Master of the Neo-Gothic

The difficult relationship between fathers and their grown-up children is always the main event in a Swadesh Deepak story, including and especially when the narrator is explicitly telling readers that it isn’t. These fathers, often retired soldiers, are authoritarian or at the very least, extremely strong-willed — they rule not only with an iron fist but with absolute moral convictions as well. The glacial surfaces of their lives are predictably shattered when their traumatised children decide to take a pick-axe to the past. Ten of the Hindi writer’s best stories have been collected in the recently published volume A Bouquet of Dead Flowers, translated by Jerry Pinto, Nirupama Dutt, Pratik Kanjilal and Sukant Deepak.

In several of these stories, Deepak’s absolute favourite themes present themselves to readers: army dads, perpetually grieving mothers, wilful, Western-educated daughters, mysterious brooding young men and an ‘unforgiveable’ mistake from the past. In ‘Jungle’, an army Captain wonders whether his almost animalistic instincts to hunt and kill have been passed on to him by his forest officer father. ‘Pears from Rawalpindi’ (a translation of ‘Bagugoshe’, one of Deepak’s best-known stories) sees a son slowly reconciling himself with the fact of his mother’s mental illness. The translation here is by the journalist Sukant Deepak, the writer’s son who has, in the past, written poignantly about his father’s schizophrenia (Swadesh Deepak left his home one morning in 2006 for a walk, and wasn’t seen or heard from thereafter).

Sexual indiscretions as well as sexual assaults are frequent occurrences in these stories, making indelible impressions on the protagonists. ‘Hunger’ sees a starving young boy discovering how bleak his world really is after he is forced to pimp his sister out in exchange for food. In ‘Name a Tree, Any Tree’, a hot-headed soldier learns that a pair of his senior officers have been going around raping the wives and sisters of the cantonment—and decides to take matters into his own hands, with tragic consequences.  This harrowing story, perhaps the pick of this collection, unfolds like a multiple-vehicle crash playing out in slow motion on the big screen. The audience knows what’s coming, and yet the dread is no less all-consuming. When the story’s narrator — another US-educated young woman used to getting her own way — declares that she has decided to marry the avenging soldier (Ajay), see how the three men react. Taciturn, but full of ominous purpose.

“The click-clack of the Brigadier’s wooden leg as he tries to rise. Ajay places a hand on his shoulder and keeps him seated. The two soldiers communicate without words — it’s all right. All is well. Brigadier Saahab leans back and his fists unclench. In a crisp voice, he orders his younger son: Young ‘un. A large rum for me. Don’t stand about like a stone. Move it.”

In the introductory essay, Jerry Pinto locates Deepak as a master of the ‘neo-Gothic’ in Hindi literature. This assessment is not only accurate, it touches upon a highly significant part of Deepak’s technique — houses and trees and animals and birds communicating what humans cannot or would rather not. And therefore, we have the visuals of a famished dog hammering home the sadness permeating ‘Hunger’. The guilt-ridden Sukant from ‘Horsemen’ shoots a bird in the middle of the story, then hangs the corpse around his neck, almost embodying the phrase ‘albatross around the neck’. It is a heightened, surreal variant of ‘show, don’t tell’ and Deepak uses the device to great effect.

Pinto writes, “When one is writing fiction, one is free to create anything, to invent everything, or so one is told. And yet when one sits down to write, one is also told to write what one knows. That immediately slices away millions of possibilities and leaves behind one’s own etiolated world and even as one begins, one senses how little one may know even of the world one inhabits.”

That last line is an apt summary of Deepak’s preoccupations as a short story writer. His cocksure male protagonists are forever discovering how out of touch they are with their own surroundings and more tellingly, their own families. And by the time they take remedial steps, it is often too late to prevent catastrophic outcomes.

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