Guerilla of Prose Fiction

The Women in Cages -- Collected Stories by Vilas Sarang; Delhi: Penguin India; 2006; 283 pp.; Rs. 275.

Then one muggy midday, stuck in very slow moving traffic, in the midst of hooting cars, frenzied rickshaw bells and a mammoth four-wheeler playing Hindi songs in deafening decibels-- the crow, musk, Ganesh and all began to make sense. I not only read the rest of the book but I concluded I liked 'The Women in Cages,' next to 'Odour of Immortality'......But hang on, wasn't The Women in Cages the title of the collection!! The reason why this was news to me was because I had covered Vilas Sarang's book with thick brown paper, primarily to prevent the cover turning grubby in my hands by the humid summer weather in Dhaka. But also to prevent myself falling in the thrall of the image and the praises studded on the covers. My brown paper had apparently done its job so well that I was able to read the stories knowing little else than that these were written by a Marathi writer who studied at Indiana University and worked in Basra and Kuwait teaching English Literature. By the time I had finished reading about a sailor called Bombil's love affair with a whale-shark, I was hooked, to use the cliché.

Sarang is widely published. The queer plots must only partly provide the texture his works achieve. He thrives on pursuing intensity and clarity, but also likes to act like a frisky trickster. His stories deliberately show an Alice in Wonderland twitch for the uncanny providing a darkly innocent and affably morbid tone to these stories where spiders are crushed in abandon, rabbits are gorged by mosquitoes, lizards are bludgeoned with brooms, vultures cry against discrimination and parrots cry 'history is on our side.'

The stories of the fourth section "The Shadow of the Gulag" appropriately belong to a Twilight Zone cum X File genre --one created by dictatorships, censorship, authoritarianism, repressions and so forth. 'The Return,' 'The Terrorist,'' Kalluri's Escape' are finely executed stories which "refract" the author's "Iraqi experience," India's 1975 Emergency, and the "growing realities of what has been called the Third World" (Preface by author). Sarang's "third world realities" will trouble many. But then often writers write about conditions back home based on artistic rather than contingent realities.

"The Visions of Nirvana," the last section, uses a ninth-century song as epigram and that really says it all: "So the fair tree of the Void also lacks compassion/Without shoots or flowers or foliage/And whosoever imagines them there, falls down /For branches there are none." These narratives are testimonies of sickness, the 'odour of contrition,' these are a hopeless 'gesture of benediction' over a 'burnt-out city.'

'Notes by a Working Writer' appended at the end of the collection were a bonus. Sarang has a thing about categories and titles. This section is also divided into three parts, 'The Making of the Text,' 'The Long and the Short,' and the 'The Short Story Writer as a Guerilla.' In 'The Making of the Text' he explains how most of the stories were in Marathi and "subsequently done in English." The 'stylistic recasting' he did means that the stories were, as far as he is concerned, written in English rather than translated from Marathi. So the stories are Indian in spirit but English in diction and rhythm, partly corroborating Sarang's belief that "English thankfully, has now a more distinct Indian identity, which it did not in the 1970s'."

In the second part of the Notes, Sarang says that the Indian languages have always taken short stories seriously but in English, the form is "scarcely more than marginal." That awes him since he believes that what cinches the superiority of short fiction against the novel form is its intensity and concentration on a singular vision. It is not hard to figure out that Sarang is partial to the short story form for he says, strange as it sounds, that the "short story writer can legitimately aspire to write the perfect story. No novelist hopes to write the perfect novel." Even if one were to differ here, I agree with the point Sarang makes later reminding us of Alain Nadaud's declaration 'La Nouvelle, c'est la guerilla'. Such guerillas would be masters like Poe and Kafka and Borges who "go beyond the limits, to find chinks in the wall, to discover virgin modes of synapsis." Even though Sarang moans that "the Indian English short story has been unadventurous and that we do not get unitive collections which can serve as primers for budding writers," The Women in Cages does at least reward readers with some very intense guerilla grit.

Nuzhat Amin Mannan teaches English at Dhaka University.