Note 45
The eight stories in Out of Print 45 are held together to a lesser or greater extent by the fact that, in each of them, the principal characters inhabit a particular circumscribed world that is, in some cases, defined by loneliness or isolation, in others by circumstance or situation, either seemingly by choice or not.
Nancy Adajania’s ‘The Cloud-eared Book of Hope Street’ follows a wild and wandering trajectory that alludes to and draws cleverly on the mythological, enters the fantastical, takes one on a personal journey of a woman and a writer, all the while making a powerful political statement about submission and state control. At the same time, it reveals chinks in the armour of autocracy through which elements of artistic expression, essentially subversive, can enter. The main character, Ahalya’s, stimulation and fulfilment is achieved not through sexual play with the king of gods as in the epic, but through wordplay in intense, internal exercises.
Internal is also a word appropriate to Sangeetha Bhaskaran’s ‘Bhoomi’, a story in which the main protagonist has chosen to recuse herself from society and incarcerate herself in her home. We meet her when she is thinking of beginning to sing and are drawn into knowing how she survives, how she fights the sentimentality and nostalgia that threaten to break her resolve by deliberately designing memories other than her own. We leave her at the ominous point at which the stories from her past, and the ones she invented are beginning to be indistinguishable.
The twenty-seven-year-old protagonist in Vandana Devi’s ‘In the Eye of the Storm’ tells us ‘…my plan of killing myself was deferred. Now the plan was to have the baby.’ Her narrative walks us through her relationships, her isolation, and her reasoning for giving up on life peppered with statements like ‘I felt like I had given away parts of myself that I really needed.’ She boldly and directly engages with the reader by tossing out her motive for writing at us, as we wait for the baby to arrive and change her life.
In ‘Catching Sight of the Dalai Lama’ by Latika Vasil we see a glimmer of the possibility of coming to terms with grief. A young woman with a guitar in tow arrives in McLeod Ganj. The story, at first, feels like a quiet, observational travel piece. But then, as she meets Hala, an Israeli traveller with her own losses to deal with, we begin to follow the main character who unveils her story in a place where, as Hala puts it, ‘Lots of us have come … with a shadow of grief over us … and yet [it is] probably the happiest place I’ve ever lived in.’
Clyde has had to move from Bahrain to Mumbai with his parents in ‘Clyde’s Calling’ by Michelle D’costa. Dysfunctional family dynamics are not improved by Clyde’s own behaviour: preoccupations with himself, self-aggrandisational tendencies and obsessions with women. Yet our sympathies, as readers, lie with him as he stumbles along, ill-understood, lonely and lost. Things explode within the family and Clyde must walk into the larger world on his own, searching for his place and that which drives him.
By the time a high school girlfriend comes to Sambhu Seth’s provision store, we have already learnt about Sambhu’s physique, his character and his anxieties. The store, a microcosm most of us would recognise from our local market, binds him in complex, inextricable ways. How he will react to the fascinating intrusion from another world he was once part of is revealed in Manish Bhanushali’s ‘Sambhu Seth’s Old Flame’.
Pratik Dixit’s ‘Death of Goat’ takes us to a political gathering on Ganesh Jayanthi. The protagonist, ‘the party general secretary of the local ward office, an ardent devotee of both Lord Ganesh as well as Dada, and also a hopeful for the ticket to the upcoming zilla parishad elections’ has managed to entice Dada, the big boss, to attend the festivities. When things take an unexpected turn, he must look hard at his party and his world and question the relevance of idealism and loyalty.
In Altaf Tyrewala’s ‘Wonder What Happened to that Dog’, a family attempts to leave their life and world in Mumbai. But departure is not straightforward. The story opens with the narrator wondering ‘what happened to that dog … that we let out of our car onto the highway, on our way to Mumbai International Airport, to catch the flight that would take us far, far away, to our shiny new lives in Dallas.’ Highlighting the ludicrous, yet pinned to the psychologically profound, the story leaves us confronting deeply difficult questions of identity and belonging and loyalty.
The art on the cover of Out of Print 45 is by Sutapa Biswas.