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"Jagatishwaran" - A Short Story by Chaya Bhuvaneswar. From her debut collection, White Dancing Elephants, 2018
You can read today's story here.
A Lockdown Read
In the nearly eleven years in which i have maintained The Reading Life i have never seen as much attention given to a debut Short story collection as that given to White Dancing Elephants by Chaya Bhuvaneswar. So far I have posted on five of her marvelous very creative stories, all deal with the interaction of persons of Indian background with western countries.
I have recently reread The Anatomy of Criticism by Northrup Frye. He talks extensively and very learnedly about the various ways in which myths are used to structure literary works. In today's story and others of her work I read prior to today we can see Bhuvaneswar very profoundly use ancient Indian myths not only as part of the rhetorical structure of her stories but she shows us how people retreat into deeply rooted ancient archetypal myths to help with the otherwise unfathomable aspects of their lives. She overlays the ancient myths with modern reality.
"Jagatishwaran" is narrated by the only unsuccessful child in a large Bombay family, the youngest, a boy. His siblings all have highly professional jobs. He is fancies himself a painter, working on a mural based on classical Hindu mythology. He lives at home and is a great disappointment to his father. His father is very verbally abusive to him. He suffers from various delusional mental disorders.
His sister, a physician, is at home on her annual visit from America, along with her adolescent daughter and younger son, bringing lots of gifts. Of course her presence only makes him stand out more as a burden on the family. We learn a good bit about how the family, affluent with servants functions. Foodies will savour the descriptions of the meals.
Jagatishwaran is a regular patron of prostitutes. It seems he feels more comfortable at the home of the women he regularly
sees than his own family.
The family dynamics are masterfully depicted. Jagatishwaran establishes a bond with his neice and she confides in him.
I give my total endorsement to all lovers of the short story to White Elephants Dancing.
https://chayabhuvaneswar.com/
Chaya Bhuvaneswar studied Indian poetic traditions with the support of an NEH Younger Scholars grant and as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, concentrating in Sanskrit. She has received a Time-Life Writing Award as well as a Yale Elmore Willetts Prize for Fiction. Her short stories have been anthologized in Her Mother’s Ashes 2,and featured on the Other Storiespodcast. An Affiliated Fellow in Writing at the Boston University Center for the Study of Asia, she lives in Newton, Massachusetts.She is a practicing physician.
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