BOOKS
A collection of stories reveals the many flavours of Chatsworth
Chatsworth Pravasan Pillay, Dye-Hard Press, R190
Pravasan Pillay doesn’t like to be labelled as an Indian writer — but the man writes about charou life like nobody else. Chatsworth, his debut collection of short stories, is a beautiful love letter to the miscreants, the mothers, the uncles, the girls and the chaos of both life and living in Chatsworth, an Indian township on the southside of Durban. The stories do not reduce being Indian in South Africa to stale caricatures — although important to the culture there’s no mention of cricket, Bollywood, spices or indenture. Apartheid flattened the nuances between Gujarati and Telugu, upper-class merchants and lower-class dockworkers on the Bluff into one mishmash of identity mediated by whiteness, however, there is no single story of Indianness in South Africa. Chatsworth works well as it favours depth instead of relying on narrow narratives of working-class people of Indian origin in South Africa.
The multiplicity of characters adds to the sense of intimacy between people and place that Pillay conveys. And intimacy, or how we care or do not care for each other, is highlighted in some form in all the stories. Sometimes it is heartbreaking and punishing, like in “Chops Chutney” where a daughter falls in love with a man whom her father hates; at other times tender, as seen in the story “Girls” where two teenagers,
Arti and Vimla, while planning a makeover by bleaching their facial hair, are talking about boys and their devotion to Mariah Carey.
In “Crooks” we meet Kamla, a mother who struggles to make ends meet by selling groceries and booze illegally from her house. Her daughter, Ambi, is unemployed and mainly bedridden. As the story progresses, an unsentimental portrayal of a motherdaughter relationship develops, one fraught with tension and sadness.
The timeline of the stories sets them in the near-past, but the interactions and scenarios could be placed in present day. Some issues highlighted in the collection are painfully contemporary, as in “The Albino”. The story of an Indian high-school girl who has albinism, and gains popularity mainly because she looks white, is told with such sensitivity and precision that the suspense catches you in your throat, and the story ends in a decidedly precarious place.
Pillay’s masterful use of what’s colloquially known as Durban-English is another strength. The rhotic Rs and hybridity of Tamil, Hindi, Afrikaans, Zulu and English that animates a particular South African Indian dialect is written in a way that rolls off the page, as it does off the tongue. Pillay captures the lilting accent perfectly. Those who know will pick up phrases in the stories unique to South Africans of Indian origin such as “katchara people” in “Mr Essop” and “you still got the barracks ways in you” in “Crooks”.
In Hindi, katchara means trash or rubbish, and the barracks could refer to the Magazine Barracks in Durban where Indian labourers lived (before being forcibly removed to Chatsworth), or to compound life on plantations. In this way, the language reflects some of the history of the inhabitants of Chatsworth. The funny-kind boys in “The Fence”, the Durban Westville student in “The Green Ghost” and Ambi in “Crooks” all speak variations of this kind of speech and the subtlety of the variation is key to their characters.
Chatsworth is the sum of a lifetime’s worth of observation, and scenes in the stories come alive not because of the expansiveness, or grandness of storytelling, but the close attention to detail.
While most of the stories have been published previously in literary magazines, seeing them side-by-side in Chatsworth lends a pleasant weightiness to the shorts. Like a platter of treats, you can savour each piece and wait before choosing the next one. Or you can binge, and finish the slim book in half a day.
Intimacy, or how we care or do not care for each other, is highlighted
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