JOIN USLost Men
Rajorshi Chakraborti
Hachette
2013, pp 246
350
Rajorshi Chakraborti, well known for his much-acclaimed debut novel Or the Day Seizes You, has always impressed his readers with his deliberate choice of departing from the usual tropes that one comes across in Indian writing in English.
His interest in delving into the uncommon and untravelled zones can be noticed in his novels Derangements and Balloonists. With Lost Men, Chakraborti steps in as a short story writer for the first time, with stories about men lost in different ways, “some in the wake of crisis, others on the verge of major discovery.” The collection of nine stories and a novella are candid snapshots of people in situations, which anyone may come across, presented by the author with turns of events which make them extraordinary.
As the readers plunge into Chakraborti’s world of fictional narratives, they are initially deceived by the commonplace world created by the author — a chance missed, a journey undertaken, a loved one lost, a choice decided, a secret withheld — but are soon able to fathom the depth of the deceptively light prose.
Chakraborti ought to be appreciated for his capability of taking the commonplace and creating intriguing and thoughtful stories. The multi-layered tales, mostly of desolation, grief and love are weaved with such uncommon twists and turns that the reader cannot help but sympathise with the ‘lost men’. Even though all the stories are presented in the most poignant way, Knock Knock, A Good Boy and Viju’s Version particularly stand out.
The introductory story Knock Knock is well-chosen to set the mood of this collection. Mystifying in its essence, the story seems to be a hallucinatory tale of a couple who go shopping to a mall and meet a bank agent who is in some strange hurry to obtain their signatures.
Chakraborti’s expertise in creating an aura of mystery till the end is noticed in Mona’s unexplained nervousness, her insistence to her husband that they meet the agent, her apparent sympathy with the man, the cool demeanour of the agent in his unexplained attack on Mona’s husband... This fast moving story literally makes readers gasp for breath till the very end.
Lost Men refreshes our memory of Niladri (in Or the Day Seizes You) and Dev (in Balloonists) and it seems Chakraborti loves to present us with vignettes about lives that have spun into disorder. Viju’s Version — one of the best stories in the collection — narrates the mistakes of a well-meaning boy whose ill-fate leads him to bring public humiliation to his school and later on get entangled with Maoists.
Men who cannot take the course of life in their own hands abound in this collection — in The Last Time I Tried to Leave Home, a young man is fated to miss his flight to a journey which would have changed his life; whereas The Third Beside Us presents the story of a boy caught in a nightmarish cricket match.
Chakraborti’s protagonists seem to be lost in a world which does not offer them any opportunities. Caught in the web of a confused sense of time and space, they drift backward to their past in an attempt to understand the present. A man (in City Lights) suddenly meets his old family doctor who revives his past and, shortly afterwards, finds himself in a locality strangely familiar to his childhood memories attached to a friend.
The first person narration, strings of carefully drawn images, the narrator’s justifications and the might-have-beens have almost become Chakraborti’s trademark style. Layered with dark humour, the stories in this collection are intense portrayals of uncontrollable situations. A consistently lucid prose and abrupt endings in cartain stories seem to mark the author’s signature style in this collection.
The stories demand a reader’s complete concentration (though my attention drifted particularly while reading the novella; I had to read and re-read passages). Once the bond is achieved with the author’s universe, the book is quite hard to leave behind unread.