The Storyteller

   

A FIVE YEAR OLD BOY is the protagonist of the Booker nominated book ‘Room’ by Emma Donoghue. The story is narrated from his perspective which is pretty constricted as he is imprisoned in a room with his Ma since he was born. For him the outside world, fresh air, flowers, other people are just fairy tales. His reality is a eleven square foot room and one other human being - old  Nick, the man responsible for abducting Ma and continually raping her. A transition from the room to the world outside is a shattering experience for him and his Ma. What makes it utterly poignant and avant garde for the reader is the narration from the boy’s point of view. He is the triumph on which the book rides high. Structuring of a book is an art ever so subtle and masterful in the hands of great writers. The craft is prevalent, though superbly restrained, and holding the entire work seamlessly together. The narrator who tells the story is distinctly chosen by the writer, after great thought. Unusual narrators have contributed to the uniqueness of a book of fiction

 It happened yet again. Nilanjana Roy, the journalist and literary critic released her first book – ‘The Wildings, in which the narrators are CATS, cheels, dogs and tigers. Successful people don’t do different things , they do things differently. Imagine hearing the story from the perspective of cats, which she set out to do initially but later with the progression of the book other interesting animals too found a voice in the narration.

A masterstroke would be ‘My Name is Red’ by Orhan Pamuk in which the first narrator is a CORPSE. The book is narrated in 20 different voices, with a dog, a horse and the colour RED, too, taking turns to narrate the story of a miniaturist illuminator who is murdered in medieval Turkey. Here, we cannot but talk about DEATH as the narrator of ‘The Book Thief’ by Markus Zusak. The over busy death, weary and cynical of retrieving souls during World War II in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, is a humane entity, devoid of grotesque monstrosity, serving its purpose with great empathy. If I say a grandfatherly figure, I wouldn’t be far from it.

To take the conversation further, the first section of ‘Sound and Fury’ is from the point of view of an AUTISTIC  33-year old man Benjamin "Benjy" Compson, a source of shame to the family due to his autism. The narration is a series of non-chronological events and shifts haphazardly. Limited by himself he cannot interpret time, cause and effect and conceives happenings through visual and auditory stimulus. Moving on to the autistic brave boy Christopher John Francis Boone, a 15-year-old boy who describes himself as "a mathematician with some behavioral difficulties” is a deserving mention here, from the book ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime.’ Finding a keen grasp of his social fears, he solves the mystery of the murder of the dog and then goes on to find his mother. An appealing, quirky novel. A great feat, using a narrator with asperger syndrome.’ The chapters are numbered according to prime numbers; the book is filled with mathematical puzzles, maps and illustrations.

‘Metamorphosis’ by Franz Kafka is told by a GIANT INSECT– a young lad morphed into an insect. A symbolic, multi-layered story of human complexities.  ‘The Art of Racing in the Rain’ by Garth Stein uses brilliant narrative device. The narrator is the know-all old dog Enzo, who has mastered human behavior by watching TV when his master is away. The story of the master who is an aspiring car-racer is relayed from the perspective of his dog, who is as good as human except for opposable thumbs and no speech. He takes us through the joys and pains of marriage of his master, meddling in-laws, illness, highs and lows of a race-car driver. A catchy read with emotional strings attached to it. You will never be able to look at a dog in the same way again.

‘The Screwtape Letters’ by C.S Lewis is in the voice of two DEVILS who exchange letters between themselves. The letters appeared during the dark days of World War II and later came out as a book dedicated to his friend TRR Tolkien “The secrets out. You've stumbled upon a mysterious series of recorded conversations between two demons tasked with securing the demise of their human patients.” Delightfully disturbing (and often diabolically humorous) entertainment, The Screwtape Letters will open your eyes and ears to the devil's schemes — and to the One who has overcome them.”

 Ralph Ellison's nameless protagonist in Invisible Man ushers readers to the stare and gaze of racial American society. A society who sees and yet does not see the black man as an individual in his own right. This looking without registering  impacts the victim and reduces him to a non entity with psychological repercussions of withdrawal, suppression and violence.

No doubt all the books mentioned above have been a great success of their times. Next time you set out to write a book, think hard who is going to do the talking.

Sensorium at Sunaparanta

Sensorium

Encoded metaphors in literature, photography, music and cinema stand reflected and mirrored in each other at Sensorium, the aptly named festival of arts, literature and ideas at Sunaparanta.  It embodies a stimulating interplay of photographers, writers, artists, musicians and cinematographers engaged in a creative dialogue.

Sensorium a highly researched theory by Marshall McLuhan in the 20^thcentury relates to senses as “constituting a kind of synaesthetic system, a “five sense sensorium”(1961), in which individual senses are in intricate interplay. McLuhan often speaks of the impressions on one sense being translated readily into another, of “sight translated into sound and sound translated into movement, and taste and smell. The effects of media on the senses are manifest through the response of an interdependent group or an interconnected system of the senses. The stimulus of one sense causes a perception by another, seemingly unrelated sense, as in musicians who can taste the intervals between notes, or artists who can smell colors.” When we read, our mind’s eye creates visual images and we hear sounds of a storm, taste the smell of wet mud…….

A brainwave of the Delhi Photo Festival founder Prashant Pinjar and director Siddharth Dhanvant Sanghvi , Sensorium becomes a celebration of photography in connection with literature and other arts. Occupying centre stage is the work of Italian photo journalist Fausto Giaccone. When he became bewitched by the literature of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, he spent a long space of time, walking and photographing the streets and locales in Marquez’s books especially Macondo (a fictionalized town as real as RK Narayan’s Malgudi or Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha). His book -  Macondo The World of Gabriel Garcia Marquez  published by Postcart is a visual reproduction of the entire kaleidoscopic imagery of Aracataca, and the Colombian region where Marquez lived and wove his experiential first-hand very own synaesthetic system( the  five sense sensorium) into  literature. Giaccone’s endeavour to convey the smell, sound, taste and feel of the magical reality of the milieu, as it was then, with annotated text from Hundred Years of Solitude makes the fare on display at Sunaparanta a treat to one’s sensorium.

“Marquez has risen to become stardust, a flashing literary comet”, but Giaccone’s work takes us on a nostalgic rewind, into a magical world rooted in a reality that once was and is immortalized through such endeavours. “The most wildest and tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end…….little by little studying the infinite possibilities of a loss of memory – he realized that the day might come when things would be recognized by their inscriptions but no one would remember their use…… when people want to refer to nations as places slow to develop---- held back by oppression, imperialism, they may shrug their shoulders and sigh “Macondo’.”

The caption Photo Poetry in the next room photographically interprets the poetry of Octavio Paz, the great Mexican poet, writer and diplomat. It is a spectacular insight into a poet’s work who unseeingly sees the glory and grandeur of decaying palaces through the ravages of time. Photographers inspired by the poems make a free translation through their lenses. Poetic expressions like The Balcony, The Mausoleum of Humayun, the Tomb of Amir Khusru which Paz wrote in the 1960s, when he was the Mexican ambassador to India; exploring the cohesion between poetry, silence and time is expressively transfigured in frozen black and white shots by Adil Hasan, Subrata Biswas and Sudeep Sen.  “A palette, exposing photographic plates-bromide undulations of an untold story- a narrative to be matted and mounted – a frame freeing open its borders to dream.”

In line with it are select photo pictures of Dayanita Singh’s oeuvre in photography, in sync with book titles – Difficult Loves, Shadow lines, A Room of One’s Own......But the exhibit is  called Offset, photography counterbalancing complete literature works..

The front lawn is house to an installation by the Magnum nominee, Sohrab Hura, excerpts from his forthcoming book, Life is Elsewhere. The teeming crowds of Raghu Rai and color and sound of Raghuvir Singh morph into an eerie wilderness. Unrelenting anguish sweeps across the frames(text and photos) mounted on lecterns , lit by a light peering from under a scalloped seashell. A disturbing true-to-life reality, which sears one to the core. You read on and somewhere towards the end, color starts seeping into the frames, healing the scarred emotions of the artist and the viewer.

Gopika Chowfla’s ‘Flesh’ UV prints on film in a darkroom are accompanied by the text: “In my exploration, the term flesh becomes a non-specific entity. Blurring the lines between the real and imagined, the images of flesh,  animal human and vegetable are created to provoke a sensory and corporeal reaction” His exhibition, an echo of Edward Weston’s photography, exposes the texture of skin of fruits and vegetables, and slicing of animal flesh to recreate a sexual and visceral experience. Watching cleaved, palpable exposed flesh, completely removed from its context imbues a pleasurable feeling of sensuality and beauty in the viewer.  

The courtyard flanked by the cafe is witness to blow-ups of Jazz musicians in concert by    Farrokh Chothia. He spent more than a decade with jazz musicians and when other photographers would move away after taking their shots for the newspaper, he would stay behind and then he felt as if the musicians performed for him, redirecting and aligning their energies to him or his art and he caught them in sublime poses. Music, Indian classical and Jazz has been a soundtrack of his life. Salman Rushdie’s comments in bold on the wall alongside read: “blurring the distinction between composer and performer…improvising within a formal framework, allowing for passages of virtuosic brilliance amid moments of sadder, deeper restraint”. He further reteirates: “Don’t look at these pictures in silence. They
ask for music to be played.”

The hand-crafted photo books in the library are special and enchanting in an old world manner. Regina Maria Anzenberger  the curator ‘leads us to the discovery of the  joy of personalising visual narratives with handmade books.’ The Archivist by Nony Singh, Go Away Closer in a series by Dayanita Singh.....black and white photography gives way to color to digitization – joy of photography parlays into intellectual perspective to abstraction and sometimes an absence. Whole lives and generations are chronicled, sorted, filtered and made legendary. Landscape confluencing metaphorical text evolves spirally vertical to higher realms..

The idea of a confluence of the arts is a masterstroke. As Farrokh Chothia says, “That’s a great way of pulling in whole groups of other worlds – it is just exponentially opening up to all kinds of other things. This gives me a context too about why I would be there. This gives a much broader sense to the whole idea of taking pictures. You are not just looking at photography but also looking at how it interacts with other aspects.” Some festivals are more than a party indeed!

        

The Goa Art Lit Fest

                                                          The Goa Art Lit Fest

Come December and the Goa Art /Lit Festival makes headlines with a contingent of authors descending on Goa to regale audiences with their voices. It is a treat par excellence for the local population, school and college students and the avid readers who visit to savour the literary curry. The festival has been gaining prominence since its inception and this year it turned a milestone. A well conceived fair executed with a touch of intimacy and class.

The highlights of the fest included a battery of poets, four of whom were the finalists for the Khushwant Singh Memorial Prize to be announced in January at JLF. Arundhati Subramaniam and Sridala Swami, with their self-assured stance and flawless performance-poetry rendition, stood apart. Ranjit Hoskote and Keki Daruwalla alternated with a collected and powerful recitation of their poems.   

 Arundhati’s poems intertwine the realms of bodies, intellect and the spiritual.  She enunciated poems from her latest collection When God is a Traveller. Disparate landscapes and a dichotomy of desires assail her verses:  ‘the gossamer flurry / of your breath, the wild nearness / of your heart beat’, and yet that ‘there is more to desire than the tribal shudder / in the loins.’ The unfathomable mysteries: ‘Remember I am as / dog eared / soiled / puzzled / as you are / and as much in love.’

Keki Daruwalla’s  ex tempore elocution of his poem at Raj Bhawan about first ten years after his year of birth(1937) ended on I wouldn’t cite it even if it rhymes with heaven/ when it comes to 1947.....Edwin Thumboos poignant maiden poem, on deleting phone numbers of  friends and family who are no longer there, wrung the audiences’ hearts and Joshua Ip with his exuberant mannerism endeared himself to the crowds.  

Art world of color and lines was aptly represented by Daisy Rockwell and Pierre Legrand. Rockwell’s debut India exhibition ‘Odalisque' invoked the famous Odalisque paintings of Francois Boucher and Ingres in the viewer’s mind-eye. But the recollection was completely disrupted by what Rockwell had on display. The series represented Odalisque as a fully participative subject, choosing consciously her pose and manner of depiction in the paintings. The artist and the subject seemed to have become co-creators in the process of signifying each stance and pose with complete objectivity and freedom.  ‘A long digression from the19th century reclining female figure, often nude or semi-clad in shawls or loose robes, meant to invoke Oriental decadence and opulence.’ (VM)

The Odalisque may be traced back to the renaissance painter Titian’s Venus of  Urbino who veiled his eroticism in myth and Ingres who transfigured the theme of mythological nude to an exotic object of desire tending to romanticism. The Odalisque changed and evolved with the masterful strokes of Edouard Manet’s ‘Olympia’.  The latter’s work was a tour de force, totally in control of sexuality. Matisse and Picasso imbued it with abstraction. Viewing Rockwell’s work, it felt that the Odalisque had truly arrived at the gates of a conscious sexual freedom.

Writing in Colour, a conversation and presentation, showcased the Auroville artist Pierre Legrand’s  unique artist works. It underlined the ubiquitous geometrically-carved meditative art riding on a pictorial alphabet indicative of a universal unity in the cosmos, made up of animate and inanimate matter.  

 Exclusive book launches continued to colour the four-day festival intermittently. Rajmohan Gandhi’s and Mamang Dai’s historical-fiction based in Gujarat and Arunachal Pradesh respectively made interesting hearing. Rajdeep Sardesai’s The Election That Changed India mixed polemics with a booming baritone and lured many a person to the Zuiyo lawns. Book focus on cook-books enthralled the connoisseurs and Frederika Menezes won over hearts with her writing: Unforgotten. The House with the Green Roof, a humorous crime-story with a signature suspense-tune and Charlie Chaplin sequences, was a laugh riot – light and barmy.....I was in conversation with the author Ashish Vikram.

The discussion on crafting a short story shifted attention to great story writers of literature: Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Italio Calvino and Paul Zarkaria (in translation). The easy rapport between Githa Hariharan and Keki Daruwalla facilitated an easy flow of witty conversation. Young literature with voices from Britain, Australia and Goa moderated by me threw up the lacunae in Indian fiction and the inclusion of sensitive dark subjects in teen literature.  Changing India with Vidhya Dahejia, TM Krishna and Rajmohan Gandhi highlighted changing Indian culture and inheritance and was followed by an equally interesting exchange between Maria Couto and Vrinda Nabar in memory to memoir. Each dwelt on her book based on her mother’s journey with a backdrop of evolving values and traditional societal structures. Sudeep Chakravarti and Hindol Sengupta exchanged notes on their writings - Clear Hold Build, and Recasting India respectively. While the former stressed the skewed business houses/human rights issues, the latter paved way for a prosperous economic India through entrepreneurship. Many cities and countries like Singapore, Nepal, Kenya and East Africa  were reinvented through talks on historical stories and later status quo in these lands. Prominent Goan writers like Damodar Mauzo, Wilfred goes and Tony Martin showcased their writings and regaled the audience with stories from Goa. Empowering the margins, Dalit writings and Ambedkar’s India Project too found special focus at the festival.

Workshop on translation by Mini Krishnan and talks with Vidya Pai and Xavier Cota was constructive without being lost in dialectics. Childrens’ Hour each day in the morning was  a resounding success with a succession of writers, poets, musicians and journalists interacting with students from different schools and colleges of Goa. An opportunity not to be missed by educational institutions in the years to come..... Chee Malabar the Indo-American rapper and Ali Aftab Saeed of the Beygairat Band from Pakistan suffused color in the evenings with their musical strains. Bird watching and wildlife conservation too featured in the festival  and the wine tasting session with the sommelier from Sula Wines was a novelty.....

Goa Art Lit festival is here to stay, mark your calenders for the next year now....... 

Appreciating Literature for Secondary School Teachers - Training Workshop

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Astounding Human Stories!

Stephen Hawking, the brilliant cosmologist has intrigued the human world with groundbreaking theories on black holes and origin of the universe. What makes his life story extremely riveting is the pulsating life force inside a body severely affected by ALS for decades, churning out astronomical details and a family life with children and grandchildren. I was completely bowled over when I read his engagingly written biography by Kristine Larsen (a physicist and astronomer herself) a few years back. Larsen presents a candid and insightful portrait of Hawking’s personal and professional life in her book.  And then this week, I watched the film The Theory About Everything at the ongoing International Film Festival at INOX, Panjim. It is directed by James Marsh with spectacularly convincing performance by Eddie Redmayne  as Stephen Hawking and Felicity Jones in the role of his wife and love, Jane Hawking.  

The film is inspired by the memoir Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen by Jane Hawking. The writer comes across as an utterly committed,  passionate and determined homemaker, a rock behind the life and success of Hawking, the great physicist. A Ph.D. in Spanish Poetry, she writes candidly and sensitively about her 25 years of married life with Stephen Hawking. She evocatively paints the paradoxical picture of her ex- husband’s scientific breakthroughs, his rise to stardom and deterioration of his motor muscular activity affecting his physical abilities. The interwoven threads of a warm family life of fun and activity with three children, against the great odds of a chronically disabled father, add poignancy to the dramatic detailing. The lucid ramifications of the intricate black hole theory, and the ongoing synthesis of theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, provide clarity to a lay reader.

When books are adapted into films, the visual gives a concrete form to the print word but sometimes catapults it into a nameless abyss to the despair of a reader. Diehard fans of books may want to murder me, but I would say that particularly in this case, the movie does justice to the book. It is indeed astonishing to view their life together along with Hawking’s contribution to humanity. The camera is the storyteller as it stays and strays from Jane’s facial expressions and lived experience. Yet the man himself – Stephen’s mind mechanisms remain mysterious. Speaking through a voice box attached to a computer, bound helplessly to a wheelchair, he holds eminent personalities glued to their chairs with his enunciations on cosmology and quantum physics. The progressive deterioration of the body is contrasted with a spark in his eyes and wit and humor in his speech and thought. Its as if an incandescent effervescence holds him together. The dichotomy of fame and disease pervades each frame, a GREAT LESSON IN THE GREAT POWER OF LIFE FORCE WHICH HAS SUPERSEDED AND DEFIED ALL LOGIC AND SCIENCE. It makes one believe in a divine presence, though Hawking never puts it into so many clear words of faith or GOD.

If you missed seeing the movie, read the books , they are easily accessible through Flipkart or Amazon.

Ram Dass, Fierce Grace was another film at IFFI based on books by Richard Alpert. A Professor of psychology at Harvard, he is known for his experiments with LSD-25 in the 1960s  alongwith Timothy Leary and their book The Psychedelic Experience. The viewer is charmed by his sojourn to India, and complete absorption into the Eastern philosophy of karma and salvation, and his relationship with the Guru, Neem Karoli Baba, who gave him the name Ram Dass, servant of God. His study with Baba helped him evolve on a spiritual path. He surmises, “From a Hindu perspective, you are born as what you need to deal with, and if you just try and push it away, whatever it is, it's got you. I help people as a way to work on myself, and I work on myself to help people ... to me, that's what the emerging game is all about." What enthralled him most was not the fact that Baba had immense love in his heart for humanity – but in Baba’s presence, he seemed to be enveloped in love and felt love for everyone around him.  

Heir to a wealthy Jewish family estate, he accommodated people from all walks of life on his father’s sprawling golf lawns, swaying to the strains of Hare-Rama Hare Krishna. In 2013, Ram Dass released a memoir and summary of his teaching, Polishing the Mirror: How to Live from Your Spiritual Heart. All of 83 now, he feels blessed and purged of every doubt, fear and belief.  He said, "Now, I’m in my 80s ... Now, I am aging. I am approaching death. I’m getting closer to the end. ... Now, I really am ready to face the music all around me."

After a stroke in the last decade, which he perceived as a grace of God, he concluded that the hidden human qualities that had emerged in its aftermath in him would not have otherwise.  As such, each human soul has to go on, on a path of inclusiveness, accepting each experience with humble faith. He preaches on webcasts and founded the SEVA and Hanuman foundations of service to the poor and needy.

The viewer is astounded, watching his life’s trajectory - born just after the jazz age, into money and great academic excellence, indulging in drugs and psychedelic experiments to karmic Hindu philosophy, a long road to map. Been there, done that – and then to morph into a spiritual life, it is indeed intriguing to read and watch. What do we take from here?

Still a couple of days here at IFFI – we are all assimilating, reflecting, engaging ourselves.....

Kudos to World Cinema intertwined with Literature at our doorstep! Enjoy!

Book Launch with a Difference : Teresa’s Man and Other Stories from Goa

         Book Launch with a Difference :

                              Teresa’s Man and Other Stories from Goa

The book launch of Teresa’s Man and Other Stories from Goa written by Damodar Mauzo at Sunaparanta was a treat - a local home-launch riding on a wave of international recognition. In early October, the book was released at the Frankfurt Literary Festival, where Damodar Mauzo was invited to participate in the Frankfurt Book Fair (FBF) as part of a five-member Indian Writers’ delegation.

Goa’s most-loved man of letters, true to his repute, brought together a gamut of Konkani & English writers and readers under one platform - a feat in itself.  The speakers at the launch delved into the heart of the book at length. The audience got a good understanding of the various elements that went into the making of the book and the writer.

 I was delighted to be a part of the positive wave and ruminated on the phenomenon of ‘translation’ (a target of dialectics at literary festivals) which had yet again served the purpose of taking regional writings to a wide readership.  Damodar Mauzo joins the league of great writers like  RabindranathTagore (who was unknown outside his home till he was translated), Ananthamurthy, Orhan Pamuk, Haruki Murakami ..........in making local flavour a universal song of humanness.

 "When you want something the whole universe will conspire together to help you get it,” said Paulo Coelo.  Bhai’s(Damodar Mauzo) passion and perseverance has yielded fifteen books so far, which have been widely translated into English, French, Portuguese and other Indian languages.

Teresa’s Man and other stories is a potpourri of exact realism, poetic myth, sadness, perception and gaiety.  Bhai’s art is kind but unsentimental, mocking but uncynical, profoundly Goan but distinctively individual.  The substantial human nature embodied in the stories holds the reader enthralled.  An innate sense of irony coupled with a complete absence of pomposity and pretence is what makes Bhai a wonderful writer. He creates thoughtful fiction centred on serious moral concerns rooted in the Goan experience, but a universal human dimension makes it encompass the entire human condition.

A dichotomy of human emotion underlies the pieces Happy Birthday and Coinstav’s Cattle.  The former is an ironical portrayal of a range of emotions between parents and children.  It inherently exposes the destructive myth of normal and abnormal state of human beings and acceptance in human race.  Our children are our pride, love and joy - our showcase in society. But if due to an inherent lack, they are unable to perform to our expectations, our important sense of self makes us feel belittled and left out. A feeling of pure unconditional love is hence mixed with shame, lack, self consciousness and defeat; a dark and true element of human shallowness in relationships.

Bhai understands that the highest satisfaction may come from the reader’s growing recognition and understanding of the characters and their situations. The presentation of human beings or of human situations and the revelation of truth inherent in that human situation leads to a “gradual and slow illumination” of facts which is more satisfying than a manipulated perfectly worked out plot.  His stories in the book like The Cynic, She’s Dead, From the Mouth of Babes and  Sand Castles largely embody this aesthetics.

 So important is  character to fiction that one may approach the story by asking “Whose story is this ?”  Bhai’s domain of fiction is the world of credible human beings, amazingly diverse and varied. A writer presents his characters in two ways: by telling or by showing.  Bhai essentially tends to reveal his characters indirectly through thought, dialogue and action folded into the drama itself.  He very convincingly makes his characters speak “in character”. The Writer’s Tale and The Cynic are good examples of this craft.  Jayatha  and Baboy, are very forceful characters, which come to life dramatically through dialogue and action with others in the stories.

Bhai’s lifelikeness in his writings is credible and original. He uses symbols and imagery to add atmospheric verisimilitude to situations.

 “It is high noon. The sun, like a ruthless foe, is literally branding her body.  Below, the baked earth and above, the unrelenting orb of fire. The whole earth is engulfed in heat like a pie being baked in the oven.”

“The idol , the chovoth, the basket of sweets, firecrackers- all started fleeing away one by one!”

There are stories here in the book which may be termed as comedies of manner.  Bhai shows us what the characters are doing in such a way that we can understand why they are doing it. Out of the details of what they do and say, Bhai builds up the conflict and tensions. Misconceptions, Vighnaharta and Electoral Empowerment are stories which could be classified under this category.  Durga comes into her own and resolves the conflict in the end by exerting her will in Electoral Empowerment and Shanker in Vighnaharta  finds an  escape in a ritual thus bringing the comedy of manners  to an  ironical denouement.

Bhai takes simple narrative accounts in pieces From the Mouth of Babes and For Death Does Not Come, and creates plots with meaning and purpose.  The final product in both the stories culminates in profound wisdom and a pure strain of truthfulness.  Babu, the  babe (child as the image of God)  in the first story  leads his father Rajesh  to discover a simple, joyful truth in  sexuality and in the latter, the reader is elevated to a revelation both  powerful and profound -  that we are here  to play our roles to the hilt in both situations good and bad, till death does not come on its own to claim us.

The literary constructions have brevity and tautness, which lend unity and power to the writing. After the horrific experience of being caught on the road with a female passenger by the self appointed ruthless police on the day of the Bandh which had been called to protest against the discontinued usage of the mother tongue,  Dattaram, a bullet bike driver, gives vent to his feelings of anger and frustration.  Three powerful lines at the end of the story encompass the whole experience dramatically - “Dattaram’s eyes were bulging, he was speechless. Getting back on the bike, he started it. Finally finding his voice, he spat out: ‘This is our language! This is our culture!’ ”

 The first person narrative in The Cynic, The Writer’s Tale, Sand Castles and Vighnaharta adds credibility, immediacy and lifelikeness to the stories.  As readers, we come so close to the action that we begin to share the character’s perception of the world.  Bhai’s strategy of using the first person narrative here makes us abandon our own critical intelligence and escape into the character’s life. It is most effective in Sand Castles which ends on a poignant and illuminating note of the truth of life.  On the other hand, the third person narrative in the rest of the stories gives Bhai the freedom to act like an omniscient presence.  He skilfully enriches the plot as the third voice by navigating to spaces past and present in the characters’ lives.

The good yarn pleasure tales have a high quotient of readability.  Readers fascinated by the tales are unable to put it down until they are led to the climax and then the resolution of the piece.  If it is suspense which sustains The Writer’s Life, the title story is propelled by the play of emotions.  The interplay of subversive elements and pure innocence imparts readability to the first story and a flux of feelings do the same for Coinsanv’s Cattle.

A short story is, after all, not a transcription of life but a dramatization of it.  In the familiar and the real, a skilful writer weaves vivid and dramatic threads to transform the banal, clichéd and formulaic reality into a potent story.  Teresa’s Man then becomes a meaningful read, a ride through the unknown, yet known realms of human lives.

Short Story Workshop - St Francis Xavier School Siolim

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