day is ruined, her life not quite the same. Turning on truth, falsehoods, intimations of mortality, guilt, regret and the elusive grey areas in between, “In the Garden” is rich in nuances and symbolism, but devoid of sound and fury. Signifying more than is immediately apparent, it offers us a foretaste of what Jones can accomplish with the most mundane of elements.

In the deceptively simple stories that follow, a certain continuity is maintained as each flows seamlessly into the other and characters from one reappear in another, but never in the state we have known them.

For as we progress, time flows, perspectives shift and relationships evolve, affording us disturbing new insights into the supposedly humdrum lives of ordinary people — a subject Jones knows so intimately that the deeper we delve, the more there is to discover, luring us on to still-unfathomed enigmas and secrets waiting to unfold.

Situated mainly in Santa Clara, a little Indian Catholic neighbourhood where nearly everyone knows everyone else and lives are strung together by shared routines and rituals and “voices calling from one garden to the next”, Jones’ narratives are redolent with the sights, scents and sounds of a community that seems placidly self-contained at first glance.

But probe a little and its dissonant notes are unmistakable. Old buildings are demolished as new ones come up. Urban slums encroach on once-respectable localities. Younger residents go abroad for better prospects and return only fleetingly to touch base.

The sense of unease that settles on those left behind implies that a whole way of life is under siege, caught between conflicting attitudes and lifestyles, past and present, reality and illusion, destabilising change and the hopelessness of the status quo.

It is a world where grand passions and monumental tragedies are rarely heard of. What Jones’ characters endure could happen to any of us, rarely crossing the limits of the ordinary. When it does, even briefly, as in the case of desertion by a frustrated wife and mother (“The Crow and the Monkey”), repeated homosexual rape at boarding school (“We Think of You Every Day”) or the secret of a daughter’s lesbianism that can never be shared with her family (“The Bold, the Beautiful”), the build-up is so leisurely and the innuendoes so veiled, that as Biddy puts it in “The Bold, the Beautiful, “…every day you’re in and out, you don’t notice these things that happen gradually.”

Yet, we absorb them unconsciously, filing them away in our minds where they linger like a dull ache. For in Jones’ scheme of things, even as life picks up again after it has been temporarily thrown off-balance, it is rarely from where it left off. Certainties have been shaken, innocence corrupted, promises betrayed, honest intentions gone awry and compromises made and regretted forever. Just as in real life.

If these tales ring with authenticity, it is because Jones’ observant eye, keen ear and unerring instincts are sustained by the power of her versatile prose. Perhaps at its lyrically evocative best in the opening story, where it acquires rich, sensuous overtones (“Threads of light needled through the woven shades and fell across the tile floor in a golden mesh.”), it is just as effective elsewhere, adapting itself adroitly to the moment, in description and in dialogue.

Possibly, this writer’s greatest gift is her ability to engage with her characters. For regardless of their age, temperament and circumstances, there is something about her little people that touches our hearts enough to make their secrets, dreams, fears, joys and grief our compelling concern.

The way it happens when we explore the lives of those who animate Rohinton Mistry’s Firozsha Baag, R.K. Narayan’s Malgudi and M. Mukundan’s Mayyazhi. Like the worlds they inhabit, the one of Jones’ creation is rich, complex and unique enough to stand on its own and be counted.

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