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The Mahabharata Re-Imagined
Now Das has come up with a slick reinterpretation — full of simmering emotions and bubbling passions — that focuses on the epic’s main characters in certain episodal contexts. Kunti is depicted as a harsh woman who silently rages against her foster-father for allowing Durvasa to impregnate her. Later on, she is married off to the effete Pandu and had to undergo the emotionally brutal experience of begetting sons from different males. Her rude reaction to Draupadi’s pleas to take back her order to marry the five Pandavas sums up Kunti’s worldview forged by her soul-sapping ordeals. The episodes relating to Draupadi’s crush on Krishna, Bhishma’s lust for Amba, and Karna’s withholding from Duryodhana the fact of his discovery of the exiled Pandavas keep us spellbound. However, there are two aspects where Das has let her re-imagination go a bit askew. She depicts the royal women in veils, not realising that the veil did not exist during the Vedic times. Secondly she describes a ‘five-year-old’ apprentice in a hermitage ignoring the fact that minimum age for admission to an ashram used to be 12 years. The Dance of Death
It is a good read, but could’ve been better had Jena eschewed the tendency to indulge in excessive descriptive/reflective verbiage.
Man Whose Name did
not Appear In the Census
The Bridegroom and The Two Lady Rams provide comical insights into the middleclass mindset. In fact, most of his stories in this collection explore the human mindscape with a touch of sardonic disdain. The language is lucid, but one feels that literal translation of Punjabi exclamations and expletives softens the punch — as main vaari/kurbaan jaawan is more evocative than Anand’s translation "may I be your sacrifice". As for the expletives, they become too tepid and tame when compared to the Punjabi originals; for example, "son of owl" sounds more like a compliment than invective, given the difference in cultural-linguistic contexts for the nocturnal bird. But this does not, in any manner, reduce the pleasure of reading.
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THERE
Chhaya
is "hauntingly beautiful". This singular quality fetches for
her the IIT-IIM graduate and IPS officer, Rakshit, as husband. Rakshit
is posted in Manipur, which, in those days, was buffeted by terrorism,
drug menace and HIV-AIDS contagion. But the young couple is happy with
each other. However, when Chhaya discovers Rakshit’s camouflaged
boorishness — the marriage is consummated in an abrupt manner sans
tender, poetic preliminaries — she overlooks it. After Rakshit’s
face gets scarred in an encounter with terrorists, he begins to
suspect Chhaya’s fidelity. Eventually, the couple gets divorced.
Chhaya marries Avinash — a college lecturer — but he dies in an
accident leaving her pregnant. When she learns that Avinash might have
been murdered Chhaya gets caught in a whirlpool of situations.
Anand’s
stories can be enjoyed both as light reading and as food for thought.
The very first story Man whose name`85 reflects a sordid truth
about the rural poor — the mortal fear of the Sahib that compels the
poor to resort to lies, subterfuge and servility. This acts as a boost
to the petty babudom’s ego even today.