Long story, short

Doppelganger is an endearing, heartwarming collection of short stories by Madhavi S Mahadevan, woven around the titled theme of the alter ego, or the “double” in the other. The characters do not plumb issues too deeply, yet the author takes the reader down to do them to some extent.

Wafer-thin surfaces are peeled away to reveal what lies underneath — seething, happy, sad, insecure, smouldering, bewildered characters… a number of miscellaneous people who seem to have wandered into the book.
The narratives appear closer to comedies of manners, or domestic dramas of sorts. They stick to Victorian-style, everyday lives. There are 18 stories, mostly about urban, middle or upper class people. Some of them have floated up from the lower strata, or rural areas. There is no sociological exploration, only psychological and attitudinal studies.

Hence, the stream of stories is a gallery of the kind of people you run into in life’s parade. Successful businessmen, failed wannabes, aspirants, housewives or hopeless people in the middle of nowhere — all the stories have certain set themes that weave the threads together. People in love, rejects from affairs, simple husbands, smart wives, scheming adulteresses, cunning game-changers, cougar relationships, self-centred children, neglected parents…

The families are breaking or expanding, splintering and dividing in a world that has changed its counters and personality. There are characters who are struggling to hold on to their identities.

The author gives some plots a few twists and intersecting points that reveal their complications. The first story, ‘Doppelganger’, is about two friends who share similarities in names, but play the foil to each other. One of them is diligent, successful and ambitious, but is seething with loneliness and a sense of failure inside, while the other is laid-back and unable to taste the success he longs for.

Some tales show characters caught in some suddenly complex twists of life, with unusual plotlines. Hence, ‘Begum Sahiba’ is about an upwardly mobile woman who fools a lot of people by taking on the aspirations of a rich lady. Her story is woven by different characters who comment on her, which make her an immensely interesting façade, but never captures her point of view.

A ghost story called ‘Chloe’ merges the divergent worlds of reality and imagination. ‘One Last Song’ sings about a wife with a migraine attack, pitted against her dumb and dense husband. ‘Faultlines’ is a tragic quadrangle of cross-wired lovers, who haven’t patched up in spite of the passage of time. ‘Love Notes’ is about the descendant of an unfortunate woman, who shows some similarity with her ancestral legacy.

All the characters are caught in the web of complicated problems. They are musing, reflecting, remembering or coming to conclusions about relationships. Some of them are dense and unable to grasp the realities of life, while others are able to empathise and feel.

What makes the tales memorable is that the thoughtfulness about facets of life are not really unusual or extraordinary, but seem like out-of-the-ordinary musings. “I feel sad for us, our tired, outworn selves. At the same time, I feel, strangely, relieved…In the warmth of that light the past suddenly seems very distant.”

The language is simultaneously simple yet rich in metaphors. Sometimes, the descriptions seem almost staccato. Yet the prose flows, capturing the rhythms and idioms of routine sights, smells and sounds, as well as interpretations.

Most of the tales swim on the gossamer surface of life. They seem to mirror the reality of the public tableaux, in which the subjects just lick the surface and then move away, though they suddenly show some flashes of deep insight. They give the impression of a slight breeze that ripples over a smooth glass of water with a slight shimmer and stirs up some currents under the surface, but does not change the superstructure in a major way.

For instance: “All of us emerge from the same alphabet soup, but our nakedness cannot remain uncovered. So we clothe ourselves in different names: chaste/unchaste; wife/whore; licit/illicit. How else can distinctions be made? Words are how we map ourselves, yet words are treacherous.

Love makes a child, while forbidden love begets a love child…” The tales hence weave gentle, fragile, will-o’-the-wisps that rock and float gently, but reveal some shining nuggets of secret relationships.