We feature ten stories in Out of Print 17.
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| Mira Brunner: Cosmogram 4 |
Loss and grief wash the existence of the protagonists with an all-pervading,
constancy in two of the stories. Manju Kak’s Andaman follows the visit of a woman in mourning for her son lost
at Kargil to the Andaman Islands where encounters with beauty, grace, humanity,
and the gentle ridiculousness of civil bureaucracy are confronted by the
violence of nature. News of disaster infuses the protagonist’s mind with further
layers of sorrow, and yet, is the reader sensing the beginning of some
distancing, a teetering hint of a fragile equilibrium? In Blink, by Shruthi Rao a young girl, profoundly destabilised by the shocking
loss of her sister, lives with a sense of certainty that her sister is within
the vicinity. The clean, straightforward narrative reveals the child’s grounded
middle-class world over which is juxtaposed the wild anxiety of a mind that is
unable to relax for fear of missing her sister’s every manifestation.
Another story of a young girl dealing with loss, this one set in the
floods of Kashmir, is Medha Gupta’s Alice
of Abadhghar. The girl withdraws into Wonderland and focuses on the fate of
Alice as her world, including her book, is washed away. The end leaves the
reader fraught with anxiety for the multiple fates that could befall the girl
as she is offered sanctuary by the maulvi at the dargah but prepares to set off
to find Alice before she is beheaded by the Duchess.
A young man bids goodbye to his lover in Harman Mavi’s You Are Dead; his dialogue, his stream
of memory, his eulogy reveals that his lover’s identity, his joy, indeed his
life was shattered by the ruling that theirs was a forbidden love. It is a
tribute, a necessary one in a landscape where as Colm
Tóibín puts it in his review of Gregory Woods’ A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition: ‘Gay people … grow up alone; there is no
history. There are no ballads about the wrongs of the past, the martyrs are all
forgotten.’
Physical distance, translocation does not release five scrapping
brothers from the trap of greed and discontent that has led them from money and
estate in their native Bihar to running sandwich stalls on the streets of
Mumbai. Altaf Tyrewala’s Vishnu Sandwich
Stall is a story that captures the intimacy of the brothers’ mutual animosity,
and the hopeless consequences, the sad sense of the inescapability that it
leads to.
Marriage, entrapment, release: a young woman in an ideal marriage to
the perfect man examines her place in the relationship and finds herself empty
and unfulfilled. Is this examination, in Bhumika Anand’s Dosa, of the shallowness, the perforations that define her life the
first step to distancing herself and recovering her identity? In Anannya
Dasgupta’s Swimming Pool, on the
other hand, a woman’s perception of her place in her marriage is at another
stage entirely. Points of view of both husband and wife weave through the
narrative as the gleaming back and enticing body of young swimmer draw the
attention of the woman as she waits for her husband and son.
Sharp, staccato in its telling, Puzhudi’s Worklife takes the reader through the relentless treadmill of daily
life, stressful, without respite. Hope of release, of realising ones dreams, while
it rests with the individual, seems distant and inaccessible to those trapped
in its cycle.
Vijay Medtia’s simply lain out Haram
is a tale of everyday activity in which the frameworks of prescription and
proscription are interpreted to find what works for daily life. The clashing of
cultures and the expectations of different generations, are dealt with in an
almost idealised sample of mutual respect, humour and humanity.
Dollhouse, first published in 1941 by G V Krishna Rao, and
translated for this issue by GRK Murty examines a utopic model of societal
equality and its fallacies through the banter between a mother and her young
son. The child lays out his idea of a model world where justice and equality
prevail, but exploits it to his personal benefit, thus shattering its very
basis.
The
artwork by Mira Brunner, Cosmogram 4, was commissioned specifically
for the issue.
