Tales from Firozsha Baag: Book Review

Tales from Firozsha Baag (Rohinton Mistry): ****

Who, among the contemporary Indian authors, even comes close to Mistry’s sensory acuteness, his ability to handpick choicest moments from the tombs of impressions that perpetually crowds the life of every Indian. Nobody. Plainly putting it, it is exactly these very earthly moments captured so brilliantly in his books that make him so very special.

A compendium of eleven intersecting tales of residents, Mistry’s first full-fledged fiction commences with Auspicious Occasion where Rustomji, an old lawyer whose frustration with the non-existent management, and intolerance towards his neighbours have earned him the title of curmudgeon.

Mistry’s expert handicraft has accentuated the protagonist’s choler and dander through his constant profanity-laden reprimands to every living being around and the way this stoic comportment is contrasted with Rustomji’s realisation about fragility in old age towards the finale sinks one deeper into his character. For an absolute relief,

Mistry’s punched in a religious satire giving that touch of wholesomeness.

You visit the book’s prime character-Kersi, a young boy in One Sunday where we witness the spurt of manhood in him and the genetic programming of males to be physically adept. All through the Mistry, a disturbing metaphor of the protagonist’s phallus and cricket bat run through which sends one’s thoughts into a maddening frenzy as Kersi cracks his bat with his foot’such is his disappointment after a brawl with a servant is cancelled eventually.

Even in a somewhat shallow The Ghost of Firozsha Baag , Mistry’s still able to convey the blind-faiths, the conservativeness and even the derogatory status of Indian servants in a fluffy and a humorous narration through the Goan catholic Jaqueline’i.e. the servant’s eyes.

The story alternates between past and present, and Jakaylee’s view of the slaughtering outside world, as she ruminates over her quotidian lifestyle, is entertaining, though even a unique climax doesn’t bestow the repeat-value to the story.

A trilogy of masterpieces follow up next’each of them so absolved in its message, so superior in its expression and so distinct in its feel, that it is here you realise the actual power of a short-story. First up is Condolence Visit where the very thought of the pretentious relatives spilling all over her and the inevitable subsequent narration that she’d have to give to them sends shivers in the spine of the grieving widow, Daulat.

Questioning the ever desultory customs which makes the very phase of bereavement torturous for the dead’s household, the finale sees the protagonist taking her stand and coming to terms with life. And this is exactly where Mistry scores. His characters are survivors. Yes, they come with their own share of vulnerabilities, disappointments, pangs, but that doesn’t deter them from being instinctive, from being themselves’they don’t shy from accepting that life for them is a never-ending lesson.

Just one look at Jehangir, the brooding observer of Firozsha Baag in Collectors and you realise that however much unaccommodating and unforgiving circumstances might get, life never halts. In less than twenty pages, there’s an almost epic flavour to it and Mistry still conquers in sending these vibes across alternating between erotic flutters of youth, pangs from public ridicule and the ensuant loss of control that Jehangir experiences as he stands mute even as he’s blamed by his mentor for stealth of a prized stamp.

Special mention should be made to the two exquisite metaphors laced through these two stories (a lamp and stamps) which have been made to so comfortably mirror the actual event that a surreal and exotic third-dimension is added to the already-accomplished tales. Absolutely brilliant!

Through Kersi again, one catches up with how the pace and the adrenaline rush of the teenage years secretly breeds an inflated ego dying to burst out in Of White Hairs and Cricket . How a single scene of suffering changes his entire viewpoint of his family (particularly his father with whom his annoyance is paramount since plucking out the latter’s white hairs have destroyed his weekends continuously) is absolutely rhythmic in its very feel and very overpowering as a moral.

Probably Squatter and The Paying Guests won’t be as emotionally consuming as the just gone threesome, yet the very tales circling around an Indian inadaptability to the Western toilet manners and a strangling tenant who refuses to let go off a flat have their own freaky moments that make for a breezy read. 

The best thing about the book is that even in one of those remote moments that the stories fail, there’s always Mistry’s enliveningly honest narration to fall back upon which maintains the mood and the right cadence throughout. Plus the continuous interjection of the characters mean that you keep absorbing, refreshing and even refurnishing the images of dwellers of Firozsha Baag, however mediocre the fable might be. 

The transformative final triplet concentrates itself squarely on Kersi’s and Jehangir’s adulthood and while the former struggles to come in terms with his inner conflicts for his motherland in Lend Me Your Light , the generation and the resultant communication gap is more than obvious in latter’s life as he struggles to balance his titillating affair and rigid parenthood in Exercisers . How exactly drawing inspiration from the muscular fellows the realisation for taking charge of his life finds its way to his cowering heart is heart-rending.

 The astute metaphors, the prudent symbols continue to beguile as they parallel with Kersi’s experience as an immigrant in the concluding story Swimming Lessons . A metamorphosis of sorts where the protagonist learns to get over his fear of water and starts accepting the eccentricity of the foreign land is catalogued together with the reactions of his nurturers back home as they receive his very own first book about his experiences in Firozsha Baag’all this in terrific irony and self-awareness (there’s so much of Mistry as himself in this one!). 

Parsees, a faction of sect that I knew so little about, but as I finish my third Mistry book, I feel like having known about The fire temple, Behraam Roje, ‘Ashem Vahoo’, tohroon, dugli, pheytoe, sudra, dhandar-patayo, sali-boti, sigri, dustoor as well as the back of my tongue, and even as I now just glance over the cover of the book, I still get nostalgic about Rustomji, Mehroo, Jaakylee, Viraf, Najamai, Tehmina, Nariman, Jehangir, Khorshedbai, Kersi, Persy, the Boyces, the Hansotias, the Kanaris, the Modys. What more elaboration does anybody want it proof of the flesh and bone Mistry’s characters possess. 

This flavour of tenderness towards seemingly insignificant lives has imparted a smug and self-aware palpate to all the fables which should have you grinning at how significant, subtle yet soulful stories can be; his characters may not be outright winners but nevertheless, thrive as petulant survivors. 

And this is the charm of this book - being amplified at an individualistic level it is honest, and being honest it is often selfish and self-regarding (just like we all can be).

The emotional outpourings reek with déjà vus, while great griefs such as the sudden loss of a mentor are recorded simply by mute acceptance depicting how true life is maddeningly full of such missing explanations. And this is one fascinating record of a cluster of intertwined lives in the middle-class at the heart of India.

 With jubilant notations, innovative metaphors, fluid backdrops, discrete images, heartwarming characters and wholesome tales, Mistry’s throbbing first book towers over the landscape of contemporary Indian fiction. If not the Titan, Mistry, for me is the Gulliver amongst the Lilliputians. We just can’t afford to miss him. No seriously. We just can’t!  

Do catch up with the book soon… Hope you liked the review!!

Interpreter of Maladies: Book review

Interpreter of Maladies (Jhumpa Lahiri): ***

Pulitzer Prizes, Commonwealth Awards, Man Booker Trophies don’t guarantee a fantastic book and this belief only became reconfirmed as I eyeballed through my rough notes and the scribbly stars that I had awarded to the different fables in the book. A collection of nine stories captioned, “of bengal, boston and beyond” this one fetched the author the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 but after reading them, one’s left with an indissoluble bitter taste and there are reasons galore.

Giving the compliments where they are due, there are two exquisite stories in the book but for some vague reason, Lahiri’s intelligence at being powerful and sensitive in tandem is limited to these first and last stories and the nosedive which the emotions and the characters takes for the seven other stories is so immoderately abrupt and steep that one’s left wondering if it’s the same book one’s reading.

In all probability, one of the most moving short stories I have ever come across, is “A Temporary Matter” which focusses around a couple (Shukumar and Shoba) whose relationship, with the passage of time and circumstances has choked while the gradually elaborating communication and emotional gap has beaten the path for a strange bond which is a confusing mixture of ambivalence and avoidance. But a temporary matter of hourly electricity cut for five days acts a pacifier as they exchange confessions each night under a candle-light. Lahiri has, with such chiselled precision visited Shukumar’s self-piteous feelings (being an unemployed, idling student of 35), his gradual blunted odium towards Shoba’s presence (Shoba being a productive proof-reader), his yearn for the once-booming relationship and his silent embitterment towards Shoba for her little candlelight confessions which furthers him to make a revelation that was never meant to be—the description of their stillborn child, that the whole story becomes haunting and being the first, raises one’s expectations to levels never attained by the others.

Seldom have I come across stories which have visited the mindset of the immigrants, and “The Third and the Final Continent” is one such rare case. A Bengali bachelor who migrates to North London for his degree and then to a library’s processing department at MIT in US, his various experiences of accommodation (at YMCA and then at a rented room in a centenarian Mrs Croft’s house) and adaptations to the environment till he finally localises with his wife and family are delicately laced with subtle humour and incised domestic detail but what takes the cake is the final sentence which so brilliantly sums up this strange mix of attachment and achievement for the forever recurring, resonating experiences of one’s first moments in the alien land:

“I have lived in this new world for 30 years. I know that my achievement is quite ordinary…still there are times when I am bewildered by each mile I have travelled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept.”

Starting from the dim-sighted amongst the blind comes the erotically titled “Sexy” which centres itself around a young Midwestern girl, Miranda (and her steamy affair with a married Bengali man) who has failed to notice the sheer insignificance in the relationship till a kid, Rohin, victim of another failed marriage causes her to visualise the other side. The story has its entertaining moments in Miranda-Rohin’s conversation and Miranda’s quest to rate Dev’s wife’s beauty which takes her to a video-library as she hears him comparing the latter to a certain Madhuri Dixit who she doesn’t have a clue of. But an open-ending dampens both the well-constructed milieu and characters.

Another mediocre story focuses on an 11-year old boy Eliot and his experiences during brief everyday sojourns at his new, Indian baby-sitter– Mrs Sen’s . His queer interpretations of her ways of fashion and meal-preparation and his reflections on Mrs Sen’s reactions as she alternates between motherland nostalgia and driving fear are rational, and through a predictable, but well-conceived climax one does feel the frigidity in the natives of America as Eliot’s mother decides against baby-sitting, but never for the actual protagonist—Mrs Sen.

As the Indian landscape sashays across Lahiri’s book, one’s bewildered at the overweening eccentricity and preposterousness with which the characters are handled. Then be it the fuss around the treatment of a brainsick woman (Bibi Haldar) whose ailment’s only cure is being sowed with some male seeds, or the sweeper besotted with her pre-Partition past, Boori Maa whose years of sweeping and gatekeeping still doesn’t deter from the superiors living in the building in pointing their fingers at her when a robbery materialises, Lahiri’s neither able to convey the sheer futility of years of servility in India in latter nor the psyche of an insane female all thanks to her rushed climaxes and forced metaphors.

Another otiose shot from Lahiri is a long-winded “When Mr. Pirzaada comes to Dine” where through a young narrator’s eyes one observes a Pakistani oldster (Mr.Pirzaada) whose family’s trapped in Bangladesh during the violent epoch of 1971. Though a poignant metaphor does persist throughout (that of the girl praying for Mr.Pirzaada’s family every night with a sweet being swallowed), I wonder if it’s the sheer immaturity of the chosen young storyteller or Lahiri’s fatigue midway to blame, for neither does Mr.Pirzaada’s tragedy exhibits the required potency nor is his stoic mien any more efficacious. A terribly clichéd climax only crushes whatever depth the story possesses.

The amusing factor of a Hindu couple finding scattered Christian regalia in their new house again bleaches abruptly in the climax in “This Blessed House” as one of the obstinate partners gives in to another’s zeal to demonstrate their “blessed” catches. Lahiri’s continuous enthusiasm is the only redeeming factor in this commonplace story.

Shockingly, Lahiri’s worst shot is the story possessing the book’s title “Interpreter of Maladies” where Lahiri has little else to convey besides a tour operator cum interpreter’s crush on one of his female customers travelling with her husband and kids en-route Konark. A poorly-conceived and untimely revelation of the wife to the interpreter about her worn-out relationship and illegitimate child without any rhyme or reason, her bizarre reactions after the interpretor’s question about her feelings and the unfastened climax leaves you feeling zonked and zapped (first at the story and then at yourself). Absolutely pointless!!

One of the selected reasons that drew me towards this book was the expectation to witness some issues surrounding the Asian community in the alien-land exile, and save for one Lahiri’s dry, clinical approach towards characters and relationships means the impact is both soggy and dull.

One can’t deny that Lahiri possesses incisive background detailing, theme indulgence and deftness in lacing simplistic humour with tragedy, which makes these tales readable to an extent, but she lacks that consistent compassion and cohesion in expression which leaves her short-stories both emotionally flaccid and wanting in content.

Given the space and word restraints in a short-story, concentration over a character or theme holds the ultimate importance; having a definite climax eradicates any scope for unsettlement; and most importantly for getting appreciated, the stories have to be wonderful, wholesome tales first. Sadly, most of Lahiri’s lanky and fatigued fables are from these basic neccesities, and appear to be forcefully crafted out powdered color-pencil drawings where neither the characters possess any sheen nor the surroundings any glow.

For somebody like me who’s grown up appreciating short stories by Ruskin Bond, R.K.Narayan, Khushwant Singh, Satyajit Ray, Vikram Seth and Rohinton Mistry, Jhumpa Lahiri’s stories just makes me chortle at the inanity, frown at the banality, scowl at the humdrum and wonder about the hype and the hoopla.

If reading seven purposeless, lifeless tales with two exotic ones doesn’t bother you, I’ll recommend this.