Literature of Defiance

A celebration of regional identity, full of the sights and sounds of Kerala, The Warp and the Weft and Other Stories signals the quiet coming of age of the Indian short story in English, says RANGA RAO.

READERS of fiction in English are engaged these days in the astronomer's delight: discovery of new heavenly bodies. Several of the "stars" in recent decades have come from the Indian space. We have had Arundhati Roy, a "Tiger Woods debut", as John Updike characterised her wholesome success; from Kerala again, though somewhat less spectacularly, Sujata Sankranti burst into view in 1998 by winning the First Prize in the Commonwealth Short Story Competition: out of several thousand entries from 46 countries.

Sankranti's short stories are eminently readable; they enjoy the first attraction of their genre: they are short. (The original piece that won the Commonwealth Award in 1998 was less than 600 words.) The opening paras, critical in any short story, are fluently done, unostentatious, inducing smooth instant reader entry; more often than not, dramatic; and the endings sophisticated, crisp, and often teasing and ambiguous, intriguing.

The range is impressive: from "detective" stories with enough O'Henry "twists" ("Musk-deer") to psychological dramas ("You and I" and "Pursuit"), from social satire to character sketches; expressionistic or symbolic; or deeply ironic. And femnist sallies: "What is delicate about being a girl?" asks the young daughter in "Mahadev's Garden". Better still is the riposte of Bhagwanti, terminally ill, in the title story:

"My husband? The last time I had set my eyes on him was thirteen years ago. He left when Shalini was two years old. I tell you, it has been good riddance. He had no job. Just sat at home, eating, drinking and sleeping! In fact, I threw him out. How many mouths could I feed? If I had given birth to a son he might have come back to claim him. A daughter meant only responsibility. So he never showed himself again!"

The short story of the kind Sankranti practises demands the art of self-effacement; there is little autobiography: it is, most of the time, invention; the author performs the vanishing trick with herself. The structure is seamless; the texture unmistakably Indian.

These stories carry unobtrusively the sights and smells of Kerala; though domiciled in distant Delhi for the last four decades, maintaining creative silence after the prize-winning short stories she wrote at college, Sankranti has been nursing her regional identity, her integrity in its precious amniotic fluid: herbal oil; mango papad; custard apples, country mangoes and palm fruits; the flavour of sesame seeds, fresh or stale; asafoetida and chillies; sandalwood and spice; flowers and banana leaves; climbing over pineapple fences, you freshly plucked cactus - "its juicy sap served me as an eraser". The Tourism Department of the state has yet another NGO doing their job for them after Arundhati Roy.

Quietly too, these stories breathe the spirit of Kerala - and India - of today; Gandhi, Jinnah, Marx and Lenin, Jesus Christ and Dr. Ambedkar; Michael Jackson and Valentine's Day. It is a world in flux: "the oil mill had disappeared, so also the paddy fields. In their place, stood a huge building...a heart centre. ("Fulfilment"). A world in which vishnu-stuti and siva-stuti co- exist with stereo music; of NRIs: the narrator of "The Garage Sale" corrects his mother; his wife is "not American, but Korean".

The cast of Sankranti's world has considerable compass: children, eminently, lonely kids; women, young and old, dalits; teachers, doctors... even a puppy.

Children are at the centre of some of the most endearing stories: "She could spend hours looking at the tortoise and the snail cruising on the slope, as though scheduled for a serious meeting! ("The Thirteenth Day").

Children or adults, the best of Sankranti's stories focus on victims. The title story, for example, expanded to a triptych in this volume, presents three "women"terminally ill. "The Window" follows the experiences of the lonely child of busy parents; "You and I" treats of an unjustly dismissed bank clerk. Male chauvinism in "Mahadev's Garden" - the man's "heartless energy" - drives a daughter away.

The reader keeps glued to the narratives because of Sankranti's approach to such characters: she does not weep for them: they themselves rarely lament their plight. Understated with exquisite indirection, these stories manage to convey their plight without becoming mushy. The three "women" of the title story are a good example: three age-groups: the first woman absorbs her own misery and with great poise and pity views the grief of her own family; the second "woman" is a little girl of nine: in the end it is she who lends her shoulder to her sorrowing mother ("Alfonsa strokes her mother's hand and holds her heaving body in her tender arms"). The most articulate is the third woman, Bhagwanti: all her life she has been barren; she remarks wryly, "But something is now growing in me after all."

There is anguish enough in this volume, but not ennui; anything but cynicism. Sankranti's outstanding gift is her compassion: "...those half-naked kids greedily drinking chalk-white kanji, poured out in coconut shells - with makeshift spoons, fashioned out of the leaves of the jackfruit tree. Those one-eyed, two-eyed coconut shells, the skull-shaped grinning coconut shells and the leafy spoons haunted me even in my dreams." ("Distant Summer").

In story after story in this unpretentious volume, amazingly, it adds up, softly, inevitably; victims who don't wear their hearts on their sleeves: all engaged in various degrees of defiance: challenge social handicap, oppression, disease and death, and remain unvanquished, a pride of underdogs.

The creative spirit in action aims at a single goal: amalgamation. Sankranti's humanism continually brings people together; she hates divided families, warring couples. This life principle knows no boundaries; like a garden creeper it does not care where her property ends and the neighbour's begins. It cuts across classes: Sankranti's agents in this agreeable mission are nondescript people, humble servants. "Bahadur took his duty most conscientiously and had stuck to his post like a sentinel" ("The Mirage"). In "The Window" the lonely child receives comfort from the sensitive maid: "Susie had never looked so dear or dignified. He buried his head into her apron - smelling of detergents and lotions - and hugged her gratefully."

Not just humanism; perhaps more properly, it seems to me, it is Indian humanism: for strikingly, in a world of jousting couples or disintegrating families, anxious efforts are made to bring the family together; as in the symbolically titled "Mirage". "Mirage should live. Without Mirage, there is no life": for though assaulted egregiously the institution of the family is, as in R.K.Narayan's novels, indispensable. It makes no difference that, as in "The Garage Sale", it happens to be an old American woman in America: "Jennifer had often complained to Kris about her children's indifference;" loneliness is no monopoly of any one civilisation; the elderly American woman is no different from the elderly Kerala mother of the narrator. Kris (that is Krishnan, the doctor from Kerala) accepts a unique gift from Jennifer, her most precious possession: her Bible. "On the top shelf of his bedroom closet, he had reverentially put it away along with his mother's Ramayanam."

Sankranti is engaged in exploring such pleasures and problems of human integration. Building bridges comes naturally to Indian writers; convergence matters.

We find few verbal pyrotechnics in Sankranti. Most of the time the language is moulded by the theme; the author stakes all on her creative powers; the tone is just right. Consider the poetry of still-life: The nightjasmines are "pearly white petals on burnt-orange stems." Or: "The grass glistened as though it wore drops of diamonds" ("The Window"). (I wonder if a man could think of this image.) And: if you care for the loneliness of a mere puppy: "the ticks clung to him as though they were passionately in love with him." ("Mirage").

More sensuously, the secular delight: "Karthi sniffed at the air, taking in all the flavours and fragrance wafting around. The sweet smell of the smoking homemade coconut oil. The crisp golden banana chips! She ran around the pandals and stood staring at those sweaty men perched on rickety stools, stirring rice and milk in huge cauldrons over the naked fire. She watched with fascination, the damask-white concoction of milk and rice - foaming and surfing over the rims." ("The Thirteenth Day").

For pastel shades, olfactorily speaking: "The breath on Mini's cheeks was warm and balmy, as though the fragrance of all the flowers in the garden had blended in." ("Hide and Seek"). And two different moods in the same story, "A Distant Summer": "As the breakfast arrived for both of us, for me, frothy milk laced with almonds and for him, four round idlies, smooth and snowy, floating like submarines in a ruddy pool of sambar."

The image is natural to the narrator. By the end of the story, the malnourished teacher is lying ill, penurious and helpless: "As my eyes got used to the darkness around I saw him at the far end of the room, stretched on a string cot. A bag of bones, he lay there, surrounded by filth and flies. Was he the same formidable old man who introduced me to Jesus Christ and Karl Marx? The spittoon, kept by the side of the cot had overturned. A huge fly was buzzing around the mess it had made on the cracked floor."

In the stories dealing with abnormal states of mind, the style is particularly evocative. As in the title story; or in "You and I": "I carried my innocence mutely like a cross....Be kind to a man who sits curled in a corner like a bundle of soiled clothes."

This imaginative energy receives further character: Sankranti adopts the translator's style occasionally to help out the reader: "When Amma grew emotional, she pronounced the word 'America' very proudly with the stress on the 'k' sound as though America was a jathikka, a nutmeg, or a pavakka, a bittergourd!"

Sankranti's language dares farther; like her best characters, she is positively defiant. She revels in quietly localised colour. "None of us would ever miss the evening deeparadhana ("Kunji Kutti").

The Indian character of the volume is further underscored by occasional Indianisms: "They seemed to be on a run"; "Stop in her track". Some fascinate: "someone had been filling his ears" ("The Rooster and the Hen"); "Even a worm trapped in them would coil around my neck" ("The Warp and the Weft"); "They have a thousand tongues around their neck" ("The Garage Sale").

Sankranti's volume confirms the advances made by the Indian short story in English. No doubt about it, the short story is our prose lyric: "capsules of imagined life". For us the short story and the novel matter, still count; because life matters, human relationships matter, the living do as do the dying.

The Warp and the Weft and Other Stories warrants optimism; the overall effect is that of a pronounced Indian accent to the short story in English. Like American Literature in the early decades of the 20th Century after it had in the period following the Civil War stopped addressing Europe and created a Huck Finn; and the Indian novel in English in the later decades; the Indian short story in English too has come of age.

Publishers in India have just begun to admit the creative adventure. More of such Srishti!

The Warp and the Weft And other Stories, Sujata Sankranti, Srishti Publishers and Distributors, 2001, p. 254, Rs. 195.

Ranga Rao is a novelist, short story writer and translator.

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