India Today Books [Native Flavours]

KATHA PRIZE STORIES -VOL.7
ED BY GEETA DHARMARAJAN AND MEENAKASHI SHARMA
PRICE: Rs 175

Sound, phonetically aflame English translations have become the distinguishing trait of the Katha series. This volume doesn't disappoint. The rich and vital sounds, dialects and peculiar flavours of various regions are astutely preserved. The stories are almost always devoted to exploring individual guilt and the wages of family obligations. The stillness of debt pervades most of the stories in the collection.

Sights, sounds and smells of the seashore abound in Nayyar Masood's "Sheesha Ghat" (originally in Urdu) where the child protagonist's physical and emotional disturbances are echoed in the constant splash of seawaves. The story is remarkable for mirroring a bourgeois restraint amidst the tensions and turmoil of ever-changing family equations in the narrator's life.

Three stories on rancorous wives -- Suchitra Bhattacharya's "The Best Bet", Tarun Kanti Mishra's "The Descent" and Khalid Jawed's "The Season of Fever" -- are bonded by one theme. Shaded reclamations and brooding self-explorations are themes that run across the stories. Although the pace is frequently unhurried, the gifted ranconteurs seem wholly clued into the grammar of gripping fiction. In Phul Goswami's "Co-travellers" (Assamese) and Ashita's "The Lies My Mother Told Me" (Malayalam), the authors reclaim their troubled relationships with their mothers without reinventing the relationship with the artillery of their art.

The absence of literary ornamentation and the gratifying synthesis of emotion and expression characterise almost all the introspective stories about loss and restoration. In Prem Prakash's "Mohdi", the theme of cultural dispossession is dealt without the breast-beating that once distinguished stories in Punjabi and Urdu about land disputes.

AUTHORSPEAK: Bharati Mukherjee

Immigrant Voice
The US-based novelist has an unlimited repertoire
By Devika Mehra

She had two choices after graduating from Baroda University: marry the perfect Bengali groom, or spend two years at the Iowa Writer's Workshop in the US. Bharati Mukherjee choose the latter. It changed her life, her Loreto House accent and, more importantly, her writing: "If I had stayed on in India, my writing would have been regarded as a nice hobby by my family, appropriate for a demure young woman, whereas at Iowa it became my whole life's mission."

In the last three decades, Mukherjee has authored seven works of fiction and her short stories have appeared in prestigious collections including the annual Best American Fiction. Her latest novel Leave it to Me, is about an abandoned orphan, Debby DiMartino, who travels across America in search of her mother. The people she feels comfortable writing about are no longer Bengalis living in Calcutta but characters ranging from Mayflower hippies, Punjabis in Jasmine, oddball puritans in The Holder of the World, to expatriates who negotiate between two cultures. "I see my books as stations in my own development as a writer as opposed to a mainstream person living in Calcutta," she says.

But with the current "Indi frenzy" in the US, Mukherjee admits that readers are more interested in romanticised pictures of India rather than immigrant fiction "which nobody wants to hear about". Following the success of her novel Tiger's Daughter, publishers urged her to write a stylish autobiographical work -- a sort of Tiger's granddaughter -- about growing up in an upper-class Bengali household. "But I resisted and wrote a feminist novel, Wife. My mentor, American novelist Bernard Malamud, always said: 'To be a serious writer you must write about material that is most urgent to you.' " A valuable piece of advice which Mukherjee and her husband, Clark Blaise, emphasised in a writer's workshop they conducted during their visit to Delhi last month.

Today, the author maintains a fine balance teaching at Berkeley, writing and travelling. She doesn't write everyday as she urges her students to, but when she does, it is a 22-hour day. It is no wonder that Mukherjee could finish Jasmine and The Middle Man and Other Stories while teaching five courses in three different universities. "I needed the money," she says. "But the books also had so much momentum that they just got done." A fine lesson for all budding writers.

January 26, 1998