The short story as a form has immense possibilities. For that very reason it can also fail with equal alacrity. A collection of short stories has to it the danger of walking across a tightrope. Even the most expert acrobat is known to slip and fall.
Passion Flower: Seven Stories of Derangement—An intriguing enough title, and the author is Cyrus Mistry, whose prowess as a writer is under no question. And yet, the collection failed to excite me. Very often, not all the stories in a collection work. A certain choppiness is expected and it is easy enough to overlook the weaker stories if there are strong ones to balance it out. Unfortunately this book, a slim collection to begin with, is hallmarked by an overall inability to leap off the page and slam you in the chest.
Each one of the seven stories inhabits an insular world of its own. There is no overlap of thought or plot except perhaps in stories titled Percy and Bokha where domineering mothers domineer. Each one of the seven stories is built around a central character. There is Percy: mama’s boy, music aficionado and ballroom dancer in secret, dreaming of reprieve from his life of quiet desperation. There is Preeti whose maternal instinct fails to kick in. There is the paranoid cook Jacintha. There is Ashuthosh and Prashant, old school mates, but whose dynamics are striated with undercurrents of one-upmanship. There is the old couple Fardoonji and Sheramai living with a secret tragedy and yet unable to seek solace in each other. There is Mahendroo, obsessed by his search for an elusive species of Passiflora and there is Bokha, caught between his tyrant old mother and his love for a young woman who is not fully right in her head.
At the end of a collection of short stories, one hopes at least a few characters would linger on in one’s mind. Passion Flower certainly has three such characters and for that very reason the stories that worked best for me were the ones with the Parsi characters. Cyrus Mistry is at his best as he takes us into the homes and lives of these characters. The three men Percy, Fardoonji and Bokha have complexities which are strangely missing in the female characters. In fact there is a cardboard villainy to the women. They are all either domineering women who bully their sons or husbands [Banubai, Sheramai and Khorshedmai] or are delusional [Preeti and Jacintha].
Herein lies the problem. The book reads more like character sketches rather than short stories. An absence of highs and lows keeps the book in a middle ground allowing it to neither fly nor fall.
There are flashes of brilliance: “When he danced, magnificent in his father’s suits, Percy did not dance in the brief circumference of open space bounded by the beds, the sofa and front door. He danced in a vast, resplendent ballroom on tiles of marble, and moved with the grace and lilt of romance. In his arms, he held his wife, his first love, a fair and elegant beauty with a small nose and a dimpled chin.”
A short story needn’t have a regulated beginning, middle and end. Even a fragment of a life can work well enough. However what makes a short story memorable is the texturing; of how characters and situations meld to suggest something beyond what is written. Eventually this is the reason why one remembers a book.
A handsome-looking book, Passion Flower hints at what could have been, but instead only delivers a curiously bloodless telling.