Cal Chronicles

Alka Saraogi’s tales swing between passionate intensity and indolence
Alka saraogi works her stories like a weaver of a Tangail sari. The shuttle of her imagination flicks back and forth as though she is speaking to herself. The intense pre-occupation with the minutiae,the fine threads that bind her characters together,is what interests Saraogi as she continues with her ruminations. So it is almost with a sense of surprise that we watch her suddenly snapping the thread at the end of each of the 17 stories in this collection and allowing us to see the patterns that had emerged from her loom.

It may be a mistake to identify her fixedly with one Bengali sensibility,because Saraogi’s characters are rooted in their upper-middle-class Kolkata milieu. And as the note in the backflap says,she writes in Hindi and “lives in Calcutta among writers writing mostly in Bengali or English”. Vandana R. Singh has done an excellent job of rendering Saraogi’s delicately wrought observations of her characters’ interior landscape into a prose that is both light and tensile as one imagines the original must be.

A character who lives in the distant future tells his companion,a middle-aged man who has chanced upon him: “There is one thing that is beautiful in your time: a kind of passionate vigour,a fire.” In another story,a mother writes to the principal of her daughter’s school,Mrs D’Souza: “I feel a certain amount of indolence,a whiling away of time and even a certain amount of carelessness is also essential in life so that you can stop and assess where you are ultimately headed.” This swinging between passionate intensity and dreamlike indolence is what gives Saraogi’s stories their unique texture.

Obviously,some stories stand out. You can head straight for the one about the man who loved a tree. The story of Jagannath Babu’s intense identification with a tree growing outside his window is something of a masterpiece. Saraogi manages to bring together all her concerns about individual freedom with her apprehensions about environment. What more can one expect of a short story?