The bewitching and the poignant and the historic and the tragicomical come together in a suite of eight short stories by author Neelum Saran Gour as she takes her readers through the back alleys and leafy suburbs and the past and the present of her city, Allahabad.
The city famous for standing at the confluence of the Ganga, Yamuna and the mythical Saraswati, then, is the fulcrum and the canvas for Gour in "Allahabad Aria" (Rupa Books) and she paints a picture of multi-coloured hues that reflect not just a physical and social geography but seek to provide a depth, too, to the human landscape, seeped in history and touched by a tinge of melancholy and nostalgia.
Thus, the boy at the centre of the first story recollects "the tortured love that he shared with his long-dead alcoholic father" and it is in this account that we are told of the Southern Cross, the name of the self-same story and an asterism in the southern sky whose Sanskrit moniker, Trishanku, lends itself to a mythological tale of a king who demanded to go to heaven in his physical body but was finally turned into a star instead, which "hangs upside down -- neither here nor there".
Gour has several illustrious predecessors she can look to who have compiled similar volumes on the life of a single city; the name that comes to mind most instantly being that of James Joyce and his 'Dubliners'. Like the Irish author and his exposition of the inscrutable ways of the Irish metropolis, Gour too conjures something of an enigma of Allahabad.
Thus, she goes back in history, to the Mughal Prince Khusrav who, blinded by his father, Emperor Jahangir, came to rest, after several torments, at Khusrau Bagh, where his mausoleum stands today as an iconic testimony to the city's Mughal past.
His story, and that of his faithful eldest wife, the Princess Begham Ain-e-Raushnaq, presented in 'The Paan Woman of Khusrau Bagh', speaks of the rebellion of the eldest son of the fourth Mughal emperor against his father and the terrible punishment that was visited upon him and gives a glimpse of courtly intrigue of the Mughal durbar as seen through the eyes of its eponymous protagonist, who finds favour with the high princess because of a charm she knows for captivating one's partner.
