A well-stocked literary kitty
Rajdeep Bains

The HarperCollins Book of New Indian Fiction: Contemporary Writing in English.

Edited by Khushwant Singh. HarperCollins India. Pages 208. Rs 295.

Every once in a while one comes across a book that seems to transcend borders, languages, cultures and styles, a book that offers a consortium of talent and oodles of thought-provoking ideas. The Harper Collins Book of New Indian Fiction is one such. Edited by Khushwant Singh, this collection of short stories allows us a peep into the rich panorama of modern Indian writing.

With well-established names like Amitava Kumar, Abraham Verghese and Githa Hariharan rubbing shoulders with relatively new writers, this collection makes things simpler for a world always on the lookout for a next-generation Rushdie or Vikram Seth. However, about the stories themselves there is nothing simple. Rich, strange, pulsing with colour, they leave iridescent trails that criss-cross the globe like a flight map spanning continents and subverting the boundaries between magic and reality, past and present.

The thirteen authors selected for this collection represent India’s long literary tradition. Ranging from the direct narrative style as in Navtej Sarna’s Madame Kitty and Manju Kapur’s The Necklace, to the Hollywood-like science fiction of Unfaithful Servants by Manjula Padmanabhan and Alienation by Samit Basu, there is something for all tastes. It’s rare to have so much of good writing available in a single volume.

Shauna Singh Baldwin in Naina gives us a tale about Indian women trying to come to grips with their situation of cultural displacement in America. Naina’s pregnancy lasts for over 14 years because she is not ready to receive her baby just as the West is not yet ready to accept Indians as part of their culture. Her plaintive cry "I am not a case" is echoed by many Indian women trying to carve a niche for themselves in a society not yet ready to allow them a chance.

Rana Dasgupta’s The Tailor is an elegant tale and most effective in the way it delivers both a traditional folk tale — the kind Shahrazad told Shahrayar in The Thousand and One Nights — and contemporary social commentary. A prince and his courtiers descend on a village like pop stars in their "father paid" cars. On a whim, they commission the village tailor to make an expensive robe for the prince. The tailor takes a large bank loan and spends months making the beautiful garment. However, when delivering it to the palace, he is denied access because he doesn’t have the right paperwork. Bonds of trust count for nothing, and the tailor is left destitute in the face of an implacable bureaucracy.

The tales are many and varied but the talent is constant and undeniable. This extravagant and wonderfully discerning anthology unfurls the full diversity of modern Indian literature, presenting today’s brightest talents in the company of their distinguished forbearers and likely heirs. The stories are written in subtle prose, employing a variety of narrative strategies, some of them quite unusual and the collection gives us that rarest of contemporary publishing rarities: a real bargain.

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