Eighteen tales about the eccentric inhabitants of a village and castaway circus performers, Circus Folk and Village Freaks certainly has its moments — of humour quietly embedded in what is otherwise a dark or bizarre story, and just the sheer presence of quirky characters and strange happenings. These narrative poems tell a truth stranger than fiction, and the interconnected tales work equally well as standalone pieces.
The reader must navigate a shifting landscape of stories about a woman’s husband who loses a foot to a crocodile and ends up partially morphing into one himself; a dwarf child born to a couple who is handed over to the circus master and eventually finds his calling as a porn star; Siamese twins Sita and Gita who share a heart and fall in love with a lion-tamer and a snake-man respectively; Urvasi, the devadasi, who starts a tiffin service; Jonas, a white man who settles in an Indian village and goes native; the hirsute Miss Rita; the defiant, unmarriageable Luxmi who joins the circus and becomes a knife-thrower; Jeeva the elephant man who falls in love with his own eyes when he first looks in the mirror; and finally, the circus master, labelled a eunuch at birth, who decides to bring together “all creatures, by humanity displaced”.
In essence, the circus is the village and the village the circus. The intersections and the parallels are obvious. The circus accepts what the village rejects and the line between ‘normal’ and ‘freakish’ is dangerously thin. Sanyal does a commendable job of driving home this point.
Writing in rhyming couplets is a demanding craft and Sanyal does not always succeed, as for instance, in the tale about Pablo the clown, which contains the following couplet:
There, dear, sweet Pablo found his purpose, his calling,
As under the arc lights, he gave a through balling
Sanyal uses enjambment, of course, and the lines do run on to advance the narrative but what suffers somewhat, thanks to the occasionally strained efforts at rhyme, is the poetry.
The folks one meets in this book are reminiscent of Edward Lear’s characters, even as they invoke a sense of an Indian village with all its flaws and concealed hypocrisies. And therein lies the charm.
The reviewer is a poet, fiction writer and Professor of Literature’s at IIT Madras. Her latest book is the poetry collection , The Unmistakable Presence of Absent Humans.
Circus Folk and Village Freaks; Aparna Upadhyaya Sanyal, Vishwakarma Publications, ₹399
