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Études
Yet moving even in its implausibility, providing a peek-a-boo into tethering relationships, love, nay loss, is the overriding constraint. In fact, alienation is the defining thread that weaves stories into one whole. These stories delve into relationships, predictably man-woman, too. Invariably about their coming apart, the yearning to connect pulsates nevertheless. In the tales, objects become metaphors. Be it the keys of the apartment that the live-in-couple share or the red underwear the protagonist stumbles upon at the laundry or the cigarette the wife discovers and smokes after losing the husband, or simply the stump of an old tree, the inanimate do not remain just lifeless things. The same transforms into objects with deeper meaning and implications. Why the missed catch becomes a missed link that aborts the relationship. Fragmented and disintegrated, the characters are united in their universality as also in their loneliness. As if the writer firmly believes what he writes, "Happy stories are so soppy so uninteresting ... just as all happy families are alike." Yet in A Love Story, he churns out a credible real love story with the subtext reading—real love is for real not for fiction. Expectedly, as with all fiction, in his fictional accounts real and unreal mingle to create interest, curiosity and awareness. Most characters are nameless, minus the excess baggage of nationality or ethnicity. Most stories have one or two characters referred to as just plain and simple he or she. But in Bomb, the character acquires a name, Dr Shyam Prasad and a place, India. While his persona is chillingly deviant, his reasons for setting off bomb explosions as irrational as those of big time terror manufacturers. In another story Googled, the name Bihag Sharma surfaces. But what’s in a name? Isn’t his account reminiscent of thousands of corporate honchos caught in a meaningless rat race? Written in a piquant style, the tenor is engaging and the message distressing. While many a story is brief, even miniscule (call it images, flashes or scenes), as in Unsaved, the author conveys much in a few lines. However, in a few longer stories, the tone does become a trifle laborious. As if he is showing off his knowledge—both literary and otherwise—some accounts sap attention. However, with all its novelty and originality—even the introduction isn’t run off the mill—the book offers an insight into the new world order of despair, desolation, sorrow and of course, violence. Terror makes its presence felt as a chilling undercurrent and then upfront as in the story Nocturne: "They lived in times when skin and muscle were cast off as easily as a dress and violence ran naked through streets." Since the writer lives in Philadelphia, the US backdrop is unmistakable in some stories. But actually his descriptions, emotions, moods and sentiments ring out with a universal truth that could be true for any place, anywhere. It is in effect the global planet with all its glitches that we the inhabitants of contemporary world have inherited. Thus, the book reveals the human predicament. `C9tude, by the way, is a French word meaning study. It is also an instrumental musical composition usually designed to provide practice material for perfecting a particular technical skill. Kaul’s Études may be his debut book, but it displays a masterful unusual skill, certainly not a practice session.
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TAKE
my word for it; these are no ordinary stories. The collection of short
stories Études by Aseem Kaul is strange (post-modernist or
whatever), often wacky, even downright ludicrous and eerie, too. Still
the narrative is imbued with a haunting poignant quality. The stories
despite their open provocation, "daring" the reader
"take it or leave it", almost cocking a snook at them,
manage to tug at one’s heartstrings. So, there you have a man buying
a "perfect" house only to commit suicide, a man falling in
love while another one is dying, a lover seeing his beloved’s body
in nude for the first time at, God forbid, a mortuary.