The Orphanage for Words
Shinie Antony
Rupa
2015, pp 188, Rs 250
There are times when one comes across a book that strikes one numb for a while and makes you want to walk out for some fresh air, take a deep breath and come back to meet life, healed and trusting. Shine Antony’s recent collection of stories, enigmatically titled The Orphanage for Words, clasps you tight in a lethal embrace of traumatic intimacies, intensely desired breakups, accidental encounters, and bizarre loyalties.
Surely, those who are familiar with her earlier work would be thrilled to savour once again the spirited irreverent strokes, the merciless play of irony, that relentless voice, that blunt tenor relishing in understatements and self disparaging snigger. But they might not be quite ready for this meditative leap into pensive philosophical dwellings on the interplay between words and human selves. Because, as deadly as the lure of human emotions are the lairs of words trapping within them incomplete universes of their own.
Shinie revisits the familiar dark terrain of domestic theatre in the contemporary urban idiom, and offers a fascinating palette. A rich buffet of emotions. A dizzying trapeze act from startlingly novel perspectives at once riveting, eerie and uncanny. It throws you often out of your narrative comfort zones and you come up panting for air only to be sucked into yet another swirling eddy which merrily lets you flail your arms about. These stories breathe from the frayed edges of life which we sadly stopped caring for some time ago. But after reading ‘A Talk’, you cannot meet the news of an accident without a knife twisting your insides. The effect is visceral as the dead child’s voice describes her own death after she is hit by a car “I saw my shoes walk the sky”. Nor can ‘Dolls’ leave you smiling in a kindergarten mood. Ordinary life and taken for granted moments assume an unnervingly menacing life and mind of their own.
The taste of the tale is in its telling. And it follows the movements of the female will wanting to be caught in a net of absurdities. There is that woman whose sole ambition is to be happy, making a brilliant expose of the vacuity of happiness. Sometimes sorrows, joys and tensions are hung out to dry and you wince as all the colours bleed white. We move through parallel worlds we invent to make a life livable. It is not the big picture at all that interests the author, but the miniature spaces and moments where we gather our splintered selves together to form a whole, only to crumble once again into funnier, more pitiful shapes. That shared cup of coffee after office, a trip to see an old lover whose memory plays hide and seek, a woman out of touch with her body, a body remembering a thousand wounds and insults — a new vocabulary unspools itself.
Shinie prises open the innards of words. There are posthumous voices tantalising us with the could-have-beens revealing the gothic in everyday. There is the surreal journey of a frock, which is a colourful monstrosity but with a soul of its own. Shinie invests every single creation with a consciousness and capacity to feel hurt so much so that many a story just overwhelms you with the enormity of it all. Enormity of existence, enormity of even the silliest of choices in life. And there are emotions which refuse to subside into nothingness, refuse to be at the beck and call of rules of logic. So a wife is just not able to forget her dead husband and leaves every door and window open to let him in at night after her present husband has slept. Some have pleasantly tumbled over into the other side of sanity and the yellow wall paper’s legacy moves on in Shinie’s imagination exploring the manic topography of female life today. ‘Breasts’ leaves you disturbed as it oscillates between a language honed for sex goddesses and the medical terminology of enervating cancer. The perfectible body peddled through our daily intake of image industry breaks down pathetically, as the pen cuts through the fluff of cosmetics and fashion into the smell of hospitals, medicines, radiation and artificial limbs.
‘Hard longing’ is balanced by a hilarious poverty of feeling. A mirthless laughter rumbles in the background as “silence clicks like a gun”. Shinie goes behind surfaces to recover the pathos at the bottom of all that vehemence and violence. The art of storytelling and the possibilities of short fiction are mined in innumerable ways and the power of imagination holds you under its spell and reaffirms your faith in this primordial art to revitalise our dried up springs of sympathy. Children are the unacknowledged custodians of unwanted emotions and words. Who else would say to a dead dog in the neighbourhood ‘Sleep on Browny’ or apologise to a doll?
And words are at the centre of it all. The best part is the last, the rumination on words which drift away from us as certain worlds disappear. And we teeter at the edges of a philosophic pause between the word and the world. “Nothing more ear-splitting than a dying word. Listen.”
(Published 25 July 2015, 15:51 IST)