Premise: This is Us, and This is Us Outside by Kuzhali Manickavel Reviewed by Farah Ahamed

This is Us, and This is Us Outside by Kuzhali Manickavel

Reviewed by Farah Ahamed

How to leave the reader disorientated and thinking ‘We are all responsible,’ Time and Point of View in Khuzali Manickavel’s 'This is Us, and This is Us Outside'.

The first time I read Kuzhali Manickavel’s stories I was left completely disorientated. I thought it must have been because I missed something, so I went back and reread them. But even the second and third time my head was still whirling. I felt on the one hand connected to the emotional centre of the story, but at the same time distinctly unmoored. The stories have a light, almost playful tone, but this is only an artful and skilful ploy to beguile us from the deeper issues at stake for the author. 

Take for instance her very short story, ‘This is Us, and This is Us Outside’, where none of the characters have real names. We are introduced to The Pepsi Girl (later nicknamed Capacity), The Girl with Razor Blades, The Gay Man and The Paracetamol Girl. The choice not to give proper names is curious; it suggests the characters could be anyone, or no one, fictional or real and makes you wonder what Manickavel was trying to hide or show. And why those particular names? Why The Pepsi Girl – was she wearing Pepsi-t-shirt? Did she look like a girl from the Pepsi poster? Who is she really? The same applies to the other characters.

The story begins with a confirmed time frame, location and action, and is told from the first  person plural point of view and also more unusually, in the future tense.

‘The Pepsi Girl will puke all over the table in fourteen minutes. We will watch her…’

But by the time we get to the second paragraph which is dotted with, dialogue predicated with, ‘she will say,’ ‘she will not say,’ ‘she will suddenly show,’ ‘she will go,’ ‘we will never,’ the reader is already wondering what Manickavel intends to convey with this host of  somewhat reliable characters, and a somewhat, unnamed, unreliable narrator.

The third paragraph is even more disconcerting as the story shifts from the plural to the first person single point of view. It has a few lines of sparse dialogue where the narrator casually introduces and dismisses an imagined or possible, rape scene.

‘I imagine The Pepsi Girl’s unconscious body being passed around a backroom where she is gang-raped by auto drivers, sons of politicians and hotel staff. “I’m sure she’s fine,” I say to The Gay Man.’

The narrator, rather than focusing on the shocking incident, makes a sideways comment about The Gay Man being the first person she’s ever met and how she will never forget him. The effect of this is to leave the reader wondering about what’s really going on, while at the same time, recognising and sympathising with the narrator’s state of mind: how often it is that we ourselves try to hide from thinking about difficult or emotionally inconvenient by focussing on something random. 

The fourth paragraph of the story employs both the first person plural and singular and even though the shift is seamless and nothing jars, still something makes us stop and reread the sentences and appreciate their syntax. The core of the dialogue is where the heart of the story lies and burns like a strong flame. We are told, ‘rape’ is an uncomfortable word, and ‘We will all feel responsible.’ This is the crux of it, both for reader and characters. 

The next two short paragraphs flit through the existential crisis of the characters, echoing Hamlet’s ‘to be or not to be.’ But here it is, ‘to die or not to die.’

‘At first we will decide that she did not die,’ while the paragraph that follows this one begins with, ‘Then we will decide that she did die.’ 

Both are written in the first person plural and give personal details about The Pepsi Girl, making her almost real and relatable to. But before we can get too close to the burden of dealing with the reality of rape and the inconvenience of it, the narrator quickly shifts our focus to thinking about The Pepsi Girl’s parents and how ‘We will be glad they are not our parents.’

The second last paragraph starts in the first person plural, but the second line shifts to the singular and concentrates on the narrator’s observations and thoughts about the ordinary. But then, unexpectedly, the paragraph closes with a casual racist statement from The Girl with Razor Blades, ‘And white women are such fucking whores,’ she says, to deliberately provoke the white woman at the next table who turns to look at them. The effect of this is to unsettle the reader, forcing us too, to take a closer look at the characters.

The story closes with a final paragraph of only one startling line, told in the first person plural, in the future tense. ‘We will only notice The Pepsi Girl fourteen minutes later, when she pukes all over the table.’ After a whirlwind, starting with ‘The Pepsi Girl,’ a girl without a proper name, and ending with ‘the table,’ a proper noun, we are left wondering what exactly happened to them and to us. 

The story is about the emotions of transitory relationships, and confusing, seemingly impersonal, yet lasting encounters which are so prevalent today. It explores how one relates to strangers and friends, individuals and families, and how thoughts arise naturally from observations and casual conversations to help us avoid thinking about what hurts the most. Manickavel’s short story is about the imagined rape and alcohol poisoning of a stranger. Or is it? 

The story will take you fourteen minutes or less to read. It will leave you reeling. And later you will decide, ‘We are all responsible.’ 

Read Kuzhali Manickavel's 'This Is Us and This Is Us Outside' in the first release of Out of Print, Out of Print 1, September 2010.

Reviewer Farah Ahamed’s story Dr Patel appeared in Out of Print 20, September 2015.

Link to #Premise

Out of Print 39

Ten years ago, in September 2010, editors Samhita Arni, Mira Brunner and I released the first issue of Out of Print with hope that it would develop into an important platform for short fiction bearing a connection to the Indian subcontinent. I am proud that we have been able to do so. I am grateful to our designers and technical consultants, to the Out of Print editors for their sharp, critical engagement, to our sponsors Brothers Twain whose faith has meant everything, and to the artists and most importantly, to the writers and translators, and the readers who have supported us over the years.

For this edition of Out of Print, after much deliberation, I decided to honour the tenth year by doing what we do best, publishing short fiction selected from the diverse submissions we receive. 

We present ten stories in Out of Print 39. Although the world appears to be adapting to the presence of the virus and is teetering towards a new normal, a strange sense of alienation and isolation continues to pervade the stories. 

Nighat Gandhi was part of our first release ten years ago, so we are doubly pleasedto feature her recent, ‘The Void’ in this issue. Two women, friends, visit Sarnath early one Sunday morning – an unusual occurrence if the responses of the people around are to be believed. Told with a quiet distanced tone, the story explores loneliness, friendship, isolation and the ‘horrible, deep, gaping emptiness’ inside with extraordinary attention.  Also examining isolation, Charanjeet Kaur’s ‘Grilles’ takes us to an apartment building in Mumbai, where an older woman, whose age and illness keep her housebound, observes the difficult life of a woman who lives on the ground floor. When the two meet after the protagonist’s stint in hospital, they both laugh when the latter says to the former, ‘He cursed us both. Said that we are sure to infect each other.’ It is an extraordinary emotional moment in the narrative.

In Saudha Kasim’s ‘The Living Hours’, a young woman walks us through the complex landscape of grief that the loss of her mother leaves her with. She revisits the difficulty of caring for her sick mother over many years and the sacrifices thatentailed, the resentment at the selfishness of a woman whom she had thought of as a friend and business partner whose shallow words of caring mean nothing, and the anger that leaves her burning the air around her. The story leaves us with a profound impression of loneliness. Selina Sheth’s ‘In Three Months a Tree’ also addresses the loss of a mother, this time in the immediate aftermath of her death. She has been dead for three hours, after ‘eleven excruciating days of kidney dialysis and chemo’ that the daughter, clinging to hope, put her through. There are practical things that need to be arranged, priests who have no understanding of the depth of her link with her mother, cremations that have to be witnessed and the passing kindness of an officiating supervisor that finally allow her to moor herself and envisage a way to grieve her mother. Another story of loss, one that manifests in a bizarre manner is Barnali Ray Shukla’s ‘Return Gift’. Her mother-in-law has died, and the protagonist is all alone in an empty house. Or is she? The apartment speaks to her in her mother-law’s voice. As she stands at her mother-in-law’s bathroom mirror, she catches sight of something move behind her. The room has been cleared out and aired, yet she discovers the older woman’s dentures. And then, there is the smell. The narrative is twisted and atmospheric, and the ending, completely unexpected.

Manasi’s ‘Window unto Darkness’ translated from Malayalam by Rithwick Bhattathiri draws the reader spiralling into the protagonist’s despair and desolation. ‘Oblivious to the blossoming of the flowers … oblivious to the comfort from the blowing of the wind’, she catches sight of her husband and children sleeping and asks herself, as if she has control of what might happen, ‘Between the darkness and them, who will I choose?’ 

Equally intense, although evoking a different kind of emptiness, Alina Gufran’s ‘Orange Juice’ is about the unravelling of a young woman as she loses control, driven by her compulsive obsession with a man. Her ‘episodes of mania, anger, depression’, the ‘innocuous white pill’ followed ‘by thirteen hours of bleeding’ that rid her of her pregnancy, the ‘burst of star-shaped white light’ that incapacitates her with pain, all paint a picture of descent and despair.

Pranab Jyothi Bhuyan takes the reader into a world that is in complete contrast to the urban nightmare of the previous story. ‘Hidden Treasures’ is set in a village in rural Assam, and describes how Lakhiram deals with the extraordinary transformation of his daily existence when his wife becomes possessed by a Mata. Dawood Siddiqui’s ‘Love in the Time of Corona’ is a story that lightens the spirit with its irony, despite the dark setting and twisted plot. The main protagonist, a brutish police guard who bullies a passing doctor, encouraging his men to beat him up, and shouts at his young wife, must confront his vulnerability. ‘The Twice-born River’ by Swarnalatha Rangarajan is a story of hope. The misuse of the environment has destroyed a river. The village has stories with an ancient reach that explain why the river is gone. Until, one day a young man and his friends arrive to investigate the place, and he begins to ask about how the river was nurtured in the past and, ultimately, the river is reborn.

The cover image, created by designer Yamuna Mukherjee, is a conglomerate of the covers from the previous ten years.