A string of intimate moments
Situations and societies demand chronicling in stories — stories of the here and now, of why and how.
Being a woman, being an Indian, and sometimes being an Indian woman, some stories are more interesting than others and that is where Alka Saraogi’s The Tale Retold comes in. Here is a slim volume of short stories that keeps in mind milieu and the moment, not sacrificing minute detail for grand denouements. These are extraordinary moments in the lives of ordinary men, ordinary women.
None of Saraogi’s characters stand still though they may appear to do so in real life; they come from all walks of life and are camouflaged with their very commonness. But scratch the surface and they are all drama and drum-rolls, humming off-key folksongs set to modern music. The simplicity of prose and narration, of language and grammar — no doubt retained by Vandana R Singh’s translation — only enhance the tales.
Saraogi, who writes in Hindi and has won the Sahitya Akademi Award for Kalikatha: Via Bypass, effortlessly creates the desi aspects and carries them forward in the ambience of microcosm realism. She also limits herself to this relentless truth-seeking route in preference to any other, not experimenting with the telling or settings, but focused completely on inner shatterings and their confused outward twitching.
The author has tried her best to maintain a distance from her characters, only delving into their circumstances, sometimes with the clinical coldness of a stethoscope, sometimes with an airiness bordering on unconcern. She allows, instead, inanimate objects to verablise atmosphere. In ‘Coming Home’, a woman enters her ancestral home. “Entering the old, dilapidated house after what seemed like ages, she felt her heartbeat quicken. It was as if the house stared at her with its old, deadened eyes — much like Dadi did the final time, as if she still had something to say.”
The mother of a ‘special’ child marks her milestones against his, bossy old women yell, a career woman asks the principal of her child’s school why she can’t have a life and a mother changes her lifestyle to circumvent obscene graffiti.
The middle-age, the middle class, people caught in midlife crises, all come up in these tales. This is best exemplified by ‘The Odd Man’, who is neither master nor slave of a house and laughs apparently for no reason. He eats with everyone else but clears the table and washes the dishes as if paid to do so. But why does he laugh? Saraogi hints at personal loss, some derangement that wreaked havoc with his emotional wellbeing long ago so that now — through these pages — he puzzles with his endless mirth.
In ‘The Woman In The Fortress’, Saraogi chillingly quotes from Raghuvir Sahai’s ‘Kile Mein Aurat’: “In the next ten minutes, one by one, the woman took off all her clothes. As she removed the final piece of clothing, her underwear, all the scintillating lights went off. She stood naked in the hazy darkness. Where is she from, I asked. Gonda, Basti, Begusarai, Ara, Chhapra, Ranchi? It was impossible to know. She was so naked.”
And that is the truth of Saraogi’s style also. Her words come out of some deep human well so that it is impossible to trace them back to a country, a state, an order of things. They come from everywhere and echo the starkness of dull lives and their tragic implosions.
