Is it possible for a volume of short stories to reveal more about interior and exterior lives than an entire novel? Two new debut collections make the case for this argument: Nisha Susan’s The Women Who Forgot to Invent Facebook and Shruti Swamy’s A House Is A Body.
The theatrical title apart, the stories in Susan’s book are narrated in prose that is lithe and quick-witted, with an ear for the effects of repetition. Her characters are largely writers, journalists, musicians and students from India’s metropolises, with detours to Macleod Ganj, among other places.
They strike up relationships online, are familiar with the moves of Farah Khan as well as the movies of Tarantino, and are keen to re-sculpt their present by using and discarding the material of the past. Take this wholly representative sentence: “It was September I think. I was shitty depressed and then I went on artyhearts.com and then I slept with Manav in October.”
The title story moves effortlessly between first-person plural and singular in its portrait of a group of young people content to oscillate between casual relationships, pub-hopping, and “sex maps” that delineate who has slept with whom. In such a lifestyle: “We made friends with strangers. We left jobs after three days because we hated them. We carried small tubes of toothpaste in our rucksacks, brushed out teeth in the pub’s narrow loo to scam our parents and drove on our spindly Lunas to our homes at opposite ends of the city.”
Another dexterous story tells of the effects of time on four trailblazing amateur dancers: “We were already tall. We were thin and tall before anyone else was thin and tall.” Then, there’s the account of a woman obsessed with the online activities of her husband’s first wife, which opens and ends with the puckish, referential, “Last night I dreamt of Teresa again.” In another twisty tale, a writer inadvertently gets sucked into a Twitter troll war and later discovers present-day resonances with Victorian freak shows.
The ambit broadens with explorations of other lives, likeable and not. A workout-loving and sexist journalist refuses to learn lessons or change with the times. A small-town singer charms and then loses an overseas prince. And in a change of pace and scene, a cook at a local school forced into a goldfish-bowl environment discovers the lengths her daughter will travel to have her own way.
Susan’s stories show how much is possible without resorting to the “mango-monsoon-pudding” clichés of Indian writing that one of her characters so actively dislikes. Their insouciance is undercut with an understanding of the ravages of time and circumstance, and studded with observations such as: “Small-town girls have x-ray vision that makes the scaffolding of pretence visible.” They go down smooth and tart, like oysters in a piquant dressing.
While The Women Who Forgot to Invent Facebook displays a variety of engagements with the external world, frequently mediated through the Internet, Shruti Swamy’s A House Is A Body explores facets of internal lives. It’s a collection of disorienting reports from off-kilter experiences and intimacies.
Many characters, based in India and the US, catch sight of their reflections in water or mirrors and find “a nacreous ghost” looking back at them. They awake with “the metallic stain of absence” on their tongues, and can even be said to be living out Elizabeth Bishop’s words: “the art of losing's not too hard to master/though it may look like (write it!) like disaster.”
Swamy’s coiled, compressed tales often portray individuals coping with the aftershocks of subterranean grief. Past incidents that are glancingly referred to can form the bedrock of entire situations. A suburban homemaker casually reveals the bruises on her throat to a neighbour, and elsewhere, a father informs his young daughter that she once had an elder brother.
In other scenarios of loss and longing, a young wife imagines unled lives after speculating about the death of her husband; another character comes across a long-lost brother on the street; and two women in a relationship attend an Indian wedding and observe rituals they will not be a part of.
Two stories offer riffs on Indian mythology in ways different from the usual fare. In one, Ravana’s wife has to handle the predicament of an abducted “woman in my garden.” Both are in situations not of their choosing and form a bond of sorts, planting seeds and offering each other whatever comfort they can.
In the other chimerical fable, a young painter comes across Krishna at a party: “In myth, his skin was blue, and in life, his skin was blue too.” He weaves in and out of her life as she traverses the shoals of alcohol and art, “but I didn’t want his gentleness: didn’t need it, didn’t ask for it, didn’t deserve it, couldn’t use it. It was like a birthday gift for a dead girl.”
The stories deserve to be navigated slowly and carefully, for they contain iceberg-like depths. A hard-won intensity gleams through their imagery, pathos and occasionally fantastical circumstances.
Nisha Susan and Shruti Swamy’s books, then, are successions of strategies that people employ to deal with the world and with themselves. These rich, rewarding short stories cast long shadows.
Sanjay Sipahimalani is a Mumbai-based writer and reviewer
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