"The Flight" by Kamala Das (1973)

The Reading Life Guide to Getting Started in the Indian Short Story

My Post on "Sweet Milk" by Kamala Das

It has been four years since I last read a story by Kamala Das.  "The Flight" is told from the point of view of a successful female sculpturer.  She begins to feel her work is declining in quality.  She seeks to escape city life which she thinks may be stultifying her creativity by moving to the country.  She lives with her husband who now depends on her as the bread winner of the family.  She seems to kind of enjoy the role reversal. She no longer loves her husband.   Compressing a bit, she hires a beautiful seventeen year old girl to pose nude as a model for her.  This seems to rejuvenate her creativity but it also has the same impact on her husband's libido.  She walks in on them having sex.  There is a lot to ponder in this interesting story.  I hope four more years from now I can still recall this story.  

This story was translated from Malayalam by C. K. Mohammed Ummer.

Kerala Das (1934 to 2009-Punnayurklam, Malabar District, India) was born  into a sucessful and prominent family.   Her mother was a famous poet, her father was  involved in the marketing of Rolls Royces and Bentleys in all of India.    Her native language was Malayalam, spoken by about 35 million people in southern India.   She also wrote in English but her short stories, which will be her lasting legacy, were in Malayalam.    She also had a weekly newspaper column for many years in which she discussed issues relating to the lives and rights of women.   She wrote about,  at the time,  near forbidden topics such as the sexuality of women.   She was socially and politically active.   At one time she was director of the forestry commission for the Malabar district.  She ran for Parliament and lost.  In 1989 she converted from Hinduisms to Islam.   She changed her name to "Kamala  Suraiyya.     (I Her work has been translated into French, English, Spanish, Russian, Japanese and several other South Asian Languages.  

I read this  in the anthology pictured below

Mel u

"Enlightenment" by Yashpal (1955, 16 pages, translated from Hindi by Keshav Malik)

"Enlightenment" by Yashbal (Calcutta, 1903 to 1976) is a fascinating look at the life of an Indian sage.   He lives a life of self-denial and teaches at his hermitage by the river Narmada.  He taught that "the soul that steeped itself in worldliness became worn out:  consequently it suffered endless cycles of birth, death, and rebirth.  The only way out was freedom from human bonds in which lay salvation and joy".  He was a renown interpreter of the Vedas and as constantly surrounded by followers.   Kings and sages from all over came to hear his discourses on detachment.  Many wandering ascetics come to his camp to take shelter during the rainy season.    Then  a beautiful young woman enters the school.  She enters totally devoted to a repudiation of worldly pleasures.  Of course she provides a temptation one of the holy men cannot resist.  It was fascinating to see how he used her faith to seduce her and himself.  

You can learn a lot about Yashpal (other than his birthname!) at http://www.viplava.com/.

author bio

Yashpal, a revolutionary fighting for India's freedom, was twenty-eight years old when he was caught, tried and sentenced to fourteen years to life at hard labour. There was little expectation at the time that he would emerge as one of India's outstanding writers of fiction.

He had led two lives, and in each of them had made important contributions to his country. His first life was dedicated to her freedom, his later life to her literature. As India celebrates the centenary of his birth (1903), scholars and public alike are re-evaluating his life and work in the light of changing social and political values.

Yashpal grew up at a time of ferment and agitation for Indian independence. In his school days he was drawn at first to Mahatma Gandhi's non-cooperation movement, but later felt that such movements were unresponsive to the needs of the poor and that non-cooperation with the British was ineffective. He joined National College, Lahore, a hotbed of nationalist sentiment, which was founded by Lala Lajpat Rai, the venerable leader of pre-partition Punjab. There he met Bhagat Singh, who was hanged for his role in the assassination of policeman J.P. Saunders in Lahore (1928), and for exploding a bomb in the Central Legislative Assembly in New Delhi (1929).

Yashpal wrote in his reminiscences Sinhavalokan, “One day I and Bhagat Singh got a chance to practice rowing in the Ravi river. Just two of us, no one else was there. I don’t remember how the subject came up, but in that solitude I said to Bhagat Singh, trusting him implicitly: Let us pledge our lives to our country.

“Bhagat Singh’s face turned very serious, and extending his hand to me he said: I do pledge.”

At first Yashpal took part in the activities of Naujawan Bharat Sabha organized by Bhagat Singh, but after the Lahore Bomb Factory was unearthed in 1929, he too went underground and never looked back. As an active member of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA), he came in contact with another well-known revolutionary, Chandra Shekhar Azad, who was killed (1931) in a shootout with the police in Allahabad.

During the next two years, Yashpal made explosives at several secret factories, blew up the train carrying the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, in 1929, took part in an attempt to free Bhagat Singh from Borstal Jail in Lahore, shot and grievously wounded two police constables in Kanpur when they tried to block an attempt by his group to escape. He also met his future wife, 17-year old Prakashvati, who had left home to join the revolutionary party.

Yashpal was arrested in Allahabad in 1932 when his bullets ran out, after an armed encounter with the police. He was one of the main accused in the concluded Lahore and Delhi conspiracy cases, but after a lengthy trial the government decided not to reopen these cases in view of the expenses involved. Some other charges against him could not be proven for the lack of witnesses. In the end, he was given a life sentence.

In prison Yashpal taught himself enough French, Russian and Italian to read original works in those languages. He also wrote and re-wrote short stories that were later published as Pinjare ki Uran (Flights of a Caged Mind). In this life of discipline and contemplation came a surprise in the form of a petition by Prakashvati to the jail authorities that she wanted to marry Yashpal, the prisoner serving a life sentence.

Since the jail manual did not forbid a prisoner from getting married, the British superintendent gave his consent. The police did not want the notorious revolutionary to go to the civil court without handcuffs and leg irons, and Yashpal refused to get married tied up like a criminal. A compromised was reached when the Deputy Commissioner agreed to perform the marriage inside the prison. After the ceremony, Yashpal was returned to his cell to serve his life sentence, and Prakashvati went back to Karachi to finish her studies to become a dental surgeon, which she had begun after her own arrest and subsequent release by the police.

Their's might be the only marriage ever to take place inside a prison in India. When the news of the marriage leaked outside, the newspapers seized upon the novel idea, provoking the government to add a section to the Indian Jail Manual forbidding a sentence-serving prisoner to be married in the prison in future.

India moved toward self-government in 1938. As a part of the election campaign, the Congress Party had promised to release of all political prisoners. Workers of Gandhi’s movement were released immediately, but assurances were sought from the revolutionaries that they no longer believed in violence. Yashpal refused on the ground that it would appear that he had bargained with the government for his release. He was the last to be set free, on the condition that he would not be permitted to go back to Punjab. He then decided to make Lucknow, the capital of United Provinces (UP) where he was serving his sentence, his home.

Yashpal and Prakashvati, as he wrote in his reminiscences, were penniless. After a few months of hardship, Yashpal founded the Hindi monthly Viplava (revolution) while Prakashvati worked as a dentist. Her dental practice was flourishing in those days of few women dentists, but she gave it up to help her husband. Soon they brought out the magazine’s Urdu edition, Baagi. The masthead of their publication said it all: “You may preach the message of peace and equality. Let revolution sing its fiery song.”

Viplava was a milestone in Hindi and Urdu political journalism. Besides being immensely popular, it was also a forum where staunch Gandhians and avowed believers in non-violence and satyagraha (civil disobedience) debated social and political issue with equally staunch Marxists and hardcore revolutionaries. When Yashpal was put in prison for seditious writing, Prakashvati filled in as editor.

In an attempt to muzzle the fiery enthusiasm of the couple, the government demanded huge security deposits from the magazine. The two closed down Viplava and Baagi, and began publishing Viplavi Tract. But police raids and constant harassment took its toll, and it all came to an end after five years of trend-setting journalism. Viplava reappeared briefly in 1948, but could not survive the censorship laws in a free India!

Yashpal, his own freedom regained and India’s on the horizon, soon made his mark as a writer. Mahadevi Verma, the eminent Hindi poet, summed it up: “When other writers were praying to Saraswati, the muse of literature, for her blessing, Yashpal was making bombs in a dark, secret cellar. When he arrived on the literary scene much behind others, it was him that Saraswati gave her undivided attention.”

If the literature of social reform and social protest in Hindi found a worthy advocate in Yashpal, he wielded a sledgehammer when writing about the exploited and the economically deprived in his fiction, and in the editorials and columns he wrote for Viplava.

Yashpal set about immediately on one of his life-long missions: repudiation of what he considered to be backward and unrealistic in the Indian society. But unlike most people devoted to causes, he went about it with gentle humour and tongue-in-cheek wit. His criticism of ancient Hindu ideals as a basis for contemporary society can be seen in his story Dharmraksha (To Uphold Righteousness) where a man denying his normal instincts under the discipline of brahmacharya (celibacy), attempts to rape his 19-year old daughter. Such questioning of long-practiced religious rites and rituals, of the Hindu doctrine of karma and reincarnation as preached by the orthodox often earned him threats to his life.

Yashpal never hid his preference for Marxist ideals, and the inefficacy of the movement led by the Congress Party and Mahatma Gandhi. His Gandhi wad ki Shav-pariksha (Post-mortem on Gandhiism), written in 1941 when Gandhi was alive, continues to be among his best-selling works. Although some of his early works showed the Communist Party as the saviour of Indian people, he himself never joined the party; in fact, the Communists later turned against him for his criticism of comrades who sacrificed free will and independent judgment to the Party’s dictates.

Another consistent feature of Yashpal’s writing is his compassion for women and his special concern for the inferior position of women in India. The women protagonists in his writings often break free, or try to, from the traditions of society that keep them in total dependence upon their family. Divya (1944), his novel set in the 1st century AD when there was a wide mingling of Indian and Hellenic cultures in northern India, is about Divya from an aristocratic Brahmin family who tries to find her identity in a male-dominated society.

Assertions by Divya such as “the mistress of a noble family is not a free woman; she is not independent like a disreputable courtesan” outraged many of Yashpal’s contemporaries. Others tried to ignore it because they felt that a story about India’s so-called Golden Age could not be considered ‘literature’ if it expounded an unacceptable political ideology. Fortunately, a core of young critics and scholars of successive generations has continued to stand - and even swear - by Divya’s yearning for independence when she decides to be a prostitute, so as to be a free woman and have ownership rights over her body. The work showed Yashpal’s deep knowledge of Indian classics and his command of Sanskrit.

His novel Jhootha Sach (1958 & 1960), similar in scope and breadth to Tolstoy's War and Peace, and has been compared to the works of Balzac and Victor Hugo. Probably the only work of its kind in any language and often acclaimed as the definitive novel on India's partition, it chronicles the ups and downs in the lives of two families (a brother and sister, and his girlfriend/wife) in pre- and post-partition India. Critics praised the novel for its balanced depiction of both Hindu and Muslims, and readers loved its merciless portrayal of the Congress Party leaders on the make in British-free India.

That portrayal was so merciless that Yashpal was blatantly passed over for the Sahitya Akademi Award given by the government. The issue of Congress Party criticism, and of India's first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, resurfaced a decade later when his name was on the national honours list. Indira Gandhi, then prime minister, reportedly read the ‘objectionable’ pages of Jhootha Sach and found nothing objectionable. Yashpal, the born anti-establishment rebel, was finally bestowed Padma Bhushan in 1970. The Sahitya Akademi tried to make amends by giving him the denied award in 1976 for his last novel Meri Teri Usaki Baat. It’s not known if he’d have accepted it; he was too unwell to say either yes or no.

Yashpal's more than fifty books of short stories, essays, novels, a play and his 3-vol. reminiscences had a profound influence on Hindi literature, and on social and political philosophy in India. Corinne Friend, translator of several works by him, said it all in her book Yashpal: Author and Patriot: “Yashpal, in his concern for the common man and commitment to social justice, his understanding of the quirks of human nature and ability to portray human beings with compassion and humour, and in his simple and powerful writing style, is heir to Prem Chand,” the greatest Hindi writer of pre-independence India. Yashpal died in 1976 while writing the fourth volume of his reminiscences. Praskashvati, who had been the publisher of her husband’s books for 60 years, died at age 88 in September 2002.

In the year 2003-2004, events to celebrate Yashpal’s birth centenary were held across the length and the breadth of India with an enthusiasm not seen except at the time of Prem Chand’s birth centenary celebrations: from national seminars organized by the Sahitya Akademi (India’s National Academy of Letters) at Shimla and at Kolkata, and by the Kerala Sahitya Akademi at Cochin, to local affairs in small towns in the Hindi-speaking heartland of India. These events were marked by a forceful and unequivocal acknowledgment of Yashpal being the towering figure in the post-Prem Chand era, as well as of the author’s importance and his impact on Hindi literature and on the successive generations of young writers. The Government of India issued a commemorative Yashpal Centenary postage stamp.

I read this story in an excellent anthology Our Favorite Indian Stories edited by Khushwant Singh and Neelam Kumar

Mel u

"Indian Dreams" by M. J. Akbar (1977)

I have on my IPAD five anthologies of Indian short stories, all in all about 140 stories.   I hope to read and post on some of these works in 2013.  One reason for doing this is to give me a non-European assembly of short stories as a cultural reference to help me see differences in short stories of different cultures. The main reason is to read works by a lot of mostly new to me writers.  I will begin my reading with Best Indian Short Stories, Vol. 1 and 2, edited and selected by Khushwant Singh.   All of the stories in these collections were originally published in The Illustrated Weekly of India from 1969 to 1979 when Singh was editor.   

M. J. Akbar (Calcutta, 1951) has had a long very distinguished career as a journalist and author.  "Indian Dreams" centers on a young Muslim man we meet just as he graduates from college.  He and his two best friends spent as much time in a local coffee shop discussing the preoccupations of the men, sex being one of the biggest, as they do in school.  The man has gone to a second class school and does not speak the socially desirable version of British English.   He knows he has to find a good job if he is to be considered as a husband of a young upper class woman he is infatuated with.  The problem is that for every job there are 100s, even 1000s of applicants.   His bitterness grows with every rejection.  Meanwhile his friends tease him about being a virgin, urging him to go see a prostitute they frequent, Lilly.   Finally he does go visit her, she is lovely and a decent acting woman who knows it is his first time.   He feels somehow guilty over having sex with her.  It is a violation of the teachings of his religion and he feels he has been unfaithful to the woman he loves even though he never meets her.  The story ends with his suicide and his friends confusion over it.  

"Indian Dreams" is a very well done story that lets us inside a troubled mind.  

Mel u

"The Resignation" by Premchand - मुंशी प्रेमचंद (1924-translated from Hindi by Neelam Kumar)

Some time later in the year, probably starting July 1, I am going to devote at least six weeks to short stories by authors from the Indian Subcontinent. This is a vast field little explored in the book blog or literary web page world.   Premchand  (the pen name for Munshi Premchand-  born in Lamhi, India -1880 to 1936) is considered one of the founders of modern Hindustani literature, having published numerous novels and over 250 short stories in  Hindi.  He also translated western literary works into Hindi.  (There is a good article on him here).

"The Resignation" is a very entertaining story that begins with these lines:  "An office clerk is a dumb creature".  The narrator tells us that if you insult a coolie he will throw off his load and walk away, reprimand a beggar and he will walk away, and even an abused donkey will kick back.  An office clerk, however, will take any form of abuse from his master and smile through it.  The story tells us of the life of a clerk named Lala Fatechand, he was a failure at everything, he had only daughters.  At age 32 his health was already ruined.   He goes to work at  900 AM and returns at 600 PM and he lacks the courage to go out at night.  His whole life revolves around his office.  He was constantly in fear of losing his job.  He has no interest in religion, the poor, the arts, literature, sports, or movies.  One night something very unusual happens.  A messenger shows up from his office telling him to come into work to take care of an urgent matter.  His wife tells him don't go in they ask too much from you.  They fight over it and he goes in telling her his job could be at stake.  When he gets to the office the office peon tells him to hurry into the boss's office as he may be mad it took him so long to get there.  The boss demands to know why he took so long to get there.  When the clerk tries to explain the boss says he is lying and threatens to box his ears.  When the clerk argues the boss threatens to flog him.  Now the story turns interesting.  The clerk can only take so much and everyone who has ever worked for an idiot they hated will love the close of the story.

I read this story in an excellent anthology Our Favourite Indian Stories edited by Khushwant Singh and Neelam Kumar. 

Mel u

"The Kama Sutra Game" by Khushwant Singh

"The Kama Sutra Game" by Khushwant Singh  (1973, 10 pages)

Short Stories of the Indian Subcontinent

A Permanent Reading Life Project

Khushwant Singh

I am very pleased  that The Reading Life was recently recommended by The Economic Times of India,. the leading financial daily of The Subcontinent.  

Khushwant Singh

hushwant Singh (1915-Hadali, Khushab, British India-now Pakinstan) is one of the best known Indian writers.  .   He was born into a Sikh family and initially pursued a career as an attorney.    He was driven to begin writing in a reflective often acerbic way about life in the Indian subcontinent by his experiences of the 1947 Partition of India.   He was very traumatized when just prior to the Partition of India he encountered a platoon of soldiers of his faith who boasted to him that they had just completely massacred a  peaceful village of Muslims, men, women and children.    He has published over twenty five books  He would be the first to admit that the very prim and prudish will find some of this work offensive (in fact I think he would be disappointed if it did not offend them) and he has called himself "The dirty old man of Indian Literature".   The "bottom line" (cannot always help myself) is that he has a big thing for the posteriors of women (and maybe teenage girls) at least his works seem to suggest this.   This is a common perception, not just mine.    Some would consider his stories adult.

A short story by the great Indian writer Khuswant Singh is pretty likely to do be very witty, very well written and have acute observations on Indian society as well as the human condition and have a narrator who is obsessed with the posteriors of women.    I think one can safely say that the author is a "bottom man".   His stories are sure, almost calculated to do so, to offend many people with his classification, making use of the ancient Kama Sutra, of women into various types based on the size and shapes of their bottoms.   From these shapes the narrator feels he can project their personality and their behavior during sex.  He says a good Hindu woman, one with a normal size posterior has only a small interest in sex, too big would mean the woman is inclined to sexual excesses and will be easy for anyone to seduce, too small means she will be frigid but if she is a "good Hindu woman"then she will have an average size posterior and she will submit to the advances of her husband.   

The action of the story takes place in a high end bar in Mumbai.   A woman, one whose posterior size and shape indicates she is very available to all offers and perhaps a prostitute is drinking at the bar alone, sucking down the double scotches.   A man sends her over and a drink and the bartender tells her he is one of the richest men in the city.   After sending her a few drinks he comes over, he feels she may well go to bed with him to thank him for the drinks or he can just pay her, after all she has the posterior of the Hastine, which means she is "pachydermatous in her proportions:  massive, off-size with a large pumpkin-like bosom, enormous hips and buttocks, expansive thighs and hirsute around the private aspects of  her anatomy.  She has a gargantuan appetite for food, strong liquor and sex".

The ending is really great and the man gets totally put down.

I have previously posted on three of Singh's short stories, "The Bottom-Pincher", and here is a link  My posts on "Karma" and "Portrait of a Lady"

I read this story in Best Indian Short Stories, Vol II, edited by the author.   This and all the other stories in the collection were first published in The Illustrated Weekly of Indian,at one time the premier place in the subcontinent to publish a short story.   I have several other stories by Singh on my Ipad and will read and probably post on all of them.  

I can see some people being offended by this story and I can see men wondering if these classifications are right and reflecting on the women they have known and I can see women wondering how they would be classified.  



Mel u

"Unaccustomed Earth" by Jhumpa Lahiri

"Unaccustomed Earth" by Jhumpa Lahiri (2008, 60 pages)

Short Stories of the Indian Subcontinent

A Reading Life Project

Jhumpa Lahiri

My Prior Posts on Jhumpa Lahiri

Jhumpa Lahiri (1967) won The Pulitzer Prize for her debut collection of short stories, The Interpreter of Maladies in 1999.   Her first novel Namesake, was made into a movie.   Many of her devoted readers say that the stories in her 2008 collection of stories, Unaccustomed Earth show a significant advance in quality and depth from her first collection.  (There is some background information on Lahiri in my prior posts on her work.)

  Lahiri is a second generation Bengali Indian American.   Most of her stories focus on similar people.   All of the people in her stories I have so far read, with one exception, are driven to succeed high achievers dealing with the struggles to fit in a new society without losing your cultural heritage.   Her stories also focus on the conflicts of parents and their adult children.   Almost all of the parents had arranged marriages and it is hard for them to accept that their children will find their own spouses.  

The title story in the collection, "Unaccustomed Earth" is one of her longest stories.   The central characters are a seventy year old widower born in Calcutta and his thirty something daughter, a law school graduate, who lives in Seattle and is married to an American hedge fund manager who dotes on her but is rarely home. They have one child and she is now pregnant.   The father, who lives alone on the east coast of the USA, comes for a visit.   The daughter knows that Indian custom requires that he be invited to live with them.   Her husband says it is fine.   The father has spent his retirement years going on tours and he has met a Bengali woman, sixty five and he has formed a relationship with her.   The characters are wonderfully realized.   

Part of the story is with the problems people have of letting go of the memories of their childhood and the dynamics that can emerge when an adult child things his or her parents needs help to live.   It is also about the guilt that those whose spouse has died feel when the do form other bonds.

This is a very rich story with lots of great small details.   The people in the stories of Lahiri are very intelligent but they use their intelligence in such subtle ways that it is not always easy to see it.   

I loved this story and looking forward to reading all of her work.   

Mel u

"Why Does the Child Cry" by Mulk Raj Anand

"Why Does the Child Cry" by Mulk Raj Anand  (1973, 12 pages-first published in The Illustrated Weekly of India)

Short Stories of the Indian Subcontinent

A Reading Life Project

Mulk Raj Anand

1905 to 2004

Mulk Raj Anand was a founding father of the Indian novel in English.    He was one of the first writers from India to gain an international readership in English.    Anand (1905 to 2004--Peshawar, India) after graduating from college in India went to England to receive his PhD.     While at Cambridge (the university of choice for Bloomsbury) he became friends with people like E. M. Forester  and George Orwell.   He was a passionate admirer of Gandhi and a strong supporter of the movement for Indian independence.    He was a friend of Pablo Picasso.    His literary output was very large including several novels, lots of poetry and numerous highly regarded short stories.   He was a strong force for good in the world.

I have already posted on four of Anand's wonderful short stories.   E. F. Forester helped him get his first novel, Untouchable, published in England and it is one of the great novels of the 20th century.   It has been compared to Dickens for its insight into to lives of the Dalits and I think if Anand had predated Dickens the comparison would be reversed.  

I was very glad to see a short story by Anand included in Best Indian Short Stories Vol I edited by Khushwant Singh.   The stories are from this nine year tenure as editor of The Illustrated Weekly of India.  During his editorship (1969 to 1979) it became a high prestige destination for Indian writers and published stories by some of the great writers of the subcontinent.  Publishing in The Illustrated Weekly of India was as prestigious as publishing in The New Yorker.  

"Why Does the Child Cry" , written originally in English, is the story of "Abdul Latif, the potter's son, was called Late Laff by everyone".   It is a terribly sad heartbreaking story about senseless cruelty and how the innocent victims suffer most in absurd wars.   Abdul is not mentally bright but he is very agile physically.  He is all over the village and everybody loves him.  He loves hunting birds and fishing with his friend Ali.   I know this story will be hard for those who do not have Singh's anthology to read so I will tell the conclusion.   One day Abdul comes home and finds his house destroyed, the runs through the village and their are dead bodies everywhere.   He has no understanding of the religious wars that were tearing apart the subcontinent.   He begins to runs through the village in a panic when he sees a tank, looking for his friend Ali who always helped him.   The scenes he sees are depicted with great passion and veracity.   This is a great story.

My "bottom line" on Mulk Raj Anand is to put The Untouchable, on your read in 2013 list.

I am writing this in participation in the Short Story Initiative of Nancy C of A Simple Clockwork.   This month the focus is on Indian Short stories.

Mel u

"Aiji's Miracle" by Anita Rau Radami

"Aiji's Miracle" by Anita Rau Radami (2004)

Short Stories of the Indian Subcontinent

A Reading Life Project

The Reading Life Guide to Getting Started in the Indian Short Story.

Anita Rau Radami

"She shouts orders, bullies the servants, eats enormous meals and farts painfully through the night.  She makes such a racket screaming before every resounding expulsion of gas, that nobody gets any sleep".

In reading for my permanent project, Short Stories of the Indian Subcontinent, I am discovering many new to  me wonderful writers.  Anita Rau Radami is certainly in that category.   I was very glad to see that Nancy C of A Simple Clockwork is focusing this month's Short Story Initiative on short stories by authors from  India. There will be reading suggestions and a place to link your reviews on Nancy's wonderful blog.

  I recently read the preface to Best European Fiction 2011 by the brilliant Irish writer Colum McCann in which he says European fiction is a vast field, drawing on forty languages and 800 million people.   Based on my reading of literature from India, I knew there are 67 languages with 100,000 or more speakers and over one billion people in India. If you add in languages with 10 thousand speakers, there are nearly 200.  In the Philippines there are over 100 languages so I think we can see the Euro-centric nature of most thought on the short story.   There is no literary culture older than that of India.    It took an Irishman, the great Edmund Burke, to tell the English they had no right to rule a country much older than their own.

"Aiji's Miracle" is a totally wonderful story that tells us a lot about the lives of women in India, especially about the often problematic relationships between women and their daughter-in-laws.   It also gives us a very good look at the dynamics of a marriage.   Told in the third person, it centers on an old woman, the stories words, Aiji who "hobbles around the house so full of herself that if you poke her with a pin she might explode".   Aiji was used to being the queen of the house until her son married.   She knows her daughter in  law has used sex to gain power over her son and she is now the head of the household.    The story is all about how Aiji displaces her and takes over ruling the house.  Aiji uses every trick of the powerless.

  I know most people will find it hard to find this story (I read it in the anthology Passages:  24 Modern Indian Stories) so I will only talk about a few of the things I liked about it.   The granddaughter is approaching marriageable age, the marriage will, of course, be arranged.  There is one big problem.  Her breasts have not developed at all and people say no one will want to marry her.  Aiji takes over this problem and brings her to folk doctors.  In the meantime, she tells all the neighbors that she barely is given enough  food to eat and brings shame on purpose on her daughter-in-law by eating at the houses of the neighbors.   This story is really a lot of fun and offers a lot of insight into family life.

Author Bio

Anita Rau Badami (born 24 September 1961) is an Indian-Canadian novelist. Born in Rourkela, Orissa, India, she was educated at the University of Madras and Sophia College in Bombay. She emigrated to Canada in 1991, and earned an M.A. at the University of Calgary. Her first novel, Tamarind Mem (1997), grew out of her university thesis. Her novels deal with the complexities of Indian family life and with the cultural gap that emerges when Indians move to the west. Badami's third novel, Can You Hear the Nightbird Call explores the Golden Temple Massacre and the Air India Bombing. Badami cites as among her favourite books Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie, Cat's Eye and Surfacing by Margaret Atwood, A House for Mr Biswas by V. S. Naipaul and Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

I hope lots of my readers will post on at least one Indian short story this month.  

Mel u

"The Birth of a Poem" by Amrita Pritam

"The Birth of a Poem" by Amrita Pritam (1968)  translated by G. S. P. Suri

Short Stories of the Indian Subcontinent

A Reading Life  Project

Amrita Pritam
1919 to 2005

My posts on Indian Short Stories are  endorsed by The Economic Times of India

The Reading Life Guide to Getting Started in the India Short Story

My post on three short stories  by Amrita Pritam 

"And then it occurred to Raji that writing a poem was like stealing an apple from Eden.  Adam stole and apple and lost his paradise forever. A man who writes a poem may keep his mind, but a part of his mind is forever banished from this world."

There is no literary culture with roots older than that of India.   I will always admire Edmund Burke for telling the English that they had no right to govern a region whose culture is much older than theirs.        Some of the writers featured will be internationally famous, such as Salmon Rushdie, Saadat Manto,  and R. K. Narayan but most of the writers I post on will be authors on whom there are no prior book blog posts.    There are numerous books and academic conferences devoted to exploring the colonial experiences of India and Ireland and I will look these stories partially as post colonial literature.   My main purpose here is just to open myself up to a lot more new to me writers and in this case most will be new to anyone outside of serious literary circles in the region.  Where I can I will provide links to the stories I post on but this will not always be possible.   

Amrita Pritam (1919-2005-She was born in Pakistan) is considered the first prominent Punjabi woman  writer.   She wrote poems, essays, novels and short stories.   Her work is highly regarded in both India and Pakistan.    Punjab before the partition of  India was in Northwestern India.    There is now a Punjab state in both Pakistan and India.   The Punjab region is home to some of the world's oldest civilizations.    There are around 100,000,000 million speakers of Punjabi today.    Some of the worst impact of the partition of India was felt by the Punjabi people whose homeland was divided up by Pakistan and India.    When India was partitioned Pritam moved from Lahore in what is now Pakistan to India. She was of the Sikh faith and this is why she moved to India.    She won many literary awards and is known as the voice for Punjabi women.    She married and divorced.   She worked for several years for all India Radio and edited for 33 years a literary magazine.   She was also fluent and wrote in Hindi.    Toward the end of her life she became a follower of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, an internationally known spiritual teacher.

"The Birth of a Poem" is a very beautiful story that enters into the creative processes behind the writing of a poem.    The story begins with the poet staring at a blank sheet of paper.  He thinks of the words of Sartre  "When I write I try to capture a certain beauty in a web of despair".   Raji, the poet, tells himself that he tries to capture despair in a web of beauty.   Raji can find no despair in his heart. I love this line "He felt like a vigilante in a cemetery".   Ravi tries to ponder the origins of poems, they are like earthworms, born of hot soil and out of heated minds.   Raji thinks on and on regarding the nature of poetry.  He needs to find something or someone that can agitate him deep enough to produce a soil from which poetry could arise.  He finds it in a lust for his wife's fourteen year sister.  (I think we need to be less judgemental in our reaction to older men and  young girls in reading older short stories from the Indian subcontinent  as women were considered marriageable at 14 and old maids at 21.)  

"The Birth of a Poem" is a very interesting story for its account of the creative process.    I read it in 

Best Indian Short Stories, Vol 1,edited by Khushwant Singh.   As far as I know it cannot be read online.

Mel u
The Reading Life
@thereadinglife

"Housewife" by Ismat Chugati Banned Books Week Day Five

"Housewife" by Ismat Chugati (1951)

Banned Books Week-2013

September 30 to October 6

Day Five

1915 to 1991

Mumbai, India
Short Stories of the Indian Subcontinent
A Reading Life Project

Prior Posts on Banned Books Week

Today is the last day of Banned Books Week, now in its 30th year.    This was my first year observing Banned Books Week, a world wide event initiated by the American Library Association.   As one might expect, it is a very America centered event with most participants talking only about American books that were banned in the USA for reasons of prudery, racism and political correctness.   I am observing the week by posting five guests posts, courtesy of Open Road Media, from distinguished authors talking about Banned Books.  In addition to this I have posted this week on a short story by two writers whose works were banned for  long periods, Franz Kafka and Zora Hurston.  Today I will post briefly about a story by Ismat Chughtai, one of the foremost 20st century Urdu short story writers.  Her work was banned for a long time in India, Pakistan and in Islamic theocracies (and probably still is) as too radical in its treatment of women and for its open treatment of sexuality.  The stories seem like the mildest of works now to me but that her stories once were so controversial shows the changing of the times.   She was considered a great champion of the rights of women, which is probably what got her in trouble!

Her most famous story by far is "The Quilt" (there is some background information on her in my post on this story) which has very deeply veiled reference to a lesbian relationship, something punishable my death under Islamic law.  (She was a Muslim but she stayed in India after the 1947 partition.)    Of the two stories of Chugati, I found "Housewife" the more interesting.   The story is set among ordinary people in Mumbai.  (I have an attraction to stories and novels about Mumbai/Bombay as I have many wonderful readers who live there).    There are two central characters, Mirza who owns a small shop and his maid, who becomes his wife, Lajo.   I wonder how many millions of women in India had life histories like this:

"Lajo was an orphan.  She was abandoned on the streets by unknown parents.  She lived by begging and snatching a living from garbage until she grew into a shapely an attractive woman.  "Youth etched her body into  bewitching curves and this became her only asset   The street intitiated her into the mysteries of life.   She never haggled   If it was not a cash down proposition, it would be sex on credit.  If her lover had no means, she would even  give herself for free".

No one ever taught her any sense of religious morals, she felt no shame at all.  As she aged she became a maid and all of her masters ended up having sex with her, beating her and then throwing her out, maybe for fear their wives would find out or from shame.  She was almost certainly of the Dalit (untouchable caste) and to have sex with her was a source of great blame for those in higher castes.  It is my understanding that it was, and for all I know still is, a common practice for Brahmins to take Dalit women as mistresses or seek them out as prostitutes, maybe this way they avoid bring shame on higher caste women.  Anyway one day Mirzi's friend brings over Lajo and tells him she should hire her as a maid.  He sees her as a "slut from the street" and at first he does not want her in the house but she offers to work for nothing but some food and a place to stay.  It turns out she is a marvelous cook and a great housekeeper and manages the kitchen budget with total honesty.   She is confused that Mirzi does not want to have sex with her, all the other men she has worked for have been very eager for this.   One day Mirzi succumbs, we knew he would!   He really enjoys having Lajo in his house, he likes her food and he relishes her shapely body and the sexual skills life on the streets taught her.   I will tell a bit more of the story as It will be hard, I think, for most people to read this.  Against the advise and strong wishes of his family, his mother is outraged, he marries her. Now she begins to wonder why he never beats her like a husband should.   He does at last beat her and now she feels like she is truly his wife.   Other men she has worked for loaned her out to their friends but Mirzi is very possessive of this and she likes that.  

This story gives us a good look and life in Mumbai.    Under it all, it is a story of caste issues, heartbreaking poverty and a society which throws out female children.  I really liked it alot and I think anyone who reads it will also. I know it sounds wrong to say this, but it was told with a lot of humor.  I read this in a very good anthology of Indian short stories, Best Indian Short Stories, edited and introduced by Khushwant Singh.   You can download a sample of the book from Amazon which will allow you to read the very interesting introduction and see all the stories in the book.  I bought it and I almost never buy any books.

It was translated from Urdu by Fatima Ahmed.

I was able to purchase this book through the generosity of Max u in providing me with an Amazon gift card.

I hope to post again in Banned Books in 2013.

I will be posting on a good number of stories from the anthology by Singh.

If you know the exact publication history of this story, please leave a comment.  My publication date for it is an estimate.  If you know where more of her work can be read online, please let us know

Mel u
The Reading Life
@thereadinglife

"A Family of Beauties" a short story by Abha Iyengar

Today I am very honored to post another short story by Abha Iyengar, PhD.   In just a few pages generations of family anguish come to life in this very moving, beautifully written story.

Short Stories of the Indian Subcontinent

A Short Story

by Abha Iyengar

A prior short story by the author -"The Red Singlet"

A Family of Beauties

By Abha Iyengar

A thick rope made of coir, rough and scratchy to touch. It was lying among the other knick-knacks in the musty and damp room. These were remnants of a bygone age, forgotten and unused. Sundari looked closely at it and found that it was not so thick in some places where its strands had come loose. These poked out like matchstick fingers, grasping at nothingness.

          She had stepped on it, as she made my way through the dark recesses of the room in this house where no one lived now. Its thick roundness under her feet had unsteadied her for a moment. She put her hand out against a wall to right herself and met the gaze of the wooden rocking horse in the middle of the room. This was her grandparents’ gift to her when they had come to stay and become a part of her life.

          She had loved it as a child. It was chipped and discolored now, with a part of the eye scratched out and the seat unsprung. She remembered how she had always insisted on wearing a hat as she rode this horse. She would have coloured her lips and cheeks and eyes using her mother’s make-up, if only her mother had allowed. Instead, she had to be content with the wide brimmed hat which hid most of her face.

          She knew where the hat had gone. From the time she lost the hat, she had had no choice but to let the world see her for what she was, the plain Jane of the family.

          Her parents, by naming her Sundari or the Beauteous One, and Fate, by ensuring that she was not so, had combined to make her life a joke.

*

The first time she became aware of her looks or the lack of them was when she met her grandmother. Sundari had run towards her instinctively, her long brown hair flying behind her. Racing on her skinny brown legs, with her long thin arms outstretched to greet her, Sundari had expected to be picked up and hugged. Instead, her grandmother had stepped back a bit and exclaimed, “Why, you are a plain Jane, dear,” and turned away. Sundari had looked at her mother in wonder. Who was a plain Jane? Was this some kind of being that was inside her that she was supposed to acknowledge?

Her mother, Sheila, had encircled Sundari within her arms and put her sweet smelling face next to hers. “Don’t we look a pair, Mother?” she asked Granny, but Granny snorted.

“Show me your newborn, Sheila,” she said. “I hope she is an improvement.” Sundari watched her mother leave her and follow her grandmother into the house. She imagined them standing over the cot and admiring the newborn, Sundari’s lovely little sister. She felt an urge to run in and pull her mother out of the room, but kicked a stone instead.

Sundari learnt what beauty was. Sheila, her mother, had always been beautiful for her, but now she saw her from the world’s eyes. She recognized that her sister had similar looks. These women were the beauties with their shining black hair, pink cheeks and glowing black eyes, like heady red wine. She was different, tall, lank, brown haired and insipid, champagne without the fizz.

Granny was supposed to be a beauty as well. Sundari looked at her grandmother’s fair, plump face, her fleshy arms and crumply powdered neck from which hung huge stones that shone and glittered in the light. Sundari decided that she did not like her grandmother’s looks or even her nature very much, and the feeling was mutual.

Grandfather, however, was different. He held Sundari’s hand and strode through fields of yellow flowers that surrounded the house, showed her the birds, and told her stories that made her laugh and forget that she somehow did not belong to this family of beauties. He would put her on this very rocking horse and sing to her as she rode the horse. Suddenly, he would pull her off the horse and they would both watch it, without a rider, rocking, rocking….

*

It was raining that day when Sundari and her grandfather had gone across to the river and taken a boat to paddle in. As the rain fell, they got drenched, and she found Grandfather looking at her in a strange way. She had just turned twelve and her small breasts strained against her wet frock. The thin cloth wrapped itself around her long slender limbs. Her face was covered with tiny raindrops. He bent forward and kissed her full on the lips. Pulling her on to him, he carefully put her hat on her head. He then put her on his lap and said, “Feel the horse rocking, Sundari,” and sighed a deep sigh.

Sundari pushed him away with such force that the boat toppled and they fell in the water. He lay there, his eyes closed, and she waded out of the dirty waters. She did not know how she would deal with this later, but just now she wanted to get away. This was the man she had loved and trusted. She flung her hat down and stamped on it hard, her rage driving it down into the mud.  Holding herself hard, she looked back once through the pelting rain that fell like a gray cloud between her and the river. She could see the small brown boat, rocking, rocking….

She ran all the way back and reached home drenched. It was surprising that not a single sob escaped her. Her face was dry; the only wetness had been caused by the raindrops that cooled her burning skin. No one was at home, they had gone to a neighbour’s house for lunch and returned only when the rain subsided.

Grandfather did not appear till night time. On being questioned, Sundari said she did not know where he was.  A search party was sent to look for him. They found him purple and swollen with the river waters. Sundari did not shed any tears at his funeral, and people put it down to the shock of his loss. They sung his praises and said what a wonderful man he had been.

From then on, Sundari wore no hats and found she had no desire left to play with her mother’s make-up either. She was already plain, and the years just added some more lines and grayness to the picture. People were shocked if they saw her with her beautiful mother Sheila or her lovely sister, Naina. She looked like their poor country cousin.

When she was eighteen, she left for the U.S. to find a new life and separate herself from the fetters of a family.

*

Sundari had Tom staying over at her place in New York. Tom was Naina’s boyfriend. He was about ten years older than Sundari, fortyish, graying, with laughter lines around his eyes and mouth. He had met Naina in Uganda while she was holidaying there. Naina, still in Uganda, had said that Tom was coming to New York for a while, and had requested that Sundari show him the city. Tom was special, and she wanted Sundari to meet him.

            So he arrived and Sundari put him up and decided that she would have to put up with him for a while. He was easy-going but she wasn’t. Sundari was possessive about her space and hated having it invaded. She did it for her sister, whom she loved very much. All her love now concentrated on women, leading people to believe that she was into lesbian relationships, but that was not true. Sundari was not into any relationships.

Tom overstayed his visit. He was to leave in a couple of days for North Carolina for some work but they got snowed in. She had to put up with him for longer than she had expected.

Sundari was getting uncomfortable with having Tom around all the time in the space with her. The warmth in his eyes as he looked at her made her shiver and quake like a wobbly egg -yellow. Sundari tried to avoid him as much as possible but it was difficult since the space was small and cluttered and he and his things just added to the mess. She found herself bumping into him without meaning to, and then occasionally because she wanted to.

She had no idea when it happened that he took her in his arms and rained kisses on her as if the deluge would never end. They slithered and fell on the floor and things poked her back and she thought it could be the sharpener she had lost, or a fallen pencil. She pulled the string that tied her hair while he pulled the one on her pajamas. It was sudden at first, and then a slow and gentle warmth began to spread within her. Sundari forgave herself all those years of deprivation in those moments.

Lying in his arms after it all, she, who had never cried before, began to cry. He got up, eyes twinkling with laughter and said, “What’s the matter… post-coital blues?”

She did not know what to say. He did not think he was cheating on anyone.

“You are hers, and I have sinned,” she said. “I have taken what belongs to Naina.”

“Which world are you living in? Sinned? Belongs? There is no sin in this. It is something that was natural. And I don’t belong to Naina. I am a free bird. Watch.” He put his arms out, spread them like wings.

“You are Naina’s, you are special to her.”

“And now special to you. She must have forgotten me, that young and flighty one.”

“She is not flighty.”

“Ummm, okay, too young for me actually, I like your type more, mature and undiscovered.”

He grinned, his smile wicked. “One more time? Another roll?”

“Oh, no,” she said, “I couldn’t.”

“Yes, you can,” he said, “It is you I want, we’ll let her know, okay?”

“We will?”

“I will let her know how things stand, of course. Now come here.”

The snow melted one day just like she had done. Tom left for North Carolina, saying he would be back soon. She did not hear from him at all.

*

A few days later, Sundari was sipping a cup of hot, strong coffee and looking out of the window when she spotted a couple crossing the road. The girl was young and beautiful, and the man older, but handsome in a rugged way. They looked oddly familiar. She turned away from the window, not wanting to know them.

A knock on the door and they were inside. Naina was flushed and happy, and Tom tender as he looked at her.There was no trace of anything other than love for Naina in his voice when he said that they had decided to get married. Sundari was invited, of course.

“Isn’t it wonderful, sis? He called me to North Carolina all the way from Uganda and said that he was madly in love with me and wanted me in his arms immediately. Of course I came. And isn’t it lucky that this has happened right after Granny has left me all her property and jewellery in her will? I will be married and rich.” Naina had a face that glowed as she talked. She was as transparent as Dresden china, as fragile as an open flower.

“Wonderful,” Sundari said, he back upright and stiff. She watched as Tom held Naina in his arms and rocked her back and forth, back and forth. All the rocking, rocking…

Her head swam and she wanted to throw up. Instead, she threw them out. Her hands clenched at her side, she spoke.

“Wonderful, isn’t it, that he was just taking me right here, Naina, where you are standing, on the floor, making passionate love to me and saying that I was the one. He said that you were flighty and would have most probably forgotten him. He is an opportunist, Naina, he will leave you like father left mother. Look at him, Naina, and see him. ” She began to point her finger at Tom, he body swaying heavily like a half uprooted tree, waiting to be felled.

“How can you lie like this? Don’t be jealous, Sundari. Not to this extent.” Naina teetered on her high heels as she spoke, then she began to retch. It was a dry, hopeless retching.

            Tom, the colour of his skin pale in disbelief, ran up to her. “My love, she is a witch, your sister. Don’t listen to her lies.”

Naina swayed into his arms. “Oh Tom, say that you love me.”

“Yes, I do. I do. How can I not, my beautiful one. I will never let you go. You belong to me.”

Belong? Tom was talking about belong and belonging? Sundari watched and heard and knew that she would soon fall, down onto the ground.

She began to scream instead,” Get out, both of you!”

Naina, at the door, looked back at Sundari with eyes full of hurt and reproach. “How could you?” she said.  

*

Sundari was at work the next morning when the news flashed on television that a car had collided with a truck, instantly killing the two drivers. The lady sitting next to the man in the car was in hospital, seriously injured. They showed her face on television and Sundari could just make out that it was Naina, totally disfigured for life, if she did survive. They said that the lady’s mother was the only other relative, and she was by her side. Sundari saw her mother’s face and then she looked away from the cameras. She continued with her work. She knew that she no longer belonged to her family; they did not want her around.

Naina survived, but the psychological trauma of disfigurement was too much for her to bear, and she swallowed some pills to end her life. That is what Sundari read in the newspaper.

            Sundari called her mother. “Mother?”

            “Who is this?

            “Sundari…”

            “Who? Who?” The line disconnected.

            A few months later, Sundari’s mother passed away. The lawyers arrived and informed her and that is how Sundari came to know of her mother’s death.

*

The house had no owner. Since she was the only member of the family left, it now belonged to her. Sundari had come to clear up everything and pack her past away. She hoped it would be for the last time.

The rope was rough against her hands and her palms were red with holding it. She looked up and found there was no fan, but a rusted iron hook hung in its place. She climbed on to the rocking horse and as it teetered, she tied the rope to the iron hook. The other end went around her neck quite easily. She stood and rocked back and forth on the horse, holding the rope around her neck. It loosened and then held.  Realizing that she was choking, and suddenly afraid, she tried to prise it loose and failed. She was now trying to keep her balance on the horse and hold onto the rope as well to prevent it from tightening. The horse rocked unsteadily and then her foot caught in one of the seat springs. She tried to pull her foot up and failing that, she began to scream.

*

Sundari was found after a couple of weeks by a vagrant tramp who had wandered in through the open door of the house to find someplace to sleep.

People in the town who heard about her were surprised that she had committed suicide just when she had come into all the property and wealth of her parents and grandparents. “Poor dear,” they said, “she was so ordinary, our Sundari. Why go now, though, with all the wealth…”

Perhaps the rocking horse knew the secret but he was not telling.

*****

© ABHA IYENGAR. First published in the Ripples Anthology, 2010.

End of Guest post

My greatest thanks to Dr. Iyengar for allowing me to share this wonderful story with my readers.

Author Biography

 Abha Iyengar is an internationally published author and poet and a creative writing facilitator at Sri Aurobindo Centre for Arts and Communication. She does individual mentoring for short story and novel writing. She also writes poetry in Hindi. She has worked as fiction editor with Leadstart Publishing. Her work has appeared in Bewildering Stories,The Asian Writer, New Asian Writing, Arabesques Review, Muse India and others. She is a Kota Press Poetry Anthology Contest winner (2002). Her story, 'The High Stool ' was nominated for the Story South Million Writers Award (2007). She writes articles on health, spirituality and travel. She is also writing for the CAB  (Conversations Across Borders) project. Her poem-film, "Parwaaz", has won a Special Jury prize in Patras, Greece (2008).Her book of poems, "Yearnings" has been published (Serene Woods, 2010). She received the Lavanya Sankaran Writing Fellowship(2009-2010).  She was Featured Poet at the Prakriti Festival (2010) and invited Speaker at CEC (2011). Her collection of micro fiction, “Flash Bites” (2011) and her fantasy novel, “Shrayan” (2012) are available as ebooks on Amazon and Smashwords. She is from New Delhi.  

Her website: www.abhaiyengar.com Her blog: http://www.abhaencounter.blogspot.com

I am so glad to have discovered her work and honored am honored that she is   a follower of The Reading Life.   

Her webpage and blog are both very interesting and I expect to learn a lot from them

I commend her work to anyone who enjoys a wonderfully written deeply felt story that can take you in a few pages to a world that might be very different on the surface from your own.  Go a bit deeper and you may see your own life in  Ivengar's marvelous work.

Mel u