OF SHOW AND TELL
Moving from Singapore to Ladakh and Kolkata, Sanjeev Sanyal’s short stories have some interesting plot lines
Some books tell you more about the writer than what they’re writing about. This one will bring the anthropologist out in you. The obvious clue is in the book title. Nice and aspirational. I imagined two jocks telling stories to each other over beer. Far from it. The title story in this book of short stories is about an out of work marketing executive meeting a girl over beer. He lands a project in the NGO she works in and discovers the scamming in the development sector. The story, like many others in the book starts in one place with one idea, then veers off in an altogether different direction. You think for a moment this is a love story. Then 10 pages are abou the details of an HIV project gone wrong in the NGO. And the story ends. Sanyal is a writer who believes only in giving you a plot. In every story, he inverts the writer’s mantra of show not tell. He only tells; never shows.
In his story – ‘The Intellectuals,’ Sanyal’s protagonist is in an animated conversation at a Kolkata tea-house. It’s meant to parody the philosopher in every Bengali. But the author doesn’t flesh out even one conversation. So the funniness and the Bengali-ness is for you, the reader, to invent. Anthropological conclusion 1: the author is smug. There is another inescapable conclusion to be drawn from the flat narratives and poorly constructed sentences. A creeping classist gaze. The first story, ‘The Used-car Salesman’ baulks at the idea of the said creature rising through the ranks and making his way into the art and literary circuit. It’s supposed to be funny by assuming a classist position. That unless you have grown up reading great literature and consuming high art, feigning your way into it is crass. True but the writer robs the protagonist of any endearing features. Why should anyone find any of this inherently funny? Especially since one of the crutches Sanyal leans on to parody this story is the Tehelka rape case. The rape was only used as a device to bring the story to a climax. But anything could have been used instead. That rape was used as a prop to parody a situation says much more about the crassness of the writer than his fictional salesman protagonist.
And oh, there is the poetry. I leave you with an extract from the poem titled ‘Exile’.
“The stars were brighter
The snow was whiter
The peaches sweeter
The restless river…”
Revati Laul is an independent journalist. She lives in Delhi. Her book The Anatomy of Hate will be out in November 2018.