With a deft pen, Shuma Raha’s book trawls our age with 13 short stories. You will find rumours that end in calamity; or a girl, who is demonised because of those who find her horoscope ‘evil’; or an old man who preys on young girls; or a train journey that forces a woman to look at her marriage afresh; there’s the humdrum life of a salesgirl in a shopping complex and a lonely child struggling to come to grips with the dark forces of city life.
Juxtaposing love and betrayal, dogma versus superstition; sexuality with unrequited desires, all the characters spring from the emerging new India. An India where snooty noses accompany the rat race going hand in hand with class and religious conflicts.
Raha’s stories are polaroid images of our times. They remind the reader of the chaotic stress that has crept quietly into our humdrum lives. On occasion she is darker than dark, or funny if not satirical.
Take her story ‘Daddy is Home’. It’s as ordinary as a drive from the airport through the water-logged roads of the capital. It’s the world as seen through the senses of seven-year-old Charu, whose proper name is Charusudan Ramakrishnan and his father, who has been working on a power project in Andhra Pradesh, and is coming home.
The drive from the airport is atypical of Delhi’s traffic snarls—sputtering and choking—‘the cars were back to back, inches away from each other, imprisoned in their collective urban memory’. Nerves begin to fray; the adults argue raucously with each passing minute. ‘And here was the jam closing in from all sides. He remembered that scene in Jurassic Park where the boy and the girl are trapped inside the overturned car.’ A reasonable read.