When you first encounter a writer who works in a language other than the one you’re discovering him in, you sometimes struggle to identify tone, style and sensibility. You second-guess yourself, wonder if cultural nuances are being missed. And this confusion is compounded if the writing is formally experimental: did an over-zealous translator chisel the original into new shape?
Reading the first two or three stories in Manoj Kumar Panda’s collection One Thousand Days in a Refrigerator , I was stimulated by the narratives — and Snehaprava Das’s English translation seemed clean enough — but the shifts in perspectives, tenses and streams of thought were a little puzzling, and I wondered if I was “getting” Panda the way a seasoned Odia reader might.
That question still lingers in my mind, but I think I know him better now. Das’ note at the end puts a few things in context: she mentions that Panda is a post-modernist who intersperses prosaic sentences with free verse. This helps account for the disorientation a first-time reader might feel. But as you read the stories one after another, little signatures, thematic and stylistic links begin to show themselves.
An important motif is how the dream world and real life can intersect with, or bleed into, each other, especially when the people involved are underprivileged, exploited or facing personal crisis. “Rajula had two passions: sleeping and dreaming,” we learn of the protagonist of ‘When the Gods Left’, an old man who disposes of carcasses for a living, even as he makes his own lonesome journey towards oblivion.
“He sleeps and he dreams. He dreams that he is sleeping, and in that sleep, he dreams again.” This theme is addressed most explicitly in ‘The Dreamer’s Tale’, with its imagery of a bright red horse and a white gourd, but to some degree, nearly all the stories here are tinged with surrealism. They are about escaping, but they are also reminders that flights of fancy can be tethered by the imagination and experiences of the dreamer(one character imagines flying past towns and oceans on his horse, but once he reaches the clouds he can imagine no further because he has no idea what lies beyond them).
Many of them are about people at a crossroads or facing a moment of epiphany where a world might be remade or ended forever. In ‘The Aesthetics of a Supercyclone’, after a storm destroys a young man’s house and kills his mother and sister, his transformation can only be expressed in non-realist language (“The storm had passed through all his organs — his bones, his lungs, his liver, his stomach, his intestines — and washed them clean.”).
Repeatedly, we meet people who are trying to fill empty spaces, an idea that finds explicit mention in ‘Kaniska’ and ‘Filling in the Blanks’. The second of these was the story that really set this book roaring for me. A simple narrative told with dark, poetic intensity, it begins with a description of a 12-year-old girl running desperately across vast cornfields — but even as the narrator vividly describes this scene, he draws attention to his storytelling by asking us to imagine this “wide panorama stretched over a massive canvas”, and the tale’s allegorical nature is made obvious: a predatory man who enters this canvas advances with such powerful, purposeful steps that a butterfly lies crushed to death under every step.
Other sorts of butterflies are crushed in ‘The Testimony of God’, where a seemingly upbeat premise — god appears in court, wearing a white hat, no less, to defend an unjustly accused woman — yields to the suggestion that even divinity can be of limited use in situations involving oppression and earthly justice systems. (To invoke the title of the Rajula story, even Gods gods must leave sometime!)
This despair runs through the book, but there are glimmers of light too: for instance, ‘A Picture of Agony’, in which various members of a family succumb one by one to heatstroke; it can be seen as a parable about survival and coming of age.
I also liked the two wryly moving pieces told largely from the perspectives of men directing accusatory remarks at their wives. In ‘Sentenced to a Honeymoon’, an oddball named Nachiketa disappears for a month and then summons his wife to a courtroom where he provides a list of ways in which she has made him feel inadequate.
And in the title story, the woman is even more passive, being comatose: her husband addresses her (and through her, us) in the refrigerated chamber where she lies, and a series of dark revelations — but are they real, or only in his head? — emerge. Specific though these situations are, each touches in a general way on the conflicts that attend most marriages, and on male insecurities.
Panda’s prose is self-consciously “writerly” in places; in others, it has a loose, casual, rambling quality. But throughout the book, there are unexpected bits of wordplay and echoes, as in a passage in ‘The Hunt’, where we are told that flies performed the Naroo dance around the bodies of three soon-to-be-dead people. (The dance has been alluded to in another context earlier in the story.)
This makes the reading process akin to putting together a jigsaw puzzle, one of the clues to which may be found in the book’s epigraph, a Gabriel Garcia Marquez quote: “Ultimately literature is nothing but carpentry… with both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.” Most of Panda’s stories involve the bending or reshaping of reality, hammering it into a new form to reach deep truths about people and their predicaments.
Jai Arjun Singh is the author of the book ‘The World of Hrishikesh Mukherjee: The Filmmaker Everyone Loves.’
One Thousand Days in a Refrigerator; Manoj Kumar Panda, Trs Snehaprava Das, Speaking Tiger, Rs. 299.
