Encountering Exile

Twilight Encounters, is the first English translation of Anand’s short stories. And it is representative of Anand’s concerns spread out in seven novels, forty plus short stories, two studies and scores of essays written over a period of three decades. He picks up people, living on the margins of a society for refusing to conform to its norms. His Christ relates more to the gypsy Domba than his disciples (Fourth Nail). Anand’s fictional world is of exiles who refuse to accept their exile, always questioning the norms of exile. They seek, a civil society where the concepts of truth and justice are less lopsided. His exiles reveal the simmering injustice that goes unnoticed behind headlines, the perceived conditions of normalcy. They rudely awaken you to the victims’ fate.

In Cells, a journalist who visits a village to inquire about a woman’s violent death is alarmed by the sense of normalcy there. He asks a resident: ‘‘Tell me, in spite of all that happening around us, why is everything so quiet and peaceful? How does the business of day-to-day life go on in the streets as if nothing extraordinary is happening?’’ He does get an answer: ‘‘There is a giant tree in every Man. But each tree is confined to a meditative existence in the womb of a seed, and is prevented from growing up. Man is carefully conserved in the cubicles of loneliness and helplessness. That is how the state, the system, the society prevails.’’ And those who try to break these cubicles are warned ‘‘not to poke into other people’ businesses’’. Yet Ramamurthy (The Lost Limb) refuses to keep away from other ‘‘people’s businesses’’ only to recognise how the State has ended up as another appendage of the oppressor.

In Anand’s fiction, living is dangerous business the minute one steps out of private spaces. The Poet in Dimensions steps out of his room, returns after a string of bizarre experiences to realise how free he was from everything. Anand has chosen to write about pain because ‘‘it is a signal of danger and hence is Man’s best friend’’. The organic image of society as a living body pervades his writings. The symptoms analysed, solutions thought of, the cure left to the reader. But why this insistence on writing about the injured?

Because as Doctor Samuel in The Lost Limb says: ‘‘The health of a society is not to be judged by counting those who succeed in surviving. It’s health and ability to survive depends on the people who are ready to get wounded and killed.’’ Most of the stories in Twilight Encounters have been written in the ’80s and ’90s. Despite the uneven translation, this collection is a decent introduction to a remarkable writer who redefined fiction in the language he writes in. Those looking for backwaters, EMS, rains, achan and amma, kathakali etc, could skip this book.