Favourite Stories (Part 1)

 

“In war, the strong make slaves of the weak, and in peace the rich make slaves of the poor. We must work to live, and they give us such mean wages that we die. We tread out the grapes, and another drinks the wine. We sow the corn and our own board is empty. We have chains, though no eye beholds them; and we are slaves, though men call us free. Misery wakes us in the morning, and Shame sits with us at night”. (from the story ‘The Young King’ in this collection).

On the night before the day fixed for his coronation, the young King, just a lad of sixteen whose birth and growing up years have given the whole country many tales to whisper about, dreams - not once but thrice. In his dreams, he sees pale, sickly and famished children, haggard women sitting at the table sewing, naked slaves in ragged loincloth chained to each other, diving into the waters again and again to retrieve pearls, Death and Avarice wreaking havoc in the woods.

And in one of the king's dreams, one of the weavers preparing the robe of tissued gold for the King’s coronation utters the above lines. Shattered at what he witnesses in his dreams, the young King refuses to wear the robe of tissued gold, crown studded with rubies waiting for him and carry the scepter with rows of pearls on it on the coronation day.

When the council arrives, says the king – “Take these things away, and hide them from me. For on the loom of sorrow, and by white hands of Pain, has this my robe been woven. There is Blood in the heart of the ruby, and Death in the heart of the pearl. Shall Joy wear what Grief has fashioned?” 

Instead, he wears a leather tunic and a rough sheepskin cloak, adorns his head making a circle out of a spray of wild briar. The young King is ridiculed and reprimanded by his advisors. Wise ones remark that the day of coronation is a special one, a day of enjoyment for the king and his subjects, not a day of abasement. Naïve is the king for he doesn’t understand that the world works in certain ways that cannot be changed, that the burden of the world is too great for one man to bear.

People mock at this dreamer of dreams, refuse to accept this king who’s appareled like a beggar. They deride him saying, “.. out of the luxury of rich cometh the life of the poor. By your pomp we are nurtured, and your vices give us bread. To toil for a master is bitter, but to have no master to toil for is more bitter still.” The young King quizzes naively, “Are not the rich and poor brothers?” They are eager to slay this king who they think is a fool.

What happens to the young King, a noble soul who believes in kindness and not in power, who wants to walk with the masses as one among them rather than rule over them? With a glowing and memorable climax, The Young King is one of my favorites in this collection of stories by Oscar Wilde. 

It is said that the author told these stories to his son at bedtime. Though the steady drizzle of thou and thee in the story may lend an archaic, classic feel, there couldn’t be a better instance of all-time relevant story. In a world where the rich are getting richer, the poor even poorer, the gnawing gap between have s and have  nots  widening like never before, this story makes us ponder if the rich and poor can be brothers, is an equitable distribution of wealth really feasible? 

So much to unpack, think and debate about in this story that's labelled meekly as a fairy tale or story for children. 

Fiction Reveals Truths that Reality Obscures

"Change is always occurring. In a slow, silent and beautiful way, change has been occurring and it will continue to do so. But you're all meddling with its process. And because of the interference of you nagariks, not just humans but every other being on the planet- the water bodies, the trees, the mountains  alike are suffering too. Everything and everyone is subjected to violence. I'm simply asking you to try and stop that intrusion. Thus far, nature has prospered only through collaboration. Instead, the civilised ways are driven by force and hostility, and everything integral to nature is being looted" . 

Sabari, an old tribal woman, born in the lap of forests who knows it like the back of her hand, says the above to Lord Rama when he visits her. The open and gentle dialogue between the two characters in Volga's On the Banks of the Pampa, translated from Telugu by Purnima Tammireddy, discusses many questions, all of which are both contemporary and urgent.

In the wake of all that has happened and is still happening in Jammu, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Punjab - flash floods, landslides, cloud bursts, destruction and loss of life on an unprecedented scale - the toll of our unscientific development and mindless avarice is explicit. It's  immense and incalculable that we cannot turn a blind eye anymore. As rivers rage with a brown fury and logs of wood pile up and choke the gates of dams, it's time we stop and ask - Is this what we call 'being civilised'? What does urban or developed mean?  What's the cost at which we earns these tags?

"We forget the original sequence - observe, marvel, understand, respect, love. A new order has emerged in its place - observe, loathe, ridicule, attack, control". 

On environment, civilisation, development, the road to change and associated costs, on state and citizenship, borders and boundaries, this slim novel, an imagined extrapolation of a very ordinary event in the epic Ramayana portrayed with a bold feminist stroke, is a proof of how fiction mirrors reality closely, often unraveling truths that reality 'coyly' obscures.

Mina's Matchbox

 

Looking back at one’s life, recalling a special phase from it with the larger history of a city or country set in the backdrop, a little like James Hilton’s Goodbye Mr. Chips or Neela Padmanabhan’s Where the Lord Sleeps, that’s Mina’s Matchbox by Yoko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder; I would tell a friend who asks me what the book is about. 

The book opens beautifully with Tomoko recalling the first vehicle she rode, an elegantly designed baby carriage sourced from Germany, trips on her father’s bicycle clinging to him tightly until he died from stomach cancer. As a 12 yr old she’s sent away from home to stay with her maternal aunt and begin middle school and Tomoko recollects all that happened during this period 1972-73 when she stayed with her cousin Mina and her family in a big mansion at Ashiya. Though 30 years back in time, her memories of this year stay fresh and clear.

Tomoko’s quiet aunt who corrected typos, her half-German uncle who owned a beverages company, her frail and asthmatic cousin Mina who collected matchboxes and had a pygmy hippopotamus named Pochiko for a pet are interesting characters. Along with grandmother Rosa who is German, Yoneda-san and Kobayashi-san who are more of family than mere caretakers, this endearing bunch gladly welcome Tomoko into their lives. Each one of them with their quirks, stories to share and secrets to safeguard make Mina’s Matchbox a character-driven, slice-of-life narrative marked by a sense of atmosphere and slow world build up.

Japanese author and Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata’s suicide, 1972 Munich Olympics and Giacobini meteor shower unravel in the backdrop. Quite a few reviews have lambasted the author’s treatment of the Munich Olympics massacre but from the viewpoint of two pre-teen girls who are passionate about volleyball and keen on seeing their national men’s team clinch Gold, I felt the references made here were in-place. 

The prose is lulling and the pacing remarkably slow in the first half but it turns incisive and agile respectively in the latter half. About two girls who are friends-for-life than cousins, not just their wallowing in nostalgia but as a coming-of-age journey, Mina’s Matchbox is both heartwarming and wholesome. 

Yoko Ogawa was born in Okayama and now resides in Ashiya (Tomoko shifts from Okayama to Ashiya for a year to stay with her cousin Mina's family) and would have been 10 yrs old during the 1972-73 period detailed in the book, so does the book tap a little into the memories of the author's childhood? 

Mina’s Matchbox is my first by Yoko Ogawa. I read a lot of reviews that stated how this book is different in terms of theme and tonality from the rest of her works. While a few who have read The Housekeeper and The Professor, Hotel Iris and The Memory Police have found this underwhelming, I felt it was a great starting point and I sure want to read the author more (And of course, the translator more). You may not highlight sentences and paragraphs as you read this book but the cumulative effect of the prose is gently illuminating. 

Sharing below a few favorite passages from the book - 

“If you wanted to describe Mina in a few words, you might say she was an asthmatic girl who loved books and rode a pygmy hippopotamus. But if you wanted to distinguish her from everyone else in the world, you’d say that she was a girl who could strike a match more beautifully than anyone.” 

“Mina would slide open the box and select a single match with her delicate fingers. Then she would close the box and hold the rounded, reddish-brown tip at a slightly odd angle against the striking surface. Up to this point, everything would happen in a relaxed, tranquil manner. Nothing forced or hurried. Her lips pressed together, her eyes lowered. Only the tips of the three fingers that held the match seemed animated with the knowledge of the deed they were about to do. Then, she would hold her breath for an instant and her fingertips would fly, followed by a sound so sharp that you wondered how such a frail girl could achieve this kind of velocity. I was captivated, realizing for the first time how transparent the flame of a match could be. If not for the slight odor of phosphorus, I might have been tempted to believe that Mina had produced the flame magically, out of thin air, or that, given the clarity of the light, it was her finger itself that was burning.”

Books Read in July 2025

 

Three collections of short stories 

Three novellas

Two short story singles

Giants

 

“The village—Ayito-phu—was located on the top western flanks of a mountain, a strategic choice that had made it virtually unassailable during the old days of headhunting. If one were to be completely factual, the days of headhunting were neither old nor gone, for in the areas that bordered Burma there were still tribes who took great delight in lopping off heads and stacking skulls like the macabre hoard of some unknown devil.”

It is in this village, far away from Kohima that our protagonist, a 12 yr old boy named Kato lives with his parents who till the land and labour hard. Kato’s mother, maternal grandmother, even his father at times, regale him with stories - of an uncle who saw a big giant in the forest, of Alhou who created the whole world and different spirits to guard different realms, of rivers that had a will of their own. Kato consumed these stories hungrily, remembered them but could not tell them to others for he was mute. What happens when a timi-ala (a forest giant) named Kene visits Kato on full moon nights, gifts him a voice for the night when they are together, tells him stories and convinces him that he is born to tell stories and save his clan?

‘The land is the oldest and it is very much alive. It is the land that sustains everything that lives.’

But, what when this very land is under the threat of a face-off between the British soldiers and Imperial Japanese army? For a people who had nothing to do with WW2 and were in awe of the simple rifle, the bombs, cannons, roaring fighter planes and endless machine guns sounded like the end of the world itself. How could a young, mute boy tell stories to avert disaster, save his clan and his land that now reeked of the smell of metal and blood? Read Giants by Huthuka Sumi to get the answers. 

Even though the story doesn’t offer crisp and straightforward answers, even when magic is overpowering, even confusing at places that the reality slips away, Giants offers an intimate and authentic portrayal of the way of life of people, the Sumis, a major ethnic group native to Nagaland. The clan’s reverence for nature and the land they live upon, their faith in traditions, skepticism to anything modern that may alter a natural order shine in the narrative that meanders, strays and moves languidly. Pork cooked in axone paste has an unmatched flavour, aqhumi, a shawl woven in a certain way has a special social status, description of farming seasons and tiger hunt, there is a lot to learn from Kato’s tale suffused with magic filled with spirits and witches that guard or abduct people. 

‘Memories are roots’.  Without stories we have no memories and without memories our roots shrivel and die'. The crux of the book - that stories on who we are, where we come need to be told and retold lest we forget our history or identity - though beautiful isn’t delivered in a crisp and convincing fashion, the storytelling never gathers steam and fails to deliver an impression. The illustrations by Canato Jimo are mere motifs alongside the chapters' titles, they don't supplement the storytelling or add detailing.  It is the portrayal of emotions that hold the fort - loyal friendship, love, loss, grief, guilt, shame, hope, standing tall with confidence and self-acceptance and redemption populate the book. Tighter editing could have cut it short by at least 50 pages and saved the read for us. Overall, a good read!