Sexy

This story begins with the promise of a typical English sitcom plot, a white woman and a brown man. And though obviously, as we are already down with four stories and the air is melancholy, we some how know, and Mr. Dev is not going to do anything to lighten the spirits.

The narrator is non-Indian, though nothing in the style of narration tells us so, except that we know a non-Indian woman, Miranda is telling her story, short-story.Maybe after writing four really slow Indian short stories, with most of them focused on the Indian experience of the Occident, Lahiri had a brain wave and decided to do this piece where a white female, who hardly knows anything about Indian culture, decides to explore it for the sake of an affair that she is having with an Indian man.

"Sexy" is titled so, because that is the word Dev whispers in her ear during a very intimate moment in the  Christian Science Center's Mapparium. The affair goes on for quite sometime, but then one fine day, Miranda's Indian friend, Laxmi's cousin's(the cousin, whose husband has left her for a younger woman) son is left with her for baby-sitting.

After Dev's wife had come back from a holiday, Miranda and him would meet on weekends, and this would be the high point of the week for Miranda. And when these weekends didn't work out, she would feel extremely low. Yes, she was clearly in love with him. It was during one of these weekends that she was baby-sitting for her friend, that she realizes the trauma the "other" woman, namely the wife has to go through.

Probably by writing about failed relationships, Lahiri, writes real-life stories. No fairy-tales, no happy endings for her. But what she does wonderfully is craft the character so well, that at the end of the day, even if we do not have our happy ending, we are made aware of the immense strength it requires to take failure of relationships and move on with life.

So all in all, in this short story, we have a non-Indian narrator, very less Indian food, a failed affair, and a woman who was so fascinated by the entire idea of having an affair with an exotic man, that in some parts of the story she actually takes a lot of effort to learn about India. Lahiri could have painted a beautiful picture of India and the Indian culture, but she always get lost in the turmoil that relationships and emotions create in life.

In A Free State

Nominally a novel, but actually more like a collection of short stories, In a Free State by V. S. Naipaul is thus a little difficult to review. Should I focus on the novella, from which the book gets its title, or should I deal equally with all five narratives, and attempt to draw out the shared themes that give the book its coherence? I’ll try to do a little of both, the latter first.

In a Free State is, essentially, about experiences being out of place. Up until now in "The Mystic Masseur”, "A House for Mr. Biswas" Naipaul displayed openly his alienation from his native land. Now how does he fare after he leaves the island ? Naipaul takes it beyond geographical circumstances, beyond material success and social position. These new stories focus on the failure of heart, on the animal like cruelty man exhibits to other men. The stories are all about people who find themselves in places where they feel that they don’t belong; the stories are about boundaries, purity, pollution and just plain strangeness. The presence of an English tramp on a Greek ferry causes uproar, an Indian servant tries to come to terms with his new life in Washington D.C., a South Asian West Indian immigrant in London reflects on the ruins of his life, two white Britons in Uganda drive from the capital to their compound in the south as post-independence upheaval around them throws their presence in the country into relief, and finally, an Asian businessman travelling through Milan and Cairo reflects on cruelty and empire. I liked some of the stories a lot more than others. Some made for uncomfortable reading.

In a Free State is a sequence of five works - the prologue and the epilogue, two short stories and a short novella - linked by a common theme . All are about individuals stranded in foreign countries and confronted by alien cultures.

The Tramp At Piraeus (the prologue) is the literary equivalent of a maestro checking and testing his theme with a few chords and melody lines before starting with the main piece. It's a quite disturbing description of the bullying of a mentally ill English tramp by two Libyans and a German on a ship sailing from Greece. It is quite a painful short piece , tense and tragic, with no word out of place , it actually promises more than the rest of the book can deliver.

The first story is “One out of Many” and it concerns an Indian servant Santosh from Bombay who is forced to accompany his master on a diplomatic visit to Washington, D.C.. The two Indians suffer from the poor value of Indian currency.

The servant lives in almost a cupboard and unfortunately blows several weeks salary just buying a snack. However he gets to meet a restaurant proprietor who offers him quite a salary, so he absconds and works for him. Once he has his affairs in reasonable order, however, he starts to live in fear that his master will find him and order him back. He also learns that he is working illegally and liable to deportation.

The only way of resolving the situation is to marry a woman who had seduced him but whom he had avoided ever since out of shame for his behaviour.

The second story “Tell me Who to Kill” a young man from the islands, out of petty and blind rivalry with his uncle's family, goes to London to support his brother in his studies. He denies and degrades himself in various ways; he takes two jobs to accumulate money faster; he gets grand notions of owning his own business though he knows nothing about running it. His brother is no student and isn't capable of being one. But no one faces up to the truth. At the end, tricked by his brother, his money gone, his energy drained, his loss complete, full of hate he looks around for revenge: "Tell me who to kill."

The main story “In A Free State” is set in an East African state that has recently acquired independence. The King is weak, and is on the run while the President is poised to take absolute power. The level of violence in urban centres of the country is rising and there are rumours of violence in the countryside.

Bobby is an official who has been attending a conference in the capital city. He now heads back to the governmental Compound where he lives, and he has offered a lift to Linda, another colleague's wife.

At a time when the crisis is coming to a head, Bobby and Linda (two whites), are returning to the safety of their compound along a road that is far from safe.

Things go from bad to worse when they stay at a Hotel, run by an old Colonel. There, they have dinner, and they witness a scene between the Colonel and Peter, his servant, who he accuses of planning his murder. Furthermore Bobby discovers that Linda was planning some extra marital activity with a friend along the way, and he becomes furious.

The two reach their destination, but not before witnessing the site where the old King was recently murdered, a philosophical Muslim planning to move to Egypt and the beginnings of a genocidal wave of violence. Bobby is beaten by the army at a check point, where he and Linda experience first hand the growing violence.

The story follows the conventions of a road trip with the reader becoming aware, as do Bobby and Linda, of the situation and how serious it has become. The necessity of a car trip by two whites through a dangerous section of Africa, where civil war is in the offing, leads to a lengthy, claustrophobic, tension-filled journey.

The contrast between the self-deluding Bobby, who claims to have some sort of authentic connection with “Africa,” and the cynical Linda is very effective. At one point Bobby says that “Africa saved his life,” while Linda gives the impression that Africa ruined hers. But, though Linda is open about her prejudices, Bobby is possessed of the same prejudices but hides them under a thin layer of patronizing tolerance.

Obsessed with savagery, cruelty, the human facility for violent sadism and unleashing horror, this story of a long drive to a place where there's "nothing to do" undertaken by two British acquaintances in a former African colony, is a worthy heir to Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness.

The Circus at Luxor (the epilogue) tells how the writer finally intervenes against the actions of an Egyptian ‘protecting the tourists’ from poor and begging local children. He cannot bear to see this man whipping the children when they come scrounging for scraps. Most of the tourists ignore them as if they were not even there, but the Italians bait them, throwing food to lure them over. The writer of the journal takes the whip from the security guard, and he submits – because really, nothing much has changed in post-colonial Egypt. It seems as though Naipaul believes that man’s inhumanity to man knows no cultural or political bounds. Those in power will always exploit those who are powerless..

In England, a brother takes advantage of a brother, patrons of a shopkeeper, one group of workers of another group. On a ship to Alexandria, two Lebanese, with the help of a German who in other circumstances would not have soiled his hands with them, turn on a poor ratty tramp. In Egypt, an Egyptian flunky lays his whip to the backs of children scrounging for uneaten sandwiches thrown on the sand by Italian tourists. What the author is saying is that neither customs nor color nor culture seems able to quiet that impulse to destruction, that murderous wantonness that is so much part of our makeup. Greed, vanity, stupidity, socio-economic status and racism rule everywhere

A Real Durwan

The fourth short story is about a poor old woman sweeper, who claims to have been rich once upon a time. Lahiri all of a sudden pushes us into abject poverty and the description of Boori Ma, "sweeper of the stairwell", "mites out of her bedding" and "underneath the letter boxes where she lives" is a bit distasteful, and though we will eventually sympathize with the character, the opening paragraph, prepares the reader for a bleak short story.

Plot-wise, it is the story of a sweeper of a building, who is extremely old and loves to tell stories of her past while cleaning the old building. The residents give her small utilities now and then in return for her services. One of the residents get promoted at work and buys a sink for his home along with one for the building. Then one day when  Boori Ma is away indulging in small luxuries ( she was having jalebi at a shop), the sink gets stolen and she is believed to be an accomplice in the crime. When she protests, the residents call her liar, saying she is always making up cock and bull stories(those about her rich past) and throw her out of the building and being looking for a "real durwan".

Although no time-line has been given in the story, but one can guess the setting to be right after independence. Perhaps Lahiri is just telling the story of a poor woman, a poor woman who claims to have a rich before life, but even then one cannot help but notice the sorry plight of "lonely" women in that India. Its not just the women, but perhaps the entire lower strata of the society.

When the sink is stolen, the residents find it very convenient to blame Boori Ma. Instead of taking the blame on themselves, or giving the Dalal's ( who had purchased the sink and were out on a vacation) an honest explanation or looking for a solution, they throw away the durwan who has served them for so many years. This clearly highlights the atrocities committed by the higher classes on the lower ones and the powerlessness of the lower ones. What is Boori Ma to do now? Why should she become a scapegoat for the negligence of the other residents?

Lahiri raise all these questions, very subtly and leaves us with the image of the shallow, hypocritical society looking for a real "durwan".

Interpreter of Maladies

The interpreter of Maladies is a tour guide on days off and an interpreter of maladies on working days in a clinic. The doctor at the clinic does not understand the language and Mr. Kapasi for a sufficient amount of money, which takes care of his family expenses, acts as the interpreter.

In this short story, Mr Kapasi encounters a strange Bengali-American family on his tour day. They are dressed in bright clothes and talk like brothers and sisters to each other(man, woman and three kids). The mother is clearly oblivious to the needs of her children and  the father is too busy photographing the exotic Indian experience. The mother, Mrs. Das, out of sheer boredom starts a conversation with the driver, Mr. Kapasi and gets very interested in his career as an interpreter of maladies, waiting for the right time to ask him to interpret and cure her malady of a mid-life crises (she has stopped feeling for her husband) overburdened with a one-night stand, the result of which is her youngest son.

Mr. Kapasi mistakes her attention for likeness and weaves a fantasy of his own, in which he dreams of writing her letters and hopes for a relationship with her, as she is very curious about his work and he likes her bare legs and full breasts. 

Quite realistically, none of his fantasies materialize and  he is left clicking a photograph of the entire family, right after they have saved their youngest son from the monkeys at the Sun Temple.

Lahiri could have chosen to describe the beautiful Sun temple and the long tree-ladden roads that lead to it. But throughout the short story, she is focused on the sad and monotonous life of Mr. Kapasi and how this one chance encounter with an English speaking Indian woman, fills him with hope of a second chance at life.

There is really nothing special about this short story, apart from the plot perhaps where the protagonist can interpret the physical ailments but not the maladies of the soul. Not much special attention is paid to food,tastes and colors in this one, expect of course if you consider how Mrs. Das ate channa and painted her nails.

Many critics have mentioned that the story focuses on the deformed way of viewing each other. They say this is highlighted by the fact that all of the characters are wearing glasses. Also Mr Das, instead of taking in the beauty of India, is in a hurry to capture it using his camera. He sees the world through his lens for most of the story.While in the taxi, Mrs Das, does not roll the window, although it is terribly hot, so she too is not able to see the world clearly. And finally the critics have interpreted that Mr. Kapasi, though he notices the difference in the looks of Mr.Das and one of the children, he views them as a family, the reality of which later hits him.  

Critics might say that the subtle description of the characters and the melancholy filling their lives, makes them believable and easy to identify with, but I was disappointed in the style, which is straight-jacketed, the language, which is very simple, the tense, which does not change, the plot which has been a part of many a hindi movies and the characters who are too banal even for real-life people. For a short story which would be the name of her collection of short stories, Lahiri could have perhaps done much better.

When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine Part 2.

Mr. Pirzada is instrumental in the sudden push of the girl into the confusing world of politics. It all begins when she asks for an extra glass(while arranging the dining table) for the "Indian man". That is when her dad begins explaining her the complicated situation of Indian, Pakistan and Bangladesh. And her father's remark that he is not an Indian really confuses her. Cause well, they looked the same, spoke the same language and laughed at the  same jokes. Lahiri highlights the shallowness of the partition in this particular paragraph.


None of the characters in the story are physically described, except Mr. Pirzada, whose appearance has been given a lot of space. I really cannot comment on character development here, because the niches of his character are ambiguous, but i guess that is what happens in a short story, not much room for development  of characters, or maybe there is but Lahiri chooses otherwise.


The twelve days of war between Pakistan and India, bring Mr. Pirzada more  close to the family, so much so that he starts to sleep in their house. The melancholy mood of the war seeps into everyday conversations and into the food too( only boiled eggs with rice), and this is where i start thinking again, what is with it with food that Lahiri is so obsessed with it, it forms an integral part of all her nine short stories.


Food aside, the war gets over and Mr.Pirzada leaves for Dacca to re-unite with his family. All in all, the second short story has a happy ending.

In a strange room

‘In a strange room’ written by Damon Galgut was written in 2003 and was a finalist for the man booker prize. The book is divided into three sections, “The Follower”, “The Lover” and “The Guardian”.

The protagonist of the book is Damon, the narrator, who refers to himself in the first and third person at his own whim, and sometimes simultaneously makes for an interesting writing style.

“But memory has its own distance, in part he is me, in part he is a stranger I am watching”

“Happy and unhappy, he falls asleep in the end, and dreams about, no, I don’t remember his dreams.”

It may also be the reason why the author decided to shun all the question and quotation marks. The first story is set in 1993, and the last one just a few years ago, and as we go from the first story to the last, the presence of “I’ increases ; the memories are clearer than of the first story, or as a review stated “the person describing experiencing the events is closer to the person recalling them”.

The title of each section defines the role Damon needs to play in that part of the story. In the first section “The Follower”, we are introduced to our protagonist Damon, a trekker in Greece from South Africa. During one of his trek, he runs into a German by the name of Reiner. Though not heading in the same direction, when they meet, Damon follows Reiner to Lesotho, where he is headed for climbing. The German is bold and proud sometimes but is uncordial others “He will not speak either, but in him silence is power. Unlike me, unlike me.” Although both of them are travelling for totally different reasons, one for more existential reasons and the other wants to make some life decisions, Damon perceives a charge of eroticism between them. The eloquent prose employed here has an undertow of homo-eroticism between the two men in their conversation.

“Would you like some, he says, holding out an apple, I found this in my bag. The two of them pass it between them, solemnly biting and chewing, the one lying propped up on an elbow, the other sitting with his knees drawn up, all it will take is a tiny movement from one of them, a hand extended, or the edge of the sleeping bag lifted, would you like to get in, but neither makes the move, one is too scared and the other too proud...”

Damon recalls a line from Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying that is possible the inspiration for the name of the novel

“In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were.”

In the very next line he sums up what all these journeys are about for Damon with all the different roles and alternative prose.

“I don't know what I am. I don't know if I am or not.”

In the second story “The lover” he casts doubt over his ability to love things or places or people or most of all the person, place and thing that he is. He agrees to the fact that “Without love nothing has value,nothing can be made to matter very much”. As he travels across Africa he meets disparate group of people while he explores themes of remorse and hypocrisy of the Western tourist. It is in this story he meets a fellow traveler Jerome, who holds a fascination for Damon, the two of them not sharing a common language communicating by the means of looks. Although the story is titles “The Lover”, it is much more about how far these two people, Damon and Jerome are, and how they are still able to form a connection, rather than a physical union. For me this was a very interesting [art of the book for the fact when Damon reflects upon the fine line that separates memory and portrayal.

“Jerome, if I can’t make you live in words … it’s not because I don’t remember, no, the opposite is true, you are remembered in me as an endless stirring and turning. But it’s for this precisely that you must forgive me, because in every story of obsession there is only one character, only one plot. I am writing about myself alone, it’s all I know, and for this reason I have always failed in every love, which is to say at the very heart of my life.”

The third story “The Guardian” entails Damon travelling to India and taking care of her friend Anna. Damon describes Anna as person with “a future full of impressive possibilities” but is plagued by depression and personality disorder which results in her “losing the plot, living in fast motion, speeding along.” The story is about how Damon struggles in dealing with “this thing that’s taken up station inside her, driving along with so much fury and power”. Continuing in this story is the trend of Damon not having full control of the situation from the outset. Anna drinks when she has vowed to avoid it, she talks about betraying her lover and she is continuously testing Damon’s vow to look after her.

“It's begun to feel as if a stranger has taken up residence in her, somebody dark and restless that he doesn't trust, who wants to consume Anna completely. This stranger is still cautious, still biding her time. Meanwhile the person that he knows is visible, and sometimes in the ascendant...But the dark stranger always appears again, peering slyly over her shoulder...”

Each story in the book is kind of insight into a different kind of relationship and how in each case Damon is unable to satisfy the role but also that both parties fail to connect properly.

How late it was, How late

‘How late it was, how late’ written by James Kelman was the booker prize winner for the year 1994. This was a very controversial booker prize winner where Simon Jenkins, a member of the committee going out and saying “ Kelman had done nothing more than to transcribe the rambling thoughts of a blind Glaswegian drunk”, another member calling it “literary vandalism”, one of the person on committee threatened to quit the committee if this book won and many other cases of dissent being shown against this book. It winning the award was not as rapturous either; columnist counted the number of times “fucks” and “cunts” were there in the book. But the motivation for me reading this book was that someone said “British won’t give a booker to a Scot just for nothing”.

At the heart of the novel is the unvanquished passion for equality and justice for the lowest of the lowest. The book is about Sammy Samuels an unlikely hero, cantankerous, unrepentant ex-con(“all in all he had done eleven years. They rolled off the tongue”) and a permanent job seeker. The reader need not like Sammy but it is impossible to not to be able to identify with him. A lot of things in Sammy’s life go awfully wrong, starting with the disastrous rife with his live in girlfriend Helen which lead to her disappearing followed by the beating he takes which result him having presumably permanent problems in lungs, spinal cord and eyes. Even after all this he is back in jail in a bed bunk which is uncomfortable to him to the highest degree. But Sammy’s response to all these problems is of courage, dignity and fierce optimism. As the tile goes ‘How late it was, How late’ the question is whether there is still time for Sammy to do anything that will help his fortunes or is now too late.

'These things are sent to try ye,' Sammy shrugs. 'Life; life is sent to try ye.' But still and all, to take realistic stock: 'There was things out his control. There was things in his control but there were other things out, they were out his control, he had put them out his control.'

'These wee victories,' Sammy says, heading for the pub, 'ye've got to celebrate them, otherwise ye ferget ye've won them.'

“How late it was, how late” had a very uncomplicated plot, with the simplest of actions being explained in minute detail. This may be due to the fact that maybe the author James Kelman wanted the reader to share the affliction of Sammy’s sudden blindness. After the onset of his blindness, which maybe permanent, all the new characters are described by their attitude and demeanor rather than their physical characteristics. Similar is the case with locations described in the book, they are identified by the mere belief that Sammy is where he is supposed to be. But most important of all are Sammy’s decisions. Even though Sammy’s thoughts on the present situation are very clear to the reader his final decision seem to happen on the fly, where though he aims to do one thing he could very well had taken the other option. Like, for instance a simple act of buying lunch is an ordeal for Sammy partially due to his blindness and sense of direction. It is as if the writer is trying to make the reader feel blind.

This is also true for the end of the novel .When the novel ends in a very similar fashion in which it started the reader is left to contemplate whether it would work out for him or not.

Kelman while maintaining the account of difficulties faced due to blindness keeps talking about things of much more importance such as reality, existence and whatnot.

“Waiting rooms. Ye go into this room where ye wait. Hoping’s the same. One of these days the cunts’ll build entire fucking buildings just for that. Official hoping rooms, where ye just go in and hope for whatever the fuck ye feel like hoping for. One on every corner. Course they had them already – boozers. Ye go in to hope and they sell ye a drink to help pass the time. Ye see these cunts sitting there. What’re they there for? They’re hoping. They’re hoping for something. The telly’s rotten. So they go out hoping for something better. I’m just away out for a pint, hen, be back in an hour. You hoping the football’ll come on soon? Aye. I hope ye’ll no be too long”

There are a lot of unanswered question strewn across the whole novel, Why and when did the police give him a horrific beating that he has come to find himself blind? Why is the medic at the clinic so intent of justifying that Sammy’s sight loss is temporary rather than permanent? Why did Helen disappear and how is that she is not working where she is supposed to? What happened during the binge drinking? Why do police keep telling Sammy that he is in deep political trouble?

The blindness in itself is also strange. It is never plausibly explained throughout the course of the book. This made it clear even though the book is based in a social down to earth Glaswegian setting, is far from a realistic work of fiction as it could be.The central theme though interesting does become somewhat tiring, as the story is concerned with only one character played out inside Sammy's head, it becomes a tad bit repetitive. Further more memory and repetition become and inseparable part of Sammy's effort to deal with his blindness. What further enrages the reader is Sammy's erratic switch from resilience to despair and his being totally unaware about this problem of his.