Up the Dark Alley

This debut collection of stories shines a flashlight on people in the shadows
Every short story collection has a fetish,a thin film of some strange obsession sticking to the tales. You don’t need to shine a literary black light to spot that; it is always writ in neon. Eunuch Park,the debut collection of stories by Palash Krishna Mehrotra,son of the poet Arvind Krishna Mehrotra,is subtitled “Fifteen Stories of Love and Destruction”,but they are not just about amour and annihilation,grand and vague though the themes may be. They are about what you do in the shadows,alone. They are about the dark-alley moments — when you dash through a lonely corridor in drag; when you watch two of your friends walk down the road after killing an old woman; when you spend an evening with a stranger in a bunk bed.

Mehrotra’s big city is mostly Delhi,with the slums of Okhla Basti and the apartments of Defence Colony,and his small city Dehra,with its deadening rain and its near-empty dormitories. The opening story “Dancing with Men” is about an evening of mild homoeroticism in a Dehradun discotheque,about dancing dirty with strangers to Kajra re,before slinking back to the usualness of his old bar,the familiar Flair Bartender Robin and his gin and tonic. It is followed by one of the best stories in the collection,“Fit of Rage”,grimy,as most of the stories are,yet brilliantly restrained. The two acts of murder appear off stage even as it describes every little prop: from the techie Manik sitting on a blue plastic stool outside the Mother Dairy booth in Def Col Market and longing for the girl he murdered while she was painting her toes; to Mrs Bindra’s servant Chottu who lives on a terrace forested by black Sintex watertanks,and slips into bed with the half-naked Bollywood heroines who climb down the posters at night; to the smackhead rickshaw-wallah Sadiq who chases his dragon on a smoking silver foil.

The first half of the anthology has the better stories,like “Bloody and the Friendship Club”. Bloody is the sobriquet of the virgin student of BA mathematics who falls in love with the “bloody hot” Ashawari. When she falls out of love with him,he is left holding an envelope from the Interlink Friendship Service and dials,one after the other,in vain,Sunita,Dipti,Sudha,Priya and Dolly. Finally,he finds a pleasurable,woman-less distraction,which involves tobacco and brown fat lizards.

The second half has some of the worst clichés — the night with the whore,the night with the stranger,the night with the senior — and,therefore,the weakest tales,including the last one,“Freshers Welcome”,which seems like a bad hangover of community showers in boarding school. Yet,whenever Mehrotra succeeds,he illuminates the men in the shadows. Often they do nothing more than dance or watch,or read an old letter or remember an old murder. But they manage to gleam like the goldfish wriggling in a dirty bowl in Flair Bartender Robin’s bar.