Palash Krishna Mehrotra’s Eunuch Park, is his first collection of short stories. They are set mainly in Delhi, a city he worked in for Tehelka.com in its days of notoriety. Earlier, he had studied at Balliol College, Oxford, and before that, St Stephen’s College in New Delhi. He is the son of the well-known Indo-Anglian poet, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra.
The stories in this collection are lean, energetic and louche. They are mainly about low-lifes, marginalised, with scarcely a chance of making good, the odds being so heavily stacked against them. The narrative voice is often in the first person, though not always. He manages to create a sense of urgency about his characters and their damaged lives. However this feeling is short-lived; one loses the characters and their twilight worlds soon after reading the stories.
Why does this happen? Is it because the keen eye for detail, the considerable powers of
description, the lessons in the craft of storytelling learnt early from a study of disparate masters is not enough to generate genuine emotion? From these questions arises another question, namely, how does one create genuine emotion in literature or, for that matter, in the arts? Is it a matter of temperament? Or a judicious mix of temperament, opportunity and socio-political awareness? It is difficult to tell. But that these elements, in various combinations, at a given point in time enrich an artiste is generally acknowledged to be true.
Palash’s language is American underground hip from the late 1950s and early 60s. It is clear he has read his Jack Kerouac and his Alan Ginsberg. All credit to him. He has imbibed their ability to shock with a turn of phrase or even a word. It is true that four-letter words in Indian fiction writing in English is old hat but its usage is generally staid and therefore unimaginative. He knows how to startle the reader.
Sometimes the unintended ironies move you, for instance, in the story of a techie rapidly going downhill, “The Wrist” as the washed up Ravi reaches the end of his rope, decides to call his mother who he wanted to get in touch with all along.
This tale has a certain poignance about it. As if the author has, however unintentionally, managed to reflect the plight of many, many techies who find themselves without a job, thanks to the global recession and the cutback on outsourcing of jobs.
“The Farewell”, is another story that is oddly touching. It is told in the first person and is about small town mores in the Northern India of the 1990s.Boys and girls from an English medium school gather for a farewell party on their way out of high school, which turns violent. The tale unfolds in small film-like flashbacks to reveal the complexes youngsters, mainly male, suffer from, including lack of sexual adequacy and confidence to face the world. The belief that “Every woman except my mother is a whore” is reflected in the end by the narrator’s old classmate Gaurav Arora, who is making the most of what he calls, “My courtship period” by leading another girl up the garden path while waiting to marry a girl chosen by his aunt. The writer is on familiar ground, the story is set in his home town, Allahabad, and he knows the people who feature in his story rather well.
The same cannot be said about other stories. “Okhla Basti”, the longest story in the collection, has deft descriptions of mileu, of people’s bodies and their desires, but in the end does not amount to anything. It is stylishly written but the lifeblood is missing.
Like most writers writing in English and other European languages, Palash too is unable to avoid the influence of the cinema. His stories have clever displacements of time, which is the main reason for the existence of both the cinema and, of course, music. Progression of time in contemporary cinema and literature seems to be choppy rather than fluid, akin to its treatment in TV. The stories in this volume move very quickly in time though not necessarily smoothly. They usually are dazzling but rarely moving.
It would only be fair to attribute to his relative youth, he is certainly young in literary terms, this strong desire to dazzle or startle the reader. One would have to be very rude to tell him how to write and what to write. It would have been nice, however, if there was more oxygen in the stories. Leaving the reader gasping isn’t a literary virtue, or is it?