Through a glass, gently

In this assured debut, Sonal Kohli directs our gaze at seemingly commonplace lives while making us aware of the complexities such lives hold.

It’s a quiet gaze that is turned on in the tales in The House Next To The Factory. This book of short stories is author Sonal Kohli’s debut and is an assured one at that.

Set in Delhi, spanning timelines between 1980 and 2010, the stories are interlinked, with some characters in one story making their appearance in others. Curiously, the house and the factory of the title do play a part but not in any impactful way.

The strength of this book lies in its characters, ordinary people living commonplace lives, their concerns having to do with making a life and a living. Caste and class do rear their heads but the complexities of these issues are dealt with in a manner quite in keeping with the overall subtle tone of the book. They do impact the way life pans out for some of the people in the stories but everything happens in a measured, somewhat melancholic, way.

Suffused with loss

The lives of others as observed here, are suffused with loss, sometimes immediate, at other times, impending. The drama in these stories plays out in a minor key throughout, simply because the characters in the stories are not allowed to become larger than life. Accordingly, the unexpected events, the losses or the sadness that occur in their lives, are all portrayed as ripples in the fabric of their existence. People go about their lives ignorant of and oblivious to the loss and pain that lies around the corner, and they seem to have been imbued with the necessary stoicism to carry on regardless.

The author uses a narrative device to interesting effect. Information is withheld from some of the protagonists in a few of the stories; the reader who is privy to this information, though, is aware of how this information will affect a life or a relationship, and this brings a sense of poignancy to their tales.

Kohli delineates the various characters that people the book, using deft strokes. A servant making his plans for a quick grab at happiness, ignorant of the fact that a future has already been decided for him. A brother who regards his sibling in a more cautious light due to a piece of information he has recently gleaned. A woman who cannot bring herself to tell a grieving friend news that will upset her more. One of the characters makes her appearance in more than one story; she appears as a little girl in the first story and in the last tale, she is a grown woman, navigating her way through a foreign city while trying to make sense of her life.

Between timelines

Class and caste are woven in unobtrusively but very much present. There’s a male house-help who starts an affair with a sweeper whilst remaining very conscious of her caste and not wanting to be seen leaving her house. There’s an imperious old woman who thinks nothing of rudely telling a humble tuition teacher that he has forgotten to flush the WC. There’s a woman who tires of her friend whose life has taken a different trajectory to hers and is now struggling. The different strata that these people belong to breeds inequality, which then subtly or otherwise dictates how they behave.

We encounter the characters at a particular juncture in their lives but there is no overall drama or urgency playing out in these stories. Even a major political event occurs on the sidelines. Sometimes, when the story alternates between two timelines, we watch the characters at different stages of their lives and get a sense of how their stories will unspool. However, there is one risk with this muted style of storytelling: we do not get too involved with these characters, these lives. We observe but do we really care?

There is a nice attention to detail spanning roadside food, its flavours and colours, the songs of Farida Khanum, the way the weather turns in a hill station, all of it adding texture.

This helps because the stories are more character-driven than plot-driven. Though the writing style is spare, it is evocative. The flip side, as mentioned before, is that the stillness and the melancholia that permeates the stories can engender a sense of detachment on the part of the reader.

Ultimately though, Kohli’s triumph as a writer is in who her stories are about — the common people. You get a fine sense of who these people are, what their world is about. In choosing to direct our gaze at these seemingly commonplace lives, she makes us aware of the nuances and complexities such lives hold. That alone makes the book worth a read.