A nice gift for any short story lover, and for readers of the new breed of Indian authors writing in English.
It was the cover that made me pick out this book.
That and the words "gulp fiction". From content that makes you go gulp to the metaphorical comparison of content that needs no chewing, it’s, perhaps, an apt description of this set of stories.
And then short stories are easier to digest and review than longer works. Most days, the Internet holds me in thrall. Much that I do there is functional and mundane but then there is also the irresistible wealth of trivia that waylays time such that reading takes a backseat. Travel, where access to the Net is random and constrained, tends to reserve the leisure to finish a full length book. But that’s matter for another day, another post...Meanwhile you can follow me on Instagram to see my latest reads.
This set of seventeen stories has one pretty much recurrent theme: bitterness against women and wives in particular. Wives, in Mr. Salil Desai's tales, nag incessantly. However, in some perverse fashion, it is the men, all of whom seem to harbour such thoughts, who get their comeuppance. Yet the passages which portray the voices of the wives remind me of a real life story I once heard.
A man bought his wife a recording gadget as she had once expressed a desire for such a thing, being something of a wannabe writer. At one point in time, this man then recorded his wife's plaints so that she could hear how terrible her whining sounded. Of course the gadget then promptly not only lost its charm for the original purpose but became a loathsome sight to the woman to whom it was given as a gift. Which makes me wonder how the author hears the other gender. It is not only the eye of the beholder which holds the magic of perception. Ears play their role too. Whatever we are fed in terms of the prejudices of our times and specific backgrounds tend to be burped up as our reality.
In a similar vein as the first story of the book, Lost Libido, there are Bit on the Side, The Maths Conundrum and, most of all, The Snake and the Stick, which reveal, at least in the protagonist, a certain marked attitude towards women.
To be fair, the author seems to be examining the various foibles of humans in general. In One Monday Morning, for example, he plays with the other famous grouse of some men, the purportedly whimsical nature of women. And the gentle twist, in not the tail but a little earlier, neatly stands that particular misunderstanding on its head.
By and large, it seems to be de rigueur that short stories be about unpleasant things or beings. In that sense, Salil Desai had done his bit.
