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An Inch & a
Half above Ground: Collected Stories
Verma’s stories are like Chekov’s, in which the surface is invariably uneventful, but something keeps on happening underneath. His plots have none of the high-octane flurry we associate with stories of action, yet these reveal a different kind of action that involves the buried layers of the character’s consciousness waiting to be explored in arresting images and symbolic associations. What strikes the reader of the present representative selection is Verma’s egalitarian instinct to allow his characters enough freedom to speak from within their own limited horizons and to live their often colourless memory-burdened lives in accordance with their customary habits and modes of feeling. No assertiveness, but only a stoic acceptance of what comes to them marks them out. From the lyrical innocence of the early The Day of Unemployment and Maya Darpan to the mature stories of the later period, particularly Migrant Birds, Guest of a Day and Crows and Liberation, Verma catches people in the inertia of their unromantic moments, as time slips through their solitary existences leaving behind a dim nostalgia and frayed desire. Thus it is with Latika in the landmark story Migrant Birds, with the Holy Baba in Crows and Liberation, Diwan Sahib and Taran in Maya Darpan, and the traveller on the English Channel in Beginning. All of them live their apportioned days without expectation. These characters simply wait, cooped in their truncated souls, and only fitfully strive to make sense of their imbroglios. As the narrator says in Crows: "A door inside me swung closed. In the past, too, I had closed many doors behind me…" Suspended in a state between The Dying and the Dead, they eke out their store of memories in evanescent glimpses of hopefulness that expire just when they seem within their grasp. Latika’s lost love kindled in Hubert’s suppressed desire, Taran’s feelings for the engineer amidst the rubble of the railway yard, Raina Ramon’s emerging passion for the tourist guide—they are partial and incomplete fulfilments and remain so throughout. Hence their tantalising ineluctable appeal. It is to Nirmal Verma’s credit that he remained unimpressed, though not unmoved by the social and political turmoil around him. A firm believer in what Keats would have called "the holiness of heart’s affections", he does not let his craft serve faddish tenets of ideology or experiment. Insistently, the outside world intrudes into the private obsessions of his characters. But Verma’s humane charitableness never fails to protect their fragile and barely above-ground selves and spare them the gratuitous impositions of an overt doctrine. He succeeds primarily by
his trademark technique of revealing character and situation
incrementally rather than at once. These stories build their insights
through a gradual linking of memory and symbol (birds, mountains,
deserts, seas and pubs), landscape and narration in a seamless
pattern. This technique enables him to transform latencies into
mini-dramas and imbue his world with a palpable feel otherwise lacking
in his characters’ drab lives. It confirms Verma as one of India’s
most distinguished practitioners of the art of articulate reticence,
and places him next to V.S. Pritchett among contemporary world
writers. |
IN
the novella Days of Longing, the narrator, an Indian student
adrift in the bohemian haunts of Prague, makes an observation that
would sum up both Nirmal Verma’s themes and his method of
composition: "The whole day had gone by without anything like an
event, but it seemed as if after reaching a point, it had reached an
event, all of it."