Who says you need a boundary? Damn the structures and comfort realities! Rajkamal's narrative branch out wonderfully to surprises and reels you in so gently, you want to chuckle at his wit or might even hold your head in discomfort from the brightness. The subtext, luminescence, bleakness and naked truths of individuals of Rajkamal's world was way ahead of his time. Upon finishing this collection, or every story, you feel like coming out of a long tunnel and be light-stricken.
In just mere age of 37, he had
written hundreds of stories and poems, ten novels, essays, criticism, etc. and
they are collected in Rachnawali by Rajkamal Chaudhary (Set of 8 Volumes). His eclectic view
of the world are seen in the stories of the collection. And it surely must have
created a displeasure among his contemporaries and critics. He was
experimenting with wild ideas, stigmas, narrative and structure, disrupting
understanding in its wake. The portrayal of sexuality and the reaction to it have
never been easy in South Asia, even if they are used in literature. You'll
know, Rajkamal's portrayal of it is not vulgar, but rather an artful disclosure
and meaningful. Reading the collection, we gather that, above all, Rajkamal
must have been a great thinker misunderstood by his time or not revered enough.
In the 12 stories of the
collection, we find wild and bizarre imagination breaking the waves of cultural
stigma, composition of discomforting veracities, oddities of characters and
persona of modernity.
In the first story, Still Life, realities blur and transcend into one another. Mirrors and still images are emulsified in the dreamy awakening of a sick man and there is his girlfriend trying to help him. We find ourselves in the midst of a hallucinatory living. Like suggested in the intro by the translator, the narrator's contemplation on life, death, suicide yields to nothingness. It is like being inside a surreal mind of an artist, who is ready to damn the world. In Some People in a Burning House, the narrator, a salesman is sent to a brothel by his friend to spend the night. Police raid happens and brothel women and their clients end up hiding in a damp, dark and dingy basement. The scenes and the setting is vivid and palpable and yet the author do not attempt to overdo the details. The dark makes the instincts and senses sharp, and the result is, you'll sense the story. You'll find as if you are there among the characters too, living their life; being them. An old man bleeds in the middle of the dark room and another saves matchsticks for his cigarettes. The momentary details: blood, scream, fear of death, stench of dead rats, sex, and nakedness, all of this explode, or even can be said, implode into a giant realization of emptiness, futility, damnation of morality and love for life even if it is disfigured or in disarray.
Elementary Knowledge of
Geography is a story of sexual encounters of a teenage boy and his inner
world of confusions and personal ways of getting out of the disquiet and fear.
The narrator, a teenage boy, shows us his world around and his experience and
witness of sexuality, homosexuality and the complex world and people abutting them.
Rajkamal is not afraid to drop taboos in his text, or establish some dramatic
comedy with dialogues and scenes. The playful narrative style and shifts in the
story at once makes it lively, brings contrast and also breaks the monotony,
though we rarely find one. In A Champa Bud: A Venomous Snake, a husband
and wife plot to marry off their daughter to a 62 year old man.
In An Angry Man, three
friends meet at a port restaurant, their usual rendezvous, near Ganges River and
wait for a woman coming on a steamer. Who is this woman? Among the three
friends, Kamlesh is irritable and now his thoughts are troubled, angered and
perplexed by his possessive maid; Ramnath still hasn't been able to come out of
his unsuccessful love affair and episodes that met an unexpected end, and Mehtab
companies his two friends. This story has a cinematic appeal to it and the
narrative expositions makes it more intense. The world of these characters is
surrounded with the influences of contemporary world – movies, celebrities, news.
and is therefore also sets a transporting experience for the readers of our
generation. Sometimes, Rajkamal's stories represent his zeitgeist while at
other times, he even beats today's contemporaries in style and dissension. In
An Angry Man too, Rajkamal's ploy lies in his strength to make personal
dilemmas as the commonality of the age, while also being able to give a comic or
witty charm to it – if these were turned into plays, they would come out as
tragedy of the century versus the comedy of the existence. We also feel, the
learnedness of the author who could encompass everything global to his use – visual
arts or literature. We may also be tempted to believe that the banal are the most
exciting things of the world; at least I did. An Angry Man can be read for many
things – psychological drama of the individuals, the urgency of coming out of
horror of loneliness – but what grasps us the most is the style, especially the
shuffling of episode from the past, the personal realms of the characters and
present burning with crisis as if in a coal. How inner world exhibits itself in
the external relationship has been one of the themes of Rajkamal's stories.
In Warriors Don't Worry About
the Right Time, the narrator visits his maternal home where his widowed
uncle has delusions of apparition of his deceased wife appearing at night.
There is also narrator's widowed aunt who haven't left her village after
becoming a child widow. Snakes of Silent Valleys – This story will give
you a deep pain and leave a furrow. The intricacy of the relationship between
the narrator and his aunt's daughter, and the narrative voice is so piercing,
that I personally consider it the best story of the collection. The story
bulges like a surface of water; everywhere there is a tension; everything is sensitive
to touch. And the mindfulness of the story is simply brilliant! Sometimes it
becomes like a raw skin; you will be afraid to touch it. As if told in a stream
of consciousness, you have no escape other than to hear Khagen's voice word by
word. There is existentialism, lurking sexuality, reclusive and hindered love
and pervasive crisis of relationship. Here, I am going to leave this as a
mystery for you. I want you to find the sensibilities of the story, enjoy it,
become its victim, become its witness and come out alive from the grip of
snakes of the valleys. In Sisters-in-Law, we find two widowed
sister-in-laws making their living by selling their bodies. And one day a
strange incident afflicts one of them with horror.
Like
Tennessee Williams' Mrs Stone, you donot know what to think and what to forget.
You just want to escape. You are afflicted by the fear of the conclusions of
your thoughts. You are unable to ask who is with me if I am not alone. It is
raining outside and I don't want to get wet.
No,
I do not want to die. I only want to kill the flame burning in my stomach. A
wrong Jesus Christ is growing in my womb, I do not want to raise the child. And
now the world doesn't even need Jesus Christ, it needs atom and hydrogen bombs!
– You want to say it but you don't have the courage.
Set in a tribal land, the story of
Veni Sanhar starts with hallucinatory images of a sickly woman who sees
her surrounding engulfed in flames. She is a mother of an infant and is not in
her right mind. Her husband has given up on her treatment. A black cat,
considered a bad omen in Hindu culture, appears from the wild. The encounter
between the sickly woman and the cat turns into a violent episode and leads to
even more disturbing consequences. Like a Wall of Glass is a story of an
artist who dreams of painting a woman, and ends in a disappointment and
disgust. In Pyramid, a married man brings a woman into his house,
particularly to show the charm of his drawing room, a self-comforting upper
class display among the ruins, while his maid and wife remain restless until
the woman leaves the house. In the title story, Traces of Boots on Tongue,
a man goes out to a hotel to freshen up his mood and encounters mysterious
women who are sticking out their tongue to him for bizarre reasons. And one
thing to note is that, snakes are the repeated symbols used in these stories. As
if people have mimicked the presence of venom, fangs, the threat display, its
slither, and constriction, and are lurking behind others, waiting for the bite.
I think Rajkamal was fascinated with snakes as symbols, and I am curious
whether his other stories have snakes in them too.
A
person's life is divided into pieces. There is no one person. There are people
inside one person. Many contradictory situations. Nymphs from Kalidasa's
heaven. Constantly warring gods and demons. Times future, past, present. Life
is not at one place, which can be presented by tethering it to a mirror, a
painting or a poem. Life is everywhere. In every moment, in every piece, in
everything there is life. And it solely depends on the one who lives the life
whether a moment is accepted under a certain circumstance and accepted until
when.
She
doesn't possess a maddening beauty or hypnotic gestures, because she is a wife,
an Indian wife, who can cook, fan and massage tired feet but cannot say that
she loves me a lot, with an amorous expression on her face, with warm breadth,
flared nostrils, widened shoulders and ruffled saree.
Rajkamal has used different
techniques in his stories like repeating the sentences, images and names
creating a vertigo, and also to remind us what possess the characters' eternal
doom. He carefully places his characters as if in a painting or play and
decides their movement, sorrows of characters and therefore of being. Poetic pieces too have entered
the stories in one or other way to leverage the intensity of narrative. He
knows every fiber of his characters and how easily they can break. It is a
restless world filled with doubts, disbelieves and compromise. You'll find terse
dialogues and their interplay in the text: their entry and exit is sublimely
done. We see man made from the past thrown into the world for personal struggle
and face his/her fate, and dilemma of the artists which Rajkamal himself might
have felt at his time. The realization of his era is vibrant, and so are his
references built upon the religious texts, modern science, contemporary art and
literature. We find ourselves in a profound feeling of empathy, as if at the
bottom of deep well looking for the heart and sorrow of the characters' gloom,
confusion and existence with a torch in the murky water. And at several
instances it seems as if he is speaking with us, asking us questions and involving
us in the narrative. Rajkamal's stories are not in the easy world despite being
rooted inside it – it is composed of the feigning, the bearing and the reverberations,
the bleakness of personal world and horror, the desolation of absence and
unspoken personal experiences and tragedies.
We would like to express our deepest thanks to Saudamini Deo for this translation work. You have lit the candle!
Author: Rajkamal ChaudharyOriginal Text: Hindi
Translator: Saudamini Deo
Publisher: Seagull Books https://www.seagullbooks.org
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