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Journalism of Courage
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 dont 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.
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 Robins bar.
