<p>The realisation that a story can be unfinished and yet be as rewarding to read as any technically complete story dawned on me not many years ago. Often, I’ve witnessed this joy while reading short stories and micro-fiction. Of late, however, a few novels, though so complete in themselves, appear to celebrate this unfinishedness in storytelling. Namrata Poddar’s Border Less: A Novel and Teen Couple Have Fun Outdoors by Aravind Jayan come to mind.</p>.<p>Buku Sarkar’s debut novel Not Quite A Disaster After All belongs to this cohort. Recipient of the 2021 Andrew Nelson Lytle Award for the Best Short Story, Sarkar is a well-known photographer too. Her photobook Photowali Didi was published last year. With this novel, she’s merely continuing what she has done previously with a camera — capturing the everyday in a manner that only an observer as astute as she could.</p>.<p>Divided into six chapters, the novel can fool you into believing it is one as it appears to be mostly a collection of interlinked short stories. It begins with the description of a rich household and afternoons — which, to me, is a monstrous time of the day and even scarier than the dark. If one pays attention to the quietness and deliberate slowness of the afternoons, one will realise how harrowing they can be. At such a time, when this house’s inhabitants are “breathing into their grief”, a terrible thing happens.</p>.<p>Sarkar should be lauded to capture it the way she does. She writes, “I could sense the pressure of Ganesh’s grip and his touch, even though light. What I felt was no longer a tickle — pleasant yet dangerous — which, like my loneliness, I couldn’t describe. But while my loneliness was entrenched in the absence of something, this was real —something airy, something feathery, yet compressed with things I understood in a heartbeat.”</p>.<p>Be it the possessiveness and the naturalness of desire, evil, love, and hatred one is witness to in the interactions between Anjali (as a child) and Dinky, or be it Anita’s motherhood and her dealing with a sort of failing marriage, there are women in this book that are trying to make sense of things by being their human, flawed, and unique versions of themselves.</p>.<p>Often, while rummaging through the text, I was reminded of what writer and journalist Joan Didion had noted about the meaninglessness of experience. Sarkar’s book is a testament to that fact.</p>.<p>Also, because Anjali is a privileged child and experiences select things first-hand, there’s an intentional critique of the elite and the powerful. Sarkar underlines how judgmental such circles can be by noting how a character “looked at [Anjali] as though she’d just said ‘prostitute’” when she expressed her desire to be a bartender. Ignorance and nonapplication of mind seem to be the two essential, membership-critical qualities to be elite. But then, these are the qualities gaining currency among a lot of people because one mirrors what one sees. And it all starts from this compromise, the farce that is a cishet marriage setup. Sarkar writes about the mindlessness of it all this way: “‘We’, ‘we’. She used to hate people who said that. As though marriage made you one. She had to learn to stop saying that now.”</p>.<p>Sarkar’s prose throughout the book is measured like the moves of a funambulist. Through her characters, mainly Anjali and Anita, whose life experiences are narrated and spread across India and the US, she deftly weaves in the urge to experience freedom — or to put it contextually, to taste if it really is freedom. Additionally, she makes one notice the startling aloneness one is bound to encounter in a variety of ways and situations. With an extra layer of quietness and female ingenuity in the storytelling, one gets a recipe for an assured debut in Not Quite a Disaster After All. However, it is fitting that nothing quite settles in this book, which remains its aching flaw. But it would’ve purposely defied its title and taken away from its promise of being as unlikely a novel as it is. It’s certainly not a disaster. It’s perhaps a portrait of all the lives almost everybody has ever lived. But better told.</p>
<p>The realisation that a story can be unfinished and yet be as rewarding to read as any technically complete story dawned on me not many years ago. Often, I’ve witnessed this joy while reading short stories and micro-fiction. Of late, however, a few novels, though so complete in themselves, appear to celebrate this unfinishedness in storytelling. Namrata Poddar’s Border Less: A Novel and Teen Couple Have Fun Outdoors by Aravind Jayan come to mind.</p>.<p>Buku Sarkar’s debut novel Not Quite A Disaster After All belongs to this cohort. Recipient of the 2021 Andrew Nelson Lytle Award for the Best Short Story, Sarkar is a well-known photographer too. Her photobook Photowali Didi was published last year. With this novel, she’s merely continuing what she has done previously with a camera — capturing the everyday in a manner that only an observer as astute as she could.</p>.<p>Divided into six chapters, the novel can fool you into believing it is one as it appears to be mostly a collection of interlinked short stories. It begins with the description of a rich household and afternoons — which, to me, is a monstrous time of the day and even scarier than the dark. If one pays attention to the quietness and deliberate slowness of the afternoons, one will realise how harrowing they can be. At such a time, when this house’s inhabitants are “breathing into their grief”, a terrible thing happens.</p>.<p>Sarkar should be lauded to capture it the way she does. She writes, “I could sense the pressure of Ganesh’s grip and his touch, even though light. What I felt was no longer a tickle — pleasant yet dangerous — which, like my loneliness, I couldn’t describe. But while my loneliness was entrenched in the absence of something, this was real —something airy, something feathery, yet compressed with things I understood in a heartbeat.”</p>.<p>Be it the possessiveness and the naturalness of desire, evil, love, and hatred one is witness to in the interactions between Anjali (as a child) and Dinky, or be it Anita’s motherhood and her dealing with a sort of failing marriage, there are women in this book that are trying to make sense of things by being their human, flawed, and unique versions of themselves.</p>.<p>Often, while rummaging through the text, I was reminded of what writer and journalist Joan Didion had noted about the meaninglessness of experience. Sarkar’s book is a testament to that fact.</p>.<p>Also, because Anjali is a privileged child and experiences select things first-hand, there’s an intentional critique of the elite and the powerful. Sarkar underlines how judgmental such circles can be by noting how a character “looked at [Anjali] as though she’d just said ‘prostitute’” when she expressed her desire to be a bartender. Ignorance and nonapplication of mind seem to be the two essential, membership-critical qualities to be elite. But then, these are the qualities gaining currency among a lot of people because one mirrors what one sees. And it all starts from this compromise, the farce that is a cishet marriage setup. Sarkar writes about the mindlessness of it all this way: “‘We’, ‘we’. She used to hate people who said that. As though marriage made you one. She had to learn to stop saying that now.”</p>.<p>Sarkar’s prose throughout the book is measured like the moves of a funambulist. Through her characters, mainly Anjali and Anita, whose life experiences are narrated and spread across India and the US, she deftly weaves in the urge to experience freedom — or to put it contextually, to taste if it really is freedom. Additionally, she makes one notice the startling aloneness one is bound to encounter in a variety of ways and situations. With an extra layer of quietness and female ingenuity in the storytelling, one gets a recipe for an assured debut in Not Quite a Disaster After All. However, it is fitting that nothing quite settles in this book, which remains its aching flaw. But it would’ve purposely defied its title and taken away from its promise of being as unlikely a novel as it is. It’s certainly not a disaster. It’s perhaps a portrait of all the lives almost everybody has ever lived. But better told.</p>