A keen eye

Secret Spaces By Aruna Chakravarti, Zubaan, Rs 250

Short stories seem to be coming back in vogue. Jhumpa Lahiri surprised quite a few by winning the Pulitzer for her collection, Interpreter of Maladies, and she returned to her forte, the short story, in Unaccustomed Earth after publishing a novel. Rana Dasgupta became well-known after the publication of Tokyo Cancelled, a collection of stories that passengers waiting in an airport narrate to pass their time after their flight is cancelled owing to a snowstorm. One can trace such a collection back to Boccaccio’s The Decameron or Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales where the narrators of the individual stories are united in a larger-frame narrative. In India, this genre has had great success. Rabindranath Tagore, Premchand, Saadat Hasan Manto and, more recently, Ambai are some of the Indian authors who have excelled in this area. Perhaps Indian readers take to this genre because we are a nation of raconteurs. Adda sessions, be they in coffee houses or on verandahs, form a part of our collective memory. People often remember their grandparents telling stories of ghosts, tales from the epics and the Purans or even gossip stories on a Sunday afternoon or as a bedtime ritual.

So, it comes as no surprise that the prize-winning translator and novelist, Aruna Chakravarti, should come up with a collection of short stories. The root of the short story lies in the oral narrative, as manifested in the anecdote. Many of Chakravarti’s stories in Secret Spaces have this essence. The stories are often first-person narratives where the female narrator speaks of people she has known in her family or among her friends and acquaintances. In “Princess Poulomi”, Poulomi’s childhood friend is the narrator who maps Poulomi’s journey from a spoilt and cosseted young girl who nibbles daintily on meals served on a silver thali to a homeless gypsy with surma in her eyes and glass bangles on her wrist, her teeth stained with paan and tobacco, who lives in Nakhoda Masjid and is picked up by the police for loitering with criminal intent. The narrator moves from childhood envy to adult aversion as she sees Poulomi’s free spirit as a threat to her comfortable but conventional middle-class existence. In “Accident”, Shreya, the principal of a college, hears of a colleague’s accidental death while crossing the railway tracks, but a startling revelation made by another colleague makes Shreya suspect that the accident may have been something else. In “Satwant Chachi”, the narrator remembers the Sikh widow who had battled all odds to bring up her two children in the Forties, but that strength becomes almost demonic by the end of the story. Chakravarti excells when she limits herself to characters from a familiar, middle-class milieu. One of the most ambitious but least successful stories in this collection is “Mobile Mataji”. Here, Chakravarti tries her hand at depicting the tantric rituals of a quasi-religious leader, Mobile Mataji, who lives in the wilderness but keeps up with the times by talking to Ma Kali on her cell phone. The fusion of superstition, rape, credulity and technology does not come off well in this story.

Almost all the stories are eminently readable and entertaining. Chakravarti does not let her long years as an academic get in the way of her simple, lucid prose. Her style is unpretentious, directed at the lay reader. One would have liked a little more insight into the minds of some of the more intriguing characters like Poulomi. But Chakravarti seems content to observe her characters with the keen eye of an outsider.