Capturing the faintest lingering of a scent
It is hard to pinpoint what makes The House Next to the Factory extraordinary. Sonal Kohli’s debut shortfiction collection is so quiet in its ambition that it almost resists inquiry. The act of examination itself feels like an intrusion. Most art is devoted to capturing its subject and/or its essence. Kohli does neither. The reader walks into a room where the faintest lingering of a scent remains while its wearer has long left. It creates immediate regret, longing and gives this collection a hypnotic pull.
Set largely in India between 1980 and 2010, Kohli’s nine short stories are loosely linked by a family that lives next to a factory in Delhi. The stories follow the family members, their domestic help, tutors, cousins and lovers. Though set for the most part in Delhi, the tales are emblematic of all of India and consist of characters that are location-agnostic and therefore also relatable.
Against the backdrop of a changing nation, Kohli explores the stubbornly insulated daily lives of middle-class Indians, the everyday mundane routines that are barely interrupted. In One Hour, Three Times A Week, in the aftermath of Indira Gandhi’s assassination, a local tutor tends to his broken leg. Then there’s Pushpa, who lives off alms collected from wealthy clients across the city, who in turn assuage their guilt with these acts of good karma.
Kohli keeps it minimal, staying away from the cliched dramatic signifiers of middle-class life, and comes up with original, more detailed versions. Such as Band-Aids while wearing ballerina shoes to protect the heel from chafing, pegs of cheap whisky accompanied by thickcut cucumber slices, avoiding piles of dung while walking. These are the unromantic gestures of Indian life so devoid of glamour that we are trained to automatically filter them out. Kohli does a fine job of removing those blinders.
The high point of The House Next to the Factory is undoubtedly Kohli’s approach to narration. In her hands, living rooms express themselves, marketplaces find emotional release, and all through the smallest, most understated gestures.
In as few words as possible, she embodies the showdon’t-tell maxim, and she uses the subtlest of ways to show.
In The Outing, Sister Celina switches on the television to get her elder mother to eat her dinner, which is getting cold. It is masterfully done. In such simple acts Kohli conveys the reversal of roles between mother and child, the mechanics of persuasion employed for seniors, and the resignation that accompanies everyday chores. It takes her barely three sentences to achieve this.
Most fiction treats time linearly, some fiction restructures it. Kohli compresses time. She makes the distant past, the recent past, and the present indistinguishable. Scenes across periods are woven together so effortlessly that the stories become snapshots where time disappears and the past and present are seen together.
In Steel Brothers, we eavesdrop on a conversation about Delhi’s business class. On a cold and foggy evening on their way home from work, two brothers, co-owners of a business, make an impromptu stop. Over whisky and street-side kebabs, they talk about their aspirations and jealousies while the tension between them simmers.
Kohli sets their story to the beat of national events such as the Harshad Mehta scam. As the brothers talk, we get an unfettered view into the lives of the nouveau riche; the strains of doing business, being undercut by ruthless rivals, and the unrelenting burden of keeping up appearances. In typical Delhi fashion, all this takes place inside a car while old ghazals play in the background.
The collection ends on a high note with Kettle on the Hob, which ties in with Kohli’s ephemeral style where the protagonist is still searching, still trying to come into her own. This story in particular is a great example of the recurrent themes that run through the collection: a sense of displacement and the underlying feeling of a character’s unease with their current environment.
There are times when Kohli’s approach feels too passive and the payoff at the end of the story feels like too little. But this does not happen often. Indeed, The House Next to the Factory is an example of how much can be achieved through sparing prose.