Tales of an absurd world

Revolt of the Fish Eaters (HarperCollins, Rs 299) by Lopa Ghosh is a collection of stories about a corporate world threatened not just by the recession but also by such menacing forces as ghosts, lovers and communists. Quaint characters haunt each story — such as the late Radha Rani Basu, the manipulative mother of the chairman of a company who returns to greet her son a year after her death, sitting next to a statue of Goethe at the Frankfurt airport, or the whore of Siberia who mastered the art of lovemaking only after her feet were eaten away by frost bite, or the village prodigy whose mother conspires to trap the world’s richest man through witchcraft. Each story creates a surreal world rich in symbolism. The language is suitably obscure and many-edged. But the stories successfully capture the paranoia, the fantasies and the absurdities that lie beneath the surface of the seemingly matter-of-fact world of business.

The inexplicable unhappiness of Ramu Hajjam (Hachette, Rs 295) by Taj Hassan is a story that revolves around the river Kareh and the two villages on its both sides. The land-owning farmers, belonging to the higher castes, live in Bhagatpur, while Tesri is populated by the lower castes. Despite the two sides being equally poor, the low-caste people eke out a living by serving the upper-caste farmers. And the former rarely question this balance of power since the rules of their lives have been written in the stone of custom. But discontent seethes under the surface of daily existence. When Ramu Hajjam, a low-caste barber, is brutally beaten up for accidentally cutting the cheek of a high-caste Subedar Singh, Ramu’s son seeks a grotesque revenge. This is a tale of violence being born out of oppression, and poverty crippling humanity. What makes it different are Ramu’s dreams, which come to him whenever he is traumatized, and foretell the fates of his people. Ramu’s premonitions serve as indicators of the dangers inherent in the caste system.

Return to Bhanupur: A novel (Penguin, Rs 250) by Giles Tillotson travels back a hundred years in time to the court of the princely state of Bhanupur, where intriguing deceptions around political image-building take place. These games of politics do not seem to be very different from the ones that are played in present-day India. The story is about Maharaja Amar Singh II and his wily Bengali prime minister. The latter resolves delicate issues like travelling to the coronation ceremony of a British king without polluting his caste, and designs devious tactics to maintain the balance of power between the British rulers and the native king. This historical novel gives the reader a glimpse of the complex political scenario in a colonial world torn between its foreign and native masters.

In the Hot Unconscious: An Indian Journey (Tranquebar, Rs 250) by Charles Foster is a travelogue which, predictably, portrays the ‘spiritual richness’ of India with wide-eyed wonder. The author attempts to answer questions like “who or what are we?” and “what on earth are we doing here?” through his escapades and his studies. This is one of the books that record his soul-searching exercises. In the “noise and echoing silence of India”, Foster confronts his “religious presumptions” and wonders whether mystical traditions of the East and the West can be married. Sharing his journey with eccentric storytellers, he “questions what it means to be realized”. Evidently, he discovers more of his own fantasies than the real India.