A short story collection I reviewed for India Today magazine:
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| Diwali in Muzaffarnagar By Tanuj Solanki. HarperCollins, 2018. Rs. 299. 232 pages. |
Tanuj
Solanki’s new collection of stories, Diwali
in Muzaffarnagar,
moves easily from Mumbai to Delhi to Diu – but it’s the Uttar
Pradesh town of the title that forms its throbbing centre.
The
book is an impressive follow-up to his 2016 debut novel Neon Noon,
which was set in Pattaya, Thailand. Stories like the
masterfully executed formal experiment “Reasonable Limits”, or “B's First Solo Trip”, which turns a laser-like gaze on the race,
sex and class dynamics of a backpacker vacation, establish Solanki as
an astute new voice.
But it's the three stories set in Muzaffarnagar that are most memorable, enabling it to emerge as more than a name in the news-cycle. It's not that Solanki is uninterested in the specific geography of what one character, with the jaded chutzpah of youth, describes as his “Riot-prone-piece-of-shit town”. In fact, the book could serve as an unerring guide for first-timers: teaching us to recognise how not just neighbourhoods but institutions (schools, malls, hospitals) filter people out by category; to watch how social borders become visible when crossed.
But it's the three stories set in Muzaffarnagar that are most memorable, enabling it to emerge as more than a name in the news-cycle. It's not that Solanki is uninterested in the specific geography of what one character, with the jaded chutzpah of youth, describes as his “Riot-prone-piece-of-shit town”. In fact, the book could serve as an unerring guide for first-timers: teaching us to recognise how not just neighbourhoods but institutions (schools, malls, hospitals) filter people out by category; to watch how social borders become visible when crossed.
Yet Solanki's Muzaffarnagar is more than the sum
of its warring parts. This is the small town in its remembered
boredom and its stultifying predictability, but also the power of its
self-containedness.
In it the Indian
middle class family comes to pitch-perfect life, in descriptions so
clear-eyed as to startle. The normalised sexlessness of parental
marriages, the slow drip of filial duty, the terrifying truth that
bonds are as much about resentment as responsibility: these form the
matrix of Solanki's fiction.
Parents stuck in the matrix hope their children might yet be released from its clutches, if only they pay obeisance to the right gods. But that dream of an anxiety-free future creates an ever-receding present, in which attendance and board exam anxieties segue into talk of take-home packages, then savings, then insurance. Deaths, marriages, even honeymoons become inevitably about money. Those outside this world can look undeservedly lucky: “Mahesh's money allowed him a calmness that could even be construed as having spiritual origins.” It is particularly remarkable, then, to watch Solanki's characters move beyond knee-jerk sharpness and dreams of escape, coming to view their surroundings and themselves with acceptance and yes, love.
Solanki's prose is crisp and unornamented, but at times it descends into clunkiness: “Her eyes were swollen, darkness beneath them, and her face carried a pained expression.” Or “Katy is laughing! As if his travails with choking and drowning are a flimsy drama he is playing to evoke some seaside mirth... He emerges a bit from under the ocean, and as flushes of relief come to him, he scampers faster.” Still, these instances do not rupture one's sense that Solanki is a writer worth reading.
An edited version of this review was published in India Today, 23 Mar 2018.
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