Thirteen windows to look at the world.... Baker's Dozen: short stories

The mind has the power to create fascinating images, images the eye has not seen— images that permeate the soul, floating in and out like deep, thoughtful sighs — images that wordsmiths carve out with the dexterity of one adept in the art.  For instance, this one:  “a tiny multi-coloured tent imprinted upside down in her eyes”, a woman in love with the stage, in love with the art of performing on stage. This one’s been carved out by the pen of Ruchika Chanana , winner of the 2011 Elle Fiction Award, whose short story The Tent shares space with thirteen others in Baker’s Dozen –The Elle Tranquebar Book of Short Stories.  Of these thirteen, six are “emerging voices”, winners of the Elle Fiction awards while the rest are wordsmiths from Tranquebar.  And Ruchika Chanana’s voice has won over this reader’s heart.

The Tent is a story brimming with vivid, haunting images, effortlessly weaving in the unsteady ebb and flow of surging emotions. It is the story of a woman who runs away from home at the age of sixteen, to join a travelling theatre, where “the cacophony of sound and belligerence was her lifeline; her deity was the nautanki, erasing her past like it had never been.” She is later found and taken back by her family, retaining, however, the inverted image of the tent in her eyes. The man who marries her, spots the tent in her eyes, “he recognised the patterns drawn on it, and he liked them. So he said yes.” And although her marriage is a happy one where she wears ghungroos all around the house, the call of the stage becomes too much and she leaves her husband and child (who are consumed by their search for her) to live, once again, in the tent of her eyes.

Then there is Nighat M Gandhi’s In Lieu of Gold, a gentle, wistful story about a man’s love for his wife. Subtly pointing to the differences in the way men and women think, it’s a story of a man who plants fruit-trees for his wife, while she—all woman—reminds him that he never bought her any gold jewellery. How Sultan, the husband, tries to please Amira and atone for not giving her what she really wanted – after she dies suddenly—is a tale that would bring a throbbing in your heart and a lump in your throat.

But Madhulika Liddle takes the cake for the knack of telling a story. Her works, full of humour and gasp-inducing, delightful twists, remind one rather of Hector Hugh Munroe—Saki— and his short stories replete with humour and amazement. Of course, Saki’s humour is darkly so, eliciting wide-eyed laughs and the occasional shiver. Liddle’s humour is the clever kind, with a flair for engrossing narration. She is a reader’s delight.  St George and the Dragon is about a humble, nondescript but upright man working in a government office, PA to an officer who is just his opposite—intelligent and ambitious but corrupt and a lecher. A serendipitious episode in the life of Mr George, who has been living in the same mundane way for decades, turns him into a hero of sorts, causing a minor coup and saving the day, too. A surprise visit from an officer of the Central Vigilance Commission, coupled with the serious predicament of Ms Shivani Sinha drive Mr George to come up with an ingenious plan for slaying the dragon. It is a very realistic account of government departments and officials, but most significantly it is a riveting account of one seemingly unexceptional man’s exceptional acumen.

Liddle’s second story, The Howling Waves of Tranquebar creates a setting and a particular mood to lure the readers into her tale. Set in Tranquebar—the site of a Danish settlement in Pondicherry, it takes the readers into a land of desolate mystery with howling winds and crashing waves before making them gasp at the climax.

Salted Cashews by Divya Sreedharan, another winner of the Elle awards, is a poignant story of an adolescent girl’s first encounter with the world of lechers and gropers… a story that makes you angry and sad at the same time, while Sanjay Sipahimalani’s In Praise of Straight Lines is unusual and interesting, delving into the dark realms of a human mind gone rather awry.

There is some lovely, masterful  story-telling here and even though some may not be as good as the others, these wordsmiths would surely give you pleasant company. 

Footnote: Baker's Dozen is 13 not 12, because bakers used to throw in an extra loaf

so that their customers didnt feel shortchanged! Howzzat??

Love, Grief and Hot-air Balloons......Levels of Life -- Julian Barnes

We have all known death. And we have all known grief. Every griever is different, every grief a separate shade, but we know it when we see it, and can feel it when someone else feels it, too. It is perhaps one of the most common subjects for a book, but no book has touched grief in such a manner as this one. Divided into three parts that appear to have very little, if any, connection to each other, this is a work of art and a work of the heart. A book that takes you through many levels…levels of thought, levels of feeling, levels of perplexity. Such is Julian Barnes’s Levels of Life.

True to its title, the parts refer to the various levels that one encounters in a lifetime—‘the sin of height’; ‘on the level’; ‘the loss of depth’. The book is spread out like a performance on stage—one where you have to play close attention and watch for the patterns—setting the scene first, creating the metaphors, weaving separate stories before the readers, to take them, at last, to where the author wants them to be. 

The book begins with ballooning, and ‘balloonatics’. There is Colonel Fred Burnaby of the Royal Horse Guards, famous actress Sarah Bernhardt and professional balloonist Felix Tournachon or ‘Nadar’. The part is full of images and ideas: the earthlings’ elation at being in the sky, the ethereal feeling of being free from all earthly impurities— on a spiritual level. And yet, there is the reference to the religious belief that God had not created humans to fly, and so, as the legends went, harshly was punished whoever dared to commit the ‘sin of height’.  It is this part where we get the first mention of the word ‘uxorious’ (used for Nadar). For the sake of Barnes, I want to underline this: ‘uxorious’ is a man who loves his wife (not a ‘lover of women’ or ‘a man with many wives’ as Barnes fears it might come to mean.) And then comes the mention of photography, as Nadar mixes the two arts—ballooning and photography—taking the first aerial pictures of Earth from his balloon. As Barnes’s points out in the beginning of each of the three parts, “You put together two things that have not been put together before, and the world is changed.” And adds, in the second part, “…and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.”

The second part takes on from the heights of aspiration. “We live on the ground, on the level, and yet—and so—we aspire…Some soar with art, others with religion, most with love.” And love, he says, is the meeting point of truth and magic. “Truth, as in photography; magic as in ballooning.” But this is the love story of two people who were ‘on the level’ with each other—Colonel Fred Burnaby and actress Sarah Bernhardt. Yet, as Burnaby later rues, “if being on the level didn’t shield you from pain, maybe it was better to be up in the clouds.”

The last part—the depth—is where we, the readers, are on the level with the author. It is the part where he comes to his grief, where we come to his grief—his account of the void, the blank page that his life became after the death of his wife; the love with whom he shared his life for 29 years.

No one can define grief. In spite of that, or maybe because of that, Barnes’s completely and utterly honest description is bound to touch a chord.

His discovery that indeed, a person can sometimes relish the pain that wouldn’t go is one of the most beautiful lines in the book. “If the pain is not exactly relished, it no longer seems futile. Pain shows that you have not forgotten; pain enhances the flavor of memory; pain is a proof of love.”

You cannot take in the entire book in one go, though. It takes some time to build up the relation between the three parts, but then, like a balloon coming out of the clouds, you can build a clear picture of the scene before you. There are flashes that come back to you—like the word ‘uxorious’ that comes back from the first part and is dwelt upon by the author in the last;  and the warning statement, “every love story is a potential grief story.” Perhaps the best image is Barnes use of Burnaby’s impression of the balloon’s shadow on a cloud as a ‘colossal photograph’: he compares it to life—our impression of life as a colossal photograph, a shadow cast by the play of light. “So clear, so sure, until for one reason or another—the balloon moves, the cloud disperses, the sun changes angle—the image is lost forever, available only to memory, turned into anecdote.”