The Patna Manual of Style, a collection of inter-linked stories by Siddharth Chowdhury seemed promising, but it was anything but. I reviewed it for The New Indian Express' magazine section. Here today. Or see below for a slightly unedited version.
PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN
There is a certain quiet comfort in
stereotypes. A character stretch that does not veer off from the generalization
is familiar, unsurprising and hence, your reaction to it is familiar as well,
predetermined almost. Life is easy when you can box people and situations into
stereotypes, however untrue these caricatures may be. Thus we have the liberal
left leaning Hriday Thakur who wants to lead a literary life, but is not always
sure of wanting to deal with the near penury that marks the early years of such
ambition. Every few pages, the reader is told that Thakur, from Bihar, smokes
Gold Flakes and likes his Peter Scot, establishing, sometimes, hammering, the
image of the struggling writer in your mind. Just so you don't forget he is
also an aspiring intellectual, Thakur picks up a Turgenev, a Dostoyevsky now
and then. It is thus that the interlinked short stories in Siddharth
Chowdhury's The Patna Manual of Style
tip a wide brimmed hat to an idealistic, stereotypical world of liberals as
they down their sorrows of reality in Russian literature and cheap whisky.
The timeline of the stories goes back and
forth into the now and when Thakur was a much younger man. In each, we meet
people from his life, most of them women, from the slightly dubious Jishnu da,
an 'importer of blondes' for his dance company to Charulata, a lost love, to the
fiery Anjali Singh Nalwa, now a novelist courting controversy, to his wife Chitrangada,
baker of the famous 'tipple cake', who on Sundays "smells of Sunday.
Unwashed and full of sex." A hormonal young man at 22, Thakur, six months
old in the big city of Delhi, spends evenings at his barsaati fantasizing about
Surma Kaneez, his thoughts coloured by an element of the forbidden, for his
mother would accept anything, save a Muslim daughter-in-law. He cannot wait to
get a girlfriend, "bored with wearing my heart on my sleeve for so long, I
want to wear a condom now, for a change."
As he grows in a reluctant career in
publishing, the world of literature becomes the backdrop of narratives that
take the reader through Thakur's memories of Sophia Singh, Sophia Loren to
those who had a crush on her, through the funeral of Samuel Aldington Macauley
Crown, proofreader par excellence. Along the way, in mildly erotic tones, Sadaf
Khan Abdali tells how a particular book on the shelves of the man was what got
her goat, in one of the more memorable pieces from the collection.
Hriday Thakur, lover, aspiring writer,
reader, tells of his life in but a couple of stories. The ones where the women
in his life narrate are the strongest in the collection. It is through their
voices that the most interesting sketches of Thakur's life and loves are drawn,
where he speaks, it is often matter of fact, bordering on the prosaic. The
Bihari babu in Delhi runs through the book, his town-ness never wholly
faded away, even after all these years.
The collection is a tad inconsistent in its
ability to hold attention, though the straight faced unsentimentality is often
refreshing. While some stories do interest, others merely offer a glimpse via
stray sentences of what they could have instead read like, if only... In being
so, The Patna Manual of Style falls
just short of being wholeheartedly recommendable. At best, the book would make
fair company on a long train journey, if you wanted something that was not
pulp, but nothing too taxing either.
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