Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay - 259 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay


Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay was one of Bengal, India’s most prolific and popular novelists and short story writers of the early 20th century. He wrote over 30 novels, novellas, and stories.

Born in a poor family, Sarat Chandra based many of his novels on his own experiences. His topics were revolutionary at the time and included social consciousness and turbulent societal traditions which made readers sit up, notice him and eventually made him iconic. Many of his popular novels include ‘Palli Samaj’, ‘Choritrohin’, ‘Devdas’, ‘Nishkriti’, ‘Srikanta’, ‘Griha Daha’, ‘Sesh Prasna’ and ‘Sesher Parichay’.

Stories from Saratchandra: Innocence and Reality

This collection of short stories is divided into two sections. First section deals with the innocence of childhood and the second section deals with adolescence. In the second section the stories relate to growing up and coming of age. There is a marked deroute from innocence and the protagonists have a clear sense of duty towards self, their family and the society at large.


While Saratchandra dwells in the duty aspect of every individual and puts the readers too in a state of silent protests against social evils such as casteism, racism, poverty etc. ,he does make us readers think of how childhood is a beautiful pool of innocence where we all must take a dip lest it dries up when the world around us changes.


The themes represented and portrayed in the collection are people’s feelings and state of mind regarding the colonial era, the rule of British, the Zamindari system and the plight of women and their role in the household.




Image - Courtesy - British Library - In India, caste is a system of social hierarchy based on hereditary occupation. This vintage painting shows the different people representing the various castes.

Orbiting by Bharati Mukherjee - 208 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

Orbiting by Bharati Mukherjee

Orbiting was included in the book Braided Lives: An Anthology of Multicultural American Writing, which was a collection of stories by different authors. According to Library blog - 'This anthology brings together the vivid stories and poems of Native American, Hispanic American, African American, and Asian American writers. It was created by Minnesota teachers, for teachers and students in Minnesota high schools. They were assisted in their work by scholars, writers, the staff of the Minnesota Humanities Commission and the officers of the Minnesota Council of Teachers of English.'


A story of complicated relationships in a family where permissions are taken for granted and nobody's happy with the life choices and career choices of the other member. The term orbiting here refers to how within a family, the power dynamic in a relationship can shift and be the center.

Everything and everyone then rotates around that one person. Sometimes that kind of one-sided family correlations can be unhealthy or downright inappropriate.


Like Mukherjee’s most stories, Orbiting also shows the unfairness towards other ethnicities and races in a predominantly white population in 70s America.

A story and a novella - Bharati Mukherjee - 207 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

Isolated Incidents


One of her short stories entitled “Isolated Incidents” explores the biased Canadian view towards immigrants that she encountered, as well as how governmental agencies handled assaults on particular races.


Leave It to Me - a novella


In Leave It to Me, Mukherjee tells the story of a young woman who is a sociopath named Debby DiMartino, who seeks revenge on parents who abandoned her. 

Set in a mythical tone, the story reveals her ungrateful interaction with kind adoptive parents and a vengeful search for her real parents (described as a murderer and a flower child). 

The novel also looks at the conflict between Eastern and Western worlds and at mother-daughter relationships.

Nostalgia - Bharati Mukherjee -206 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

Nostalgia is a story from Bharati Mukherjee's short story collection Darkness.


'Nostalgia' deals with an Indian who has made his fortune in America. Dr Patel is married, has a son who studies at a prestigious college and he works in a hospital for mentally ill people.

One day he falls in love with an Indian girl and has an affair with her which results in disappointment after he learns that she takes advantage of him.


The protagonist, Dr.Patel has achieved what he feels is the fulfilled American dream - an American house, wife, car and education for his child. But when he meets a beautiful young Indian woman,he begins a disastrous affair. The reasons for his affair is later portrayed through his thoughts and recollections during the affair. He is nostalgic about his country and the image of a simple, Indian wife never had really gone from his mind. It was what was lacking, according to him despite all the comforts he currently has. As the story progresses, the girl takes advantage of him through a scheme with her pimp uncle. When everything is over Dr. Patel is washed out - from a bit of money, respect and something more - nostalgia of an Indian wife. His chameleon mind suddenly realises the futility of his hopeless life and returns reluctantly to his American dollhouse.

The Management of Grief - Bharati Mukherjee - 205 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

“The Management of Grief” is a short story by Bharati Mukherjee.


It was published in 1988 as a part of her collection The Middleman and Other Stories. It also appeared in The Best American Short Stories of 1989 and in The Best American Short Stories of the Eighties.


Shaila Bhave, a recent widow, has also lost her sons in a plane crash. The story highlights, along with a family's way of dealing with grief, the horrors of apparent Sikh terrorism.

The story opens in her house in Toronto, with mourners and neighbours around her. Some of them also had their family members die in the same crash. Though she appears calm, she has actually been given Valium to manage herself physically and emotionally. This is mistaken by Judith Templeton, a young Canadian government official, to act as a liaison and translator for her group of mourners. She tells Bhave that she has heard that she is a pillar of the community. Bhave reluctantly agrees to help Templeton, while reflecting that among her own community, her calm affect is not a mark of maturity, but of strangeness. The title of the story comes from Templeton’s conception of “grief management”—her belief that grief proceeds in orderly stages, and that it is an emotion to be controlled rather than given in to.


The group of mourners soon fly to Ireland to identify the dead because that is where the plane crashed. From Ireland they go to India to perform the death rituals. Throughout these travels, the way the family members adapt to their new life without their loved ones is shown in conversations and memories.

The other mourners in Bhave’s group have meanwhile all coped with their grief in different ways. Kusum decides to remain in India and to become an ashram devotee. Dr. Ranganathan finds a job in Texas, where he plans to tell no one about the crash, although he still cannot bring himself to sell his old family home.

Back in Canada, Bhave is shocked to see racial prejudices towards Sikhs and Indians, by representatives like Templeton. She rejects not only friendly advice and grief management by the government official, but also turns to her native Indian rituals and reaches out to family for comfort.



Image - A Widow performs ritual immolation (Sati) - an ancient tradition of India where widows would jump into the funeral pyre of their husbands as they would not deem it fit to live after they are dead.

Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee - 204 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

Jasmine” by Bharati Mukherjee


“ She was a girl rushing wildly into the future.”


The story Jasmine focuses on a young, ambitious girl who wants big things in life. 

Jasmine is a Trinidadian girl who, through a middleman, illegally enters Detroit. Finding odd jobs like job cleaning and keeping the books at the Plantations Motel, she finds there are other Trinidadian Indians who are trying their luck. Soon she finds employment with an American family.

The Middleman -Bharati Mukherjee - 203 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

About the author - Bharati Mukherjee

Born in Calcutta, India, just seven years to Indian independence, Bharati Mukherjee would soon set foot on American shores which would become a catalyst for her literary mind. 

She was known to write about the experiences of immigrant Indians mainly in America. Mukherjee explained this shift as "a movement away from the aloofness of expatriation, to the exuberance of immigration." Her early novels, The Tiger's Daughter and Wife, both published in the early 1970s, are stories about the isolation of Indian expatriates. 

In Darkness, the stories are centred on a different geographic area which is Canada. There is a pleasantness in the tone and attitude of the tales, but the loneliness away from motherland remains. Other stories explore North America through the alien voices of its various immigrant cultures—Italian, Latin American, Sri Lankan, as well as Indian. With The Middleman and Other Stories Mukherjee gave voices to these nationalities also. In these stories, sometimes with anger, often with violence, sometimes with comedy, often with tenderness, Mukherjee gives voice to the "other" within North America. "The Management of Grief," which deals with the sorrow of the bereaved relatives of the victims of the 1985 Air India disaster, is perhaps the most moving story in the collection. The horror of that tragedy is dealt with in harrowing detail in Mukherjee's second nonfiction collaboration, The Sorrow and the Terror.


After a gap of fourteen years, Mukherjee wrote Jasmine, which explores female identity through the story of an Indian peasant woman whose path takes her from the Punjab, to Florida, to New York, to Iowa, and as the novel draws to a close she is about to set off for California.


In The Holder of the World, Mukherjee turns her attention to one of the founding novels of postcolonial America —Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. Reversing the usual binary opposition between occidental and oriental texts, Mukherjee presents Hawthorne's novel as one which has been written out of a knowledge of India.


Bharati Mukherjee is a writer who is at her best when she draws on her experiences of the Old World while writing with insight about the New World to which she now belongs.


Adapted from jrank



The Middleman

“there are aspects of American life I came too late for and will never understand.”

This line may be the very gist of the story about a man who is always on the harrowing line of doing things for others which he doesnt want to but he does so only to eventually be a citizen of America.


"The Middleman" is a story about a man from Iraqi Jew named Alfie Judah. He is working for a land-owner in South America. Alfie becomes a middleman between the land-owner's attractive wife and her lover from her youth in plotting to kill and rob the land-owner.


Narrated by Alfie who is a naturalized American citizen, it is set in an unnamed area which is in the throes of a guerrilla insurgency. The idea for the story came to Mukherjee when she was writing an incomplete novel about a Vietnam veteran who becomes a mercenary soldier in Afghanistan and Central America. The novel featured a minor character named Alfie Judah, a Jew who had relocated from Baghdad to New York, via Bombay, India. Alfie became such a strong presence in the writer's mind that, as she reported in an interview with Alison B. Carb in Massachusetts Review, he "took control and wrote his own story.


"The Middleman," then, is the story of a cynical man who "travels around the world, providing people with what they need—guns, narcotics, automobiles." It is a story of lust, betrayal, and murder, featuring American expatriates, a beautiful woman, and ruthless guerrillas.


Adapted from American expat blog.

The Banyan Tree by Ruskin Bond - 142 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

The Banyan Tree by Ruskin Bond

As a young boy, Ruskin had travelled to many parts of India with his parents. a place he frequently visited was Dehradun and spent many years there eventually. This story is inspired from his memories of childhood.

On a banyan tree built more than sixty five years ago by his grandfather, a young boy regularly loves to climb on and sit. He builds a platform for himself on which he sits and enjoys the views from the great height. The adventurous boy obviously loves nature. He soon makes friends with the birds and squirrels.




One day a dramatic event occurs on this banyan tree which teaches a lesson of nature to the boy. A fight ensues between a cobra and a mongoose. The onlookers are a myna, a crow and the author. After a battle of physical power and then mind, eventually one is killed and the other one survives. While someone else prays on the dead one. The author is witness to all this and is stupefied at the play and competency of the otherwise 'dumb' animals.


Nature operates and thrives in the world by one law - everything is balanced and the great balancer is God, the creator. Thus we can only wonder but cannot question certain phenomena. Why the food chain or water cycle occurs. Why does one animal eat the less powerful one? Why are some creatures born and die the same day? What is the purpose of a thousand eggs being laid by a mosquito only to be perished by a medicinal spray? We cannot attempt to deduce it all but only wonder at the mysteries of nature. The only assured thought we have about nature is that it's all in the plan of a higher being and looks simple yet is deeply mysterious.




A simple story but with a treasure of meaning - be it about the love of nature, the spiritual symbolism of it, the characteristic of good over evil , the might of intellect and the curiosity of man about the happenings in nature.

The Blue Umbrella - Ruskin Bond - 141 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

The Blue Umbrella - Ruskin Bond

The Blue Umbrella is a 1980 Indian novel written by Ruskin Bond.

An endearing story of love and sacrifice. When Binya, a sweet little village girl,  receives a charming blue umbrella from some tourists, she is overjoyed. She runs through her village Garhwal and plays with it. The village shopkeeper becomes jealous of her possession and tries to steal it but fails. In the process, he loses his good name with the villagers and everyone boycotts him. Binya however befriends him and sacrifices her gift just so that he could be happy and restore his name. Thus starts a sweet and innocent friendship.

 


In this simple story two differing characters are shown - one of innocence and one of possession. Both traits are part of us humans in varying measures. We can be evil at times and act on our impulses in words or actions. And we can also be extremely benevolent and generous. This juxtaposition is beautifully depicted by the pleasant writing of Ruskin Bond.

The Garhwal village

Nature is also symbolically used to elucidate this. As typical of Bond, the setting is a beautiful scenic hill station. Tall pine trees arrayed on the mountain slopes and tiny huts and houses hardly visible among the fog and dense wooded greenery. Fog vs sunlight. Hardy nature vs soft flowing spring water. Innocence vs hard heartedness. Varying themes disguised by the wonderful writing of Bond.


It was adapted into 2005 Hindi film by the same name, directed by Vishal Bhardwaj, which later won the National Film Award for Best Children's Film.

My Uncle Jules by Guy de Maupassant - 115 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

My Uncle Jules by Guy de Maupassant

My Uncle Jules is a story within a story. Set around the Paris culture and lifestyle and drawing a lot on the social norms of the time, the story conveys the standards expected from the rich and their preferences for friends and family who follow the very same standard.

The narrator's family builds high hopes around one member of the family, which is the narrator's uncle Jules. Jules was considered a worthless young man who squandered the family money and was finally shipped off to America so that he can work and understand the value of money. The family members waited for his return in Havre.

 
One day, the family is on a ship for a trip.
In the ship there was a ragged old sailor who was selling oysters. The narrator’s father and sisters liked eating oysters on a moving ship and therefore they went near the old sailor. The narrator’s father recognized the sailor who was none other than his own brother, Jules. The whole family was upset. They did not want to talk with him as he was very poor they also did not want their son-in-law to know about it. They reached the place Jersey. The narrator wanted to talk with him. But the old man left the place as no one was eating any more oysters the family members were disillusioned and frustrated when the reality turns out to be quite different from what they had anticipated. They had expected a bright future for Jules but all their hopes were dashed.
Their disappointment was not so much that Jules did not learn a lesson of hardwork, rather that they now have a member who they will be reluctant to talk about in their parties and social circles.

The Elephant and the Tragopan- Vikram Seth - 114 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

The Elephant and the Tragopan- Vikram Seth


In this story, Vikram Seth presents the views of the animal kingdom about the human race, though an elephant and a tragopan.
Through a sparrow, the tragopan hears that men around their forest, plan to redevelop the area. Fearing the loss of their habitat, the animals decide to protest. Ultimately the animals are killed and this incident becomes news. 

Imitating the situation happening around us, the story is a sad portrayal of the world and of the people who live, work and die for the environment as well for the social causes.

Crossing the Ravi- Gulzar - 113 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

Crossing the Ravi

Gulzar

”The moment the train reached the bridge, a wave of excitement ran through the crowd
We have reached the river Ravi.

this is River Ravi. We are in Lahore”

Ravi Paar  is a short story about the time of India partition and when the lakhs of people moved to Pakistan and many from the former undivided state, moved to India.

In this confusing times with riots and killings everywhere, many strange but sad things happen. A man gets thrown off a moving train by another, who is afraid that he will be killed. A dead baby gets breastfed while a living one mistakenly gets thrown off a train and into a river.

However, humans may change but a river remains. It is witness to so many unholy or amazing things happening on the land. This is the story of a river who was there throughout the history. 

Gold from the Grave- Anna Bhau Sathe - 112 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

Gold from the Grave- Anna Bhau Sathe


The story gives importance to themes of equality and independence. Sathe emphasizes on the establishment of an oppression-free society. The evils of the caste system are portrayed here and the deplorable plight of the Dalits in our community is shown.

 

Draupadi - Mahasweta Devi - 111 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

Draupadi - Mahasweta Devi


Set in 1970s Bengal, the story is around the time of immense sociopolitical problems, further fueled by the Maoist insurgency.

Draupadi is the story of Dopdi (the Santhali name for the Sanskrit Draupadi). Dopdi is a naxal wanted by the police for killing a landlord. She is captured by the policeman and gangraped.

Drawing parallels with the Draupadi of the Mahabharata, who is saved by Lord Krishna from the Kauravas, this naxal Draupadi is treated with the lowest point of humanity. Readers are exposed to the question, if we only worship the ancient goddesses in clay statues or do we respect them in real life?

A RajaRavi Verma painting

The Blue Light - Vaikom Mohammed Basheer - 110 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

The Blue Light


Vaikom Mohammed Basheer

A story of poverty and of the supernatural.

The Blue Light tells the story of a poor and struggling writer. When he rents a house, he is unaware that it was haunted by a ghost - specifically a female ghost. Bhargavi, who had lived in the house before, had committed suicide after a failure in love.

The writer, affected by the solitude, the gloomy location and influenced by the songs of Paul Robeson, Pankaj Mullick, Bing Crosby and M. S. Subbulakshmi, finds himself eerily drawn to Bhargavi kutty (kutty is a an endearing way of calling a young woman).

The Quilt - Ishmat Chugtai - 109 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

The Quilt - Ishmat Chugtai



The Quilt tells the story of a neglected housewife. Left on her own and treated like a furniture at home, she longs for her husband and his attention. In the course of time, she develops a relationship with her chambermaid.
Her husband, the Nawab Sahib has his eyes on one of his students and he goes for ‘one very strange pursuit’
The Quilt was known as a very early story of Indian literature for its depiction of homosexuality and the state of marriage with its various veils and curtains which are more for the show of society.

Elephant at Sea - Kanishk Tharoor - 108 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

Elephant at Sea

Kanishk Tharoor


'Elephant at Sea' a story by Kanishk Tharoor, is the journey path of an elephant from being a gift for the kings and royals of Morocco and used as transport in many places in Kerala.


The story transforms into a journey through the mind and thinking of the elephant just as a human would think.. It deals with the loss of its natural habitat and the familiar places and fellow animals. Its deals with loneliness just as a human would. Can we do without our homeland after a point of time?


Similarly, as a human would adjust and assimilate to his environment, the animal adapts to its new environment.

The Scout - R K Narayan - 107 / 365 of reading one short story every day

The Scout


To all who were part of Scouts and Guides, Narayan remembers his times being a part of the same. He dwells in nostalgia to show his keen interest and activities of the group.

A great starting point for those who want to join the army or police force later in life, scouts and guides can help to steer one's career path in the right direction.

Bridegroom Bargains - R K Narayan - 106 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

Bridegroom Bargains

106 / 365 of reading one short story every day.



In Bridegroom Bargains, Narayan recounts the sad state of affairs when it comes to dowry taking and giving. He brings forward many issues of the evil social system and appeals to the readers to stay away from it.

A simple but affective essay on the serious topic is an admirable because considering the age in which it was written, we should salute his thought direction.

Family Doctor - R K Narayan - 105 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

Family Doctor


105 / 365 of reading one short story every day.



When I started reading this essay, my first thought was the grey haired, small briefcase carrying, tweed jacket wearing doctor of the Hindi movies. He would come in a with a solemn expression, inspect the patient with all the seriousness of a cloudy day and then the standard line would come - 'inhe dawa ki nahi, dua ki zaroorat hai' ( the person needs prayers, not medicine.) Oh how many memes and parodies have been made on this!




Narayan recounts the time of the personal family doctor who had all the authority or maybe even more than the head of the household. He loved to come in, mostly unannounced, listen to the woes and pains and then give a series of lectures. These could range from the quality of vegetables to the oil used and the lack of herbs growing at home. Sometimes the talk can even go to the political party reigning ta the time and the state of affairs at England (essay takes in the time when the British raj was tumbling)

By a few tappings on the abdomen and chest and a good many wise knockings on the head, the doctor would then proceed to sound advice. This would then be argued by the noisy matriarch or the overbearing grandfather. The children will show their brown teeth and the occasional uncle will bare his pan stained ones too in either debate or despair. But the family doctor was a just that. Family. He would have a delightful and warm authority over the household.


Narayan compares the same to today's clinical and professional attitude of doctors who believe in money minting rather than a pure and keen interest in patients. He says that the long queues, the multitude of doctors at a single nursing home has become like Chinese products in the market. We are split for choice but still come back with a low quality item.

The charm of a doctor's visit and the respect of the profession keeps growing less.