Halfway effort

To give a modern twist to the old adage""Never judge a book by its cover""here's another one: Never judge a book by its blurb writers.

To go by its back cover where Ravi Shankar Etteth tells you that with Basu around "you don't really need Jhumpa Lahiri" and Malavika Sangghvi comparing her with "that other great interpreter of contemporary Bengali sensibility, Amitav Ghosh", you'd think Kankana Basu was the next Great Indian Talent on the block.

But both Jhumpa Lahiri and Amitav Ghosh can rest easy. Ms Basu isn't even within recognisable distance of established Indian writers in English, and it will be a while before she makes it to the phalanx of blurb writers wanting to give a leg-up to other indeterminate talents in the genre of fiction and short story writing.

Having said the worst right away, does Vinegar Sunday have no merit at all? On the contrary, if anything, it must be said that Basu does have an insight and an ironic wit""both of which she might have put to better use if she hadn't been in such a hurry to sit down, write her stories, and be done with them. One cannot help feeling that she might have taken considerably less time writing her stories than this reviewer did reading them""which wasn't very long.

The premise of the book is most exciting. There is a house, a kind of block of apartments really, sadly neglected but somewhat fancifully nicknamed Halfway House.

Here live its residents""Bengali for most part, and Punjabi in one instance""who form the characters of Basu's short stories. One by one, Basu peeps into their lives, taking out a slice of life here, another there.

Had she succeeded in weaving her characters and their intertwining lives a little closer, she might, in fact, have created a new genre of writing, a novel of voyeuristic proportion of the kind all of us who live in community dwellings would have loved to devour.

The first story is perhaps the best in this collection. Khokon Guha, unable to bear his domineering relatives, commits suicide.

He will reappear in the last story""not only the weakest in the book, but one which should consign Basu herself from the pantheon of writers for some time to come""as a ghostly presence who first incites and then reunites neighbours in a parody of what might have been a great and sensitive work of writing.

Between these chapters, you'll meet the asthmatic Bubla, Priyam Banerjee (in a nod at the Gujarat riots, in one of Basu's rare stories that do, in fact, work), Malaika Ganguly (still a deft touch here, Ms Basu), Sharmila (what was that about?), Supriya (oh-oh, is this the beginning of the slide?), Sharma Dadi (a feisty story, at least, true to its Punjabi characters), Teertha Chakravarty (trying too hard), Piyush Ganguly (trite), Subroto Dey (oops!) and Sudeshna (no, puhleez!).

A middle-class community house should have middle-class lives, but like the in-house fiction writer at Halfway House, Kankana Basu too fills her pages with people whose lives are touched with the macabre.

For all its seeming normalcy, Halfway House is home to murderers and thieves, to accidents, survivors and victors, but the stories unravel too fast, the action spools out without any visible catalyst, and the strings that control the cast of characters are held too visibly in the same fingers that have so clearly tapped out their lives on a keyboard. Ms Basu is, we are informed, a commercial artist by profession, and a moonlighting freelance writer. She also has a husband and two children. Clearly, this book of short stories has been written in between meetings and meals, and the effort shows.

For Kankona Basu to deliver a product worth her effort, she'll have to give her writing more attention than her current output. Until then, she's probably better off writing for Good Housekeeping.

Sunday
Kankana Basu
Indialog
Price:Rs 195; Pages:136