Fiery beginnings, shaky endings

I skipped the first story in this collection of short stories which has an intriguing title and a stunning cover, because I’d read it in another collection, and the taste still lingered in my mind. The Infamous Bengal Ming keeps you on the edge of your seat with its love-meets-death theme and the violent and the fallible, the manic and the vulnerable so imperceptibly separated. A tiger in a zoo wakes up with the realisation that he’s in love with his keeper whom he has known pretty much all his life. A bizarre and disastrous day follows, the events of which only just tie together, and only because you’ve suspended belief while you clutch your heart. The story has something both obviously and subconsciously macabre about it, and something which you discover runs through this first collection of Rajesh Parameswaran’s short stories, if not with as delicious impact. The memory of that macabre took me through a large part of this collection. The Strange Career of Dr Raju Gopalarajan crystallises the author’s ability to build an endearing character, and yet with a twist, so that just as you settle into empathising, you’re pulled back, or kept suspended uneasily in anticipation of some quirky turn. (Often these “turns” are set out at the beginning and frame the story, and so the terms of the plot are set, and even while you want to manoeuvre the story elsewhere, you’re mesmerised by it.) Stories like The Strange Career , I Am An Executioner and Demons also have in common seemingly familiar situations that are stretched to a definitely uncomfortable conclusion — generally placing blood and/or death on the same continuum as work, marriage, ennui and so on.

“When the phone rang the night before Thanksgiving, Savitri Veeraghavan was doing her best to forget that her husband, Ravi, lay dead on the living room floor. A pot of tomatoes and lentils and water was boiling, a simple dinner, and Savitri had put a stainless steel wok next to it on the stove, turned the heat to medium, and poured in a yellow pool of vegetable oil.” — Demons

Form wraps itself around content, and all the stories, however discomfiting, have an easy and unintimidating style, which often makes their plotlines even harder to digest. Stories like Bibhutibhushan Mallik’s Final Storyboard and Four Rajeshes push beyond the realm of the bizarre, with characters playing out complex emotions and situations: the stories delve deeper, and the psychology of the characters are stripped open, in light-as-air prose.

“I think: Hal Pereira, Robert Boyle, Henry Bumstead. Who in the general public knows these names They are Hitchcock’s wonderful art directors, but for all their beautiful work, what acknowledgement I am determined to be just as much forgotten, unless I make my own film. But as I read Jogesh’s screenplay, such an endeavour is starting to feel entirely beyond me.” — Bibhutibhushan Mallik’s Final Storyboard

There are two things that make this collection fall short of being really absorbing, even tedious as one gets to the end. The first is the length of some of the later stories, especially Elephants in Captivity (Part 1) and On the Banks of Table River. We begin with stories that are simple, accessible and have impact in terms of plot and style; stories that live up to the potential that the short story form throws up. They are tight, well-structured and perfectly timed, but towards the end of the book, the stories ramble both in terms of plot and form, three or four endings passing you by before you reach, numbed, the end. The other, more frustrating part of the read is that for the stories’ protagonists, who are really interesting and worthy of empathy — whether Ming the tiger with his hapless love, Raju and his single-minded ambition, Bibhutibhushan and his end of career frustrations and desires — things don’t turn out well at all. So while the collection seems innovative with twists and turns that almost all the stories take (leave maybe two), the twists seem so predetermined that by the end one has the depressing sense of walls closing in and aspirations or lives — “demons” — which fall beyond the norm being ultimately censured. There is a tragedy and a cruelty about the fool falling from grace, but there is a fatality about the “deviant” protagonist and turn of plot in the stories that is frustrating for a collection that is otherwise quite bold.

“For all is said and done, what else is there for we to do All is said and done, Margaret is my wife, and I am an executioner.” — I Am An Executioner

Disha Mullick travels, writes and edits when she can