The maiden ventures of Grey Oak publishing, a joint venture with Westland Books, are a worthy if slightly uneven effort to bring new writers into limelight and breathe life into the short story genre. Western publishers’ allergy to this form has always been a mystery. Urban Shots: Crossroads and Urban Shots: Bright Lights show that at least some Indian publishers are farsighted enough to give the short story a chance. Certainly, the best of these stories will leave you shocked and shaken. Jump, Didi, in Crossroads, is one such. Others are smart and clever with twists of just the right piquancy floating at the bottom of their tall, frosted glasses, like Mervin, Baba Premanand’s Yoga Class, or The Last Week, riffing on established Indish (my portmanteau word for the cumbersome term ‘Indian writing in English’) fiction conventions.
Among the second rank of stories, some almost make it but don’t quite: Getting Off a Virar Fast at Borivali tries an urban slice-of-life but lacks the right pace and punch. Plummet suffers from a serious plot flaw. She Got Off Easy attempts a social conscience-type story, but is too anecdotal and flat to impress. Virtual Reality has a strong premise but is told too flabbily to keep the suspense going: most of it is told in passive descriptions, and sounds more like a plot outline than a flesh-and-blood story. But these are common rookie mistakes.
All in all, the editors do a good job of shepherding their little flock into print, and there are only one or two that really disappoint. Rohini Kejriwal’s Foreword can and should be skipped, and her Categories fails to put flesh on its predictable bones.
I wonder what the publishing logic is for bringing out another volume hard on the heels of the first. It probably makes sense as people tend to be more willing to buy two books rather than one, and two thin volumes at Rs 199 each are easier to sell than a fat one at Rs 398.
But Bright Lights tends to feel like the B-list, and contains a couple of stinkers, one of them sadly by the former editor. It’s a bit unfortunate, then, that a gem, Salil Chaturvedi’s Window Seat, is squirrelled away in the back of the volume. It would have been better if the editor had been sterner about inclusion and held back till a good collection had been assembled: Bright Lights has more ballast than Crossroads and, though shorter by pages, will seem longer. But then, it’s the dream of every publisher to have an orderly series marching along a shelf, like neat little soldiers.
The collections are good time-pass, to use the idiom of urban India, and some of the stories show real promise. We desperately need a venue for short fiction, and in the absence of good literary magazines, these collections are the next best thing. It makes sense in our busy world to have books of bite-sized fiction, to be read while stuck in airports or waiting for the rajma to boil. Overall, they live up to their promise. One or two stories will annoy you, but they will not take up more than a few minutes of your time, and are worth it for the company they keep. Certainly they have convinced me it will be worth our while to look out for more offerings from Grey Oak. They could be a solid launchpad for new writers, and will edify and entertain readers in the process. For a publishing house that is barely off the ground, these are a very promising beginning.