Best Loved Indian Stories of the Century, Volume 1 Read online

  Indira Srinivasan & Chetna Bhatt

  Best Loved Indian Stories of the Century

  Volume I

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  About the Authors

  Introduction

  A Horse and Two Goats

  A Pair of Mustachios

  Who Cares?

  The Cow of the Barricades

  Sparrows

  The Mark of Vishnu

  Cargo from Singapore

  The Night Train at Deoli

  Phoenix Fled

  Games at Twilight

  Love Across the Salt Desert

  The Valley in Shadow

  Appa-mam

  The Tree

  The Tenant

  The Connoisseur

  Martand

  The Copper-tailed Skink

  Her Mother

  The Remains of the Feast

  Notes on Authors

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Authors

  Indira Srinivasan, educated in Delhi, Waltair, Chennai and Plymouth, is an English teacher with twenty years of teaching experience at the high school level. A resource person for teacher training programmes all over India, she is involved in the production of training materials. She is associated with the British Council’s Business English programmes and is a trainer in Business English courses for various corporate houses in Chennai.

  She is the author of several textbooks, including the Connect series, and is presently compiling another English textbook. She is married and lives in Chennai.

  Chetna Bhatt, educated in Chandigarh, Delhi and Plymouth, has been teaching English in a public school in Delhi for nearly twenty years. She has conducted teacher training workshops all over India for English teachers at the secondary school level and is a resource person for CBSE and the British Council. She is also associated with the British Council as a trainer for the Business English programmes and is a course writer for Indira Gandhi National Open University.

  She is the author of Interactions in English and several other English textbooks for high school students. She is married and lives in Delhi.

  Indira Srinivasan and Chetna Bhatt have also edited Best Loved Indian Stories of the Century (Volume II).

  Introduction

  It was some months back that Penguin Books India wrote to us, asking if we would be interested in putting together an anthology of Indian writing that would put between two covers the best-known and most enduringly popular short stories written in the twentieth century. Yet another anthology of Indian writing, we thought, would it really have anything new to offer? But then, as the idea took root, its significance and relevance came home to us.

  This is a corpus of stories that we are well-acquainted with, stories that we are fond of reading over and over again. Some of these stories are written in English, others translated from various regional languages. They are written at various points of time in pre- and post-independent India, and reflect the milieux familiar to older generation Indians as well as more contemporary readership. All the stories have one thing in common—a universality of experience that appeals to young and old alike.

  Hence the name, Best Loved Indian Stories, indicative of the long-felt need to rediscover and enjoy these narratives that have withstood the test of time and continue to engage readers with their freshness and vitality. They hold a mirror to life and we recognize in some of the characters our own selves, young or old. The writers included in this collection are well known and these stories are some of the best expressions of their art. They are also a mix of old and new, balancing the relevance of the contemporary with the significance of the past. All the stories have a message for us, though the themes vary widely—from the pathos of coming to terms with old age to childhood joys and sorrows from modern expatriate experiences to tender tales of romance.

  Given the subjective nature and wide scope of the volume, selecting the stories for it was not an easy task. Selecting short stories is not like choosing clothes where you can mix and match, adding to or removing from the selection by going back to the wardrobe. The criteria used for this selection include universal appeal, emotional range, the novelty of situations and of course, literary merit.

  For this first volume, we have restricted our selection to Indian writers writing in English; a subsequent volume will be devoted to regional writing translated into English. Novels and works of non-fiction have come of age in Indian writing in English. Till a few years back, although Western short story writers like O. Henry, Maugham, Mansfield, Saki and Dahl were read at the school and college level, only a few Indian writers like Premchand and Tagore were included in textbooks. But now, writings by authors ranging from R.K. Narayan and Khushwant Singh to Anita Desai and Padma Hejmadi are required reading for students. This volume brings together some of the most widely read stories in India today.

  The ‘big three’ of Indian writing in English—R.K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao are represented here. Santha Rama Rau and Attia Hosain too belong to this generation. R.K. Narayan’s hilarious account of an American tourist talking to a Tamil rustic who knows no English in ‘A Horse and Two Goats’ ends with an unusual convergence. Underlying the humour is the tragedy of poverty that is the bane of rural India. It is a faithful portrait of the Indian countryside woven skilfully by the master story-teller in his inimitable style. Mulk Raj Anand uses humour in ‘A Pair of Mustachios’ to highlight the misguided sense of pride in the impoverished ‘nobility’ as they try to come to terms with the rise of the ‘trading class’.

  Raja Rao’s ‘The Cow of the Barricades’ set in pre-independent India narrates the story of Gauri the cow, a martyr to the cause, venerated and loved by the people of Gorakhpur. The legend of Gauri lives on in the wooden toy cow. ‘The Mahatma is right about the fullness of love in all creatures—the speechful and the mute’.

  ‘Martand’, by Nayantara Sahgal, takes the reader into post-independent India ravaged by the Partition and reeling under the influx of refugees. It highlights the private torment of the protagonist even as the public space around her becomes vitiated and changes forever. The unexpected denouement changes perceptions.

  Old age and the travails of time are the themes of K.A. Abbas’s ‘Sparrows’, Attia Hosain’s ‘Phoenix Fled’ and Githa Hariharan’s ‘The Remains of the Feast’.

  In ‘Sparrows’, Rahim Khan, thwarted in early youth in love and ambition, grows into a misanthrope—‘the iron having entered his soul’. Deserted by his sons and his wife, his lonely existence undergoes a change with the advent of a family of sparrows which builds its nest in his hut. In ‘Phoenix Fled’ Attia Hosain describes with sensitivity and understanding the ravages of time on a ‘parasitic old woman whom time refused to drop into releasing oblivion’, yet whose eyes grew bright and sharp when the great-grandchildren raced through the door. Hosain’s deft strokes create a picture that reveals more in the unsaid. In ‘The Remains of the Feast’, Githa Hariharan describes with consummate artistry the special relationship between the narrator and her great-grandmother whose extraordinary and amazing last wishes were a revocation of a traditional existence. Told with humour and sensitivity, the story captures the sights and smells of death, of special relationships and bonds.

  Khushwant Singh, Anita Desai and Ruskin Bond relate charming stories of childhood and the pains of growing up. In ‘The Mark of Vishnu’ Khushwant Singh makes wonderful use of irony to delineate the brash thoughtlessness of youth, while Anita Desai captures familiar scenes of childhood in ‘Games at Twilight’. It is a story which
will strike a responsive chord in all those who have experienced that inexplicable feeling of loneliness even in the midst of one’s nearest ones.

  Ruskin Bond’s sensitive portrayal of the college student smitten by the smouldering eyes of the basket-seller at Deoli is a vivid recreation of teenage love. The writer uses the incident of a chance encounter in a remote railway station to skilfully weave a tale of longing, of hope and dreaming.

  Keki N. Daruwalla’s ‘Love Across the Salt Desert’ is a wonderful tale of youthful romance. It is a story of love that knows no boundaries; of star-crossed lovers; of timid bashful Najab transformed into a valiant hero, blazing a lonely trail across the dangerous border to Pakistan, unmindful of bullets and the burning desert. Triumphant in love he brings back the beautiful Fatimah.

  Three stories that deal with confidence tricksters have a different twist to each tale. Manohar Malgonkar, that master spinner of stories, weaves a deft tale of intrigue and smuggling in ‘A Cargo from Singapore’. Set in post-war Singapore, the story is a fast-paced account of the flashily dressed Mathrani, customs informer, trapped in his own web of deceit and lies. Padma Hejmadi’s Appa-mam is a familiar figure in every large family. The lazy, no-good wastrel and loafer who has the supreme confidence and breezy nonchalance of the conman is the hero of the children’s circle and ‘has no compunctions about taking [and] no hesitation about giving either’. Miss Krishna, the magpie-like connoisseur in Nergis Dalal’s story of the same name has an underlying pathos as the lonely ‘spry thin spinster’ walks away with artifacts and rare curios to add to her secret collection.

  The expatriate experience is now an integral part of the Indian middle class. Stories about the alienation and nostalgia of the expatriate are a recurring theme in contemporary writing in Indian English. But Santha Rama Rau’s ‘Who Cares?’, set in the sixties, recounts the problems of ‘foreign returned’ Indians resettling in Bombay after studying in the UK and USA. The narrator and Anand remain good friends but are not disposed towards marriage. In the end it is the very Indian Janaki who manipulates things very cleverly for Anand to fit easily into the ‘arranged love marriage’ situation.

  In Bharati Mukherjee’s ‘The Tenant’, Maya Sanyal, the Indian divorcee in USA who has broken from her Indian moorings, has relationships with men she picks up. She has ‘a job, equity, three friends she can count on for emergencies’. She is an American citizen. But she cannot rid herself of her nostalgia for India and Indian ways, and turns to a fellow immigrant in order to come to terms with her predicament.

  Shashi Deshpande, Manjula Padmanabhan and Anjana Appachana offer different perceptions of women’s experiences which have a popular appeal. Warm and stimulating, honest and engaging, the stories deal with relationships in and outside marriage, the man-woman equation, and family ties between generations of women.

  In ‘The Copper-tailed Skink’—the Western biologist, Madeline Whitely, is struck by ‘the reproductory behemoth that is India’, as she herself is childless. Manjula Padmanabhan explores with rare sensitivity the effect of Indian sensibilities on the white scientist who discovers a rare species—the female copper-tailed skink. Anjana Appachana’s ‘Her Mother’ is a moving tale of relationships—of mother and daughter, the growing chasm between them, and the mother’s anguish for her daughter who is miles away in the USA. Her letter to her daughter is an account of her own life—a life of toil and sacrifice, when ‘standing up for oneself was an act of betrayal’. And as she writes, she realizes her daughter’s secret agony with the ‘omniscience of motherhood that hurt and ached’.

  Shashi Deshpande’s ‘The Valley in Shadow’ is the story of a lonely, polio-stricken woman on holiday with an unfeeling husband, drawn towards a stranger. The chance encounter sets her fantasizing but things fall into place and hope seems to lift the shadows from her dark, brooding existence as she decides to return home with her family. These stories have all won wide acclaim in a very brief period of time and are sure to be cherished for a long time to come.

  This then is a general overview of the anthology. What emerged, albeit unconsciously, when we made the selection was a fair mix of men and women writers. If we have excluded some well-known writers, it is purely unintentional. We had to restrict our selection to a viable number and as mentioned earlier, we wished to explore a wide variety of writing based on various factors.

  We hope you will find this journey down memory lane exciting, enjoyable and rewarding.

  INDIRA SRINIVASAN

  CHETNA BHAT

  A Horse and Two Goats

  R.K. NARAYAN

  Of the seven hundred thousand villages dotting the map of India, in which the majority of India’s five hundred million live, flourish and die, Kritam was probably the tiniest. It was indicated on the district survey map by a microscopic dot, the map being meant more for the revenue official out to collect tax than for the guidance of the motorist, who in any case could not hope to reach it since it sprawled far from the highway at the end of a rough track furrowed up by the iron-hooped wheels of bullock carts. But its size did not prevent it giving itself the grandiose name Kritam, which meant in Tamil ‘coronet’ or ‘crown’ on the brow of this sub-continent. The village consisted of less than thirty houses, only one of them built with brick and cement. Painted a brilliant yellow and blue all over with gorgeous carvings of gods and gargoyles on its balustrade, it was known as the Big House. The other houses, distributed in four streets, were generally of bamboo thatch, straw, mud, and other unspecified material. Muni’s was the last house in the fourth street, beyond which stretched the fields. In his prosperous days Muni had owned a flock of forty sheep and goats and sallied forth every morning driving the flock to the highway a couple of miles away. There he would sit on the pedestal of a clay statue of a horse while his cattle grazed around. He carried a crook at the end of a bamboo pole and snapped foliage from the avenue trees to feed his flock; he also gathered faggots and dry sticks, bundled them, and carried them home for fuel at sunset.

  His wife lit the domestic fire at dawn, boiled water in a mud pot, threw into it a handful of millet flour, added salt, and gave him his first nourishment for the day. When he started out, she would put in his hand a packed lunch, once again the same millet cooked into a little ball, which he could swallow with a raw onion at midday. She was old, but he was older and needed all the attention she could give him in order to be kept alive.

  His fortunes had declined gradually, unnoticed. From a flock of forty which he drove into a pen at night, his stock had now come down to two goats which were not worth the rent of a half rupee a month which the Big House charged for the use of the pen in their backyard. And so the two goats were tethered to the trunk of a drumstick tree which grew in front of his hut and from which occasionally Muni could shake down drumsticks. This morning he got six. He carried them in with a sense of triumph. Although no one could say precisely who owned the tree, it was his because he lived in its shadow.

  She said, ‘If you were content with the drumstick leaves alone, I could boil and salt some for you.’

  ‘Oh, I am tired of eating those leaves. I have a craving to chew the drumstick out of sauce, I tell you.’

  ‘You have only four teeth in your jaw, but your craving is for big things. All right, get the stuff for the sauce, and I will prepare it for you. After all, next year you may not be alive to ask for anything. But first get me all the stuff, including a measure of rice or millet, and I will satisfy your unholy craving. Our store is empty today. Dal, chilli, curry leaves, mustard, coriander, gingili oil, and one large potato. Go out and get all this.’ He repeated the list after her in order not to miss any item and walked off to the shop in the third street.

  He sat on an upturned packing case below the platform of the shop. The shopman paid no attention to him. Muni kept clearing his throat, coughing and sneezing until the shopman could not stand it any more and demanded, ‘What ails you? You will fly off that seat into the gutter if you sneeze so hard, youn
g man.’ Muni laughed inordinately, in order to please the shopman, at being called ‘young man’. The shopman softened and said, ‘You have enough of the imp inside to keep a second wife busy, but for the fact the old lady is still alive.’ Muni laughed appropriately again at this joke. It completely won the shopman over; he liked his sense of humour to be appreciated. Muni engaged his attention in local gossip for a few minutes, which always ended with a reference to the postman’s wife, who had eloped to the city some months before.

  The shopman felt most pleased to hear the worst of the postman, who had cheated him. Being an itinerant postman, he returned home to Kritam only once in ten days and every time managed to slip away again without passing the shop in the third street. By thus humouring the shopman, Muni could always ask for one or two items of food, promising repayment later. Some days the shopman was in a good mood and gave in, and sometimes he would lose his temper suddenly and bark at Muni for daring to ask for credit. This was such a day, and Muni could not progress beyond two items listed as essential components. The shopman was also displaying a remarkable memory for old facts and figures and took out on oblong ledger to support his observations. Muni felt impelled to rise and flee but his self-respect kept him in his seat and made him listen to the worst things about himself. The shopman concluded, ‘If you could find five rupees and a quarter, you would pay off an ancient debt and then could apply for admission to swarga. How much have you got now?’

  ‘I will pay you everything on the first of the next month.’

  ‘As always, and whom do you expect to rob by then?’

  Muni felt caught and mumbled, ‘My daughter has sent word that she will be sending me money.’

  ‘Have you a daughter?’ sneered the shopman. ‘And she is sending you money! For what purpose, may I know?’

  ‘Birthday, fiftieth birthday,’ said Muni quietly.