Austere beauty of
The short stories, in precise detail, down to Durban Indian English, capture the township
Pravasan Pillay is a literary ascetic. Chatsworth (Dye Hard Press, 2018), his collection of short stories, is largely unencumbered by adjectives and adverbs. His prose is spare yet precise in detail and minutiae. It captures not merely the lives of people living in the eponym of his collection, the former Indians-only township south of Durban, but the claustrophobia and gloom that accompanies class and caste disdain, racial oppression and the fatalism of a dead-end — set to a dead-beat — imposed on individuals and a community.
His stories are the mise en scène of melancholia.
“I have always felt that there is a deep vein of melancholia that runs through Chatsworth and which touches the lives of some of its residents,” says Pillay.
“It's a place where people were forcibly removed to, from other parts of Durban during apartheid [from 1950 onwards], so there is an obvious sadness in its origins — however, the melancholia I sense is something more, it's a way of being in the world, it's a heaviness.”
That existential “heaviness” of Pillay’s characters — most of whom are outsiders — deftly propels his social realist stories, some of which have no discernible plot. Rather, they are layered portraits of people, moods, prejudices and claustrophobias.
In Crooks, there is a single mother illegally selling alcohol from her kitchen who treads a fine line between revulsion, love and duty for her incapacitated, morbidly obese daughter. The Albino is a slow-burning story of a fair-skinned girl — Indian, albino, white, mixed-race? — whose presence in an Indiansonly school during apartheid incites gossip among teachers and children, and reaches a tremulous denouement (of sorts) while on an excursion to the Durban Museum.
Pillay, who now lives in Sweden with his wife and son, admits to a “feeling of ‘outsideness’ growing up in Chatsworth” mostly because his family moved around often and he was raised by a single mother.
His parents divorced when he was young, something unheard of in the socially conservative Indian community in the 1980s: “[The divorce] was a definite source of unease and alienation. Unsurprisingly, as I grew up and discovered films, books and comics, I found that I gravitated towards characters on the margins of society. Apart from fiction, I was likewise attracted to human glitches in township life, people who stood out a little from the crowd. But yes, I do feel like an outsider, whether it was while growing up or as an adult in Durban and now as an immigrant in Sweden. I think it's just the way I am wired and it's what I gravitate towards