Of Burdens Without Weight
In Vinod Kumar Shukla’s stories, you find an escape in reality rather than from it
OOne of the stories in Blue is Like Blue describes a group of poets who gather regularly to read their work. These meetings are presided over by a critic who, lest it be said that “poets are cut off from reality”, insists that each poet physically bring the symbols used in their poems. This is more troublesome for some poets than for others. One ‘labourer-poet’ hasn’t been able to attend for two years because all his poems are about rotis. He sets out for the gathering carrying rotis, but ends up eating them on the way and is left with no symbols to bring.
The story itself is atypical for this collection, but it contains a useful introduction to it. Vinod Kumar Shukla started as a poet—with the wryly titled collection Lagbhag Jai Hind (1971). He went on to write novels, including Naukar Ki Kameez, turned into a film by Mani Kaul, and Deewar Mein Ek Khirkee Rahati Thi, and was given the Sahitya Akademi award in 1999.
Many of the stories in Blue is Like Blue are written in the 1950s or 1960s, and it isn’t hard to see a poetic quality in Shukla’s use of imagery. The stories feature almost-interchangeable young male protagonists who live in barelyfurnished, dimly-lit rented rooms, counting out their rupees to last them the month. As one might imagine the labourer-poet’s life to be, these lives should be burdened and unrelenting. But in Shukla’s vision of the world, there exists a perspective from which they can become nearly weightless.
In The Burden, a young man is cycling to work when a dried neem leaf falls into his shirt pocket and proves hard to clear out. He stops and wonders if he has locked his door properly. For the second day running, he returns to check. It so happens that his salary has just come in and is in his trunk, “inside the pocket of a freshly washed shirt”. That evening, he spends
most of that money paying off his bills and making small purchases. The next morning, as he cycles to work, “the faint misgiving obscurely entered his mind”, but he just smiles and cycles on: “It was summer and hundreds of dry leaves were falling, but not one found its way into his pocket.”
Shukla revels in the stuff that normally occupies the periphery of human awareness. In one story, the narrator notices that the watch on his father’s hand continues to tick after he has died. He writes, ‘It’s not as if I’d expected it to stop, but I did think about it.’ In another story, a character takes water from a pot: ‘I could have taken water from the fridge, but the glass water bottles clinked when you closed it, and I was afraid that something might break.’ Shukla’s characters can feel sparse, as if they’re occupying a dreamscape. But they also feel intensely relatable, seemingly fashioned from a barely acknowledged fringe of one’s own consciousness.
The experience of these stories is closer to that of viewing a narrative painting than it is to reading a narrative. Part of the reason emerges in a piece of autobiographical writing included in the collection. The day Shukla was born in Rajnandgaon (in today’s Chhattisgarh) also saw the inauguration of its first movie theatre. It was practically an extension of Shukla’s house, and his early years were spent there watching silent films. Shukla says he prefers to “think in scenes, rather than in language”. The translation here by A.K. Mehrotra and Sara Rai is clean and elegant in recreating those scenes. Blue is Like Blue also comes with an insightful introduction by the translators.
Shukla’s stories deserve to be read for their perspective that is at once unique and universal. They seem to suggest that if you stare hard enough at it, reality provides its own escape. ‘It was a matter of great joy,’ reads a line from the book, ‘that people would set out to buy okra and would return home after having bought okra.’ ■
—Srinath Perur