People behave in strange and illogical ways when they’re afraid they may have to take responsibility. I have reason to think about such things. The revelation that I can no longer justify my own erratic behaviour on these terms is a recent one, however; it came to me many years after the event itself. No doubt this awareness gradually became stronger over time, but, even so, various aspects of that incident jump up from the depths of my memory every now and then, with a thud and without any warning. (187)
This personal reflection from the story’s lawyer protagonist gives voice to the deeply human quality of the stories from this year’s International Booker Prize winner. Banu Mushtaq’s stories are probing, examining seemingly simple phenomenon and adding layers of nuance so that the “illogical ways” people behave are explained more richly. For a number of characters, indeed, their behaviours are ways of coping with the fear of taking responsibility. In “The Shroud,” for example, the main character promises to, but ultimately neglects to, buy a funeral shroud for a poor woman while she’s on her Hajj, and has a complete breakdown from the guilt. In “A Decision of the Heart,” there’s a complex interplay of conflict between a man, wife, and her mother-in-law, which prompts the son to get his mother married off. The conflicted impulses of the story read like a Dostoyevski novel, with characters engaging in self-destruction to avoid confronting their own flaws.
The declarative tone of the passage above is also reflective of why I think that of all this year’s International Booker Prize shortlist, Heart Lamp is most likely to be seen as a ‘classic.’ The collection is not afraid of making assertions about humanity and grapples with art’s most classic topics: love, death, marriage, birth, religion.
The construction of the stories is also compelling. It’s here that I’ll have to offer my first disclaimer in reviewing Heart Lamp. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I tend not to enjoy the short story as a literary form as much as I do poetry or novels; they often feel to me like seeing a passing acquaintance rather than bonding with a close friend. Just as I start to get to know the characters, their story is done. I had a similar dilemma with Mushtaq’s stories, but to her credit the artful construction of the narratives is an intriguing twist on the genre. Many of the stories start with descriptions of a particular set of circumstances and characters before shifting mid-stream to their ‘real focus,’ that is, the main character and conflict. Besides the social-realism of the approach, I also appreciate the resonances it creates. For instance, characters in the first part of a story may be introduced and we hear about their marriage and children before the ‘real’ focus of the story kicks in and we see another angle for the topic through another set of eyes. The doubling effect, sometimes only noticeable upon review, lets the stories cover a lot of ground in relatively little space.
Beyond the construction of the stories, their actual use of language also feels ‘classic.’ There’s a directness in the writing that imbues it with the authority of “the Greats.” Mashtuq is self-assured and offers stylistic flourishes strategically. There’s a scene in the story “Fire Rain,” for instance, that recounts a man’s burial and subsequent exhumation. The imagery of the scene offers some unsavory details about the “rotten body in the brand new, starched shroud” (38). Given the circumstances of the burial, it was “too rotten for ritual bathing” and “the foul smell made them want to retch, but no one showed it on their faces” (38). In context, the scene rides the line of comic and macabre and the paragraph ends with some symbolism of jasmine buds that hadn’t bloomed before offering the phrase “not all blooms have the fortune of adorning a bride; some flowers bloom only for mausoleums” (38). The poetic line resonates beautifully and stands out as an example of Mashtuq’s style.
Another factor in making the book read like a classic is the use of an omniscient narrator in most of the stories, which affords Mushtaq the opportunity to comment on a number of perspectives and universalizes the characters’ experiences. At this point, I feel I need to offer an additional disclaimer. A lot of what the stories’ characters go through is far disconnected from my own experiences. The barrier is my own lack of knowledge, but the characters are generally Muslim Indians and it is sometimes difficult for me to interpret characters’ feelings, given the role of Islam in their lives. The failure to grapple with nuances is my own, but in my reading the characters are more like ‘figures’ in most of the stories. They have discernible purposes and traits but they did not yet feel fully resonant for me. Apologies to Mushtaq for my own experiential gap here.
It’s tempting with any collection to give a full play-by-play of each short story Heart Lamp has to offer, but documenting all twelve feels quite impossible, particularly given that there are stories nestled within other stories. One trend I would note is that across the collection, the endings are almost always satisfying. “Stone Slabs for Shaista Mahal,” the first story in the collection, depicts couples essentially competing with one another to show their love. One of the husbands says how he would build a Mahal for his wife to show how devoted he is to her. There’s some problems with this idea: first of all, it implies that she will die. At the conclusion of the story, his wife does indeed die and he remarries and talks about how much he loves his new wife—he never builds the Mahal. The discussion that follows was my first hint of Mushtaq’s craftsmanship for a fine ending.
My favourite ending is probably to the collection’s namesake. In “Heart Lamp,” a woman’s husband has lost all affection for her and is cavorting with another woman. Feeling desperately alone, the woman decides it is time to end her life. She circles the rooms of the house with kerosene, deciding which room would be best for self-immolation. The tension of the scene is finely crafted; it’s as if she is being controlled by some obscure force. You also feel concern for her sleeping children: would they escape the fire? She ends up outside, doused in kerosene, but before she ignites, her daughter comes out and makes the plea for her to stay. The central character “picked up the sobbing baby and hugged Salma to her chest, and, feeling as if she was being comforted, touched and understood by a friend, Mehrun’s eyes became heavy, and all she could say was, ‘Forgive me, my darling,’ as the darkness of the night was thawing” (111). I really love the phrasing of the ending: “the darkness of the night was thawing.” To me, that implies light. The idea of there being natural light, light of a different tenor, than the light that would have resulted from her ignition is such a great image to end the story on. It leaves things tense, tortured, but with that creeping light of optimism.
Sadly, one of my favourite stories in the collection had the least satisfying conclusion. “The Arabic Teacher and Gobi Manchuri” is about a woman who works as a lawyer. She is separated from her husband and has two daughters that she can’t spend much time with, so she hires a private tutor. There’s a shroud of mystery around him as an outsider and she has concerns about leaving him alone with her daughters. There’s the implication that he, an unmarried man, might do something untoward. He’s surprisingly good with the girls, and even surprises their mother by having them stage a beautiful performance. One day the mother catches the three with oil all over their fingers in the kitchen and the teacher never shows his face in their house again. Supposedly, he got a fake recipe for making gobi manchuri. He’s obsessed with it. He eats it like I eat chips. For some reason, this breeds more distrust in the main character and everyone around. He’s framed as an unmanly man. It’s really weird and I was fascinated by it. It felt like a fun-house mirror of The Vegetarian by Han Kang—this guy that wanted to just eat his deep-fried cauliflower or whatever. The main character keeps hearing about this man trying to marry women but calling it off unless they can make gobi manchuri. The story ends by implying that he’s been fired from work, has married a woman, and that he beats her—but the main character still feels compelled to help him for some reason. It’s an understated tale that I thought was really compelling and the only of the stories that really felt like it ended too soon.
Peoples’ idiosyncrasies and hypocrisies take up their fair share of the stories. In that respect, “A Decision of the Heart” really shone as a perplexing nuance of desires. I also really liked the story “High-Heeled Shoe” and its symbolism. Like most stories, it offered multiple layers worth exploring. The story focuses on a man and wife who are in the process of renovating his house. He has chosen to sell off parts of it for rentals to make some extra money, meaning that he has also had to cut down the family’s mango tree. Throughout the story, different characters offer their reflections on the meaning of that mango tree to them, which has its own beauty. The real focus, though, is that the man is obsessed with his brother’s wife’s high-heeled shoe. He covets them (and her feet) as she floats through rooms. He becomes monomaniacal about it and his obsession makes him barge into a shop and demand they sell him the high-heeled shoes that match his sister-in-law’s. He makes his wife wear them, putting them on in a glass chair (like a reverse image of Cinderella?) even though they don’t fit and she can’t walk in them. He has already packed away her other shoes and she’s forced to walk home unevenly, eventually collapsing and hearing her unborn child calling out to her from the womb. The consequences of a man’s jealousy and obsession hit hard. “The Shroud” follows a similar path of unfulfilled desires and misplaced interests. I briefly mentioned that story earlier, so I won’t belabour the point here, but the fact that the main character loves shopping for herself (she buys a carpet and makes her husband lug it around during their Hajj) while not buying a kafan for her poor neighbour leads to a grief and guilt as literary as “The Tell-Tale Heart.” The desperation she experiences to fulfil her promise when it’s too late is as moving as it as pathetic. I loved it.
“Soft Whispers” and “A Taste of Heaven” are the two other stories that I found to be most noteworthy. Like the others, they are rich and layered. “Soft Whispers”, written in first person, has such a wonderful sequence embedded in the middle where the young girl is at a pond where a boy is trapping birds for the entertainment of other children. I can’t quote the whole sequence, but Mushtaq depicts his mischief beautifully. The boy asks the girl if she wants an egg from the bird he has trapped. He then proceeds to slit its throat, cut open its guts, and pull the egg out for her. The other kids are all clambering to see it, and so she holds it closed in her fist and as they all try to see, she crushes it. It feels symbolic. Then, the boy dives underwater and pops up and kisses her on the cheek. She sobs and tells her mom all about it. Flashing forward, the boy becomes a religious leader. The sequence has such a strong focus. In “A Taste of Heaven,” we see more childhood mischief. Again, the story is really about other things for most of it, but essentially the kids have an aunt (?) that lost her husband when she was young and she never remarried. One girl gives the woman’s ja-namaz (prayer rug) from her wedding to a boy so he can clean oil off of his bike. Despite being stoic and pleasant about everything, the woman essentially has a breakdown over this. Long story short, the children come together to conspire and the woman walks in. The most mischievous of the three children gives her a Pepsi and tells her that it’s the drink from the afterlife, that she has indeed passed away and that they are angels. She asks: if she has made it to the afterlife, where is her husband? They sprinkle flowers from behind her and say that he is there but that she musn’t look at him. The whole scene plays out like something out of The Decameron or 1001 Nights. After that, though, the whole family is placed in a position where they essentially have to keep up the ruse that she’s in heaven and all she drinks is Pepsi and the kids are worried about the guilt of murdering her with malnutrition. The whole story was both entertaining and troubling. It’s certainly one of the most memorable in the collection.
So here we are. It’s the end of the year. I left Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp as the final book for my reading goal (70 books) and my final review of all of this year’s International Booker Prize shortlist. Heart Lamp won, so it only seemed appropriate to leave it for last. While I have some contextual barriers and preferences for novels over short stories, Mushtaq still offered a good deal of discussion-worthy stories. They’re provocative and well-wrought. Where the characters feel figural, the stories themselves achieve, I think, what ‘classic’ literature aimed to accomplish: Mushtaq offers a clear vision for humanity’s biggest issues: life, death, birth, marriage, religion—alongside all those other feelings of guilt and jealousy that pop up along the way. Every International Booker Prize shortlist has been so different and compelling in their own ways, and I’m glad that Mushtaq’s English translation has found such success.
To another year of reading.
All the best.
No comments:
Post a Comment