A city as stage for a work of fiction offers ambiguous, fascinating possibilities. For a city made up of its many inhabitants, also has a life of its own, and its people share a symbiotic relationship with it. Take the novel the Italian novelist Italo Calvino wrote in the early 1960s: Marcovaldo, or The Seasons in the City , translated into English only in 1983. The eponymous narrator who is a hapless labourer finds himself with his family in an unnamed north Italian city, and conjures up dreamscapes for himself in a way symbolic of his alienation. He takes joy in the sudden sprouting of mushrooms on a city road or for example he tends to a flower plant lovingly as it almost overnight grows into a huge tree.
Trickster City, a collection of stories, vignettes, essays and collages is written by a group of young people who live in Delhi but it is a Delhi few Delhi-ites or Dilliwallahs would be aware of. For these pieces, are set in the city's underside, the marginal, shadow, ubiquitous and still invisible parts of the city. This is where the newly arrived, the itinerant, the roving, the nomadic, the part-timer, those with no fixed address or even identity stay. But these aren't dark tales in any manner, though some have pain in them, and some carry in them the forlorn hopes of people who have to, of necessity, eke out a living. The title then becomes an affectionate paean to the city. Like the flashing glimpses of a city that a train leaves one with, this book is structured in a similar manner. Its sections broken into ‘Arrival', ‘En route', ‘Whereabouts', ‘Eviction', ‘Incognito', ‘Encounter' and ‘Frontier'. The people in these stories are familiar figures, their stories too seem to leap out from the inside city pages of a newspaper. The rag picker, the young man in the slaughterhouse, the girls who come home quietly, eyes downcast for fear of drawing a stranger's eye, the man in the STD booth, the electrician who falls in hopeless less, the independent artisan, the theatre artiste, the courier boys and the waiters.
The quiet and the graphic
While some stories tread quietly on the travails and fears of everyday life, there are some graphic accounts as well, such as Arish Qureshi's piece on the slaughterhouse, where he tells with methodological, detached precision how hens are killed every day; the telling break in the middle when they pause for tea washing their hands, and the plaintive question the narrator leaves in the end, ‘why do the hens have to be thrown around so much?' Azra Tabassum and Suraj Rai depict the small pleasures in a hard job that come by in the instance of a waiter at a fancy party and a courier boy who it turns out is too underage to receive a driving licence.
‘Eviction' is a collage of several pieces that tells of the suddenness, uncertainty, loss, disbelief, the rumours and the ruthless devastation of small lives that follows when settlement or what is home is suddenly wiped off the map, and of a city's collective consciousness simply for the sake of beautification. The tearing down and eviction of Nangla Maanchi's residents made routine news at one time but here are stories of those affected. Stories of loss familiar and unique. For loss could mean memories, things you carry around in a trunk, even the familiar trip to work and back home.
‘Incognito' makes up a fascinating series of short pieces most usually to do with the secret love that develops when people live in such close proximity to each other. But for all this, the love remains unnamed, or chooses to communicate through mirrors, can cause heartbreak, even real pain. Fazal played his radio on loud because Azra loved to hear the songs that played. When she left, he couldn't bear to put it on any more. There is the brother who goes missing one day, and his presence lingers in everyday events and then just as suddenly he returns from Hadol station where he had been the last few months. Shanu drives the hammer into his finger unthinkingly as he watches the ever popular Babli but for all the teasing he is subject to, he has never had the courage to speak to her of his love. Sana likes Rayyan's attentions but she fears this very unknown-ness of love that makes it an alien emotion for her. ‘Encounter' tells of interactions with a hostile authority, the symbolic power figures of the city who are too quick to label and slot people like them, the easier to handle them. ‘Frontier', the last collage formed section tells of a new life in a new settlement called Ghevra.
This collection tells stories of small, almost invisible lives. Lives one may have barely brushed against in a modern day metropolis, still reading these stories makes you feel as if you have shared their stories perhaps in a bus, in a tea shop by a busy street, or even as you are waiting in queue. Lives that on the surface are filled with everyday struggle but are alive with dreams, ambitions, yearnings and longings. If there is a dark, sombre note it is in the women's lives it is because they live cloistered, closed lives, for the most part, lit up largely by the rituals that direct a woman's life. The young women who work in the beauty parlours, as typists, as salesgirls are absent. But this is a minor quibble in a collection that is enriching and also strangely fabulous at the same time. Shveta Sarda's end note also explains the many influences at work on a translator, and how the latter must strive for an essential honesty between the written word, and the intent; how the translator must combine in herself the twin roles of creative artist and interpreter.
Trickster City;Tr.Shveta Sarda;Penguin Books India; Rs. 499
