Arriving Somewhere

From the Nilgiris, its “every tea bush aching with green”, to a camp in a nowhere land, surrounded by “Naxalis” and landmines. From a hip restaurant in Pondicherry, where lust is as languidly toyed with as scallops on a plate, to an akhara somewhere in Uttar Pradesh, where a bruised, underling wrestler goes for the ultimate fight with a master pehelwan. From a club in Delhi, where silvery kaftan and Dior shades give way to something gruesome in the whirlpool, to an unkempt acting studio in Mumbai, where a yesteryear villain watches with growing disgust one of his students getting his big break in Bollywood. At every stop in the journey, you get down at a different landscape, you slip into the shadows of another mind.

In ‘The Trouble With Dining Out’, a tale that is spread out on the table of the Pondicherry restaurant, Roma and Amit are meeting the socially superior couple Brij and Sabine. In a conversation that is plucked out of nowhere and plonked in the middle of the story, Sabine tells Amit, “It is not really a performance, more of a slow descent into a primal state.” That is what all the 13 stories are about — it is about men and women who live with dread, lust, anger or terrifying nonchalance in their heads and with no redemption or solace on offer.

Rao is brilliant at drawing people and places, a talent evident in his first book, the novel The Smoke is Rising. In this collection, too, characters come alive at the glistening edge of a phrase, at the curling tendrils of a sentence. Here, for instance, is a one-line summary of two lives in a Srinagar home in ‘The Word Thieves’: “In the last few years, the lives of grandmother and grandson had wavered and shrunk, like a large room reduced to its reflection on the back of a spoon.” Even peripheral characters, those with just a cameo role, are sketched in a few stunning strokes.

The opening story, ‘Eternal Bliss’, is set in Mysore, where Rao, who grew up in Nairobi, lives now. It is about Bindu “who tended her anxieties well”: “She did not discriminate and gave freely of her time to trifling inconveniences and insurmountable predicaments.” When she gets a job as a manager at, of all places, the Paramasukha Yoga Centre, she thinks it prudent to lie that she is a widow rather than tell the uncomfortable truth that she is separated from her husband. It is this lie that gnaws at her, sinking its teeth into her bone, until she has to run away.

‘The Agony of Leaves’ is about the private hell of an old man who deludes himself into believing that there is something more than affection between him and his daughter-in-law — even though all they do is drink tea, watch the green slopes of the Nilgiris and play rummy. He finally imagines himself to be spurned by her — to disastrous effects.

Often the central characters brood — and these quiet agonies prod and push them into a final, irresoluble act. At other times, they are passive. They are spectators, reduced to watching others, but in that act of surveying, they change. Like the rich philanderer in Kolkata, with 15 blue silk ties, each a different shade of cerulean, who follows his taciturn lover to her home and finds a low-block flat that smells of medicine and burnt milk, old age and unrelenting care.

Some of the best stories of the collection are stacked towards the end: the scrawny primary school teacher in Srinagar who decides to mount a larger-than-life protest against the tyranny of the state; and the young mother in Guwahati who goes mad, pursuing her heroine Minu Goyari. Here it is all about the minutiae of the mind and the place.

Yet, it is a journey with mixed results. At the end of the tour, when you look back, you can’t recall all the landscapes you traversed. For all its virtuoso descriptions, some of the stories fade in the vagueness, in the smudgy outlines, of the plot.

Charmy Harikrishnan is a journalist in Thiruvananthapuram