Opinion The wondrous, ordinary world of Vinod Kumar Shukla
He wrote about modest people living in mundane circumstances, though their inner lives seem to be touched with magic
“Just as one never stops experiencing,” Vinod Kumar Shukla said in an interview, “written literature is... never a completion Written by Sara Rai
At the Jaipur Literature Festival in 2011, in a stroke of serendipity, I found myself put up in a relatively modest hotel in which Vinod Kumar Shukla was also staying. The “stars” had been accommodated in somewhat flashier hotels. An unassuming, intensely private man, Shukla did not know the names of any of the other writers, even though several literary celebrities from across the world were around. He simply did not understand what the fuss was all about. After J M Coetzee’s session, he looked at the long line for his book signing and asked me why so many people were queuing up. “To get Coetzee’s books signed by him,” I said. “But I haven’t bought his book,” he said guiltily. When I assured him that it was not compulsory to buy Coetzee’s, or any other writer’s books, he looked relieved. This world of literary stardom and book signings was foreign to him. His world – real as well as fictional – was different: They did things differently there.
In it, a bus travelled through the air at great speed; a man with two noses was seen walking on the street; another man with a pot of curd in his left hand was noticed walking in the same direction twice without having returned even once; herons entered a classroom and politely left when they saw that a class was in progress; an elephant moved forward, leaving behind an elephant-shaped space; a man bequeathed his dentures, the upper set of teeth to one son, and the lower to the other; a police thana was like a chowkidar with big moustaches.
In this world, light was not needed to look at the dark.
The instances are legion. It is a world of absurd humour and tender light-heartedness that lifts cramped commonplace lives just a little above the ground, giving them space to breathe. The mundane are constantly being transformed into the wondrous in the world of Vinod Kumar Shukla, whom author Vidyan Ravinthiran has called the “philosopher-magician” and the “special-effects wizard” of literature, who died on December 23.
“You speak simply as you can and must,” says Swiss writer Robert Walser in his story, Dear Little Sparrow, in which he addresses a sparrow, “who tumbled …in the silver light, in the divine ocean of air.” While this sentence by Walser could be read as a description of his own deceptively simple essay-stories, it could, as much, be applied to the fiction of Shukla, who, too, speaks as simply as he can and must. The seeming simplicity of Shukla’s work has spawned shoals of Hindi writers trying to write like him, only to discover that the simplicity is not so simple after all. Suddenly, a straightforward sentence twists, acquiring a complex syntax and grammatical structure. The meaning too undergoes a sly transformation and now demands an imaginative leap from the reader. For instance, in Teen Billiyaan (Three Cats), he writes:
“Sometimes one saw at the same time three or four cats. To see three cats at the same time was like seeing three times the act of seeing the three cats.”
In one vertiginous moment, the cats have metamorphosed into the act of looking.
A single Shukla sentence can cover substantial mental distance, forcing the reader to adjust her binoculars; for the angle of vision has subtly changed, become skewed. The writing that had been going along at a steady clip has suddenly taken wing, taking along the reader on its giddy flight. And yet, Shukla sticks close to the ground. He writes about modest people living in mundane circumstances, though their inner lives seem to be touched with magic. He has an obsession with the small and the ordinary. “We don’t need to see anything out of the ordinary. We already see so much,” says Walser in A Little Ramble.
Yet none of his observations overstep the boundaries of the real. In the provincial world that he creates in extraordinary detail, everything is possible. The quotidian is never far from the comic, nor is the real from the imagined. In Shukla’s own words, “I believe, and it is only my personal view, that my imagination is also my reality.” Elsewhere, he talks of imagination providing “a cover when fires rain down.” The uncertainty of what happens next is the basis of Shukla’s art, in which the unexpected is never far from the humdrum. In fact, the more humdrum the occasion, the greater the chances of it becoming something else.
“Just as one never stops experiencing,” Shukla said in an interview, “written literature is… never a completion.” Writing, for him, is “a continuous process of becoming.” It is this quality of “becoming,” rather than having become, the unwillingness of the writing to be shaped before the process of writing has started, that gives his stories the lightness of feathers. They seem to have the “winged existence” of Walser’s sparrow.
On the morning of December 24, I woke up to find that the world had vanished. There was a thick mist outside the window that lives in my wall. I could see nothing. My first thought – the special-effects wizard had been up to a last trick. He’d left, taking along the world!
Then he spoke in my ear:
“The blurred tree looked exactly like a tree.
To its right was a blurred horse of inferior stock,
Looking like a horse of inferior stock.
The horse was hungry, the mist like a grassy field to him.
There were other houses, trees, roads, but no other horse.
There was only one horse. I wasn’t that horse,
But my breath when I panted was indistinguishable from the mist….’
(Translation: Arvind Krishna Mehrotra)
So, there he was. Ironic. Haunting. Present. Indistinguishable from the mist.
Rai is a writer and translator
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