Vandana Singh's unusual short stories are less science fiction than speculative fiction.
The title of Vandana Singh’s short-story collection The Woman Who Thought She was a Planet raises expectations of science fiction, and indeed the title story really is about a woman who is slowly turning into a planet… complete with little alien beings residing inside her! The impression persists through some of the other stories, notably “The Tetrahedron”, about the sudden, inexplicable appearance of a large structure on a busy Delhi street corner. But read on and you discover that this collection doesn’t lend itself to easy classification. Some of these stories aren’t sci-fi in any obvious sense. The very moving “Hunger”, for example, is a seemingly straightforward tale — about a woman hosting a party for her husband’s colleagues and their wives — made otherworldly by its depiction of the interior life of its protagonist, Divya.
“I don’t classify my stories, I just write them!” the Boston-based Singh clarifies in an email interview. “But in hindsight I admit I write some stories that, though not explicitly science-fiction, have a science-fictional feel to them, in that they make you aware of the strangeness in everyday things and events.”
Strangeness is a recurring theme in this collection. Common to many of these stories are characters who have a slanted perspective on the world, and who are therefore “aliens” in one way or the other, even when they are flesh-and-blood people leading mundane lives: a small-town mathematics teacher obsessed with the idea of infinity; a lady on the verge of separation from her husband of many years; a Bihari man who takes along a stock of his cherished roasted black gram on a Mars mission. And Divya, who sees familiar things as if through a distorting lens: her 12-year-old daughter is turning into someone, or something, she can’t recognise; looking at a faded black-and-white photo, she can’t tell whether its subject is a woman or an animal “or something entirely different”.
“People like her have a kind of binocular vision,” says Singh, “They’ve never really separated themselves from the wider world — unlike other people, who live in a closed circle of mostly human making, limited by their jobs and responsibilities, by social custom, by unquestioned cultural limitations, the daily humdrum-ness of their lives, not noticing anything outside of their little cages.” By now she’s made it clear where her own sympathies lie. “Divya and other characters in my stories maintain a connection with the greater world, a world that is complex, ancient, sometimes terrifying.”
This theme of connecting with the wider world runs through much of Singh’s writing; as a guest blogger on Jeff Vandermeer’s site (www.jeffvandermeer.com), she wrote a thoughtful essay titled “The creatures we don’t see: thoughts on the Animal Other”, about human self-absorption and our refusal to “see” other life-forms. What, in her view, are the repercussions of this apathy? “I think the ecological crisis we are in — the mass extinction of numerous species, the collapse of every ecosystem in the world — is a direct result of our alienation from what we so distantly call nature,” she says. “We’ve isolated ourselves mentally from the fact that our fate is tied in with the fate of other creatures on this Earth.”
Imagine now, she proposes, that instead of being obsessed solely with our lives and bank balances, instead of trying to keep up with the neighbours or comparing the largeness of our houses and the number of vacations abroad, we were aware of the greater world, open to its wonders, appreciative of our belonging to it. “Imagine that we noticed other creatures around us, and were sensitive to their lives and deaths. Would it be so easy then to clear-cut forests, pollute the air, let sparrows disappear from Delhi?”
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Singh believes this lack of sensitivity towards the natural world can also tie in with the human tendency for intolerance towards other people who are dissimilar from them — in terms of religion, class or whatever other categorisation. “I can speculate that the two things are related because their roots are similar: fear, greed, self-absorption. One of the things apparent in today’s India is not only the communal divisions but the class divisions, where we become blind to the suffering of the rural poor or the boy with the jharoo on the street corner. We shut out all this in much the same way as we have shut out nature. We are putting protective walls around us, and each time we do this the space we are in gets smaller, until we’ve imprisoned ourselves in our own fears.”
It’s no surprise that she sees speculative fiction, the genre (if one can call it that) she works in, as being liberating — because “it has the largest canvas of all fictional forms: the universe itself”. Speculative fiction is the oldest form of story, she says, a place where the imagination ranges freely and where realism is only one option. “It allows us to examine reality in a deeper and more powerful way than realist fiction.”
This is the achievement of the other little gems in The Woman who Thought She was a Planet — such as “Delhi”, a fine imaginative work about a man with the ability to experience “temporal coincidences, produced when one part of the time-stream rubs up against another”, which means that as he walks the streets of Delhi he might encounter apparitions from the past or the future; or envision a futuristic Lower Delhi (“Neechi Dilli”) where the poor, the criminal and the dispossessed live underground, in the abandoned tunnels of the Metro. This, and the other stories in the collection, are worth reading for Singh’s examination of her characters’ inner lives and their encounters with parallel universes — whether in the form of a giant portal with invisible gateways that open out over the Thar desert, or a shadowy farishtaa glimpsed from the corner of one’s eye. Strangeness is everywhere.
THE WOMAN WHO THOUGHT SHE WAS A PLANET
Author: Vandana Singh
Publisher: Zubaan
Pages: 224
Price: Rs 295
