The Puppet's Tale

 

“We are but puppets; an Invisible One is pulling the strings''. Most of us dance along to the whims of this invisible puppeteer, but some desire freedom, protest constantly for greater control, they either rebel till their strings break or are forced to a meek surrender. The Puppet’s Tale (Puthulnacher Ithikatha in Bengali) by Manik Bandyopadhyay, deftly translated by Ratan Kumar Chattopadhyay, in bare bones is about how ‘all the world’s a stage’ and the show’s always on.

Shashi, the protagonist, a Calcutta-trained doctor returns to his ancestral village Gaodiya. Torn between ethics, selfless service and his personal desires, he tends to villagers with great care and commitment, a far cry from his father, Gopal Das who’s the village usurer. Shashi’s world is largely shaped by his friend Kumud, a free-willed & headstrong man, Kusum, a capricious & enigmatic young woman from Gaodiya for whom his love blossoms only to die of neglect over time, Bindu, his sister whose life’s irrevocably changed by her affluent husband and Jadab Pandit, a holy man who embraces death at his will at a self-ordained time.

Just like contrast sharpens a picture, the author by portraying opposite forces at play within us humans and in society adds depth to the story. The tussle between village and city life, tradition and modernity, Ayurveda and English medicine, rational/scientific logic and superstition, believer and atheist, the many contradictions that confound the human mind makes the novel’s lifeforce.

The father-son relationship here, fraught with tension, is a luminous example of the above, we notice that Gopal feels insecure as his son Shashi’s popularity and reverence grows. He is definitely concerned about Shashi’s health and lifestyle but would like to have him under his thumb all the time. This is evident as Gopal mulls -

“When the son is grown up, what a difficult task it turns out to be to interact with him. Not a friend, not a debtor, not a boss, god knows in what relationship a man stands with his adult son.”

It is notable that the author chooses to start the novel with death of a certain villager, Haru Ghosh, who is scorched to death by lightning during a thunderstorm at the village’s banyan grove but places immense importance on Haru’s family members- his daughter, son and daughter-in-law, they are characters who have a huge hand in propelling the narrative forward.

The first half, markedly slow, demands reader’s attention & patience for we have to understand a motley bunch of characters, each one multi-dimensional and mysterious. By detailing how they talk and act, the author teases us into analyzing how their minds work; the second half flies by effortlessly.

Manik Bandyopadhyay took to writing after his debut short story ‘Atasi Mami’, written to fulfil a challenge thrown in the college canteen to get himself published in a reputed magazine in three months’ time, earned him laurels and fame. Over a literary career of nearly 25 years, plagued by abject poverty, alcoholism and illness like epilepsy, his works bore the clear intent to expose unabashedly the bleak reality of life, the meanness hidden in civil society. Mostly set against the rural backdrop, his works dwelled on unravelling the complicated schemes of the human mind. 

 

And in matters relating to human mind, his acumen is rare and astonishing. 

This is evident as he writes –

 

“In every human being, there dwells a child who loves to play at any hour with poetic perceptions of the mind, with its imagination, its bizarre unreality, and its craziness.”

 

“The world is a web of truth and falsehood. Falsehood has significance too. A lie can even reign perpetually as truth”.

 

“A single spark had set a dry thatch on fire; no one had the power to extinguish it. He realized for the first time today that the collective opinion of people with whom we have no relation whatsoever in our daily lives could grow into an ineluctable, blind and ruthless force.”

 

 

I read 3 Stories by Manik Bandyopadhyay, published by Bee Books, translated by Arunava Sinha two years back and it served as a good primer to understanding the author’s writing style. The Puppet’s Tale, ably translated by Ratan Kumar Chattopadhyay, only widened my understanding of the author’s ideas, beliefs and written word. The foreword by Samantak Das on the author’s debut short story and his foray into writing is not to be missed. The Boatman of the Padma translated by Ratan Kumar Chattopadhyay and published by Orient Blackswan is another book I wish to read by the author - a literary giant of the modern classic Bengali literature, one of the Bandyopadhyay triumvirate. 

A classic by a master storyteller, The Puppet’s Tale is a ‘realistic’ chronicle of life and human frailty. 

Going: Stories of Kinship

 

Going: Stories of Kinship by the eminent poet-writer Keki N Daruwalla consists of five stories centered around family relationships and kinship ties.

A young man, Vikram throws a bomb at a tea-estate bungalow in Dibrugarh, Assam. But is this a terror attack by a ‘hungry for independence’ Indian rebel or an act of personal vendetta? In three sections linking the past to the present, the first story ‘The Brahmaputra Trilogy’, delves on a son-father relationship where the son’s not kosher. Set in the period between WWI-II and its immediate aftermath, the evocative writing here renders a series of daguerreotypes of India under British rule. Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies, shots fired from .410 muskets, the mist covered Brahmaputra river with foam drenching its banks, the smoke from a steam ferry on the river feel real and stay in our head long after the story is over.

The story ‘Daughter’ set in a Parsi family in Delhi examines how history (the battle of Kudesia and Nahavand, Yezdegard - the Iranian king & the Arab general, Mosanna), racial attitude and memories drives a wedge between a father and daughter.

Highly nuanced, well layered and extremely insightful of the culture, communities and the time period, these two stories, each about 40 pages long, are huge favorites in the collection. That the locals are irked with the steady inflow of Bengalis, Santhals and Biharis who come to work in the tea gardens in Assams under goras is evident and touched upon in The Brahmaputra Trilogy. The traditions and beliefs of the Parsis (their menstrual taboos sent a mild shockwave in me), the realization that their community faces the threat of near extinction due to celibacy, late marriages, sterility and inbreeding is brilliantly woven into the story.

Men who willingly renounce everything to embrace solitude are principal characters in ‘The Bird Island’ and ‘The Long Night of the Bhikshu’. In the former, a reticent son remains ‘missing’ for his parents for 10 years. In the latter, a man deserts his home, village & faith, switches Gods, talks only to a scarecrow and roams like a mendicant but is unable to cut ties with his mother who unfailingly appears in his dreams.

‘Going’ is an immensely moving story of a woman who’s closer to her maternal grandmother than her mother. By a sense of intuition, she arrives at her grandmother's home to be with her in her final moments but does she ‘really’ manage to be there by her side? A poignant tale of a grandmother-granddaughter who miss out on a few ‘crucial’ moments in each other’s lives though they have been there for each other otherwise. The green barbets in a human-like chatter, the measured movements of peahen-peacock - the description of many birds that flock the grandmother’s house’s garden are absolutely beautiful.

Keki N Daruwalla’s writing taps into the subliminal and gently wakes you up to your own experiences. There is a quiet magic about this poet's prose.  

“Postponement is only another form of neglect. When I put something off I don’t just slot it on another diary page. I erase it from the mind. The mind is used to erasures, but nothing is wiped clean for good. Everything has a clock of its own, each anxiety, each problem and you choose to face or shove under the rug” (from the story Going).

“Memory was a flame and there was a lot of dry tinder in the void of his heart” (from The Brahmaputra Trilogy).

He delves deep into human emotions and relationships, portrays them with a certain tenderness and sensitivity and cushions them well with additional details of history, traditions and culture. For instance, this in my limited experience feels so true -

“When the aged are correcting you it means they feel that they are still in charge. It is when they consent to whatever you say that you need to be wary” (from Going).

 “Tranquility is not a garment one can put on. It has to descend on you on its own”. And it does, in Keki N Daruwalla’s words. A BRILLIANT collection! 

A little about the author:

Keki N Daruwalla, a former Indian Police service officer, is an eminent poet and writer. Recipient of the Padma Shri award, he received the Sahitya Akademi award in the year 1984 for his poetry collection The Keeper of the Dead, the one he returned in the year 2015 after the death of Dr MM Kalburagi, in wake of rising intolerance and the threat to freedom of expression in writing, citing that the Akademi didn’t stand up for beleaguered writers. The story ‘Going’ from here features in his collection - A House in Ranikhet, ‘The Bird Island’ in the collection Island and ‘The Long Night of the Bhikshu’ is available online on The Indian Quarterly site. I would have loved to see a little endnote on when each of these stories were written and if they appear in the author’s other collections. Going - stories of kinship published by Speaking Tiger Books is an amazing primer, a marvelous short read, that teases us to read more written by the author.

Cold Enough for Snow

 

"I had one vague, exhausted thought that perhaps it was all right not to understand all things, but simply to see and hold them".

When an author writes what you have been thinking about, you get a little friendlier with the author, and the book begins to feel extra nice. 

Possibly as a loose extension of that quote, I have begun to appreciate books without a plot, books where I care less about the names of characters or where they hail from and like to engross myself in observing what they do. The comfort to volitionally pick such books got real with Jhumpa Lahiri's Whereabouts. The writing, I feel, in such books is delicate, clearly rejuvenating, as if the words here have an additional job of calming the reader who's annoyed at the lack of a plot. 

The New York Times reviews Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au with the following headline - A Mother and Daughter go sightseeing. They see each other. Now this's a crude one line approximation of this deceptively simple and beautiful novella.

A daughter (the unnamed narrator) and her mother travel to Tokyo and as they see different sites, a swirl of memories - memories they remember clearly, others safely forgotten and many they pretend are hazy, envelopes them gently. 

"Earlier in the year, I had asked her to come with me on a trip to Japan. We did not live in the same city anymore, and had never really been away together as adults, but I was beginning to feel that it was important, for reasons I could not yet name".

Walking through the cemetery at Aoyama, visiting a large outdoor museum in Koganei Park, a church in Osaka, over admiring artwork, having food and reading horoscopes, over little conversations, often punctuated by deep silences, the mother and daughter share many things between them and convey quite a lot (though not explicitly) to us readers. The daughter reflects on her university days, her first job as a waitress in the restaurant, her relationship with her boyfriend, her thoughts on having children. 

She mulls over the frugality she feels she has inherited from her mother, the need to be desired even when she isn't sure if she really likes the person who desires her, the urge to be diligent and perfect even when no one's steadfast about it. 

However, not all is self introspection as the love story of her maternal uncle, the tantrums her elder sister threw as a kid at their maternal grandfather's funeral, a visit to her boyfriend's father's house and kayaking across a crater lake add layers. 

The writing is highly evocative creating a montage of images. The attention to detail is immaculate - the description of a nature trail, a convenience store highly elaborate. However, this doesn't make the read cumbersome for it is of the 'right' length. There is a mild philosophical touch to the words, for instance -

 "Nowadays, she said, people were hungry to know everything, thinking that they could understand it all, as if enlightenment were just around the corner. But, she said, in fact there was no control, and understanding would not lessen any pain. The best we could do in this life was to pass through it, like smoke through the branches, suffering, until we either reached a state of nothingness, or else suffered elsewhere".

"By looking indirectly at the thing they wanted to focus on, they were sometimes able to see it even more clearly than with their own eyes." 

Cold Enough for Snow through the ruminations of a daughter-mother duo makes us see/recall some of our own memories clearly, making them 'warm enough' for us to embrace.

On a River's Bank

On a River’s Bank by A Madhavan, translated from Tamil by M Vijayalakshmi, explores environmental degradation as a result of over exploitation of nature. Published in 1974 as Punalum Manalum, it’s an early, notable instance of what is now termed as ‘eco-fiction’. 

The novella is set in Vallamedu (a place near Trivandrum as hinted by the mention of Marudan Kuzhi dam), the site of confluence of two rivers - Kottaiyaru and Perumanaiyaru. Sand harvesting is the most important commercial activity for the inhabitants on the riverfront. 

Angusami, a well respected 50 yr old man who knows the river like the back of his hand, a star employee of the sand contractor for several years; Damodaran, a diligent and well-mannered young man who’s like a son to Angusami; Panki, a young woman & Angusami’s step daughter who’s an object of revulsion for her ugly looks are the three principal characters. 

Panki labours hard at the riverfront and at home yet elicits nothing but extreme hatred from Angusami. Damodaran, her only friend, serves as a bridge between her and Angusami. Over time, sand dredging alters the river's course and its banks shrink. Swelling menacingly under torrential rain, the river threatens to take away the life it nurtures.

The river, a primary force in steering the narrative forward, described in vivid detail is a character too. It is interesting to note how its vagaries match Angusami’s moods - its bountiful flow mirroring the content and blissful life he spent with his beloved wife Tangammai until she died of smallpox, its eddies reflect the emotional abyss he falls into when incapacitated by a shoulder dislocation injury. The Madan Sami (the river God) festival, flora and fauna terms enhance the local flavor. That the women characters here only embody a man’s love and hatred, the excessive stress on women's looks, a whole village fretting about ugly-faced Panki’s marriage may feel annoying and dated.

For the way nature’s vagaries, its wrath are explored dwelling on human relationships, On a River’s Bank by A Madhavan reminded me strongly of Dweepa by Na D’Souza, translated from Kannada by Susheela Punitha. The setting (the river) is just as important (maybe even more) as the principal human characters and for this reason, the book reminded me of Neela Padmanabhan’s Where the Lord Sleeps. Interestingly, both A Madhavan and Neela Padmanabhan are from the same region, the former born in Trivandrum, his parents hailed from Kanyakumari and the latter was born in Nagercoil, both the authors were known for their literary prowess in Malayalam and Tamil.

That continuous sand dredging alters a river’s course and degrades it beyond repair is something I have witnessed in the case of Bharathapuzha river that flows through my maternal grandmother’s town in Kerala. That the book written back in 1974 focused on this important environmental issue is pretty impressive. Lovers of Amitav Ghosh’s fiction on climate change/ecological issues now have a work to turn attention to from the arena of Indian translated literature in On a River’s Bank by A Madhavan, thanks to Ratna Books. 

With an end that leaves room for contemplation, On a River’s Bank clearly indicates that when man begins to plunder, nature can get ruthless.

Slices of the Moon Swept by the Wind

‘They say nobody can understand what I say .. So, my teacher told me that I must write whatever I think of in a book. As and when I remember’. So, our unnamed protagonist, a special child referred to by different names by his family members, writes everything down. 

He writes about Amma whose lap is his safe haven when he gets splitting headaches. He writes about Appa who dotes on him, is miffed with God and wakes up at the slightest sound from the deepest sleep. 

He writes about his Doddakka (elder sister) who pampers him and draws the most beautiful rangolis; about Sanakka (another sister) who never spares anyone who bullies him, tells him stories in the backyard in moonlight; about Tangi (younger sister), a 1  ½ yr old baby who looks like a sugar doll. 

There’s Anna (elder brother) who calls him a ‘pain’, pinches & beats him when alone, another ‘dead’ sister who reappears at their doorstep one day, Appa’s friend who teaches him at home, Dr. Shetty who’s always kind, a maternal uncle who regales him with the frog prince story, a man from Muharram procession who smiles and waves at him, he writes about them all. Though some of his notes feel disjointed to start with, it’s brilliant how everything (including the title) makes complete sense as we read. 

‘I will not tell you how I look. Whatever your imagination is, I look worse than that.’ And as you turn the pages, you care the least about his looks for you know he has the most beautiful mind.  Wise and mature beyond his years, he isn’t angry with God for his illness, with the school principal who refuses him admission or with the world that greets him with shock before half-pretending everything’s okay; he’s ‘special’ indeed! 

Slices of the Moon Swept by the Wind by Surendranath S, translated from Kannada by Prathibha Nandakumar, is a heart rending glimpse of a special child’s little world from his POV, of his family beset by many serious problems. In the introduction to the book, the author writes about his paternal aunt who he is extremely fond of. He claims that the book is loosely based on her and her family. He also states that it is Raghavendra Khasaneesa's Kannada short story 'Tabbaligalu' that inspired him to write the book. The family. neck deep in tragedy, in this story bore an uncanny resemblance to his aunt's family and this motivated him to write this book. Simple drawings by Apara adorn the pages. Translations from Kannada are few and far between, so heartfelt thanks to Prathibha Nandakumar for the translation , one that allows intimate connect with the text. 

Every page will leave you misty eyed, still you will gladly give into the pull of the words. An immensely moving novella, beautiful and heartbreaking in equal measure.