A Case of Sad Marvels

Title: A Case of Indian Marvels - Dazzling Stories From the Country’s Finest New Writers

Editor: David Davidar

Publisher: Aleph

First Published: 2022

ISBN: 978-93-91047-64-1

Pages: 390

Price: 999/-

Thanks are due to Aleph and Purple Pencil Project. 

The editor was “surprised by the lack of anthologies that focused exclusively on the work of writers belonging to the millennial generation” and we are glad that he felt this way. We have these forty stories put together. The authors have been described as India’s “finest” and “most exciting” new writers. The list also includes well known names like Meena Kandasamy and Prayaag Akbar. The editor is “frustrated by lack of quality translations’”. However, he has managed to include five of them - A J Thomas and Rita Kothari are amongst the translators.

These stories present voices of today’s India – perspectives of the youth. An India that is unjust but at the same time “will not dance” to someone else’s tunes. A generation that inhabits a world which is way different from the world its elders lived in and a world it was told and taught about. A generation that questions more but at the same time is also more accepting of the realities around it. To quote the editor, “The stories tell you how perhaps India too has changed”.

The characters in these stories are more about urban than rural, more about the young than the old, more about the material than the spiritual, and concerned more about the immediate than future. Issues they grapple with include polluted air, night shifts, dumping trash, empty lives, immoral media, love bites, lesbian love, quitting jobs, oxygen shortages, mining mafia, murders, fettish for statues and the Swachchh Bharat Abhiyaan. They are based in an India that is increasingly getting more unequal on the economic front and less open and accepting on the religious front.

Many of these stories carry a generous dose of that element which takes a short story to the next level - surprise. Few also possess the ability to shock the reader. A M Gautam in his story describes a friendship between a man and an alligator in a north Indian town. While Tushar Jain’s story, no less in its ability to shock, ends with apt words, “Isn’t life bizarre?”

Some of these stories also convey what the newspapers and news channels do not. Majority of the stories, however, are gloomy. Vineetha Mokkil’s story for example talks of a family with members in civil and armed services (read elite) and open enough to drink together go to extremes when the daughter (also the narrator) falls in love with a person from another religion! As one reads the grim tale one’s heart goes out to her. Vrinda Baliga in her story brings out the horrors of illegal migration where people end up losing money, family, identity and a lot else including hope. This one is gloomy from the word go. None of the characters have names - “names have long ceased to matter - they are use and throw articles, of no value, easily discarded”.

One wonders if sadness is pervasive to this extent amidst the youth today or the book has fallen in the trap of looking at the past as perfect, present as imperfect and future as tense. Or it is the reflection of the editor’s bias. A bias he does not exactly hide when he states, “India in the 21st Century can hardly be characterised as sunny and hopeful”. Having grown up on a healthy dose of short stories, primarily western classics, I missed sparks of humour amidst the gloom.

Some books leave you with lines that stay with you long after the book is up on the shelf. This compilation has its share of these. Sample a few, “Stories are living things, they breathe, they absorb little things from around them” and “. . if you are a good story-teller, then stories talk to you” by Bhavani or “Humans always lose more history than they ever possess” and “the ethnographers, after all, are modern enough to know that nothing can be totally genuine” by Kanishk Tharoor.

The piece by the editor in the beginning too consists of lines that one reads and re reads - including this quote by Anton Chekhov : “Remember that writers whom we call great or just good, and who make us drunk, have one very important feature: they are going somewhere and calling you with them . . " Majority of the stories in the book possess this quality. Written with a high degree of skill, these “Marvels” reassure us that for some time to come Indian short stories will be in good hands.

This is a book that will get me back to short stories.