Sunday, January 6, 2002		Books

A Storehouse of Tales
edited by Wasi, Jehanara and Malashri Lal ..Shrishti Publishers, New Delhi. Pages 199. Rs 200.

IT has been a sheer coincidence that I was looking for short fiction of the last decade when somebody directed me to the book, "A Storehouse of Tales" published recently. The book came as a welcome relief because there is complete dearth of primary material on the contemporary short –fiction written in English. While novel is being apotheosised as the major literary genre of the present era, short-fiction in Indian English has been thoroughly ignored by the academic circles simply as another rung in the ladder that leads to novel writing. Short fiction has been treated as a residual and not a dominant form of writing. That is why one feels that this book is a laudable attempt to bring together contemporary Indian English short stories by women.

The title of the book appears very promising, almost mysterious at first glance as it suggests some kind of a pristine consciousness at work. But as one reads through, one is surprised by the contemporaneity of the pieces selected by the editors. The best part is that all pieces are actually "tales", the form which is closer to Indian notion of the same and not to the more western genre called "short story". Therefore the title of the selection is in harmony with the stories selected. If we consider the distinction between the word "tale" and the word "short –story", we have to grant that the word tale denotes something less specific, more oral. To quote the OED the word "tale" denotes "a report of an alleged fact".

We all are aware how our grandmothers have churned out tales turning fictions into seeming facts and vice versa, holding our attention in complete suspension of disbelief .A grandmother’s tale can never be called a short story. A short story is a very specific, very English form with a perfect structure with a plot, characters, theme and technical virtuosity.

This selection is aptly called "A Storehouse of Tales" and the very first piece proves to be a tale coming almost out of the mouth of someone who can invoke your curiosity at night by weaving a next-door incident into a "you know what happened the other day" tale .Yes Ipsita Roy Chakraverti’s "Delhi: City of The Dead" is one such tale with seemingly true confrontations with the ghosts of the Capital city .

"Jani’s Morning" by Shama Futehally is surely a tale , it only seems not meant for adults, and especially not for English lecturers.

Namita Gokhale’s "Omens, Sacred and Profane" is a fantastic short story in real sense of the word. It is a story about a modern city woman, who could respond to life only in conditioned ways inspite of all her modernity and she realises this when she had lost precisely that which she has been searching for, because of her own false perceptions.

However even this short story can be called as a tale due to Namita Gokhale,s direct address to the readers, where she deconstructs the whole genre of the short story. She says , "My quarrel with the short story is precisely that it imposes a false order and symmetry on events, forcing impressionable young minds to anticipate a similar state from the inchoate mess that is generally life."

"Fig Blossoms" by Sukrita Paul Kumar is unusually striking, as it takes up the perspective of an unloved poor child whose mother works in a rich woman’s house.The child is able to find that affection in the cooling shade of the fig tree, where he makes his niche . Its view of things in the simplicity of his perception reveals not only his deep suffering but his own way of dealing with it.

Other interesting works included in the book are Manju Kapur’s "Chocolate" and Lakshmi Kannan’s "Simone de Beauvoir and the Manes". Both tales are about the kind of resistence women can devise to protect themselves and survive in a male- dominated atmosphere.

Madhu Kishwar’s "Twenty or Twenty-five" and Anuradha Marwah Roy’s "Lifework" also Raji Narsimhan’s "A Toast to Herself" are very realistic stories, that are set in contemporary Indian metropolitan cities, in real situations today’s women can easily be found in.

One remarkable fact about "A Storehouse of Tales" is that the settings of all the stories are Indian. The stories reflect a variety of Indian milieu , life in a big city, in a small town, etc. and they reveal the issues that concern today’s women, women from various strata of society.

Finally, one must say that "A Store House of Tales" is a very compact collection for the readers of short fiction, which provides a fine look into the world of tales.