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 the career of an individual with letters and signatures. Pandey has characterised mobs in India diversely; each with a context-based complexity, giving these groups the stature of a character in the narrative. Interestingly, there are no female protagonists in the stories.
Women do pepper the stories, and are in fact treated interestingly. In the titular story, for instance, men are seen chasing the wife of a police officer. Her beauty is ‘spotless’; ‘mesmerising’ enough to make men feel ‘stripped of all manliness’.
When her ring goes missing while she is out one day, the whole town gets together to find it. Thieves are lined up, stolen jewellery, not hers, surfaces, yet the ring is nowhere to be found. A superficial reading of such observations is likely to be dismissed as misogynist.
But looking at Indian women, especially Hindu, in the context of India’s history gives them a layered meaning. The image of an ideal Hindu woman entailed a figure who gave up her freedom sought through Western education, accepted and nurtured the space of home, and became the bearer of the next patriotic Indian man. This image was first challenged with neoliberalisation in the 1990s.
Women entered the IT sector and other industries traditionally dominated by men leading to right-wing vigilantism and violence against the ‘modern woman’ in the 2000s. The women in turn responded with the ‘Pink Chaddi’ campaign, which began in 2009. Pandey’s stories capture the anger of men who felt challenged and mystified by what was happening to their Indian women.
In The Keeper of Desolation when Pandey does not make a woman his protagonist not because she is unimportant. Instead he tries to show how her existence beyond the prescribed ideal image can rattle a man. The Poet soars with a nail-biting intensity.
Here, the protagonist is a newly appointed sales manager at a firm. But when his identity as a poet is revealed by a senior, both get embroiled in a power tussle until they get their hands on the notebooks and letters of a dead man who wanted to be a poet. Admirers of AS Byatt’s Booker-wining novel Possession, will find themselves moved by this shorter, but equally fast-paced rendering of a literary mystery.
Like Randolph and Maud, Alok and Pradip embark on a quest to search for poetry that speaks to them, yet remains unspoken. The collection is written and translated with a seamlessness that captures the unique tone of each story. The short, simple sentences make the layers of conflict encoded within ring louder and with more grit.
The writing is intelligent, and provocative enough to grab the readers’ attention, and eventually move them. In a world where Bora Chung’s Your Utopia (translated by Anton Hur from the Korean) gets the status of a scathing depiction of contemporary South Korean society, Pandey’s collection only adds to the genre of present-day narratives written in non-English languages to capture the angst, agony, and perils of imagining our utopias..
