Chandan Pandey’s The Keeper of Desolation is a collection of nine stories—translated from Hindi by Sayari Debnath— that capture the social milieu of contemporary India. The first story works well on the scale of sinister and poignancy when a family begins forgetting the youngest son of the house until a terror shakes the very foundation of their kinship. In the second tale, the readers confront a man dealing with a memory of murder he’d witnessed.
This hits the reader hard but with a tender blow because the death was over an argument of the right to sit in a train.The stories that follow come together to paint a portrait of an India imbued in exploitation, corruption, red tapism and fraudulent belief systems. While Pandey has a protagonist taking the first person narrative style—one male character to tell the story—it is hard to not notice the other character that keeps haunting them—a mob, or a mob-like group of individuals.
In the final story Wound, we encounter an Investigating Committee, the members of which are wounded by a magazine’s illustrator. They accuse him of drawing shoes next to their writing to cause ‘symbolic’ abuse. Unlike the first or the second story, where a huge, predominantly uneducated mob is involved to catch a terrorist, or murder a man for not leaving his seat, in Wound the mob is urban and educated.
Not dictated by physical violence, this corporate mob is mired in showy bureaucracy, power control and a hegemonic right to destroy .