The American writer Flannery O’Connor said: So many can now write competent short stories that the short story is in danger of dying of competency. O’Connor herself has been dead for 50 years and the short story has undergone multiple incarnations. It no longer ticks off the usual boxes: brevity, focus, unity of purpose, one-sit read, etc. Rather it is a definition-defying genre that, in recent times, has run the gamut from micro-fiction to interconnected stories.
In the latter category falls Meera Godbole-Krishnamurthy’s Gardens of Love: Stories of a Marriage. It’s hard to say whether this is a collection of short stories or a new kind of novella. It has—in some measure—the basic ingredients: characters, conflicts, obstacles, resolution. What marks it as different are the reams of detailed descriptions of famous gardens. The page usually called ‘Contents’ bears the heading ‘Itinerary’, perhaps to give the reader a clue as to the real nature of the work—a guidebook.
The four stories are set in famous parks. The four protagonists—unnamed, save one, because names don’t matter—are referred to as he and she, and his father and her mother. Thus, in the first story, titled ‘He Said-She Said’, he and she take a walk through the historic Lodi Gardens of New Delhi. While musing over the complexities of landscaped gardens, they also discuss, elliptically, the state of their crumbling marriage.
‘The palm trees are so perfectly lined. You can almost see the vanishing point,’ he exclaimed.
‘I see a wall,’ she said.
‘Look at those grey tree trunks, so tall and proud.’
‘I see a road beyond the periphery wall,’ she said.
‘Listen to the birds,’ he cried.
‘I hear the sound of traffic,’ she said.
This walk ends, but not their story. It takes three more rambles to unfold. He muses about life and marriage with his dad in the Forum Romanum, Rome; then she does the same, with her mum in Central Park, New York. Finally he and she end up walking together through the Hanging Gardens of Mumbai. The drama of their personal lives plays out, predictably; if there is a point that the stories make, it is that marriages, like gardens, require commitment and care. While this may not count as an epiphany, the reader discovers a lot about public gardens.
Illustrated by the author, an architect herself, the work has 70 pen and ink drawings. True to the saying that ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’, they bring alive the remarkable features of the gardens: domes, arches, turrets, bridges, trees, walls, statuary and even butterflies. They are, in fact, the book’s saving grace.
Gardens of Love:
Stories of a Marriage
By: Meera Godbole-Krishnamurthy
Publisher: Speaking Tiger
Price: `399; Pages: 176