In a marketing-driven time, it's inevitable that books come with convenient tags attached. They have to be neatly categorised because most readers looking at back-jackets in a cluttered bookstore need a clear sense of what a book “is about”. It also helps to stress that so-and-so book is a first of its kind, or that it deals with an uncommon subject.
Given these compulsions, it isn't surprising that Rahul Mehta's fine short-story collection Quarantine was being promoted, months before its release, primarily as a book about homosexual relationships. This isn't inaccurate — Mehta, a US-based lecturer, is gay himself and his fiction is peopled by gay men — but it would be a mistake to put these stories into a box marked “Gay Fiction”. It's true that they open a window to worlds that are often closed to heterosexual readers, but it's also true that in a more general sense they are about lonely people and fractured relationships. They touch on perceptions of gender roles and responsibilities and show the many little ways in which even “conventional” family lives can become bleak and uncaring — as in the story “The Better Person”, where the falling apart of a marriage is contrasted with the similar trajectory of a gay relationship.
Sensitive portrayals
Particularly notable are Mehta's finely etched portrayals of elderly people. In the title story, an old man's quarantine — the result of an unexpected attack of tuberculosis — becomes a metaphor for his isolation, but even before his illness we are told he lived for years in the basement of his son's house in America — a space so cut off from the rest of the house that his grandchildren come to call it “Little India”. We are well-prepared, then, for the moving passage where the unhappy old man briefly comes alive during a visit to a Hare Krishna commune, and then pleads like a child to be allowed to stay behind.
In “Citizen”, a widow named Ranjan spends exactly three months in a year with each of her four US-based children, so that she comes to associate each season with a particular house. But she's really living in her own interior world — she can't concentrate on a DVD she has to watch to prepare for a citizenship exam because her mind is travelling oceans and decades, and Mehta shows us her perspective on things that others around her take for granted. (“Too many vocal flourishes,” she thinks to herself when she hears Whitney Houston sing, “as though the notes were flowers and she were a butterfly unable to settle.” To her, Lata Mangeshkar is a real singer, and a real woman.) And in “A Better Life”, a woman named Lala lives in the US for decades without ever really learning English; the wordless communication she establishes with the story's protagonist — a young gay man named Sanj — is one of the highlights of this collection.
In many of these stories, the lives of a gay narrator and his boyfriend intersect the lives of these other characters. But the most direct and candid account of a romantic relationship occurs in “Ten Thousand Years”, which is about the estrangement between two lovers from the point where the narrator's boyfriend confesses — over a long-distance phone call — to having cheated on him. Their subsequent interactions — marked by hurt, betrayal, recriminations and even a sarcastically told story about Ravana doing a millennia-spanning penance to Lord Shiva — are an eye-opener for anyone who might patronisingly have thought that gay relationships were mainly about the physical act; that emotional tumult didn't figure in them.
Out of sync
The overall effect of Quarantine is slightly diluted by two stories that are different in tone: the rhythmical “The Cure”, in which a young man starts burning currency notes after a reminder of the gross unfairness of the world, and “What We Mean”, about a narrator obsessed with wordplay. These are more wry and playful than the others, and while they hold up well in their own right, one doesn't really get the sense that they should have been in this particular collection. However, that won't matter if you read them as standalone stories.
“Being gay forced me early on to question one of the most fundamental aspects of who I am,” Mehta said in an interview to this paper last month. “Naturally that led me to ask bigger questions about everything around me.” It's a cliché, perhaps a stereotype, to think of gay people as particularly “sensitive”. But another way of looking at it could be that people who have been marginalised in some way by society tend to have a high level of empathy for those who have been marginalised in other ways. The whole of Quarantine is there to suggest this. Personal dislocation is a theme that runs through this aptly named book, and Mehta's chief strength lies in how he puts us in the minds of people who frequently ask themselves questions like “Why am I here?” and “How did I end up in this place?”
Quarantine,Rahul Mehta, Random House, 2010, Rs. 359.
