Beyond all frontiers: Shama Futehally

SPEAKING VOLUMES

Two years ago, almost to the day, I heard from a friend that Shama Futehally had died, after a long and painful battle with cancer. Like all readers, I know how often the obituaries on the daily pages will signal the death of a writer whose works and words one cares deeply about; but Shama Futehally's death felt especially cruel, especially premature.

She had made a name for herself as a reviewer of rare sensibility and unshakeable honesty, and as a gifted teacher, but she came into her own as a writer relatively late. This week, Ravi Dayal/ Penguin India released a set of four books that contain the best of her writings. It is a small collection: two novels (Tara Lane, published in 1993, Reaching Bombay Central, published in 2002), The Right Words, a volume of collected essays and reviews, and Frontiers, collected stories. Her children's stories, her translations""most notably of Meera's bhajans""and a play are available elsewhere.

Still, in an age where excess counts""the fattest novel, the biggest advance, the six-volume collection of short stories""and where books and authors' reputations alike seem to be afflicted by a creeping obesity, the collected works of Shama Futehally are refreshingly approachable. It is humbling to realise how much she packed into this seemingly small compass.

All of us who read know how very easy it is for even the best writers to sink into oblivion, how quickly books and authors can be forgotten. It takes a special effort to rescue what is worthwhile, and a special kind of generosity. Githa Hariharan, an extraordinarily gifted writer herself, has both the generosity and the determination required. In Shama Futehally's lifetime, the two were friends who collaborated as writers on specific projects, most memorably on stories for children. After Shama passed away, Githa Hariharan sifted through her friend and fellow writer's work to produce the most significant of her writings.

To read Shama's writings, spread across three decades, is to rediscover and re-evaluate the work of a writer who was often lazily typecast: as a "woman writer", as a writer who came from privileged, insulated India, as a "genteel" writer. The truth starts, perhaps, with her early short stories and Tara Lane, where the settings are often both domestic and reflective of privileged India""but where the writer's vision is subversive and unsettling. Shama was never didactic, and some of her most deadly effects were achieved with quiet observations.

In Tara Lane, Tahera Mushtaq dismantles a whole world of stifling insulation and submerged fears when she observes: "...Thus I was terrified of possessions. Never could you say about them that they were only objects. They were all imbued with significance, significance which inhered in them like a scent and which had to be guarded devotedly in order to prove that you were an adult. You had to make sure that the object in question was locked away against thieves, wrapped up against monsoon damp, moth-balled against termites, guarded from stains, not paraded before servants..."

In Reaching Bombay Central, the Muslim wife of a government servant indicted on corruption charges grapples with an India turning openly hostile to 'minorities' in the course of a train journey. Reading this, I began to understand that Shama Futehally's central themes were not domestic at all, even when that was what occupied the surface of the prose. She understood the rot that lay at the heart of an apparently functional society; she charted the small betrayals that grow into a corruption that eats away at the body of an entire nation.

Her last work, Frontiers, never published before, was planned as a novel that would explore the Uphaar cinema tragedy, where hundreds of film-goers perished in a fire. Githa Hariharan writes: "As in the real-life event the fiction reconstructs, the irresponsibility that leads to the fire... does not have one single perpetrator. Culpability is a much larger thing, a thing much closer to all of us than we would like to believe." Shama Futehally died before she could "finish" Frontiers, but what she has left behind reads like a finished novella. She reached an assurance and an absolute command in this novel that is rare, as though she had found exactly what she needed as a writer.

I finished reading Frontiers this weekend and in a fit of absent-mindedness, reached for the phone to call Shama Futehally before I realised that she was no longer with us. This is Githa Hariharan's real achievement: that by bringing this collection out along with the editors at Penguin, she has kept alive not just the memory of a fine writer, but the reality of her work.

nilanjanasroy@gmail.com