Two collections

THE locations in which these dozen or so stories by Nisha da Cunha are set are beautiful - the paradisial landscapes of Goa, the blue hills of India, even the winter in Bombay. Their inscapes, however, are meditative and melancholy, rather than celebratory, describing a loneliness, often misguidedly self- inflicted, that haunts the characters to their end. Thus in "Ember Days", the first story in the collection, an Anglo-Indian woman realises, after 25 years, that she loves her piano teacher, Prescott, but when she decides to tell him of her love, she discovers that he has died. "The Dearly Beloved, Kept Woman" tells the story, as the title indicates, of a mistress kept by a professor of English literature in a cottage by the sea; eventually he dies, and she is left alone, with not even the comfort of being able to mourn him legitimately. In "A Woman of My Age", a woman refuses to marry her love because she is 40 when he is 20, only to discover, a lifetime later, that he too lived out his life alone, writing a letter to her each day until he died. "Mending Wall", one of the best stories here, borrows its title from Robert Frost's poem of the same name, and is a deviation from such themes in that it describes a meeting with a neighbour in Goa. The beauty of Frost's poem, which lies in the ordinariness and mediocrity of mind in the neighbour who doesn't think beyond his father's saying good fences make good neighbours, however, gives way here to a villain who puts his parents into an old age home and is served justly by having to inhabit one himself later in life.

The most difficult task any critic faces is to define exactly why a creative work doesn't work: one of the cardinal rules in such cases would perhaps be to return to the rudiments of the craft: does the singer sing in tune, does the writer use language well? Even so, judging art is difficult: the simplest strokes by Jamini Roy are transformed into great art, the most transparent language used by R.K. Narayan may give the greatest pleasure.

Nisha da Cunha's stories read well; they are written in competent prose, and there is no single vice in them that may be singled out as irritating, no pretension or affectation. Yet the stories make no great impact, leave behind no trace, and nor is there a single memorable sentence to savour. In summing them up, therefore, there is nothing much to be said. These are stories one might pick up and read in a magazine on a train journey (one can almost imagine the manner in which they would then be illustrated), and then put aside without regret or repulsion - they are located, for the reader, in the twilight between discovery and forgetting.

Ruskin Bond, on the other hand, in When Darkness Falls, creates a world which inhabits us with a presence that transcends the impact of the individual story. Much like Narayan's Malgudi, the hill station of Dehra Dun and its environs, subtly and ineffably, fill the nooks and crevices of our consciousness while we read. Some of Narayan's Malgudi books provide a fictional map of the place in the inside jacket; Ruskin Bond's stories too supply us with a similar andfamiliar set of locations that might easily be drawn on an imaginary map: the Mall, with its bakeries and shops; the walks, with their familiar trees and flowers, the run-down, once-magnificent hotel or house that belonged to so-and-so and the all-important cemetery. Characters such as Markham, in the title story, are partly based on memories of a man with leprosy who was never seen by anyone and whose food was left outside his door, but equally vivid is the gross Mrs. Khanna, the hotel- owner's wife and victim of the tragedy in the story. The greatest pleasure, however, is to be derived from the shorter autobiographical stories that predominate in this volume: "The Garden of Memories", "The Writers' Bar", "Living Without Money"; even "Young Man in a Tonga", "Monkey Trouble" or "The Amorous Servant", which are not identified by the author as real-life stories, but seem, unmistakably, to be so. These stories delineate characters who seem to occupy the recesses of our own memories: who has not had a person such as the dashing uncle Ken in their family, or known a prototype of the languid tongawala who recites Urdu poetry and drives recklessly, or treated with much less tolerance a servant like Kundan Singh, with his love for the cinema, the liquor shop and other city diversions? Described here as India's best-loved writer in English, these celebrations, interwoven with memory and desire, give reasonable evidence once again of the probable truth of that appellation.

ROSINKA CHAUDHURI

No Black, No White: Short Stories, Nisha da Cunha, HarperCollins India, p.135, Rs. 195.

When Darkness Falls and Other Stories, Ruskin Bond, Penguin India, p.102, Rs. 150.

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