Ajeet Cour’s latest collection of stories, Life Was Here Somewhere, ironically begins with a tale, titled ‘Dead-End’. A story about survival and moving on after the loss of a loved one, it puts the spotlight on the act of confronting one’s conflicted feelings towards a person. The backdrop is the extremist movement in Punjab, where a young man is found murdered. While the police suspect militants, his mother and sister believe it’s the brothers of the girl the ‘lower caste’ victim loved. Even as the reader begins to think Cour has penned a story on caste politics and honour killing, the narrative takes a strange turn when the sister finds a wounded militant in her backyard. What follows is a series of difficult decisions ending in an unexpected outcome.
Cour’s skill as a writer lies in how she manages to bring to the surface—the hues of humanity notwithstanding—the mounds of violence underneath. The optimistic outlook perhaps stems from her own experiences, an amalgamation of which finds its way into her storytelling. Having experienced gore and compelled to leave her childhood home in Lahore during Partition, the yearning for home and the horror of death loom heavily on her words.
In ‘Black Holes’, for instance, she depicts brilliantly the anonymity of the ones who lost even as India and Pakistan gained freedom. Cour writes about a group of people fleeing in a cart in darkness towards an unnamed destination. As the narrator gives a brief yet haunting summary of what she was surrounded with, recreating the cruelty humans are capable of in desperate times, the hopeful climax of the story changes everything.
The book focuses on moving on. So, even though the trauma of Partition is etched in the author’s memory, unlike many writers of the exodus, she has trained her focus on other pressing issues ailing contemporary India as well. Corruption in government offices is one of them, and she writes about it in two stories—‘Clerk Maharaja’, and the titular story, ‘Life Was Here Somewhere’. The narrator talks, in grave details, about her struggles to avail certain government facilities, repeatedly questioning the system, making one wonder if the tales are fictional at all.
Since the stories are in first person, the reader travels along with the narrator. Each of the 14 tales explores a distinct aspect of reality, and how one copes with it. And, Cour appears to have a flair for both capturing and evoking emotions with equal might. She navigates through loss as skillfully as she does with exasperation, anger, fear and accidie, to reveal the elusive hope at the end of it all.
Life Was Here Somewhere
By: Ajeet Cour
Publisher: Speaking Tiger
Price: Rs 499
Pages: 264