Love and longing in urban India

For those of a worldly bent, cities offer an opportunity to obtain a good education and then launch a determined quest for money, worldly possessions and status. For the fiction writer, the city’s denizens are not just economic agents. Rather, they are repositories of countless stories. Their ambitions, passions, crimes, even their maddening contradictions and foibles, provide a rich ore which the writer, armed with her powers of observation and imagination, can proceed to mine. This is what Shuma Raha, a journalist-turned -fiction-writer, has accomplished in this collection of short stories. 

“Smell the Coffee Beans, Please” captures the dreams and hopes of a young girl from a lower-middle-class family who works at the perfume counter of a large departmental store. This opulent world of glass, steel, marble and polish is a far cry from the straitened circumstances in which she grew up. When not hawking her wares, she whiles away her time fantasising about her customers. In these reveries she is wooed by rich and powerful men, knights on white steeds — or rather, the limousine, its modern-day equivalent. She imagines that one of them will carry her away some day to a life replete with love and luxury. Despite her vaulting ambition and constant flights of fancy, she ultimately succumbs to the advances of a colleague at the department store, underlining how difficult it is in reality to rise above one’s station in life.     

“The Leaving” captures the pain of an old couple forced to sell their bungalow that is too large and decrepit to maintain. Their children, who are doing well, offer little financial help, but are keen to cart away whatever valuables they have for long had their eyes on. As the old lady goes through the boxes in her store room, trying to decide which items to keep and which ones to discard, every object brings an onrush of memories. A massive bed, too massive to be transported to the tiny new apartment, yet too precious sentimentally to be abandoned, becomes a metaphor for the helplessness of the old couple struggling to cope with a change that is too big for them to handle at this advanced stage of their lives.    

“The Party” is based on the subject of Indians’ unstinted admiration for those who have made it good in a foreign land. During their visits to India, non-residents Indians, on their part, too, fuel the impression of how grand and perfect their lives are. Some even harbour condescending attitudes towards their country cousins who have failed to achieve much in material terms. But sometimes, the burden of pretence becomes too much, the façade weakens, and the truth of a more cracked, sordid reality comes tumbling out.   

Even if you plan your strategy for life meticulously and execute it with military precision, there is no guarantee that you will be happy at the end of it all. A perfectly balanced life is a chimera. In real life, if you strive for one thing, something else goes out of whack. Decisions that appeared hard-headed and practical when they were taken can begin to appear more like compromises at later stages. Lives that are ruled largely by the mind and very little by the heart can appear desiccated, once you have done it all, achieved it all. In “The Trip”, an upwardly mobile couple finds themselves in a compartment with another newly-wed couple — from the “trader stock”, as the yuppie lady brands them scornfully. Their carefree and unburdened ways and public displays of affection, irritate the lady but also bring home the barrenness of her own life that is utterly devoid of spontaneity and romance.        

The most admirable quality of this book is the writer’s command over the language. There is an easy fluency to her writing. Many of the sentences, chiselled and polished to a high level of perfection, will fill you with pleasure and admiration. Read the book at least twice — once for the stories and a second time to relish the writer’s artistry with words.