The Long and Short of a Story

A novel is like building a house and a short story like furnishing a room, declares Anjum Hasan, who now has both under her belt

The young novelist and literary critic Anjum Hasan’s short story collection Difficult Pleasures comes with a significant honour to start with: an elegant hardback cover. In India, this is almost invariably a privilege reserved for three sorts of stars—established pin-ups like Amitav Ghosh and Vikram Seth, promising newcomers backed by luscious advances from Western publishers, and foreign or NRI writers on India assignments (Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Siddharth Deb’s The Beautiful and the Damned). Hasan doesn’t belong to groups two or three; her first two books, Lunatic in My Head and Neti, Neti got splendid reviews but soft covers. But in some of her short stories in this collection, with a sentence here, a startling turn of phrase there, she shows why she could one day be counted automatically as part of group one. Here she tells us about the delicate and concise thing the short story is, the void into which characters that people short stories disappear, and why the form should not be seen as the germ for a novel.

Q There is this feeling that short stories are easier to write than poetry or novels. What do you feel?

A The interesting question to me is what we do with each form rather than which one is easier to pull off. I’m not sure why anything should be easy.

Perhaps the belief about ease originates in the misconception that a short story is a sort of truncated form. It’s a concise and delicate thing, but it’s not a vehicle for the half-formed or undercooked, which it’s sometimes made out to be. The story has an inner logic, just like a poem or novel does. The elements that are introduced have to be successfully tied up together—a resolution, however one understands that word, of both feeling as well as plot.

Q How much time did you take to complete this collection?

A I’ve been writing stories from time to time over the past six years, while doing a bunch of other things. Some of these were published in magazines such as Mint Lounge, Tehelka, Himal and Elle, as well as in three short story anthologies. I think I was encouraged by the growing opportunities for publishing the individual story. When I had about ten stories, the idea of a collection started to take shape in my head.

Q What is the art of the short story?

A There is no single recipe; if there were, then we would not be able to appreciate both, say, the tragedy of Nikolai Gogol’s The Overcoat, where the poor Akaky’s fate becomes tied to his precious garment’s, as well as the comedy of Rohinton Mistry’s Auspicious Occasion, where the curmudgeonly Rustomji’s fate is only slighted marred by the fact that his coat is stained by a passerby’s spit. We would not be able to take equal pleasure in both Hans Christian Andersen and James Joyce if we operated with one yardstick.

When I’m writing a story, the question of what would make it good for me hangs upon that old question ‘What happens next?’ The stories are introspective, but at the same time, incident and drama are important engines.

Q What is the difference between writing a novel and a short story? Is there, for instance, a ‘short story’ frame of mind which is different from the ‘novel’ frame of mind?

A I think they are different and I am quite sure that a collection of stories is not a novel in disguise, nor should it be made out to be one. In Difficult Pleasures, the canvas for me has been the individual story. Each is an attempt to create a self-contained universe with its own rules and its own citizens. At the same time, as a writer of fiction, one’s sensibility and interests remain the same— it’s the treatment and the telling that changes.

Q There is this view that Indian publishers do not encourage short story collections, and certainly not by debut authors. Your own debut was the much acclaimed novel, Lunatic in my Head. What is your experience? Did you hold back your short stories till you had a couple of novels in the bag?

A In many Indian languages, the short story was the form through which writers experimented with modern themes and styles. To find the best contemporary writing—in Urdu, for example—one would still turn to the short story. In English, there has been a mystifying ambivalence about the short story even as publishers continue to put out collections and anthologies, and have done so for decades. I think the problem is that a short story collection is seen as a lesser version of the novel, not a form in its own right. It’s how we talk about the short story that has to change. And no, I didn’t hold back my stories. I wrote the bulk of them after my two novels were published.

Q You are also the books editor of Caravan. How easy or difficult do you find magazine writing?

A It’s hard when I find myself writing about my contemporaries; a fiction writer is not necessarily the best person to be reviewing her fiction-writing peers. On the other hand, as the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum (who also reviews the work of her peers) recently pointed out, the book review is one of the few avenues of engaging with the public on a regular basis.

Q I feel short story collections in English are rare in Indian publishing. In your job as books editor, do you come across too many or too few collections?

A I come across short story collections all the time. On an average, there’s one on the ‘Caravan Bookshelf’ every month. Some recent ones that caught my eye are Ambai’s Fish in a Dwindling Lake, Chaso’s Dolls’ Wedding and Other Stories, Her Piece of Sky: Contemporary Hindi Stories edited by Deepa Agarwal, Yellow is the Colour of Longing by KR Meera, Release and Other Stories by Rakhshanda Jalil and Anita Desai’s The Artist of Disappearance.

Q Vikram Chandra developed one of his short stories in the collection Love and Longing in Bombay into the novel Sacred Games. Having written a short story, have you sometimes felt that a character could lend himself/herself to a novel?

A Someone asked me, so what happens to the character Ayana in Good Housekeeping? Where will she go? To which my answer was: she’ll go into that void into which all fictional characters go and from which they are rescued only when the reader thinks of or remembers them. I wrote these stories very much as standalone pieces. But, of course, characters should be imagined as having lives before and after their stories. That hope in the reader that a character might live on in a novel makes me happy. But I haven’t thought of turning any of the stories into novels, at least not yet.

Q When you publish a collection of short stories, is there a need to find a theme around which the stories revolve? Is that a conscious impulse?

A It wasn’t for me, and I don’t know if a common theme is a necessary precondition. It’s the individual story that’s the point. Like the Modernist writers knew when they started going inside people’s heads, the story really exists only in the intensities of the present moment.

The Hungarian writer András Nagy talks about the fundamental untranslatability of the story by paraphrasing Gertrude Stein on the rose—the story is the story is the story. I think he means that the story is sui generis; it cannot be likened or reduced to anything else. I like that idea—that in writing a story, one is writing nothing more, but also nothing less, than ‘just’ a story.

Q How much time do you take to write a short story?

A It could vary from a week to a month. What starts it off is usually a simple image or idea—a woman boarding a plane for the first time, a man learning that his brother has killed himself. I write out a very rough sketch of the story before I start working on it. I need to have the skeleton of the story in hand at the start.

Q I feel that writing a short story is simpler than writing a novel, because the arc is, well, shorter. There is less I need to think through, less I need to figure out. The scope for amorphousness is more, which in some ways is the beauty of the short story. You disagreed with me when I asked about the ease of writing short stories. Still, I ask again, what do you think?

A Yes, a short story is perhaps simpler to write than a novel—a novel is like building a house, a short story is like furnishing a room. But this simplicity does not guarantee success. You have a smaller canvas on which to try and achieve perfection.

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