Greatest Short Stories

by Mulk Raj Anand

  electricity in the new dam.

  In The Tractor and the Corn Goddess a similar problem is tackled but a different solution is indicated. The arrival of a tractor brought by a progressive minded young landlord creates panic in a village. The giant machine is severally accused of having desecrated Mother Earth: of violating the Corn Goddess; of containing jinns, bhuts and Shiv-Shakti of being a weapon of destruction with concealed guns to be used to shoot the peasants down. The clever landlord then has the tractor dismantled in the presence of the villagers, who are finally convinced that the thing is after all only so much of

  ‘iron and steel, so tempered as to plough the land quickly ’. The peasant’s down-to-earth commonsense ultimately triumphs over superstition. The story is also a satire on the weight of convention in a feudalistic society. When the radical young landlord, who has newly succeeded to the estate, remits taxes and refuses to accept nazrana, his tenants, instead of being delighted are shocked at this lapse from feudalistic propriety.

  Feudalism is also the object of Anand’s satire in A Kashmir Idyll with its most ironic title. Here, what starts as a pleasure trip in Kashmir ends as a tragedy of feudal exploitation and retribution. A petty State nobleman compels young tenant to row his pleasure-boat, ignores the poor man’s pitiful plea that he has to attend to the funeral of his mother who is just dead. The protesting young tenant is however, himself shocked at having annoyed his lord and master by so gross an act of disobedience, and grovels in the dust, in atonement. The fat Nawab, driven to hysterical glee at this conclusive demonstration of his feudal power is choked to death by his fit of laughter. The theme of how unjustly the haves treat the have-nots is handled in a more restrained manner in The Price of Bananas, in which a well-to-do businessman not only makes niggardly recompense for a service done to him by a fruit-vendor but also unjustly accuses him of having a hand in his discomfiture.

  In all these stories of social criticism there is a clear under current of comedy (which in A Kashmir Idyll is mixed with a touch of the macabre). The ignorance of the village in The Power of darkness and The Tractor and the Corn Goddess and the discomfiture of the rich businessman at the hands of the monkey in The price of Bananas are obviously diverting; but the comedy here is evidently secondary to satire on social mores. In A pair of Mustachio, The Signature and Two Lady Rams however, comedy holds the stage, relegating social criticism to the background, while in The Liar we have unalloyed laughter. A Pair of Mustachios, presents Khan Azam Khan, who claims descent from an ancient noble Afghan family. Now reduced to poverty, he still retains all his feudal hauteur of which his up-turned ‘tiger mustache’ is a concrete symbol. When he finds the village shopkeeper turning the tips of his mustaches upward until they resemble the aristocratic ‘tiger mustache’, he is so profoundly disturbed that he enters into a strange deal with the low-born shopkeeper, according to which, the Khan will transfer all his household goods and chattels to the banya on condition that both the tips of the mustaches of the upstart come down permanently and are kept glued in the ‘Goat style’ appropriate to his station in life. For the feudal ‘downstart’, the world is indeed well lost for a bunch of hair on the upper lip of an upstart. Feudalism is equally the source of farcical humour in the Signature. Subramaniam, a bank official who arrives at Aliabad to take the signature of the Nawab on an important document, finds a

  business which should normally take not more then a couple of minutes dragging for days together, since feudal etiquette demands that a guest be properly and elaborately entertained before any business is transacted. It is difficult to decide which is the more comic of the two-Subramaniam’s plight in the feudal world in which he finds himself ‘a stranger and afraid’ or the Nawab’s refusal to realise the futility of obstinately clinging to traditional feudal ways in the modern age.

  The comedy in Two Lady Rams arises out of the complications of bigamy which, in the pre-Independence days in India was far from uncommon. Lalla Jhinda Ram receives a knighthood, the glory and joy of which are clouded by the fact that he has two wives (the first fifty and the second half her age) and each insists on attending the investiture ceremony as Lady Ram. He finally cuts the ceremony where the appearance of the two Lady Rams creates quite a sensation.

  The Liar is a highly diverting account of Labhu, an old village Shikari whose tall tale of shikar are garnished with monsters, magicians and damsels.

  The last three stories in this selection — The Tamarind Tree, The Silver Bangles and The Thief have one feature in common. They are all primarily studies in human psychology, though other elements such as social criticism, and humanitarian compassion, which are almost ubiquitous in Anand’s work are also present in them. In The Tamarind Tree, Roopa, a young wife and an expectant mother cannot satisfy her longing to eat tamarind from her neighbour ’s tree, but a far greater disappointment for her is the sad realisation that the fear of the elders and the weight of convention have made it impossible for her to communicate satisfactorily with her husband, for her plight is that ‘her inner impulses had always remained where they were, incommunicable even to her man.’ This invests the story with obvious psychological interest, though ostensibly Roopa’s tale would appear to be another variation on Anand’s favorite theme viz., the position of woman in traditional Hindu Society.

  In a similar way, superficially viewed, The Silver Bangles would appear to be a story on the usual theme of caste distinctions, but on closer scrutiny, is revealed to be a study in sexual jealousy. Here, a good-looking sweeper girl, who sports the silver bangles given to her on the occasion of her betrothal by her mother, is unjustly accused by the lady of the house, of having stolen them. The poor girl is also admonished that ‘untouchables in the South are not supposed to wear silver at all’. As the ending of the story makes clear, the high caste lady of the house, who is sexually frigid, is actually jealous of the attraction her husband feels for the sweeper girl, and is only seeking refuge in her caste-superiority to hide her inferiority vis-a-vis the untouchable beauty.

  The Thief, the last story in this group, is also far more than a presentation of the theme of humanitarian compassion as it would at first sight appear to be. Ganesh Prashad, the young protagonist in the story, feels a strange and irresistible sexual attraction for a dirty beggar woman and comes to realise that the source of this strange passion lies in an incident in the past when he had been responsible for the beating up of an innocent beggar whom he had unjustly accused of theft; ‘and now, this hangover of an unkind act against one beggar had become an undertone beneath the lust for another ’. This is perhaps a strange but by no means inappropriate kind of atonement for a deep-seated feeling of guilt which lies buried

  in the sub-conscious mind of the protagonist.

  The range and variety of Anand’s short stories are evinced not only in mood, tone and spirit but also in locale, characters and form. The setting ranges from the Punjab (as in The Parrot in the Cage) to Uttar Pradesh (as in The Price of Bananas) and Kashmir (as in Kashmir Idyll); and both the village and the city get almost equal representation. The men, women and children that move through these narratives come form different strata of society. A seedy-looking nobleman rubs shoulders here with an ambitious upstart; a timorous native clerk cringes before his British boss; a lost child searches frantically for its parents, and an old refugee woman hopes to make a new start in life. There is a virtual mine of human nature here. Anand’s characters are almost always representative of men and women. Old Bapu, Srijut Sudarshan Sharma (in The Gold Watch), Khan Azam Khan (in A pair of Mustachios) and other men in Anand’s stories are typical of the social milieu from which they come; and the same may be said of Anand’s women characters — Phalini (in Lullaby), Parvati (in Birth) Lajwanti, and others.

  Except in the Fables, the narrative element is always strong in Anand’s short stories. He is a skilled story-teller who can usually tell an absorbing narrative, beginning close to the action as in The Lair, The Silver Bangles and The Two Lady Ra
ms, or with short, apt description which creates the proper atmosphere as in The Tamarind Tree, Birth and Lajwanti. Occasionally, however, he is tempted to begin his stories in too leisurely a fashion, with a long introduction which delays the action unnecessarily. This is seen in stories like The price of Bananas and The Signature, though the long, leisurely introduction to The power of Darkness is perhaps a calculated device underscoring the bardic nature of the entire narrative. Most of Anand’s stories maintain their narrative thrust throughout, A Kashmir Idyll with its long, tourist guide type of place descriptions being an occasional exception. The endings of the stories show interesting variations. The action reaches a clinching conclusion in stories like The Lost Child; and Lajwanti, while in The Thief there is a fresh twist given to the action at the end, a la 0’ Henry Birth rightly ends on a note of hope for the future, and some of the Fables, not inappropriately, with a moral. Lullaby ends effectively with a refrain describing the factory scene and while there is a genuine poetic note here arising naturally out of the mood and tone of the narrative, the ending of Silver Bangles (Sajani lifted her head as a dove updives off the earth…) is open to the charge of poetizing, since the drift of the entire narrative does not support a conclusion in this vein, which strikes an obviously false note.

  Like almost every other major Indian writer writing in English, Anand has given some thought to the problem of the use of the English language by an Indian for creative purposes. He has made a useful distinction between ‘the higgledy-piggledy spoken English in our country ’ and ‘the imaginative use of the same language in the hands of the creative writers in Indian English."6 The former is ‘Pidgin-English’, and the latter he describes metaphorically as ‘Pigeon-Indian’, in which ‘the words soar in the imagination like pigeon,’ in flight.’7

  Analysing ‘Pigeon-Indian’, he says:

  The psychology of Indian English is rooted in the Indian metabolism. Most Indians, who speak or write English, even

  when they have been to Oxford and Cambridge… tend, naturally, to bring the hangover of the mother-tongue, spoken in early childhood into their expression… the pull of our mother-tongue leads to a heavy sugarcoating of ordinary English words.8

  Regarding the creative process involved in his own writing, Anand declares:

  I found, while writing spontaneously, that I was always translating dialogue from the original Punjabi into English. The way in which my mother said something in a dialect of central Punjab could not have been expressed in any other way except in an almost literal translation, which might carryover the sound and sense of the original speech. I also found that I was dreaming or thinking or brooding about two-thirds of the prose-narrative in Punjabi or in Hindustani, and only one-third in the English language;9

  True to his creed, Anand’s style almost aggressively sports peculiarities which make the Indian origins of his English unmistakably apparent. Colourful Indianisms permeate diction, idiom and imagery in the dialogue. Anand employs in his fictions expletives like’ Acha,’ ‘ohe’, ‘ wah’, ‘jaja’, ‘areray ’, honorifics such as ‘huzoor ’, ‘sardar ’, ‘Maharaja’ preserver of the poor’ and ‘sahib’ while these are the authentic article, the use of (‘sire’ in A Kashmir Idyll. and The Power of Darkness is clearly seen to strike a foreign and therefore false note); words used in a complimentary sense in a peculiar Indian fashion, such as ‘they ’ and ‘their’ used by a wife while referring to her husband, and phrases hallowed by custom such as ‘the wife of my son’ as a form of address while talking to a daughter-in-law; terms of endearment such as ‘My life’; colourful swear-words and imprecations reeking of the soil, as for instance,‘budmash’, ‘sala,’ ‘rape-mother’, ‘seed of a donkey ’ and ‘eater of you masters’. (The use of the phrase ‘sun of a gun’ in “The Tractor and the Corn, Goddess" is a jarring exception) and Indian vernacular idiom literally translated into English as in ‘Don’t stand on my head’, ‘there is something black in the pulse’, and ‘Darkness has descended over the earth’.

  Anand’s English in the narrative portions, though correct and idiomatic on the whole, also shows distinct peculiarities which make its Indian origin clear viz., its oriental opulence, its passion for adjectives, its tendency to use more words than are absolutely necessary, and its fast, galloping tempo. Thus, Roopa in The Tamarind Tree has her nose ‘bedewed… with jewels of perspiration’; ‘little virulets of sweat trickle’ through deep fissures of old age’ which line Rukmani’s face in The Parrot in the Cage; the agitation of old Bapu’s nerves produces ‘the aberration of a phantasma, like the red stars over a toothache’; and Lajwanti finds that ‘Destiny spread(s) the length of dumb distance before her ’, and ‘descending into the pit of confusion’, she is ‘lost in the primal jungle of turmoil’. Though this kind of stylistic opulence is almost overpowering for modern taste, it is a moot point whether it is not, in a way, typical of the Indian ethos shaped over centuries by the ornate utterances of Sanskrit and Persian literary modes. It would be as unreasonable to expect Anand to write like Hemingway, as it would have been to expect Faulkner to write like Maugham. Of course, there are occasions when Anand’s quick flow of words and dense accumulation of conceits are not justified by his immediate subject. This would perhaps indicate an occasional failure of sensibility,10 and sometimes a rather simplistic reading of life, though, at his best, as in The Lost Child, Birth and Lullaby, he does unmistakably show himself capable of looking into the heart of life.

  With all this limitations, Anand’s contribution to the Indian short story is truly impressive. He is a born story-teller, who has, at the same time thought deeply over his craft, drawing upon several sources in shaping it. He has an unerring sense of situation and a sure ability to visualize a sense clearly. His stories are a museum of human nature, and have a wide range and ample variety of mood and tone. Among the Indian short story writers in English, he has few peers.

  1 C.V. Venugopal, The Indian Short Story in English:

  A Survey (Bareilly, 1975), p.l.

  2 M.R. Anand, Indian Fairy Tales (Bombay, 1946) n.p.

  3 M.R. Anand, Preface to Selected Stories (Moscow, 1955), p.5.

  4 M.K. Naik, Mulk Raj Anand (New Delhi 1973), p.132.

  5 Ibid., pp. 132-133.

  6 M.R. Anand, 'Pigeon-Indian: Some Notes on Indian English Writing', Journal of the Karnataka University (Humanities), XVI, 1972, p. 72.

  7 Ibid., p. 90

  8 Ibid., p. 78.

  9 M.R. Anand, Pigeon-Indian: Some Notes on Indian English Writing, Journal of the Karnataka university (Humanities), XVI, 1972, p. 81.

  10 In answer to this criticism that there is 'an occasional failure of sensibility ', in a personal letter to me, the author writes:

  "In the ultimate analysis, my efforts at expressionism in the short story result here and there, in the diffusion of the metaphor, which inspires the tales — the love which connects all creatures, which I wish to infuse into my fiction in the face of the human situation. And, perhaps, some of my characters live in a kind of haze, with which I had intended to cover my sentiments. In the short stories about 'tears at the heart of the things', the elegy of Lajwanti may have remained a private lament. But Old Bapu is part of the vast tragedy, when he sees his face in the mirror and realises that he has grown old and is nearing death. In the stories of man's fate, baulked by the new cash-nexus society, happiness my be coloured by my over-enthusiasm to transform old gods into new gods and it is possible that the naive bard in Power of Darkness remains a silhouette. In The Cobbler and the Machine, however, Saudagar is realised. In the farcical tales, there is an inevitable resort to one-dimensional characters, like the Pathan in A Pair of Mustachios. In the stories about women and children, you will notice that the sensibility is sought to be ultimately fused, as in the pangs of Parvati in Birth, the anguish against the over-all fate as in Lullaby and the lostness of all the people in the world fair as in the Lost Child. In these tales you concede that I may have touched the heart of things."<
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  Part I

  ‘ LYRIC

  AWARENESS’

  1

  The Lost Child *

  It was the festival of spring. From the wintry shades of narrow lanes and alleys emerged a gaily clad humanity, thick as a swarm of bright-coloured rabbits issuing from a warren. They entered the flooded sea of sparkling silver sunshine outside the city gates and sped towards the fair. Some walked, some rode on horses, others sat, being carried in bamboo and bullock carts. One little boy ran between his parent’s legs, brimming over with life and laughter. The joyous morning gave greetings and unashamed invitations to all to come away into the fields, full of flowers and songs.

  “Come, child, come,” called his parents, as he lagged behind, fascinated by the toys in the shops that lined the way.

  He hurried towards his parents, his feet obedient to their call, his eyes still lingering on the receding toys. As he came to where they had stopped to wait for him he could not suppress the desire of his heart, even though he well knew the old, cold stare of refusal in their eyes.

  “I want that toy,” he pleaded.

  His father looked at him red-eyed in his familiar tyrant’s way. His mother, melted by the free spirit of the day, was tender, and giving him her finger to catch, said: ‘Look, child, what is before you.’