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Away from the norm

Photo: Rajeev Bhatt

Seriously authentic Palash Krishna Mehrotra, author of "Eunuch Park", jokes that he cannot ever be serious during photographs

“Eunuch Park” spells out the silences of ellipsis by magnifying life’s hushed episodes. Author Palash Krishna Mehrotra describes this Penguin publication best; “It focuses on vulnerable characters. It’s not about evil. Instead it’s about small time deviancy that is inside all of us.”

His Greater Kailash house is also an obvious deviance from the norm. With broken glass for vistas, ladders for stairs and iron girders for roof it is a bit like the book — a world exposed. Neither the house nor the book believes in the niceties of paint or touch-ups. Books from Hunter S. Thomson to J.D. Salinger line the mud plastered walls of his warren. In a bid to feign tidiness, newspaper piles huddle sheepishly below the table. He warns us with a deep-throated laugh, “Don’t move anything you might discover a lot of dirt!”

“Eunuch Park” is this Delhi-based author’s first short story collection. The short-story form lends itself perfectly to Mehrotra’s candid snapshots that explore the spectrum from love to destruction. Each story peeps into bedrooms, throws aside a veil but most importantly lays bare our soul. Seduced for long by the short story, he says, “It enables you to do more. Novels are more homogenous. Short stories are far more subtle and powerful, while lacking the swagger of novels.” Dealing with drug addicts, murderers, cross dressers, the short story form is an obvious choice.

A contributing editor to Rolling Stones magazine, music is the background score in Mehrotra’s work. Reacting to the 14-minute Pink Floyd epics, Mehrotra opts for punk rock instead. Puffing on his Gold Flake, he says, “Punk rock is a big influence on my life as it is packed with a lot of energy. It says everything it wants in one minute.” A fan of Jarvis Cocker he appreciates this leading Britpop musician’s story telling and his themes of claustrophobic bedrooms and seedy joints. His book deals with similar themes and is endowed with similar energy. If punk rock has been an influence so has been V.S. Naipaul. He reveals, “In terms of craft I’ve learnt a lot from him. There’s nothing superfluous to his work.”

This Stephenian’s strength is that he writes about what he knows proximately. He underscores, “The Indian male is what I understand. And the Indian middle class male consumer is what I understand most.” It is through this deep understanding that Mehrotra spins stories about — the government clerk with closet desires, the young boy in a smoky black dress, and the college boy discovering his sexuality. Mehrotra believes that male sexuality is not sufficiently explored in Indian literature. Male writers, he says, stick to topics of nation and state, adding, “Men have stayed away from writing about themselves but it’s time that changed.”

If he centres the male in his stories he also foregrounds the campus. With four stories set in a campus and two in a school, Mehrotra dissects the campus without sentimentality.

This editor of “Recess: The Penguin Book of Schooldays”, strongly believes it is time campus stories come to the fore, free of nostalgia.

His interest in the metamorphosing generation is also clear in his forthcoming book, “The Butterfly Generation”, where he defines a “generation which is doing jobs which they never thought would be doing while growing up.” A travelogue between Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru it reveals from inside a slice of changing India. “Eunuch Park” is a fitting prelude to that.

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