Note 56
We feature seven stories in our 56th release of Out of Print, stories that are ultimately about relationships and isolation.
Connections within families, biological or constructed are dissected in these stories, connections between parents and children, siblings, contemporaries. Expectations play into the works, especially as regards the ways in which characters respond to the pressures and anxieties imposed upon them to conform; questions of autonomy over comportment, love, marriage, child bearing, are examined, and the invisible yet entrenched divisions of class come under the lens. The issue includes works set in the present and in the past, giving us perspectives of histories and cultures that seem distant, yet resonate even today.
Prasanta Das’ ‘Theo’s Folly’, which is framed by the mores and moralities of missionary communities in nineteenth century Assam, reveals the complexities of living within the norms and the immense sacrifices that calls for, at the same time revealing what it takes to step outside prescribed expectations. ‘The Old Man Has Lost His Mind’ by Padmini Sankar, also a story about stepping outside the mores, focusses on generational repercussions against the backdrop of the violence of war. Set in the present and looking back at the Japanese occupation of Borneo, it deciphers the protagonist’s attempt to make sense of the past.
In three stories, the body and its particularities weave through the narrative, giving the reader different levels at which to engage with the work. Amrita Lall’s ‘Everybody Loves Pregnant Women’, is told from the point of view of a young girl. Here, we confront the cruelties, the weight – which the narrator observes ‘descended onto her shoulders and slithered down to her fingers’ – that women encounter, even women held close in supposedly caring families, when forced to conform to what is expected of them. In contrast, in Smita Sahay’s ‘Unborn’ the protagonist is anything but a conformist. She grasps her sexuality with boldness and abandon, despite which she must face the conflicts of expectation – rendered even more complex in the middle of the lockdown, traversing urban and rural geographies – and rely on herself to make critical decisions. ‘The Marketplace’ by Raymond Beauchemin features characters who follow yet a different set of mores. The young male protagonist is kicked out of his Catholic boarding school when his grandmother dies, and dropped into the middle of Delhi’s Chandni Chowk; he must locate his mother’s place ‘on the second floor of a building on the Lal Kuan Bazaar Road, tucked in an alley between two windowless restaurants, one veg, one non-veg’ and find his way.
In ‘Bomb Cyclone’ by Ushma Shah Goyal, the narrator compares her emotions to the atmospheric phenomenon referred to in the title: ‘not high enough for an outburst but not low enough to just hold inside me.’ The closeness, yet seemingly insurmountable distance between the two sisters in the story moves the reader into examining the meaning of family and belonging.
In Utsav Kotrial’s ‘The Democracy of Dust’ we follow the protagonist’s observations on the city and its people. Confronted with a ‘yawning pit of time to kill’, they begin to document their existence by drawing. A story about the city, about observing the city, and about observing the city’s people, this is also a story about the protagonist‘s relationship with their own creativity.