I love reading short stories because they resemble a couple on a park bench watching an ephemeral sunset (or a sunrise, if you prefer) waiting eagerly to discover at least one startling moment every time they are there. ‘It happens’ is a collection of short stories written by Bhaswar Mukherjee that I have just finished reading and must admit that his work is all about a varied clutch of emotions woven into different characters. I’m not at all surprised that Vinita Dawra Nangia, the Executive Editor of TOI, calls him an engaging storyteller.
Bhaswar goes a few steps beyond being merely engaging as most of his characters go way beyond ‘frolicking on the beach and building sandcastles’ or ‘internalizing and suffering alone’ and actually transform passive and entertaining engagement into one that is discernably actionable. Isn’t this how Rishab interacts with his dilemmas in ‘The war within’ or how Kiara connects with the reality of Rishaan in ‘Karma’? The stories in this collection aren’t only about a character’s ‘struggle to establish his identity through all the pain and torture’ but coming to terms with the fact that we ‘can’t plan life in advance. Plan as we may, we’ll get hit by many curve balls’. So yes, trust the conflict in his stories to move around through surprising twists and sometimes even reach resolutions that managed to surprise my creative instinct… for instance, the way the writer ends ‘A welcome shade of grey’. I believe a good short story transcends prejudices and beliefs, asks the right questions, responds with resolutions, and sometimes must attempt to change even convictions that exist today. These are some of the things one finds in this collection and I wouldn’t mind labelling it ‘a cauldron where the best minds and views coalesced to create the magic of learning’, to quote from one of the stories in this book.
The stories aren’t just tales where ‘the maelstrom of conflict’ struts around trying to intimidate the reader as most are told in a simple language even though the ideas held within are ‘like traversing a minefield, everyday’. The reader isn’t held firmly to one locale or city or country and we hop from Lucknow to Kabul to Delhi and Mumbai only to shift base from Coimbatore or Kasauli to Kashmir and even a little village in POK, not necessarily in the order that I have written – my point in mentioning this facet is that this isn’t insignificant as it fills a reader with a new kind of anticipation every few pages. The freshness of perspective keeps the mind away from a sense of dreariness that sometimes does creep in if the geography in a narrative remains glued to just one region. And now that we are talking about variations in the settings, I might as well mention that the issues that the stories deal with are no less different from each other. The author has attempted to speak his mind out from issues ranging from what ails the transgenders to those that surround adoption, from terror to honour killings, and from complex medical ailments to relationships within the family. This kind of combination, some may argue, isn’t what a collection of stories about one chosen niche would be… and that the exploration of any one of these issues then tends to remain unsatiated. I would respond by saying that human behaviour in any situation is rarely orderly and that even if a variation of any sort appears to be an anomaly, it does serve a purpose. This collection definitely isn’t a single condiment out to impress but is a medley of spices that seem to exist in harmony and peace with each other. The best part is that the stories in themselves have the faith and belief that they are telling the reader something vital.
Most of the stories in this book are those where commonplace things, actions, and objects meander through the plot because this is what life is all about… most lives are lived trying to convert normal moments with their routine conflicts into moments that may stay on as exceptional memories.
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Details of the book:
Title: It happens
Author: Bhaswar Mukherjee
Publisher: Readomania
ISBN: 9788194337348
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Arvind Passey
09 December 2020
