One hot summer night, when I was twelve and tear-deep in Victorian fiction, dreaming in bed beside my sister that I was Jane Eyre and Agnes wooed by Rochester and David, I felt my sister shuddering. It was the eve of her wedding, and I, with all the wisdom of my twelve years, turned to her, and putting my arm around her heaving body, assured her that there was no need for pre-wedding nerves, for wasn’t Nikhil, her husband-to- be, kind and tender and handsome, and she, beautiful to boot? Turning to me then, she held my hand in a painful grip and said that two days ago she had been raped by Nikhil’s brother, Abhinay.
These are the opening lines of the opening paragraph of the story. But here’s the kicker: it is only half the first paragraph. That so much information is tucked inside the opening to the story should inform the attentive reader of the type of writer being dealt with here. This is not Hemingway’s style of writing where he works overtime taking stuff out in order to make the reader work overtime trying to figure out what should have been left in. This is storytelling pure and simple by a writer not interested in playing mind games, but in getting to the heart of fiction: sucking you into a good story with robust characters. To get from a Bronte gothic novel to a semi-incestuous rape of a young Indian bride just days before the wedding within the span of a few sentences is the sort of leap that most writers could never pull off As for Hemingway, on the best day his greatest fan can imagine for him, he wouldn’t even dare to try.
The heroine, self-effacing and self-sacrificing, was beautiful and beloved by all. A doting bahu and wife, she manages her house and her in-laws with efficiency and sweetness. In between household chores she and her husband frolic in the nearby park, sing love songs, roll down undulating hills and chase each other through a blaze of blossoming flowers and gulmohar trees. But the villain desires the heroine.
The narrator of this story is a young Indian woman who marries a man she loves named Siddharth only to find that once married she is—and is expected to—spend more time with her in-laws than she spends alone with him. Naturally, this does not create the merriest of situations. The story opens with a recollection of the first movie they have seen together in months which sounds like a perfect opportunity to be alone, but, alas, a veritable laundry list of in-laws wind up accompanying them, including mother-, father-, sister-in, brother-in and others. Interestingly—by which is meant importantly—the first long bit of descriptive prose in the story is basically a summarization of the plot of the film.
Again, what is excerpted above represents only half of the entire paragraph as it appears in the film. Normally, such a summary would evolve and transform into a description of the reaction of the film by the actual characters in the story itself. And, indeed, that does describe the first sentence of the paragraph, but everything after that is devoted to the plot of the film being watched. Once again, this is the kind of narrative choice that many other writers besides those who adopt Hemingway’s minimalist approach would eschew, but what seems an unnecessary digression at first circles back upon the narrative to become more revealing that it may seem at first.
“Bengali boys nice as long as their temper not disturbed. Once these Bengalis get angry, they are setting fire to first thing they see. Always they carry matches for such times. I am not wanting to get on wrong side of Bengali. You see how they are setting fire to football stadium in Calcutta every year? That is why stadium is made of wood. One year one side loses and setting fire to it, and next year other side loses and setting fire to it.”
Not every story in the collection is quite so heavy as those about rape and unhappy marriages. “When Anklets Tinkle” is a serious story, ultimately, but it is couched in the form of a sort of goofy would-be ghost story. The identity of the ghosts—and the motivation for raising the question of their existence in the first place—is done lightheartedly as this element of the tale is becomes the narrative text within which is partially hidden the more serious subtext. The context, as always, is the hypocrisy of gender conventions and relations in Indian society. Much of the humor in the story is found within the dialogue rather than the narrative description, proving that the author has a terrific handle on all aspects of the form when it comes to crafting short fiction.
