The Keeper of Desolation by
Chandan Pandey, translated from Hindi by Sayari Debnath is a collection of 9
stories, stories that reveal a yawning gap between the rich and poor, those who
wield power/authority and the common man, between dreams and reality, what's spoken and unspoken. And, it does this leaving a slim gap between fact and
fiction, the surreal feels almost real.
For instance, in ‘Wound’, we are reminded of many instances where shoes have been hurled at politicians/eminent persons by frustrated commoners. In this story, an illustrator working for a magazine has his intentions and actions questioned by the top management for drawing pictures of shoes. ‘The Junction’ germinates from a mob lynching and a death in train when a man refuses to make space for another. For the intense farmer strikes that rocked the nation, farmers’ woes find a place in 'The Mathematics of Necessity’ where a farmer writes a letter to the PM of India requesting him to provide a more humane formula for calculating interest over loans. While this story feels light with wit and mild sarcasm, the staggeringly high interest rates that leave people in debt hanging from a precipice is dealt with in a deeply affecting fashion in ‘The Alphabet of Grass’. The starkly disproportionate power play (not the powerplay of cricket) unfolds in the titular story and this feels like a farce. Interrogation of some sort features in a couple of stories here - but a very menacing one in the story ‘The Land was Ours’ leaves a deep impact.
A wonderful collection of very immersive and essential, thought-provoking stories!
Sharing some favorite lines from the stories below-“The powerful want just this to happen, for shoes to be rained on them. And that is why we should not hit them with real shoes. The day the police and criminals bigger than them come over to your side, you may but anyone you want with shoes without any fear.”
“After all, one way of fighting life was to arrest the present in the neat cages of calendar dates"
(From the story Wound)
“What were the heights to which we could soar or the depths to which we could sink in our wonderful lives? We were not targeting the bullseye. We were so caught up in the pettiness of everyday existence that the real wonders of life were passing us by - and we were acutely aware of this loss.” (From the story The Junction)
"When I visited him (him referring to the editor of a newspaper), I found him writing two articles, one with each hand. With his left hand he was writing about the necessity of land grabbing, and with the other one, a condemnation of the act. Wah, I thought, what an intellectual!" (from the story - The Mathematics of Necessity)