On a tangent

The stories in this collection are all angular and quirky and make no attempt to woo the reader. The style is unadorned, there is no attempt to beautify or be politically correct, yet the narrative tone is marked by a breezy confidence, says ANURADHA ROY.

NOT all the stories in this book are of sexual obsessions. One of the finest in the collection, a road story, is of a boy who grows up fascinated by little else than railways timetables and trains. When it becomes too much of an effort being an acceptable son and student, he jumps on to the Secunderabad Express, and begins a life of taking trains to nowhere, sleeping where he can, scrounging for food and drugs. Over the years he travels many routes, and one day, waking from his drugged stupor, he finds himself in Bangladesh. Here, much like the character in Narayan's Guide, he realises that sitting doped out on the river bank ensures people thinking him a fakir and giving him alms. There is some regularity in his life at last: "6 a.m.: rise; 7-8 a.m.: prayers; 9-11 a.m.: beg; 1 p.m: lunch...My father would have been pleased: he often complained that what I lacked was discipline."

In this and in the other remarkable story in this collection, the narrator finds his otherwise placid existence complicated by larger political developments or people over which he has no control. "The Assassination of Salman Rushdie" is a delightfully comical story in which the life of the narrator, a Parsi car restorer, is thrown into turmoil because he is a Rushdie lookalike and devotee:

My maker made me His replica... My eyebrows are inverted tickmarks, just like His, and my ears are at a 45-degree angle to my face. The flared nostrils, oversized nose and lips that look like a bird in flight, only complete the picture. But this is not all. My skin too, has the texture of condensed milk. I lose hair at exactly the same rate that He seems to be doing.

These are intriguing stories, angular and quirky, refusing any overt effort to woo the reader. The writing is at times bafflingly unremarkable, even slapdash: "This was opening up a wound and washing hands off", says one of the characters in the epistolary first story. The writer is also interested in experiments with style, for, another story, "Bhanu", is written throughout in a Bridget-Jones-like diarese that goes, "Worked out compro, asked him to come middle next month". Two of the stories, the weakest in the collection, are written as interviews. In these the dialogue is often laboured, and the point almost forgettable, as it is in another, written as a screenplay within a first person narrative.

However, all these experiments with narration are characterised by an appealingly breezy confidence. The conscious effort to avoid prettifying, when it works, evokes a kind of sand-in-the mouth urbanness, often the underbelly of urbanness, whether the setting is a small-town university campus, Mumbai, or Trinidad. The unadorned style of writing is accompanied by a studious disavowal of any obvious political correctness or concession to "good taste". In many of the stories the characters are self- obsessed, or disgusted by other people; in one allegorical monologue, the narrator, caught in a crowd, "could see their squinted eyes and jagged teeth and running noses... that deformed creature with stumps for arms and lumps for feet, not to speak of skin adorned with pimples, warts and moles."

The writing is unafraid, as are the writer's themes, several of which are connected by the common concerns of obsession, alienation and unrequited love. In "Moonlight Tandoori", a young student who finds himself homeless and alone over Christmas in England, finally gets a room above an Indian restaurant. Here, in unlikely surroundings odorous with onion and chicken dhansak, he falls in love with Rashid, the Bangladeshi cook's assistant. As in two of the other stories, the lovesick wooer finds to his dismay that the object of his affections is ambivalent and perverse. Rashid reciprocates all attempts at seduction and prompts some, yet is horrified at the mention of a full-blown relationship. In "Confessions of a Boy Lover", to Siddharth's anguish, his lover Sudhir first abandons him, and then announces he is marrying a woman called Maya. The catastrophe prompts Siddharth to write him a pop song: "I love you/You love me/You are my life/I am your wife/ Forget Maya/ Make her your Ayah."

This self-parodying, tongue-in-cheek voice renders the pining lover faintly ridiculous, his agony amusing. The settings of these abortive love stories, from restaurant to sex-change clinic, ensure the affairs are denied the dignity of poetic surroundings; we are instead made to confront the comical, pathetic absurdity of desperation. The sex is shorn of any attempt to titillate. The vulnerability of being homosexual in a belligerent and macho culture is similarly depicted with a slightly sarcastic smile.

A man has a sex-change operation to win his beloved; he finds people now ridcule him as an eunuch. A gay man is locked up for molesting a woman on a train; he is indignant at the assumption that all men want to pinch women's bottoms. When he tells the police officer he could not logically have molested a woman because he is gay, he is raped by two depraved constables. In Raj Rao's world, whatever you do, you're screwed.

One Day I Locked My Flat in Soul City,

R. Raja Rao, HarperCollins, p.189, Rs. 195.

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