GRIM BUT GRIPPING
THERE’S NO ONE STALKER BUT SEVERAL, THE LARGER PLOT INTERLINKING THE STORIES REVEALED ONLY IN THE END
Loyal Stalkers, Chimmi Tenduf-La’s new collection of interlinked short stories, is a far cry from The Amazing Racist, the Sri Lankan author’s muchadmired debut novel. Portraying a mixed marriage between an English man and a Sri Lankan woman, Tenduf-La’snovel was funny despite its grave themes. His latest work is much darker. Nevertheless, his most serious tales reveal a dash of cheerfulness that marks him as a unique writer. A stark contrast between subject and style means he risked the collection being dismissed as superficial. Curiously enough, this peculiarity heightens the darkness and makes the narrative more hard-hitting.
The 15 stories evoke a thousand emotions simultaneously. The ‘happier’ ones such as
‘Lovable Idiot’, ‘My Fair and Lovely Lady’, and
‘Everyone Has to Eat’, have a somewhat R.K. Narayan-like feel despite a shadow of melancholy in the background. Others are simply disconcerting. In the title story, ‘Loyal Stalker’, for instance, Chin-up Channa is a gym instructor obsessed with his beautiful rich client. He first follows her abroad and then takes to living in her house like a phantom, watching, observing, and acting on her behalf—all without her knowledge.
‘The Dog Thrown Off a Building’, probably inspired by a recent real-life incident in India, is equally disturbing, but with a twist towards the end. ‘White Knight’, ‘Devil Mask Tattoo’ and ‘TukTuk Bang’ create the same creepy feeling and sense of anticipation as the psychological crime novels by Britain’s Ruth Rendell. As the title points out, there isn’t one stalker in this book but several. Tenduf-La surprises over and over again convincingly. Meanwhile, the larger plot that links the stories together develops subtly, almost imperceptibly, and unfolds only towards the end.
His insistence on the fairness of his women characters is a bit off-putting. But Tenduf-La’s characters throb with life: the cricket coach (Coach Uncle); Jinesena, the security guard at Monsoon Lodge; Pasindu Amarasinghe, the young cricketer with an overzealous mother; Kiyoma, the battered maid soldiering on in her life. Overall, a brilliant collection, one of the few to appear in quite some time.
—Divya Dubey