The stupidity of the hedgehog is his optimism
“I
am leaving because in my heart there is growing,” the narrator of Anushka Jasraj’s story The Circus writes in an incomplete note to her husband. Sita knows she is in love with a hijra lion tamer whom she has not yet met because she has inherited her circus performer great grandmother’s “vision” (and also her eyeball preserved in a glass jar). She is leaving her husband as well as her lover to join the circus. But she is unable to find the word to “explain the emptiness inside me which is also a kind of nourishment.”
“Language is a rigged carnival game where the hoops are too small to fit around any of the prizes. Friendship. Desire. Love. Loneliness. None of these words can explain what I experience,” Sita says.
And so Jasraj explains these experiences through low-key, almost hallucinatory, sequences. Principles of Prediction is a wildly original collection of 13 stories containing just enough truth about the incomprehensible reality of our inner lives and desires. Most of these stories are set in Mumbai and told through awkward protagonists. A woman makes regular appointments with her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend who is a hairdresser unsure if she wants to get closer to her or him by proxy. Another sets her freeloading boyfriend on fire (kind of). Then, there are relationships driven by fantasies existing solely inside the mind. Jasraj shows the fluidity of desire in all its glorious ambivalence. The stories are all framed by a baffling ambiguity: students of an Art of Occult class in Dharavi make up predictions for a man who wants to seduce his asexual girlfriend; the daughter of the founder of the Indian Psychoanalytical Society meets Freud in Vienna in 1931; a forecaster whose mother disappears spends her days naming and predicting an upcoming storm. In Feline, my favourite story in the collection, the narrator is a private detective on an assignment to investigate the ex-boyfriend of her client who wants “to know who he is now.”
“I’m aware some people take pleasure in asking intrusive questions and learning everything there is to know about another person. But really, that’s just like detective work, and I find it tiresome. There’s no solution, no pay-off... No matter how much evidence you collect, people still betray you,” she thinks as she takes on the assignment. The story goes on to show how information creates intimacy.
Jasraj’s sentences are sharp and revelatory. The smallest characters are summed up succinctly, holding up archetypes: “Riya begins a lot of sentences with ‘My therapist told me’, as though her association with a doctor of the mind provides more heft to her opinions.” Short exchanges between characters reveal entire hypotheses on relationships: “Do you know hedgehogs are drawn to each other for warmth, and then they hurt each other unintentionally because of their prickly spines, and then they separate, and then they miss each other. The whole process repeats. I think the stupidity of the hedgehog is his optimism.”
Her last story, which is her latest, is chillingly prescient (she wrote it in 2019). In Luminous, it looks like the world is ending. A new kind of light pierces through most materials, making sleep difficult and dreams impossible. But, “Like a fever during flu season, people seemed comforted to know everyone had been experiencing the same thing.”
A linguist is hired to document life and vocabulary for future generations. This is a microcosm of our times: “…the new light worked as an alarm bell to amplify what we already felt. These weren’t new symptoms but the old ones with the volume dialled up. I felt like the numbness had been cranked up and all other experiences were memories, which I could visualise but remained emotionally disconnected from, like conceptual art or scenes in a video game.”
In Luminous, life plays out as normal: the linguist and her poet colleague talk about Emily Dickinson and the impossibility of love. Their intern who looks “a little bit different each day, as if he was not one person but an army of twins” could possibly be a con artist or a bird.
No matter how strange the circumstances, Jasraj seems to be telling us, we will still feel the way we feel, and desire will take form.