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Nine on nine
If An Arranged Marriage brings out poignantly the irony of depending in old age on a daughter, who has been discriminated against throughout, At Jenny’s is a fast-paced narrative of lives intertwined. Jenny’s beauty parlour serves as a point of intersection of various lives, literally and metaphorically, where Sonika Shah and Aalia meet and are thrown together in most unusual circumstances. Flashback has a quality of bathos. Srimoti and her mother’s life follow an uncannily similar pattern and of course there is a sting in the tail as the reader discovers that her dalliance with Arijit was incestuous. Babhiji captures the symbiotic relationship beween Gautam and his brother’s family, as they sponge on him unabashedly, in a typically Punjabi manner. The cadence of the spoken word comes through remarkably in The Piano Teacher. Valerie D’Souza’s desire to be more than a mere piano teacher eking out a living is true-to life as are the lives of her landlord and students. Humour and pathos mingle as does an unsettling objectivity. Deft in her charcterisation, without lingering on details, Puri uses a story-within-a-story framework to carry forward her narrative and gives a multi-layered effect to the story. The authenticity of portrayal is underscored by attention to subtle variations of region, class as well as moment and milieu with the delicate strokes of a miniaturist. Often polarities coexist in Puri’s fiction as they do in life—humour and pathos, laughter and tears, hope and nostalgia, memory and desire. If we feel Rekha’s pain when she sees her irresponsible brother get the family’s attention as well as fortune, we share in Deepa’s triumph from the daughter of a maid to an affluent manager. Puri never goes over the top while defining a situation or character. With control, she goes back and forth in time and space, and makes an imaginative use of italics to denote the movement. The epistolary method is used with a variation as in Pages From Indulata Debi’s Diary, which describes, using pages from a journal, the travails of the first woman to practice medicine in Bengal. Biography merges with fiction as the reader is transported to the late 19th century. An engaging tale of a poor girl from an Orissa village to triumph over her circumstances and educate herself makes Remembering little Dee memorable, while Waiting captures the double-edged tragic wait of a cancer patient to recover miraculously and her husband’s wait to marry again. A character comes alive with a few strokes, whether it is a taut description of facial features, a mannerism or a behavioural peculiarity. Puri uses her journalistic experience to make the stories contemporary. There is absolutely no authorial intrusion. Puri allows the situation to speak eloquently without attempt to browbeat or impress the reader with too-clever-by-half forays into experimentation and technique. The simplicity of style is disarming and, of course, deceptive. With a touching foreword
by Gulzar and an evocative cover design by M.F. Husain, one can give Nine
on nine, a perfect 10. |
A
well-told tale has the power to make the reader forget time and space
and watch the line between fiction and reality blur as the characters
acquire a life and momentum entirely their own. Almost all the nine
stories in Puri’s collection have the grip of stories well told. Women
are the protagonists and the varying nuances of their lives, be it
vulnerability and helplessness or the tenacity and triumph over trying
circumstances, are depicted. Despite being women-centred and inspired by
all the women who have touched Puri’s life, the stories have a
universal appeal that transcends gender or class.