Book Review: Best Indian Short Stories Volume II

I FINALLY finished the book of short stories I had borrowed from the library on 30th december to read should the occasion arise that I'd find myself bored on my New Year's sojourn. I wasn't... which led to a wasted two days of reading opportunity. Being at home after work is stressful because I have to bestow my attention on others who demand it, and now I have the additional stress of dance rehearsals for my cousins and best friend's weddings, both happening on the last 10 days of this month. Oh, they are joyous events to be sure, but I already joked to my best friend's fiance that he has upset our schedules for the next two weeks!

OK, so Best Indian Shirt Stories Volume II has been compiled by Khushwant Singh, journalist and frankly racy male sardar writer. From the smattering of his stories that I've read, I'd compare him to a male version of Shobha De, with a tone thats frank, less ironic and deliciously sarcastic and lyrical than Salman Rushdie's. He has the blundering humour of a jovial man who has lived and enjoyed life - the whole wine-women-song routine, that gives him interesting insights into South Mumbai social and street life, a life that's different from that in the slums or suburbs of this indescribable city. Though he still manages to maintain a distance... probably created by the sense of wonder you can feel in his words.

I wasn't sure if I wanted to borrow this because as i skimmed through the authors featured, I realised I hadn't heard of any of them except for Khushwant Singh himself, and R.K. Laxman. AND I noticed, with some indignation, that there was only ONE female author featured. That put me off a little more. But I borrowed it anyway, figuring that on my trip if I had an hour or so to spare, short stories didn't need quite the same amount of attention span as a novel would. Also, I'd get exposed to authors I hadn't previously heard of!

Honestly, I'm glad I borrowed it. After a somewhat disaapointing first story translated from the Marathi about a dhobi (washerman) with rather rakish, unperturbable filmy proclivities elsewhere in Maharashtra, by P.L. Deshpande, we are whisked into the midst of a furore in the conservative Parsi community in Bombay by B.K. Karanjia involving a prostitute, and abortion, and a question of public and private goodness and morality. Then we are told the translated from the Tamil story of a dustbin that could be located anywhere in India and its travails, by M. Karunanidhi. I didn't quite get the story of the corpse during the morcha (protest march) at an explicable level by Kamleshwar, originally written in Hindi. And the story of the foreigner by Shiv K. Kumar was lovely and poignant and pointless and typical of a man. The fat frog's greediness by P. Lal was random, and the story of the accident by R. K. Laxman quite brilliant and acute. The story of the framer had the irony of R. K. Narayan, indeed, it only registered into my biased brain that this story was indeed by R.K. Laxman and NOT R.K. Narayan! Woman at the Window was typical R.K. Laxman. Quite shiver-inducing for me for some reason. Good buildup. Manohar Malgaonkar too writes with irony, and quite a good range of characters. He somehow loses the plot slightly when the irony seems a bit overdone and clumsy at the end though. One is about smugglers and bureaucrats, the other two about frauds within politics. Quite scary, the amount of scheming and sabotaging involved. Eeep! The last one is superb, about the way serendipitous events and people can be played off against each other to achieve a particular aim. But that is all luck. Quite amusing and quite characteristically Indian in their gentleness and greed. One gets a glimpse into the sexual whirlwind of love, deceit and marriage, in no particular order, that is metropolitan Indian high society through Inder Malhotra's and Dina Shah's English stories and the very peculiar elegant yet whimsical feel of erudite Indian English. Saadat Hassan Manto, Urdu writer, has the gentleness that Ismat Chugtai lacks (not featured in this volume), possibly because as a man, he can see beyond the tragedy of the female situation, and yet into it, with compassion. Mozelle is about the tempestuous relationship between a Jewish girl and a Sikh boy in Bombay, about inhibition, religion, riots and all the issues related to the three. And love. Siraj is also about love, albeit in a different form. Mohan Rakesh writes in Hindi, from within the male gaze, and laced with irony (or was it just me) about the mistaken self-perception of goodness and respectability of a man trapped in middle-class morality and the longing for some love. His second story is quite sweet, about a woman's love and fear of her husband, that seems to be characteristic of rural Indian marriages. Maybe I'm mistaken, but I think so because I'm of the same school of thought, albeit more moderate. Bhisham Sahni writes a quite tragicomic story from the point of view of a fat, somewhat hypochondriac, self-satisfied housewife about her servant and her middle class life. Quite garrulous and revealing.

Khushwant Singh includes himself in his collection quite blatantly. Hehe, writing about agnostics, bottonm-pinchers and his conclusion of the modern unclassifibility of the Kama Sutra women types - Hastini, Sankhini, Chitrini, Padmini. Ok, I'll describe them because it's quite fascinating. Hastini is fat and hairy and has a ridiculous appetite for alcohol, food and sex, smells like a mahout's wife and sounds like an elephant when she cums. Sankhini is hard and sexually agitated and screams and is quite wild in bed. Chitrini is arty and smaller and less horny and loves music and painting and likes to dress up. Padmini is supposedly the ideal, "petite, demure, with a water lily blush on her damask cheeks" *rolls eyes*, softly musky and never expresses desire for sex or displays coarseness. She makes no sounds except for a sigh or something holy. JESUS!!! Hmmm... I think I'd be a bit of all! You guess which bits! ;) Khushwant Singh is funny, but not particularly literary - I don't quite know how to describe it. he isn't esoteric or enigmatic, I guess, which I like a little bit. It just sounds like he's the one writing, you know?

Bringing up the rear, is Yashpal, who wrote a story in Hindi about a boy who stubbornly married a lovely useless girl and who gets so jealous of her beauty that he inflicts violence upon her. Typical of men who are insecure and not confident of themselves. A little personally scary for me because I know men who are that insecure. It's very sad indeed, for both parties involved. Not satisfying because one partner is always suffocating/subduing him/herself for the other's satisfaction. It's a terrible task to put upon someone for life. Unless both parties like such masochism. Unfortunately that's the way it seems to be all over the world.

I like anthologies by different authors... one author alone compiling a collection of short stories can rarely, with the exception of R.K. Narayan, create and accurately an entertainingly describe a profusive range of characters and events because each author originates and is immersed in a particular cultural subjectivity and fairly limited range of experience. Even most of Narayan's works, though they describe many different characters, are based in a small town, with a certain type of mentality.

Definitely worth reading. You probably think I praise everything I read, but I'm very careful about what I read and take a great deal of time choosing. As you can see, I'm biased towards Indian and post-colonial literature, and stories that involve confronting and escaping love and principles.

Oooh!!! Look what I found!!! A Review of the book in Sunday Tribune! Better written than mine, but contains slight spoilers!

Have a good day!!!