Longish Short Story Done!

Not everything is okay in K-town. Lalgarh...I am in no position to undermine or trivialize the violence that has been unleashed in there...but apart from all the co-lateral damage involved,one cannot help recognizing this plain old fact that the states, all over the world, can be extremely funny and idiotic when they are scared. And quite ridiculous too! Not too many years ago, in Kenya, Ngugi wa'Thiongo's novel Matigari was arrested. This is not a typo. I am serious. They issued a fucking arrest warrant against a novel. I wouldn't be surprised if I witness something similar in my home-state!

In terms of my writing, I finally finished the story I had been working on (yay!). It was a painful process--writing this story. For one thing, it took me almost three months to finish it. Granted, in the middle of it all, I took my comprehensive exams, wrote and defended my dissertation proposal, but still, this is the longest short story that I have ever written. And during the entire process, I kept worrying about the plot, the voice, the cris-crossing of voices, point-of-view, characterization etc. But now, I realize that this story had been influenced a lot by the general tone of Jhumpa Lahiri's latest short story collection Unaccustomed Earth, which I was reading during a big chunk of this time that I was writing this story.

I must confess, I am not a great fan of Lahiri's. I do think she is a very competent short story writer, and has a lot to teach in terms of the craft of short fiction. But for most part, she is replicating in a much more sensitive way the kind of assimilationist narrative that was popularized by Bharati Mukherjee and the ilk. No doubt Lahiri is much more sensitive and adept at representing more complex characters, but at the end of the day it is all about the American Dream. But what to do? If you are a Bengali, a writer and a poco-lit-critter, then you will end up bouncing against her. Even if you yourself choose to ignore her, people will ask your opinions about her and her work, and then you suddenly find yourself leafing through her books.

At the same time, I must confess that Unaccustomed Earth is a very important book to me. It has given me the permission to write long, novella-like short stories where nothing much happens. Where I want to deviate from Lahiri is, the whole complex question of how to represent women. My own thesis is that, Lahiri finds it extremely hard to represent feminine rebellion, feminine intellectuality, feminine radicalism. Consequently, her women characters tend to inhabit that space of demure Bengali femininity which does not nettle with either the mainstream South Asian/Bengali perceptions of womanhood, or the American/Western/white perceptions about hapless South Asian women. On the other hand, I like to think that this story is primarily about women resisting. In multiple ways. Across generational lines. And also, the failure to resist. I think the story is also about memory, destruction of memory and the vicious circle of violence within which families are often implicated.

My own sense is that, I still need to work on the concluding section of the story. Also, I know very very well that once I begin to send it out for feedback, there will be lots of things that I will need to revise. But for now, I will sit back for a while and celebrate!