A Tiger at Twilight and Cyclones By Manoj Das, Penguin, Rs 350

Born in the village of Shankari in Balasore, Orissa, Manoj Das is one of India’s leading bilingual writers, producing short stories and novels both in Oriya and English. Das has won many prestigious awards like the Sahitya Akademi Award, the Padma Shri and the Saraswati Samman. Besides being a novelist, Das is a thinker-philosopher. An ardent votary of communism in his early life, Das came to realize, “that economic problems are not the only cause for human suffering”. He later read the works of Sri Aurobindo, and has lived in the Aurobindo ashram in Pondicherry since 1963.

Das’s mastery over story-telling has earned him comparisons with Vishnu Sharma, the author of the Panchatantra tales, and in contemporary times with R.K. Narayan. Graham Greene, for instance, writes, “I imagine Orissa is far from Malgudi, but there is the same quality [as Narayan] in his stories with perhaps an added mystery.” And Vijay Tendulkar notes, “Manoj Das, like Graham Greene and R.K. Narayan, is a deft spinner of yarns. Narrating an Indian experience in a language which is alien or not Indian, without losing the original Indian charm and ethos is a difficult task. Das succeeds in this like Narayan”. These comments reveal that Das’s narration has an element of mystery about it, and also that he possesses a rare felicity of style that renders the foreignness of the English language immaterial in terms of communicating an Indian reality.

A Tiger at Twilight, the first novella, exudes an old-world charm. It is set in a nondescript Indian town, Samargarh, which was the capital of a small princely state of the same name in pre-Independence India. The plot unfolds in a valley called Nijanpur, where the protagonist, who is also the first-person narrator of the novel, comes to live, in a mansion called ‘Heera Mahal’. He later renames the mansion ‘Horizon’. When the Samargarh dynasty fell on evil times, the mansion was pledged to the protagonist’s father by the last raja, and was not recovered. Now, the raja comes to Nijanpur to spend time with his family, which includes his motherless daughter and his ‘step-sister’ Heera, a mysterious lady after whom the mansion was originally named. Meanwhile, an otherwise calm Nijanpur is gripped by the menace of a prowling tigress that has suddenly turned a man-eater, and the raja forms a party to hunt it down. Heera, who, like the proverbial femme fatale, casts about a sinister charm, and the tigress seem to be uncannily linked.

The second novella, Cyclones, is set in Kusumpur, a small coastal village in Orissa. The story kicks off during the time of India’s freedom struggle. The novel starts with a description of the ravages of a cyclone. Sandip, the scion of the Kusumpur zamindar family, tries to restore order. The cyclone depicted must be rooted in Das’s childhood memory of a devastating storm, which he recalls in an interview with P. Raja, the author of Many Worlds of Manoj Das.

Meanwhile, in a drive for industrialization, the colonial government wants to turn the peaceful Kusumpur into a bustling port town, and to this end, they decide to fill up the river, Kheya, that flows by it. The villagers take strong exception to this, and Sandip leads their protest campaigns. Things take a serious turn when the contractor for the project, with whom Sandip had had a heated exchange, is found murdered, and Sandip is the prime suspect. He absconds, and a series of misadventures land him in an ashram in the forest of a city torn by communal riots. The cyclone becomes a metaphoric representation of the political turmoil that marked a phase of Indian history.

The plasticity of Das’s narrative style sucks the reader into the story before he realizes it, and then seals all escape routes. As E.M. Forster writes in Aspects of the Novel, “the plot, instead of finding human beings more or less cut to its requirements, as they are in the drama, finds them enormous, shadowy and intractable, and three-quarters hidden like an iceberg.” Das’s narration is a demonstration of this view.