Gooday Nagar | A nowhere town and half-told tales

This book catches the eye for three reasons. The cover by Harshad Marathe is dreamlike and nostalgia-inducing. It’s a book of short stories, though a common enough object for readers of a pre-mercenary publication world; it is only now that entire formats are subject to gatekeeping.

The author Maithreyi Karnoor is building a reputation. So Gooday Nagar has much in its favour. “The town was yet to be called Gooday Nagar. It was a time when the landscape of the hopes and dreams of the townspeople was just farmland. Their senses weren’t dulled by the onslaught of new things. And life was innocently oblivious to a future where it would be labelled charming in hindsight. The town took itself as seriously as it always did.” Compact, it holds 10 short stories connected rather tenuously, for it is supposedly set in this location. The cast of characters is rather bewildering: from the self-important to the pitiable, the philandering, the almost holy, and those good old stock characters, and not to forget, an assortment of drunks. They may pass for a healthy mix that somehow floats in and out of a town like a bad play.

“People mind businesses — their own and that of others. They believe in moving on and about, and are resolute in their ability to unmind heaps of rubbish. The voices are shrill, quick and jagged. To be heard over the din of trains, and each other, is an important instinctual development, and anyone who joins the milieu gains it.” Combined, these stand for a people unique in their need for attention, resolute in their sorrows and joys, and going on to the next day despite it all.

While ‘Return of the Salesman’ leaves the reader underwhelmed, ‘The Bachelor of Artsy Fartsy’, after much meandering and lots of faff about his art, returns to his village, where labour is cheap. ‘Uncity’ is uncertain, with three mini-stories and a final, ambitious lapse into verse. When little Rani in ‘Mapmaker, Mapmaker, Make me a Map’ is less than 12, her school teaches her O Henry’s ‘The Gift of the Magi’, which taxes the imagination. Although Rani is delightful, she is secretly overjoyed with her vitiligo and spends hours every night tracing its progress. “The vitiligo’s changing contours were like secret messages from a big-hearted sender with a mischievous smile who watched over her. The patches resembled land masses, contrasting with the water: peninsula, gulf, lakes, and isthmuses that slowly disintegrated and stretched until islands broke away and turned into an archipelago.” None of the stories outshines the others. And in all of them, you find the story arc somewhat incomplete, perhaps by design, leaving the reader hanging.

What is admirable here is that it’s a post-Covid offering that treats Covid like reality: without hysteria and without diminishing its power. Not as a central event or character, but as something that swept through all lives, leaving none untouched. For the boy who adopts a monkey, and his mother, it was a harrowing time with people dying, which they survived by the skin of their teeth. Whereas, to Motya, the village drunk, it is the time to be creative and brew his own alcohol. Typos creep into all works, and here they singe. “Once, he loaded the canon (sic) and set the fuse on, but it wouldn’t fire.” And again later: “I was so scared I confused break (sic) and accelerator.”

When we try to define Gooday Nagar, if only as an idea, we find we can’t. Sometimes it is a tiny town that was a precursor to larger towns, barely half a decade removed from farmlands. Sometimes it is just a bus ride away from the village, as with our play-obsessed Jayesh. It is all kinds of places in between, where sows are reared, and husbands run away to cities with their protégés. There are also posh locations with swimming pools where the Bobbies reside, and the reader is left wondering, holding an assortment of clues, but none add up.

For it is neither conceptual nor solid, imaginary nor rooted in fact. It does not cohere into a contiguous notional location either. In trying to be everything, it is nothing. Gooday Nagar does not, as it may have, stand for the idea of a microstate. Instead, like its prose, characters and its stories, it is stranded midway.