topics: |  fiction | india | english

Extraordinary lives, every day

It is said that the scientist looks at the extraordinary and explains it in
terms of the ordinary, whereas it takes a poet to discover the extraordinary
in the ordinary.  "Art of Dying", by Githa Hariharan, promises to do the
latter, and though a compilation of short stories, in parts it is pure
poetry.

A short story writer is like a miniature artist - with a few strokes she must
sketch out enough of the narrative to draw in the reader.  Githa Hariharan is
known primarily as a novelist - her novel The thousand stories of night
had won the Commonwealth Writer's Prize for Best First Novel and
In Times of Siege had been recommended to me (though I haven't gotten
around to reading either).  But here she reveals herself as a master of the
short narrative as well.

This is a thin volume - twenty stories - most of them seven or eight pages
long.  A quick read, but it had been sitting on my shelf for five years
perhaps, before I finally got around to reading it. But was I glad that I
did!

There was an uncertain rain outside as I started on the opening story,
Unfinished poem, in which a retired tubelight-salesman, a poet at heart,
and his wife, are trying to kill a rat that has been vandalizing their
garden.  His own enemy is his inability to write, "a dull, stupid animal,
given to platitudes":
	  Tell me, koel, when you heard him last
	  My little boy in the wooded past --

Besides two slim volume of poetry, he has written a biography of an obscure
Keralite poet, who wrote of the smell of fish drying in the sun, and thatched
huts that let in the rain.

Meanwhile, each night the rat attacks the roots and stems in the garden, but
does not eat them - "it is a song of pure destruction." Finally, the poet
decides to sleep outside, next to the creeping jasmine, and try to capture
the creature directly.  The rat's "thick, slicky slime of his blood" becomes
his last poem.

Like the other stories, there is no preponderance of drama, just a quiet
narrative, highlighting the dramatic in the everyday humdrum of a daughter
looking after a dying mother, or a young boy becoming aware of his budding
sexuality.  Despite the title, it is a tenacious affirmation of life, rather
than death, that drives these stories home. It is one of the most moving
story collections I have read in a long time.

The stories are unobtrusively set in a vivid south Asian context: ironing a
sari ("the kind of counterfeit silk sari we have always given servants when
there is a marriage among them"), the brahmin widow lusting for cakes
containing egg, killing a mosquito ("it leaves behind a small blotch of
brownish-red, stale blood on the white net"); and yet there is the touch of
the universal, as in this paean to an aging mother:

	The tenor of my life --wifing, childbearing -- has been determined by
	the subtle undulating waves... Bleed, dry up; expand with life,
	contract with completion.

Remains of the Feast

Here the narrator Ratna's great-grandmother, widowed early on, has lived
her long life under sharp social restrictions - her hair must be shorn, she
can wear only very plain saris.  (These laws for widows have not changed
for nearly a millennium; (see the 17th c. text Tryambakayajvan's
The perfect wife,strIdharmapaddhati, a compilation of norms for women going
back to the apastamba sutras, c. 400BCE).

Now at ninety and on the verge of death from cancer, Rukmini suddenly feels
the urge to taste all that is forbidden.  She conspires with Ratna to eat
cakes with egg in it.

   I smuggled cakes and ice cream, biscuits and samosas ... to the deathbed
   of a brahmin widow who had never eaten anything but pure, home-cooked food
   for nearly a century...
      "And does it really have egg in it?" she would ask again, as if she
   needed the password for her to bite into it with her gums.
Her repressed desire for food, and in the end, for the colourful saris worn
by married women, becomes the focal point of the very effective narrative.

Title story: Art of Dying

Death forms a subtle backdrop to the title story, which is one
of the most moving stories here.  The sparkling first-person narrative
focuses on her aging mother, still caught up in the untimely death of her
beloved son, balancing it with some vignettes from her own experience as a
psychiatric councillor.  Several case histories are sketched, in tight,
crisp, detail.

Marriage and the mother-in-law

A couple comes to see her; though married for four years,
they can't have a baby.  She sends them to a doctor, who pronounces her fine,
but a virgin.  It is only on their subsequent visit that

      He says, the words tumbling out of his thick lips: She calls out to
	my mother when I touch her.

      And what does your mother do?  I asked.

      She has been sleeping between us every night for the last four years,
	he replied, his hands still at last, clasped furtively on his lap.

These stories live in these nuances; the furtive hand, the gecko's eating the
moth.  In the title story, her mother's illness moves slowly, and there are
flashbacks to the dead brother and his white girlfriend, Janet: "He was not
sure whether he wanted to marry her."  Several times in the story, she talks
of memory as a Time Machine that can only move back, to the days when one is
younger:

	when my body was something precious, not just a machine
	to be oiled and exercised at the right times, but
	examined, caressed, even, on occasion, flaunted -- I
	had a buffer between me, that living, demanding thing,
	and death.

But while tending to her bed-ridden mother on her last days, she has a
furtive wish to to "relieve the burden... It would be simpler to help her
forward.  It would take only a minute or two to give her what her heart
yearns for.  ... Her real self, the young, full-blooded woman with long,
thick, hair... He [her son Ram] awaits her, his chest as broad, his face as
unlined as in his framed photograph, the eternal lover."
                      - review by Amitabha Mukerjee (late 2008).

Quotations (from title story)

My mother has a good memory, but she is not a storyteller.  She is too much
of a hoarder for that.

In my younger days, when my body was something precious, not just a
machine to be oiled and exercised at the right times, but examined,
caressed, even, on occasion, flaunted -- I had a buffer between me, that
living, demanding thing, and death.
	The tenor of my life --wifing, childbearing -- has
	been determined by the subtle undulating
	waves... Bleed, dry up; expand with life, contract
	with completion.

As a counsellor, she begins as "a bystander, sympathetic spectator to
other people's memories."

[A couple comes to see her.  The wife does not talk.]

He was a heavy, thick-set man in his late twenties.  Though his fleshy,
pock-marked face had a double chin, and he wore a loud and shiny yellow
shirt, there was something tender in the way his hands moved" [She sends
them to a doctor, who pronounces her fine, but a virgin.  He says,] the
words tumbling out of his thick lips: She calls out to my mother when I
touch her.

    And what does your mother do?  I asked.

    She has been sleeping between us every night for the last four years, he
replied, his hands still at last, clasped furtively on his lap.
---

[The counseling center] is lit only by tubelight, which gives the faces
across my desk, muscles straining with anxiety, a faintly bilious green
pallor.

The first few weeks I worked there, I missed windows.  I would rush up the
stairs every hour and stand at the top, watching the snarling, smoke-spitting
traffic, taking deep breaths.  ... [Finally] I got my younger daughter to
draw me one of her bright, garish pictures; an open window, orangey sunlight
pouring in.  I no longer remember if I looked at it often then, but I cannot
imagine my corner now without the faded crayon-window.

[A girl medical student comes to the center.  Even in her 5th year of MBBS,
she cannot stand the sight of blood. ] "She [her mother] loves me deeply.
She pours fresh cold water on my head while I sit on the stool in the
bathroom, stark naked, on the third day of every month.  Even if I am still
bleeding, she bathes me like a baby.  Not even my stale blood may contaminate
her.... She washes my white coat herself, though it is not blood-spattered,
every single night. "

[Killing a mosquito inside her mother's mosquito net] I hit it the
instant I see it, sitting black and stupid on the inside of the net, as
if it has the right to live, sit, dream, after gorging itself on an hour
of whining.  It leaves behind a small blotch of brownish-red, stale blood
on the white net. 79