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.
It is said that short stories are small windows to the outside world. What when these windows are shape-shifters, what when we readers have been pushing these windows for a view of the world only to realize that they should be pulled in to open. Chandan Pandey's stories present a knotty affair at many places that we readers learn to disentangle. The writing here is clever, convoluted. The translation by Sayari Debnath, so fine
and erudite, makes the reading wholesome. In fact, there are many places where we wonder how the original lines in Hindi would have been. For instance, an entire paragraph in the story 'The Keeper of Desolation' that begins like this - "This town survived on a mountain of information. For example, B knew A well, and although B's relationship with C was tenuous, C was convinced for this reason ... E took D to F. F and D were on their way .."
In these stories, the socio-political issues are
juxtaposed with personal strife, tender with brutal and stark with subtle. The corrupt who turn a lie into truth by repeating it a thousand times straight-faced and vice versa propel many stories here. The ideas of freedom and democracy are only a joke under despotic rulers, only silently buckling under the weight of very real 'oppressor -oppressed' existence.
That the author portrays women as ethereally
beautiful objects meant for man’s desire and lust irked me at times, but this
isn’t unrealistic. A woman's waist chain pattern comes under close scrutiny in one story and in another, a man feels like kissing the pomegranate shaped, red mouth of a lady DM officer who's questioning him.
The Harper Perennial editions usually have an 'insights' section
at the book's end, I am a little disappointed that it’s absent here. These minor
niggles aside, The Keeper of Desolation unravels truths we have lived with for
years, some that we have even turned a blind eye to, thanks to our privilege.
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)
