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Literary Review
SHORT FICTION
Of love and grief
SHEILA KUMAR
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Each story, touching lightly upon the human condition, is sure-footed in its movement and measured in its pace.
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The Japanese Wife, Kunal Basu, Harper Collins, Rs 395.
This slim volume holds a baker’s dozen, short stories touching lightly upon the human condition, each one sure-footed in its movement, measured in its pace. Right at the end of the last story, there appears this line: I savour the story more fo
r its poetic fantasy than for any truth it might contain. Now, that sums up Basu’s book neatly and precisely.
The writer takes us places with each story; we sit beside the untamed Matla river in the Sunderbans one moment, walk the cantons of Switzerland the next, gaze at the Taj, head to Karol Bagh after that, go on quick trips to Hong Kong, China, Udaipur, dreary Bryansk, bustling Yogyakarta. All these places hold their place as mere backdrops but Basu describes landscapes as if he were filling in the details of a still life painting…we see every little pointillist detail coming alive with simple yet evocative strokes.
The first story, “The Japanese Wife”, (now being made into a movie by Aparna Sen) is easily the best in the collection. A young teacher in a coastal hamlet enters into an unlikely bond with an unseen Japanese woman and what’s more, sustains this bond for 20 years. Twenty years, during which he does not get to see Miyage, his Japanese wife, only exchange letters with her and receive parcels at frequent intervals, parcels of books, fruit, silk scarves, all rather poor substitutes for the warmth of human touch. The teacher and the Matla river have their own unique bond, too. To add to this mix of unmet longings comes a young woman to stay in the teacher’s house, to invade his quiet existence, to upset his plan. It is as if the reader is sitting in a boat on the heaving Matla, watching the teacher’s life come slowly apart.
Dealing in the unlikely
Continuing to deal in the unlikely, Basu juxtaposes a Punjabi family in Karol Bagh with an American widow carrying the ashes of her rock star husband, in “Grateful Ganga”. The Ganga is in spate, and so are the emotions, too; the pull of attraction between people of different cultures and background, threaded together by strains of music. Evelyn wants to immerse Andy’s ashes in the Ganga because the late rocker believed India was the world’s expressway to the stars but can’t do so till the river calms down. The interim period is one fraught with tensions of all sorts, but of course, humans being what they are.
“Lenin’s Café” has Basu doffing a cap to the Bengali of yesteryears (not altogether a vanished breed, though), who believed passionately in the Revolution and all the promise of radical change. Lenin’s meeting with fellow Russian exiles in Zurich is reprised here, as seen through the eyes of a young Bengali and his dead father who suddenly appears for a tryst with his son. Basus’s elegant turns of phrase — “woodcuts from America lay trapped in the attic of my sister”…”venerable Japanese elders stared balefully at sprouting terraces before rows of gingerbread homes” — shine through here.
Elsewhere, we meet an elderly Jewish widower determined to put an end to his life in Udaipur, of all places, whereupon an unlikely guardian angel comes between him and his plans. A couple who happen to be in Beijing at the time of the Tiananmen uprising have to deal with twin tragedies, the larger one building up inexorably outside their apartment, the personal storm building in their lives. In Hong Kong, a young couple watches with trepidation the budding romance between their Filipina maid and her Gujarat Muslim beau...and here the unlikely element is the Gujarat riots.
Quirky tale
“The Accountant” is a quirky tale of well, an unlikely reincarnation. Stodgy Mr. Ray will keep on having recurring visions of his past life as one of the principal architects of the Taj Mahal, even as his wife folds endless piles of laundry in so methodical a manner, the reader is instantly captivated, charmed.
“Tiger! Tiger!” is about the night of the poachers, where humans assault animals even as the river (the Matla again) assaults the land. For all the tragedy that any tale of poachers and animals must carry, there is a strong vein of pragmatism that runs through here, and you know life will carry on in this hamlet beside the river, just as day will follow the most traumatic of nights.
“Father Tito’s Onion Rings” is the weak link in the book, and the padre’s mental forays into his war- torn Yugoslavia seems just that bit contrived. In “Miss Annie”, a Russian streetwalker is intruded and branded forever by Kolkata’s special brand of communism. The unlikely factor here? The young prostitute suffers from rheumatism! “The Last Dalang” is a gem of a tale, where we are introduced to a shopkeeper/puppeteer who is reluctant to rouse Kumbhakarna in his version of the Ramayana.
“The Pearlfisher” is another evocative story, dealing with another unlikely pair, an ageing journalist, set in his ways, and his quest to restore a young girl’s honour. The journalist is in Delhi, the girl in Chad and the quest takes the man to Puducherry. The reader is at the man’s shoulder throughout, anxiously egging him on, eager to see how it will all end.
Love, longing, grief. The non-layered stories are well crafted, attention paid to small details and the reader’s interest sustained all through.
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