Small Exiles

Publisher: Penguin

Pages: 247

Price: Rs 399

To read Anjum Hasans Difficult Pleasures,a collection of stories that have appeared elsewhere over the years,is to be reminded once more of Irish writer Frank OConnors thoughts on the short story. He famously asserted that,in this form,one found an intense awareness of human loneliness. It was here,he went on to write,that we would meet outsiders,outlawed figures wandering about the fringes of society.

People who think of themselves as outsiders wandering about the fringes are aplenty in Difficult Pleasures. These are drifters who go on small exiles from the familiar and in whose minds lurks the mild danger that such a life encompasses a great deal but amounts to little. A naïve,budding photographer comes to Mumbai to meet the person he thinks of as his mentor. A young woman returns to Bangalore after studying in England and sits among packing cases,thinking of her mother and a failed relationship. A disobedient schoolboy plays hooky to marvel at the pleasures of a mall in a big city. A Paris-based economist decides to drive to Sweden upon hearing of the suicide of his brother. In this way,time and again,Hasans characters emerge from ruts to find as the bumper sticker has it that theyre diagonally parked in a parallel universe.

These,then,are humane,unshowy tales that depend more on character than on plot for their effects,and the best of them such as Immanuel Kant in Shillong,in which a widowed professor revisits old haunts are moving and eloquent. In another vivid story,The Big Picture,the predicament of a widow approaching menopause and travelling to Europe for the first time to attend an exhibition of her paintings,is narrated with empathy,grace and,finally,unexpectedness.

Hasan writes with a lightness of touch that saves her tales from being terminally grim. There are,for example,some wry reflections on peoples foibles. A character thinks of her landlord that he was tolerant of the worlds instabilities as long as the rent was paid on time. Another character in the depths of despair thinks: I cant want to kill myself because Im hungry and its not possible to feel both things at once.

With such an approach,there are traps that lie in wait,and Difficult Pleasures doesnt entirely skirt them. On some occasions,theres a slide towards solipsism,as with For Love or Water,in which a narrator,looking back on her lonely days as an unwary student in Bangalore,discovers a scarcity of both love and water. In Hanging on like Death,in which an eight-year-old schoolboy worries about whether his father will remember to attend the school play,theres an uncharacteristic turn towards the dramatic at the close.

These,however,are small quibbles,given the quiet yet striking insights that one encounters in other tales. It is possible to feel completely at home in the world, one story begins,but this is only because we have laid claim to a small space a few rooms,certain streets,a familiar town over which our habitual wanderings create grooves that we can comfortably slip into. When Hasans characters force themselves to drop out of such grooves,they find themselves in terrains that they have to learn to navigate. They sit alone in cafes eavesdropping on the conversation of others,are quick to seek ways to comfort themselves,ruminate obsessively over the past and,if theyre lucky,make their peace with it.