Mosquito And Other Stories

Shifting Sands, Dominique Varma, Penguin Books India, 2004; 184 pp.

First the good news: one of the books being reviewed here is actually worth reading. Now the bad news: masochist readers will endure the other one pleasurably.

Mosquito And Other Stories brings together twelve of Premendra Mitra's---poet, novelist, essayist, short story writer and film-maker--wildly popular Ghana-da (shorthand for Ghanashyam Das) tales. The first story 'Mosquito' ('Mosha') appeared in 1945 and landed sizzling in the middle of the Bengali literary world. Then followed 'Insect,' 'Pebble,' 'Glass,' 'Fish,' and a host of other ones, with the last one published in 1987--all of these outrageous tales told by a tall, bony raconteur sitting in an armchair on the rooftop of his mess-bari, or boarding house, at No. 72 Banamali Naskar Lane, smoking cigarettes bummed off other people. How old is he? He evades the question, instead hums and haws: 'I was too busy going around the world to keep track! But--', and before you know it, that 'but' has proven to be the launching pad of yet another story.

These are tales nested within other tales, stories within stories, which straddle the thin line between make-believe and truth. In `Pebble' we find him trading in sandalwood in the New Hebrides; `Glass' and `Duck' explore nuclear science; in `Hole' he tells his spellbound audience about the Fourth Dimension; and in `Hat' he is dragged over Mount Everest by a runaway yeti. These bizarre narratives draw upon science, history and geography to conjure up exotic locales, other worlds and peoples, their habits, lifestyles and languages.

As when, in 'Watch,' Ghana-da attends a festival in a far-off place:

'You might call the Palalo festival one of the wonders of the world. It is celebrated on only two days of the year around the islands of Fiji and Samoa. Mysteriously, hordes of small marine insects called Palalo appear on the surface of the seas to reproduce. Fish seem to know about this yearly occurrence, for they too congregate there, and most of the Palalo end up in the stomachs of the fish. But eagerly waiting for both the insects and the fish is another creature--the Polynesian fisherman. Both the Palalo and the fish are delicacies, and so because of the opportunity to catch masses of both fish and the insect, these two days are a great festival for the local fisherman.'

The now-legendary mess bari, Ghana da, the setting, the characters--all these took time to settle and develop in the readers' minds, but once they did, the tale and the teller were inextricably linked, as when 'Pebble', a fantastic tale about rocks, lakes, a diamond and a volcano, kicks off with:

‘When Ghana-da yawns, it's an event. If you've seen the lion in the zoo stretch itself and yawn when it's tired of the antics of the puny little bipeds in front of him, you might get an idea of what it's like. The same cavernous maw, the same display of teeth and even the same drawn-out music, much like the scraping of the wheels of a buffalo-cart which haven't been oiled in years. But the lion can't snap its fingers the way Ghana-da does.’

'No Ice Cream for Ghana-da,' a tale about cold temperatures and lasers, has elements in it that sound surprisingly like today's Dhaka:

‘Even in these difficult times, Shibu would go by train first to Gariahat, then to Sonarpur and finally all the way to Canning, in search of elusive prawns and bhetki--even the Ganga ilish. The scarcity of good mustard oil would be carefully concealed by mixing mustard paste in groundnut oil. Shishir was producing a fresh tin of cigarettes every other day and had even stopped keeping count of the cigarettes he was lending ...

Then why this sudden outburst?

Because of the best ice cream in town!

We had decided on the ice cream after much deliberation. We couldn't rely on the fried stuff from the famous eatery in our neighbourhood any longer. Mustard oil had gone into hiding inside tins of coconut oil in traders' warehouses--who knew whether the stuff we were eating was fried in petrol or in cyanide?

The restaurants on the main road weren't any good either. If nothing else the sawdust from the mill nearby was finding its way into the chops and cutlets..'

That's great writing for young adults, which is what the Ghana-da tales were written for, but of course they became popular with readers of all ages. It's a fine translation by Amlan Das Gupta , in that it not only picks up the cadences of the original Bengali, but also retains the sly, knowing relationship of the language with its audience.

As with the original Bengali tales, so too with their English versions: I see no reason for readers of all ages not to turn these pages.

The second book,Shifting Sands by Dominique Varma, is supposedly, according to the book's blurb, 'an extraordinary odyssey across space and time into the heart of desire and madness.'Which made me groan. This is the kind of hack publishing house blurb lingo guaranteed to raise the suspicions and hackles of even the most benign reviewer: how many books are published across the world every year breathlessly promising these very same 'odysseys' ('into the human heart,' 'into the mysteries of time', 'into the nature of love,' blah blah blah) and then end up serving up tafetta prose wrapped around rank concoctions?

My suspicions were well-founded.

The plot is relatively simple: while working Paris on Vedic myths of the fabled river Saraswati, which has been missing all these centuries from the equally fabled Indian desert, a young Indologist comes across the letters (God, no, you feel like screaming at this trotting out of a hoary narrative device: the pile of just-discovered letters, like the keyhole to peep through in Victorian pulp romances, or the lover concealed behind floor-length drapes in French bedroom farces--- where would authors be without their characters stumbling upon heaps of grammatically correct, sensitively written, not-so-well-hidden troves of dead men's and women's missives?) of her cousin Eliya, a dancer who died in Rajasthan after a gradual descent into insanity. As if this was not enough, intertwined with the above is the story of her father Ezekiel in a Nazi concentration camp in Terezen, Prague. So the story moves across (the blurb again) the 'grim world of concentration camp in Prague, the vibrant landscape of Rajasthan, and the rain-splashed streets of Paris.'

But the three levels of the story never really mesh, never really cohere into a whole. And what the reader winds up with is prose that makes one wince, visibly, when for example in Eliya-in-the-Rajasthan-desert parts of the novel, prose that no doubt was supposed to be mystical and lyrical, mysterious and 'Rajasthani Indian' merely ends up sounding like phony Goethe, some Orientalist's fantasy set in the languorous East:

'That evening, under the effect of the opium and the enchanting spell of the cold moon, Eliya glided along the dark stairways leading out of the silent fort, through the village steeped in sleep. She ambled across, light of gait, sure of herself, insensitive to the barks intermittently punctuating her passage. She threw herself down on the sand, by the side of the well with the four minarets, and snuggled into her shawl, her feet scratched by the brambles. There she swallowed yet another little black pellet, and allowed her gaze to lose itself in the stars.’

'enchanting spell of the cold moon'?

'her passage’?

'allowed her gaze’?

Puh-leeeze! Who seriously writes like that any more?

There is one redeeming spot. Here and there, through morning fog and coffee-cup steam, modern-day Paris (where the narrator pursues ancient Vedic texts in libraries, much like what the author Dominique Varma with her 'serious study of classical European languages' and her master's in Sanskrit no doubt must have done herself) is glimpsed and evoked effortlessly, as in:

'...sunny winter mornings in Paris, when the cafes are empty, after the breakfast hours, before the frenzy of hurried lunches, with the regular customers jealous of their places reserved in the sun upfront. That's the time when the waiters swallow their meal in a quiet corner, in a halo of dusty light filtering through the freshly cleaned panes ...'

Or,

'It has snowed in Paris. The snow brings with it a sudden hush. The cars are silent. No one hurries. Only the children run. In the silence, their laughter is magnified. Everything becomes grey and white..The Bibliotheque, with its warm and thick walls, makes light of the tempest and remains a steadfast haven...'

These are the patches where the writing is light of gait, where the weight of the thought contained in the sentences and the sentences themselves are in balance, and the lyricism arises unforced and naturally from the direct handling of the subject matter.

If the whole book had been written like that, that might have been worth reading.

Khademul Islam is literary editor, The Daily Star.