Small-town angst

This is a shit town”, thinks Gunjan, the protagonist of the short story “Compassionate Grounds” in Tanuj Solanki’s new anthology, Diwali in Muzaffarnagar. 

The town to which she is referring is Muzaffarnagar, in western Uttar Pradesh, which shot to infamy in 2013 when Hindu-Muslim riots killed 62 people and rendered 50,000 homeless. 

Almost all the major characters in the book hail from this town; some of them have managed to escape its claustrophobic society, where communal tensions keeps the air taut, but they all keep coming back: Gunjan returns after the death of her father and grandfather, Ankush is on his way to meet his mother for Holi, another one has come for Diwali, while Saransh is taken aback by a picture he sees on Facebook.

Two of my favourite stories in the collection are “My Friend Daanish” and “Good People”. After reading the first one, I scribbled “Devastating” in the narrow margin of the page with my pencil. The last line of this long short story reads: “I shut my laptop and tried to remember how to breathe.” 

The reader is also likely to experience asphyxiation as they read this tale, exploring the uneven contours of inter-religious friendships in our country that has become rapidly polarised since the election of the National Democratic Alliance government in 2014.

In the second story, Ankush and his wife, Taruna — a survivor of child sex abuse — encounter a crisis that brings their relationship to the very edge, before a catharsis of sorts.

Another story deserving special mention is the titular one, which revolves around a road accident on Diwali — reminiscent of a similar one that reportedly sparked the 2013 riots.

Not all eight stories in the collection are equally strong, though. The weakest one is “Reasonable Limits”, in which Solanki tries the trick of writing a six-page narrative in a single sentence.

It is somewhat similar to the opening of Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis (2012), but lacks the necessary tension required to capture a reader’s imagination. 

Another is “The Mechanics of Silence”, which imitates the technique of silent film scripts; but it again fails to engage this reader sufficiently. 

Of course, these take nothing away from Solanki’s craft in this his second work for fiction after his debut novel, Neon Noon (2016). The good thing about a book of short stories is if you don’t like one, you can always skip to the next.

Small towns are also the subject of Anjum Hasan’s new collection of short stories, A Day in the Life. The first story in the collection, “The Stranger”, begins with the line: “There were no new ideas to be found in the city so I retired last year to this small town...” Retreat — away from the main steam and big cities — is a recurring theme in Hasan’s book, her fifth work of fiction. 

Like the unnamed narrator of the first story, Jaan in “Sisters”, Gulfam in “Yellow Rose”, Karin Gran in “The Lady with the Dog”, and Punitha and Partha in “Bird Love” have all retreated — of their own volition, or out of circumstances. 

Even those in the big city, mostly Bengaluru, are also out of joint with the tearing-at-seams metropolis they inhabit.

Retreat or the desire to do so, however, is not without their own problems. 

In “The Stranger”, the narrator cannot escape the communal tensions in town; Jaan cannot sink into her sickness but is pulled out of her soporific state only to experience loss; Gulfam’s desire to be a futuristic automaton are hardly insulated from the attractions of a yellow rose, and even in a rain-swept hill station in south India, Punitha must encounter death, albeit in the form of chicken and turkey that are to be killed for their meat. 

Almost all the stories are stamped with Ms Hasan’s unique style, which never hurries, is always in control.

In a recent interview Hasan said that if everyone is writing about big ideas, who’s writing about the small ones? She manages to do it with extraordinary skill. 

Her concerns might be quotidian but they manage to capture something of the zeitgeist of our times, in this country.

It would be unfair to write about this book without mentioning the cover: A stunning work of art by Bhupen Khakhar. 

There is a sort of a family relation between the characters that populate Khakhar’s canvases and the ones that Hasan captures between the covers of her book. 

If you met them on the street, you would not turn around to look at them, but  Hasan takes you into their rich inner lives. This is an invitation that a lover of fiction would only be stupid to refuse.