by Vani Viswanathan
Well-written short stories are full of magic. Within, what, 2,000 to 3,000 words, they draw you into their world, make you cry, laugh, sympathize or get your heart racing. They manage to pack a whole episode effortlessly in those few words, and in the end you hardly feel cheated – you have been to a different place, been part of a tale, and – without the heaviness that comes with an extensive novel – been completely entertained.
I guess my first initiation into short stories, like most Indian kids, was through my school English textbooks. Every summer vacation before school reopened for the new grade, we’d get our books. After taking in the lovely, intoxicating smell of new books, the first thing I used to do was to read the English textbook front to back. Thanks to this, by the time the teacher got to teaching us those English lessons, I’d nearly know most of the sentences by heart. And what brilliant stories they had!
One of the most memorable ones is ‘The Umbrella Man’ by Roald Dahl. An old man asks the narrator – a 12-year-old girl – and her mother to give him a pound (saying he has forgotten his wallet and needs the money to take a taxi back home), in exchange for an umbrella. Genuine enough, until the narrator of the story and her mother follow the old man to realize he uses the pound to buy a drink and steals an umbrella from the pub to dupe another stranger off the street! What’s amazing about this narrative is the way it is narrated by a 12-year-old – she talks about getting a banana split after a dentist appointment, her questions to her mother, and the unforgettable ‘frosty-nosed stare’ her mother was famous for, where her ‘mother’s chin was up and she was staring down at him along the full length of her nose’ and ‘most people go to pieces completely when she gives it to them’. Or the way she talks about the coolness of the mother to the stranger when he approaches her to when she begins to melt: ‘My mother stood there chewing her lower lip. She was beginning to melt a bit, I could see that.’ Such simple words, but such eloquent imagery!
Another tale we’d read in school was Ruskin Bond’s ‘Koki plays the game’. Ruskin Bond is a personal favourite. ‘The Blue Umbrella’ and ‘The Angry River’ are books I distinctly remember as being so easy to follow, gripping and such lovely narratives. His short stories span a wide range of topics, including children’s writing, paranormal, charming rustic life and young adult fiction. ‘The woman on platform 9’, ‘The Night Train at Deoli’, ‘The Road to the Bazaar’ are such marvelous literary treats! ‘Koki Plays the Game’ is special. It’s about a little girl who’s always relegated to be the ‘twelfth man’ in her local cricket team (which is full of boys, by the way). When Koki is asked to play one evening – with no other recourse – by the boys, she saves the day! As a fervent 11-year-old in a girls’ school, the thrill of reading Koki’s heroics and her rising to the occasion to win was exhilarating!
RK Narayan is an all-time favourite when it comes to telling stories with stark simplicity – these are people you’ve known, you’ve lived around with or have been, yourself. His creations, starting from Malgudi to the talkative man, to Swami to Lawley Extension, are each gems in their own right. The everyday simpleton, the village man, such as the lead old man in the short story ‘A Horse and Two Goats’, have not been described as effectively by any other.
‘A Horse and Two Goats’ is a tale about old Muni who hardly earns anything (much to his wife’s chagrin and consternation). One afternoon, as he’s watching his goats graze, sitting in the shade of a giant statue of a horse, a ‘red-faced’ foreigner comes up to him and starts marveling at the beauty of the statue – in English. Muni, whose English vocabulary only has two words – ‘yes’, and ‘no’ – soon has nothing to say. Then ensues a hilarious ‘conversation’ between the two men – one rambles on in English about the horse and wanting to buy it, while the other goes on and on in Tamil about his goats, ‘bad characters’ whom Gods were watching, village floods and jackals killing cattle. The foreigner even offers Muni a cigarette and flicks open a lighter to light it, which so confuses Muni who doesn’t know how to react and ends up blowing on it to put it out. After a long conversation, Muni is convinced that the foreigner wants to buy his goats, takes the hundred rupees offered and leaves for home, jubilant. Meanwhile, the foreigner lifts the horse off its pedestal and leaves. Muni’s goats, in the meantime, dutifully follow him home – much to his wife’s dismay, who thinks her husband has stolen the hundred rupees.
O. Henry was a master of irony, with his ‘The Gift of the Magi’ a memorable story nearly everyone’s read – of a doting couple where the wife sells her hair to buy her husband a chain for her husband’s watch, while he sells off his watch to buy her a beautiful, ornamental set of combs. A sensitive, touching story, told in a shockingly pragmatic tone.
And who can forget the talented Saki – Hector Hugh Munro – and his classic ‘The Open Window’ and the legendary line ‘Romance at short notice was her specialty’! A man who has come to the countryside to calm his ‘nerves’ happens to be left with the niece of his hostess who tells him a story – the story of the hostess’s husband and brothers who had gone hunting three years back to that day and never found again. And that was why, the niece explained, the French window in their house was always open – they had gone out through it three years ago. Imagine the man’s shock when he sees the husband and two brothers return home that evening – needless, he flees the house in horror. The niece, having a good time, invents an equally good story about the man’s abrupt departure to her relatives. ‘Romance at short notice was her specialty’, ended the story.
Oh well, I can go on for longer describing these masters at storytelling. And I haven’t even mentioned Oscar Wilde, Edgar Allen Poe, Anton Chekhov, Jhumpa Lahiri and Stephen Leacock. And today, thanks to blogging and the opening up of the publishing industry, there are more and more writers stepping into the literary world with delicious, well-written stories. Short stories will continue to remain popular, especially with shorter attention spans demanding changes to all forms of art. Here’s to more of these!
Pic : Vani Viswanathan
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