37 Bridges and Other Stories
Aamer Hussein
Harper Collins
2015, pp 180, Rs 350
The 13 stories of Aamer Hussein’s 37 Bridges and Other Stories explore a variety of human emotions, ranging from romance and displacement, loss, nostalgia. Some of these stories are translated from the original Urdu, some are interspersed with photographs, and some use a variety of literary narratives from first to second to third person to reveal the lives and foibles of their characters.
The first story, ‘The Man Who Stood Still’, is a tale of loneliness and companionship, ‘Two Old Friends on a Stormy Afternoon’ has at its core two friends catching up on various issues, reminiscing about the world and its state of affairs, ‘Singapore Jay’ is about a boy’s experiences in a school in the mountains. ‘Love and the Seasons’ focuses on young college student Umair’s friendships, his trysts and his love for music. ‘Ahmar and Anbara’ is fairytale-like in its approach, with a prince and princess and a soft romance. The two characters from ‘Nine Postcards and Nine Notes’ travel together and seem to experience the same things, but in different ways.
The painter in ‘The Tree at the Limit’ has her life story told through miniatures and their symbolism, ‘The Man from Beni Mora’ mixes the fantasy of a television serial and one man’s own reflections and memories while he watches it. There is another fairytale interwoven into ‘The Swan’s Wife’, where a romance that is not really a romance is explored. A lot of promises to make biryani and deliver it on time are broken in ‘The Entrepreneurs’. Subtle undercurrents of political strife and displacement mark both ‘Knotted Tongue 1’ and ‘Knotted Tongue 2’.
The final story, ‘37 Bridges’, draws inspiration from Paris and its many bridges, and a sense of homelessness and dislocation that the characters face.
Each of the tales in 37 Bridges and Other Stories has an odd cast of characters, many of them on roads to discover, or rediscover, what they have lost, mostly in Europe, amongst its people, trying to fit in, but never really doing so. The problem is not so much in the book’s exploration of the theme, but rather in its execution of it. The stories are quirky, unusual, and utterly confusing.
The narration weaves in and out in a jerky, stilted manner that is almost pretentious. Perhaps some of the stories suffer in translation as they were originally written in Urdu. It is difficult to sympathise with or even identify with the characters of these tales, with their jaded ruminations and incoherent thoughts. There is a good mix of characters in 37 Bridges and Other Stories and each of them comes across as rambling and sometimes bigoted individuals who have no idea if they are coming or going. Most of them speak in an odd, stylised prose.
There are too many gaps in the stories, especially between subsections, and, apparently, too much symbolism. Where the narration switches its point of view, there are allusions to history and poetry, a medley of other things that make it hard to comprehend what these characters actually feel.
As a result, the stories appear disjointed and peter off into vague and unconvincing endings — many of those are bridges to nowhere. An underlying sense of cynicism also mark these stories, and they do not, unfortunately, give any inkling as to what is being presented in the tales themselves.
37 Bridges and Other Stories does have some melody in its prose, and some sections, those in ‘The Swan’s Wife’ for example, are inherently poetic. The blurb declares that the book blends “…modern art with soap opera, traditional tales with contemporary realities…” That could be true, if only these tales had more clarity. If only the writing was more lucid and less inclined towards ‘intellectualism’, the book may have made for better and more enjoyable reading.