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Underbelly of a life we choose not to see

Jairaj Singh

Palash Krishna Mehrotra writes about men locked in the prison of their minds. His book, Eunuch Park, opens a tall grim iron gate that leads you into a dark morbid passage and before you can light a match to know where you are, the cold sweat rising from your temple tells you there’s no turning back.

If there’s one thing to gather after you’ve read his collection of short stories, it’s the stuff foreboding nightmares are made of. It’s original and even makes Shantaram shy away from a distance.

Palash is not writing to please you with purple prose and descriptive melting imagery that most Indian writers tend to write. He writes no far-fetched fashionable tales of slum dwellers, of ordinary hope or lush romance. Instead, in terse, short, simple and articulate sentences he tells you gory stories that you will never hear sitting in a plush living room. He writes stories in a manner in which it’s meant to be told, that gets you to sit on a dry, dusty hard floor dotted with cigarette butts and empty booze bottles rolling, with the taste of blood, sweat and tears in your mouth.

In his 15 stories, Mehrotra covers an expansive ground as smoothly as one flicks ash from a cigarette. There is murder, drug addiction, sexual abuse, homosexuality, prostitution, lust, bullying, stalking, repression that takes place in big cities and small towns. Hidden in his writing is a certain void of life, an irony within an irony that unlocks the myth from fantasy and upturns the underbelly of a life we merely choose to not see.

In all his stories, one realises in bitterness, that the events, instances or churlish situations are no vivid imagination of a sick writer that derives a certain pleasure by jabbing a finger at you. Palash takes you down familiar routes whether it is New Delhi, Bombay, Dehra Dun or Allahabad with a perspective of a person that easily slips between the barriers of class into a territory where perversity exposes vulnerability and honesty trips experience. Often the stories are told in first-person or in-and-out recollections, often they are so short and heady that they end up in a certain abruptness leaving a charcoal stain on your mind as you rush to meet the new one.

In Fit of Rage, the story is about a tenant, a murderer in the past, who lives in Defence Colony of New Delhi, and is taken into confidence by the servant of the house and his smack-addled friend who plot to murder the landlady and make a runaway with the loot.

In Eunuch Park, the story is about a Delhi University hostel student who is on the lookout for a safer option to make out with his girlfriend after having run into trouble with college authorities and the girl’s stringent parents. In Okhla Basti, the story is about the experience of an uneducated 26-year-old, who in order to wash away the memory of an old lover drowns himself in country liquor and chillums of ganja smoke, in one desolate night in the basti. In The Nick of Time, the story is about a student studying in Oxford, who recounts an episode when he cross dresses and has to make a dash to the loo without being caught. In The Other Evening, it’s an episode between a man and a prostitute, an indelible moment they share and the meaningless of it.

Palash in his style of writing brings a welcoming change in Indian writers writing in English. He has the ability of instantly captivating the reader by the sheer force of simple storytelling. Even the weaker stories, the ones that sometimes bounce on a thin line of obscurity covered in grime, resonates the continuity of the voice of a writer that’s taken some sort of a solemn pledge.

If one has to quibble about Eunuch Park, perhaps it is that Palash doesn’t dwell in his stories; these candid vignettes give a cursory peek of living on the wild side leaving the reader digging his fingernails in the pages wanting to know more.

What he does best is kill the concept of literary elitism, he shreds the aloofness and allows you to witness a spectacle perched in an amoral vantage point.