Era Murukan’s foreword to G.B Chathurbhujan’s (Baskar S Iyer) short story anthology ‘A lesson in love’
Ray Bradbury, the noted Science Fiction writer quipped when once asked how to write a good short story, ‘write one short story weekly; you can’t write 52 bad stories one after another and there is going to be a good one among them’.
Of these 52, how to select the best story? And who should be entrusted with the onerous task of picking the diamond out from the heap of pebbles? Which scales would he employ?
We all like reading short stories. Short stories of all categories, like love stories, horror stories, humourous stories, stories of valor would find place in our like-lists. Just because we like a story, it does not mean that we would like to read it any time of the day. any day.
We like a story because of its strong characterisation or the narrative technique employed or the commencement or culmination. All these are attributes of a well written story but do not constitute goodness per se. There is nothing called The Good Story, it appears. We like reading or remembering a story when we are in a certain mind frame. This is true of music, food, travel and recreation. The more broad the frame is, the more will be the enjoyment, delight and enlightenment derived.
‘A lesson in love’ is a book like all others worthy of a ‘good’ tag and would provide good reading and remembering as we glide through the time and space coordinates.
Baskar S.Ayer has a penchant for a few things which would make his writing a tad different from what most others of his ilk would create. He would by and large write about the urban middle class, that too of Chennai, to be precise, of south Madras which still would zoom-in to the dull and drab locality of Ashok Nagar, in almost all the stories in this anthology. To be frank, I too am a resident of Ashok Nagar who moved in recently after two decades of happy residence in T.Nagar, another South Madras locality. I, like most others of my kind, observe Ashok Nagar to maintain a stoic silence and an expressionless urban countenance, while T Nagar is always cheerful and loquacious.
Baskar S. Ayer appears to be a long time resident of Ashok Nagar and somehow could extract almost all his fictional outpouring from this apparently frozen landscape. I am happy like any other reader hailing from Ashok Nagar to observe the Ashok Nagar landmarks like Ashok pillar, Mango grove colony, various avenues and a cinema theatre, not to mention the vegetarian restaurants serving piping hot, tasty fare anytime of the day. finding mention in these stories like the Malgudi landmarks in the master storyteller R.K.Narayan’s immortal works of fiction.
The author in these stories displays his verve for providing an ‘opposite to the generally assumed’ perspective. It is akin to looking from the other end. Thus we find here a newly wed pair on a house hunt in South Madras for renting a house or a portion of it. When one goes house hunting, the landlord would unabashedly quiz the probable would-be tenant whether he is a vegetarian and whether he is a Brahmin. An emphatic yes to these questions would lead to further conversation, while any trace of carnivorous food habits and diagnosing any apparent trace of other caste or religious DNA in the house hunter would certainly be conversation stoppers. Baskar S.Ayer’s young couple on house hunt has the temerity to ask the landlord whether the house owner’s family is vegetarian as the couple are averse to any meat cooked and consumed around their living area. And the landlord is put off when for the customary next question, ‘are you Brahmins’, the response is the customary Yes. They are disappointed the couple are Brahmins as they have decided not to rent the house to Brahmins as the previous Brahmin tenants were lacking in cleanliness and were always quarrelling with the landlord on flimsy issues.
In the same vein, the author depicts a professor in a leading management educational institute, who shows remorse when meeting years later, an ex student assessed by him as eligible for less than pass marks. The teacher in such narratives would be happy he acted right in the past and the then acolyte too would echo similar sentiments. In Baskar S.Ayer’s short story, the professor is genuinely sorry as he understood quite late that mathematics in the form of linear analysis has nothing to do with marketing and advertisement though the curriculum for the marketing course has linear analysis as one of the mandatory subjects for getting a pass. In other words he thinks like the student in the past while the ex student too has a change of perspective –different from the one he was having long back as a student. Time is a great perspective changer if not a healer as the short story implies.
Points of view changes enable the narrative to happen between the lines, ushering in, the element of interest. A variation of this is the perspective change for a upper middle class woman who loses her new pair of footwear at the gates of a temple. The lady finds her footwear is replaced with a worn-out pair. The usual suspicion is on someone of lower class walking away with expensive ones. It transpires later that the footwear was by mistake worn away by a stranger, an affluent lady, due to oversight. The rich act like the honest poor while the middle class is at wits end as to decide on how to respond to the situation.
The author’s depiction of south Madras middle class is precise. The parents belonging to this class are by default doting parents to their children. While teaching the son how to ride a bicycle, they also take pains to educate the junior on traffic rules to be obeyed as a cyclist. A parent in another story is overtly concerned how his son would handle writing the obituary when the father would pass away and makes arrangements to gift the son with a book on writing obituary, through his wife, the doting mother.
The mothers of this clan are acutely concerned about the risks their sons would encounter while straying out interacting with the big bad world. When the sons, college going mostly, do not phone up till late at night they are immensely worried and nudge the menfolk (the fathers) to share their concern and act without losing time to trace the boy out. When the son phones up saying he is in a hospital, that turns to be the last straw for the mothers, who compel their husbands to immediately take them to the hospital, only to find the boy had gone to the hospital to visit an ailing friend and not as an in-patient.
The sons, when the time is ripe for expressing their gratitude to such wonderful parents, declare solemnly that they would not like to migrate to the USA or UK after their graduation like their classmates but would be Chennai based along with their parents, taking up local employment, rooted to the soil. They of course are not stereotypes but are archetypes mostly.
1‘No sex please, we are British’, as the British farce stage play goes, these boys are ‘No sex please, we are South Madrasi’. They go through different phases of getting into adulthood from calf love to dating. No sex, pre or extra marital is a part of their younger days. When the love interest walks out of the boy’s life mostly because the girl’s parents get a work place transfer necessitating the winding up of the establishment at the boy’s locale, the later takes that in his stride as a lesson in love and continue with his hi-octane practicing and expression of filial love. In other words, men don’t follow their love interest when the girl moves out. They instead delve into long range next generation planning for arranged marriage of their respective heirs, when the time is ripe.
The middle class South Madras women in these short stories are mostly docile while some are averse to getting over qualified than their life partners, education wise. As executive heads of small families they quite often lead the family to eat out. They are all right with eating out without undue concern that house making in all respects is the woman’s responsibility, even if she is a working woman and half the bread earner. They are also not unduly concerned about raise in food prices and lessening of the helpings, yet return to the hotel and patronize them, as the food is ‘heavenly’ .
Even after 20 years of successful marriage they don’t make any song and dance to celebrate that longevity of relationship as observed in this anthology. They each has their own limited walk down their memory lane and take care not to share their recollection of feelings about their past. They are happy to reminisce that they have talked in secret, personal, hard to hack lingo. They have been understanding and helpful to each other. When they decide enough is enough or when it is time to unwind, they settle down to watch the serials on the small screen.
The middle class men and women depicted by the author Baskar S.Ayer go by the dictum – “We see so many weddings happen. Most of them run successfully; only a few end in divorce. Think good, do good! The Almighty will take care of things.”
On the lighter side, they are still enthralled by Tamil cinema. I disagree though – they are equally enthralled by cinema stars, small screen actors, musicians of classic and modern music, cricketers, etc. Men and women are immersed in reading the gossip columns of newspaper.
They try to find sages and karma yogis everywhere, even in an octogenarian woman broom maker who tells a protagonist “Go, go, Go home and do your work. As long as we live, we must be at work, we must be doing something”.
Coming to the news, Baskar S.Ayer observes the media decides upon the shelf life duration of the news, the middle class are fed with and shared. Even the sorrowful news of a teacher stabbed by a student has a single day shelf life with everyone giving it a go the next day after it trended in sharing. Andy Warhol is correct. In future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.
Even Gods of the middle class need marketing of their service offerings these days. Whatever be the trouble of the devotees, they need to put them down in green ink on yellow-tinted card and place it at the feet of the idol of the God of a newly established temple in a busy Ashok Nagar area and the trouble vanishes. The typical middle class mentality of meek submission of the protagonist takes a break. He writes his prayer for success of his English Speaking Classes in a yellow card. He tears it off as he nears the over crowded temple and goes back. He is confident he too can advertise like the God and reach out more citizens through bills.
The upper middle class interaction with lower echelons of the society mainly through part time maid servants is cordial mostly as narrated in these short stories. The maids draw inspiration from the masters and mistresses always. They treat the employer as embodiment of all virtues worthy of emulation.
A friend of mine who also is a writer would always convey a social message at the end of the story. Sometimes he is so absorbed in morality preaching that the story ends abruptly as it commences and the morality broadcast creeps in, making the rest of the narrative. The author quite unlike him has been successful with his creations and has given us a basket of flowers ranging from daffodils to merry gold.
Stanley Kubrick the famous Hollywood movie director said ‘ A film should have a beginning, middle portion and an end, not necessarily in that order’. Likewise, reading a book can also commence at the middle, proceed to the end and then go to the beginning. It is for the reader to read all the stories at one go or at random. Whatever be the strategy adopted, this is an absorbing short story anthology to read and relish.
Era.Murukan
Tamil Author
A Lesson in Love |A collection of crisp short stories |Author G.B.Chathurbhujan
Published by Creative Workshop, Flat 1 Aristo, 9 Second STreet
Gopalapuram, Chennai 600 086
