Blue is like Blue, and familiar is strange: on Vinod Kumar Shukla’s translated short stories

[Did this review of a collection of VK Shukla’s short stories, for Open magazine]
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In “College”, the longest piece in the new collection Blue is Like Blue, we are told that a particular neem tree, when seen in the dark, doesn’t look like a neem tree but “like some other tree dressed up like a neem”. A magistrate’s house similarly looks like it has been “dressed up to look like a magistrate’s bungalow”. An economics teacher walks half-bent, leaning forward: “If he had picked up something from the ground, no one would have noticed.”

So detailed is VK Shukla’s writing, so full of unexpected little observations and asides, that it brings the texture of a hyper-real dream to seemingly everyday incidents and musings. To properly convey something of the effect of his stories, one has to mention vignettes and descriptions from them. For instance, in “Piece of Gold”, when half of a broken ring falls on a bed, the narrator stops his friend from getting up, because “if he got up the piece might get lost”; it is then found embedded in a crease in the bedsheet. Such things, said in passing, might seem tedious or superfluous in a different sort of tale – but in Shukla they create a sense of a lived-in world: we feel we know his characters, mostly young men living in rented quarters, worrying about finances.

Often, there is the matter-of-fact anthropomorphising of things – living spaces, trees, colours, a marketplace – and we are made privy to people’s relationships with their environment. In “Room on the Tree”, when a young man locks his second-floor room to go to work, he feels “as if he had bound the room hand and foot, not that there was any chance of the room climbing down after him”. Another young man who likes visiting the local bazaar idly muses that “if you didn’t have money you could be in the bazaar and the bazaar couldn’t care less whether you died of hunger or for lack of medicines”. “Seen from the cinema’s point of view, I was just another cinemagoer,” says the narrator of “Old Veranda”. The utensils in a household, bought second-hand, are named after old films like “Duniya na Mane” and “Jhumroo”. In two stories, a constructed setting shares space with the natural world: a secluded room is so close to a peepal tree that it is referred to as a tree room; a classroom is so close to a pond that you can lean out of the window and touch the water.

It’s tempting to call these slice-of-life stories, but that doesn’t capture how they manage to be familiar and off-centre at once. Also, despite the languid, undramatic tone of the writing, many of the stories are clearly “about” something – it’s another matter that they then find detours and cracks to slip into, so that the “what will happen” becomes less important than the gathering of detail. As in “Man in the blue shirt”, which starts on a very specific note – with the narrator intrigued by two sightings of a man wearing a blue shirt and carrying a pot of curd – but then becomes more abstract, as the story’s focus shifts to other people on the road. Or “Spare time of the crowd”, which begins with a man drawing the attention of a group of people by standing on an overturned drum but then segues into a series of conversations about shoes and feet.

At times, you might find yourself searching for the hidden core of a story (which may or may not exist). So the title of “The Burden” could refer to a leaf that becomes lodged in a young man’s pocket while he is cycling (“the leaf fragments could hardly be called heavy nor did he have to stop to remove them, but stop he did”) – or to the burden of a full month’s salary, 150 rupees, which he has kept in his room, causing him to worry about the possibility of theft, and the sense of lightness once he has used the money to pay off his debts and expenses. In another story, after a brass tumbler owned by a Brahmin family falls into a privy and they continue using it after washing it, the jamadarin goes about telling people that these brahmins “drank water from a tumbler that had been caked with shit”. This is presented as a casual aside, but it is also suggestive of the poverty of this family.

You can start reading this book from anywhere, but it may also be useful to look at the dates of original publication (given at the end of each piece), to trace possible changes in Shukla’s writing arc. For instance, “Fish”, written when he was only around twenty, feels relatively narrative-driven, with a clear beginning, middle and end: the story has two little boys hoping to play with some fish that are to be killed for dinner, and there is a subplot about their unhappy elder sister (who shudders as she weeps in bed, much like “the twitching of the fish”). But even in the early work, there is an unusual perspective on something that might otherwise be mundane – in the way, for example, that the smell of fish seems to fill the house on a day that a crisis has visited the family.

Some stories feel more allegorical than others. “The Man’s Woman” features a conversation where two men seem to be discussing whether to pour acid on a woman’s arm to remove an unwanted tattoo, but the indolent nature of the exchange almost belies what they are talking about. And then there is the very intriguing "The Gathering", about poets and the literary symbols they use, which are then given physical shape, and scrutinised by a pedantic critic. “There’s no mention in your poem of a dead snake with ants sticking to its mouth,” this critic says, “But the dead snake you’ve brought has ants sticking to its mouth. You must change either the poem or the symbol.”

Is this a dig at artistic pretensions, or at how creative people are expected to provide clear explanations for everything they do? In the case of Shukla – who, the translators tell us, was a provincial, “ground-hugging” writer who lived his whole life in Raipur and Rajnandgaon, seldom travelled, was puzzled by an elaborate autograph signing at a literature festival, and had no idea who JM Coetzee was – it could be a combination of both. And for the reader who has never before encountered him, these stories can cause one to rethink what narratives should look and feel like.