Nisha: Amazing story, I was guffawing. And the bus is like different things for everyone, right. Like for his daughter it’s a bad reminder of school in Bombay…
Ashwin: But there’s some kind of catharsis going on there. Not by gaining an explanatory hold of the situation, but by entering into this romantic, melancholic relationship with the actress…
Nisha: But she takes charge, doesn’t she?
Tejaswini: And the definitive act is not her meeting him, which is foreordained, but the definitive act is him running out of the office of the supervisor, getting on the bus, and driving it away.
Ashwin: So imagine that incongruence of a double-decker bus on a highway, and finally a double-decker bus in a remote village. This incongruous situation is what helps this man gain an understanding of what is happening here. Of course, there is a third story, ‘Interval’, which is really a masterpiece. Two young people deciding to elope … the interval in your life when you reflect on things. You’re not ‘reflecting reflecting’, but what’s happening is your world is re-arranging itself internally for you. Now this is rare in Kannada fiction. So this is one aspect which stands against the social explanation model of understanding contemporary issues. Look at all the modern writing in Kannada, what is it apart from the tale of this country’s moving into a social modernity?
If you want to look at the deep pursuits of men, or women, these kinds of things, you can go back to your Dostoyevsky and so on and so forth.
Tejaswini: But mainstream critics, who are not academics, will say universal values, approximation to the ‘universal’ is what for them qualifies as good fiction. Even if it’s very concrete or specific, it will be about that realization in that moment.
Ashwin: Yes and no. Yes, in so far as the language in which people talk about literature in Kannada refers to universalist values. But look at the fiction writers, there is a heavy, social explanation bias. Take somebody like Kuvempu. Kuvempu is talking about a ‘return to the soil’ in his two novels. But outside those thin abstractions, very quickly, you can reach a stage where you say this is a kind of transformation for the peasant milieu, which is encountering urbanity. Broadly speaking, the social register is the main register in which most Kannada fiction writing is done, from the perspectives of the critic as well as the writer. There is, of course, some lip service paid to metaphysical pursuits but that’s there in the way you frame your work for others, but it’s not there on the page.
Tejaswini: I would call it by a slightly different term. I would say it is ‘descriptive’. Criticism in Kannada and most Indian languages, and even in Indian writing in English, is very descriptive. It is usually not seeking to make a proposition about the work in question—
Nisha: Or glorify it.
Tejaswini: It gives you an idea of the plot, that the twists and turns of the plot are interesting, that it is a very good read, that the language is good, or whatever. Beyond a point, the fine art of reviewing fiction, it is not a genre we are comfortable with at all. You’re not seeking to make the book your own; you’re just doing, crudely put, a sort of consumer review. In a way, the descriptiveness of criticism, which you called the social register, is the problem. And I think it’s difficult for Kannada critics to figure out what to describe in Jayant’s writing! I want to spend some time on what this means. It may allow us to get at the distinctiveness of the writing.
Ashwin: Let me add one more thing. It takes a lot of effort not to introduce imagery from the outside to help us understand what’s happening in the story. An image the character would not have seen or understood. It’s not like Jayant is doing it like a James Joyce-type vrata, that he wants to only do things in a particular stylistic way. A writerly mode of description is avoided. It may be a small point for literary criticism, but I think it suggests these are fault lines for a lot of fiction in Kannada. The fiction becomes ‘false’ by fictional standards, not those of realism.
Nisha: I totally agree. I don’t read much Indian fiction where there is no distance between the writer and their characters. Jayant’s is unique in this regard. There’s no kitschy quality here. None of the self-congratulation which reminds us of the distance.
Tejaswini: I’ve noticed that too. So now, this book is being launched into the English-reading universe. There is of course a huge Indian market for it, but there are also readers outside of this. I keep thinking what the life of the book would be after it’s launched. So I’m positioning No Presents Please here not against Kannada fiction but against other translated works and other fiction books in English about contemporary urban experience. And in that larger canvas, it’s fascinating to me how the stories are doing what Nisha is saying, how they are able to cut across class and caste, how they are able to speak in a range of voices – the sex workers in some of the stories, the boy who works in Opera House, people who have odd jobs, or those who run a small shop, the person whose horse runs away with him on his wedding day, and also middle class people. Jayant is able to capture the intricate lives of his characters so we see what they are embedded in. The characters don’t just appear here because they are artifices in Jayant’s stories. They’re dragging those lives into the stories … and you get a glimpse into the lives of others, that’s what’s amazing in the way the fiction is structured.
Nisha: You’re using the word ‘lives’. That’s what it is. The fact that these people have inner lives is not something granted any more in commercial publishing. The subaltern is only for non-fiction, and much celebrated non-fiction at that. Fiction, especially Indian English fiction, is for the middle class and the upper middle class. I feel there’s such a distance between middle class people and others. If I take an auto and go into a place I haven’t been before, I am supposed to immediately write a book about it. Very far from the inner lives question…
Tejaswini: Indeed. Jayant is not a tourist in the lives he writes about. He’s on the same terrain as those lives.
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Celebrating 25 Years of Great Publishing
HarperCollins India celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2017. Twenty-five years of publishing India’s finest writers and some of its most memorable books – those you cannot put down; ones you want to finish reading yet don’t want to end; works you can read over and over again only to fall deeper in love with.
Through the years, we have published writers from the Indian subcontinent, and across the globe, including Aravind Adiga, Kiran Nagarkar, Amitav Ghosh, Jhumpa Lahiri, Manu Joseph, Anuja Chauhan, Upamanyu Chatterjee, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, Shekhar Gupta, M.J. Akbar, Satyajit Ray, Gulzar, Surender Mohan Pathak and Anita Nair, amongst others, with approximately 200 new books every year and an active print and digital catalogue of more than 1000 titles, across ten imprints. Publishing works of various genres including literary
fiction, poetry, mind body spirit, commercial fiction, journalism, business, self-help, cinema, biographies – all with attention to quality, of the manuscript and the finished product – it comes as no surprise that we have won every major literary award including the Man Booker Prize, the Sahitya Akademi Award, the DSC Prize, the Hindu Literary Prize, the MAMI Award for Best Writing on Cinema, the National Award for Best Book on Cinema, the Crossword Book Award, and the Publisher of the Year, twice, at Publishing Next in Goa, and more recently, the Publisher of the Year Award 2016 at Tata Literature Live, Mumbai.
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Thank you for your continued support and patronage. And here’s wishing everyone a great new year!
About the Book
‘Very few writers have caught the absurdities, pathos and comic turmoil that drive life in an Indian city today with the vibrancy of Jayant Kaikini.’
– GIRISH KARNAD
‘Jayant Kaikini’s compassionate gaze takes in the people in the corners of the city, the young woman yearning for love, the certified virgin who must be married off again, the older woman and her medicines. Tejaswini Niranjana’s translations bring the rhythms of Kannada into English with admirable efficiency. This is a Bombay book, a Mumbai book, a Momoi book, a Mhamai book, and it is not to be missed.’
– JERRY PINTO
No Presents Please: Mumbai Stories is not about what Mumbai is, but what it enables. Here is a city where two young people decide to elope and then start nursing dreams of different futures; where film posters start talking to each other; where epiphanies are found in keychains and thermos-flasks. From Irani cafés to chawls, old cinema houses to reform homes, Jayant Kaikini seeks out and illuminates moments of existential anxiety and of tenderness.
In these sixteen stories, gaps in the curtains of the ordinary open up to possibilities that might not have existed, but for this city where the surreal meets the everyday.
About the Autor
Jayant Kaikini, Kannada poet, short-story writer, columnist and playwright, with six short-story volumes, five poetry collections, three collections of non-fiction, and three plays to his credit, is also a much sought-after award-winning lyricist, script and dialogue writer for Kannada films. He won his first Karnataka Sahitya Akademi award at the age of nineteen in 1974 for his debut poetry collection, followed by three more in 1982, 1989 and 1996, for his short-story collections. He has also received the Dinakar Desai Award for poetry, the B.H. Sridhar award for fiction, the Katha National Award and the Rujuwathu Trust Fellowship for his writing. He is the recipient of the Karnataka State Award for best dialogue and lyrics, and the Filmfare Award for best lyrics in Kannada four times – in 2008, 2009, 2016 and 2017. Born in the coastal temple-town Gokarn, Kaikini is a biochemist by training and worked with pharmaceutical companies in Mumbai for two decades before moving to Bangalore, where he lives presently. A well-known television personality, he was given an honorary doctorate from Tumkur University in 2011 for his contribution to Kannada literature, film and television. He was honoured as Zee Kannadiga of the Decade in 2016. He was the first recipient of the Kusumagraj Rashtriya Bhasha Sahitya Puraskar in 2010. His latest book is a collection of essays on cinema.
Tejaswini Niranjana won the Central Sahitya Akademi Prize for her translation of M.K. Indira’s Phaniyamma (1989) and the Karnataka Sahitya Akademi Prize for her translation of Niranjana’s Mrityunjaya (1996). She has also translated Pablo Neruda’s poetry and Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar into Kannada. Her translations into English include Vaidehi’s Gulabi Talkies (2006). She grew up in Bangalore, and has studied and worked in Mumbai. She is currently professor of cultural studies at Lingnan University, Hong Kong.
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First published in India in 2017 by Harper Perennial
An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
A-75, Sector 57, Noida, Uttar Pradesh 201301, India
www.harpercollins.co.in
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
Copyright © Jayant Kaikini 2017
Translation copyright © Tejaswini Niranjana 2017
P.S. Section copyright © Tejaswini Niranjana, Surabhi Sharma,
Nisha Susan, Ashwin Kumar A.P. 2017
P-ISBN: 978-93-5264-587-9
Epub Edition © October 2017 ISBN: 978-93-5264-588-6
This is a work of fiction and all characters and incidents described in this book are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Jayant Kaikini asserts the moral right
to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved under The Copyright Act, 1957. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Publishers India.
Cover photograph: Nitesh Mohanty
Cover design: Studio Em&En
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