Greatest Short Stories

CONTENTS

Introduction

Part I: Lyric Awareness

  1.   
The Lost Child

  2.   
Lullaby

  3.   
Birth

  4.   
A Village Idyll

  5.   
Five Short Fables

  6.   
Little Chicks
Part II: Tears at the Heart of Things

  7.   
Lajwanti

  8.   
The Parrot in the Cage

  9.   
The Gold Watch

10.   
Old Bapu

11.   
The Cobbler and the Machine

Part III: The Social Scene

12.   
The Power of Darkness

13.   
The Tractor and the Corn Goddess

14.   
A Kashmir Idyll

15.   
The Price of Bananas

Part IV: The Comic Vein

16.   
A Pair of Mustachios

17.   
The Signature

18.   
The Two Lady Rams

19.   
The Liar

Part V: Probing the Mind

20.   
The Tamarind Tree

21.   
The Silver Bangles

22.   
The Thief

Selected Bibliography

Introduction

M.K. NAIK

As the fables in the
Upanishads,
the beast stories in the
Panchatantra
and the Buddhist Jataka tales show, the short story is an art form Indian in origin and yet the paradox is that the modern Indian short story in English is a product of Western influences. From 1898, when ‘the first collection of short stories in English by an Indian writer —
Stories from Indian Christian Life
by Kamala Sathianadan — was published’
¹
to the present day, the short story has been tackled by most of the leading Indian writers of fiction in English. Among these Mulk Raj Anand is one of the most outstanding, by virtue of his fecundity and the great variety of theme and mood, tone and technique which characterises his short stories.

Mulk Raj Anand has so far produced more than half a dozen collections, of short stories over the last forty years:
The Lost Child and Other Stories
(1934);
The Barber’s Trade Union and Other Stories
(1944);
The Tractor and the Corn Goddess and Other Stories
(1947);
Reflections on the Golden Bed and Other Stories
(1953);
The Power of darkness
and Other Stories
(1959);
Lajwanti and Other Stories
(1966); and
Between Tears and Laughter
(1973). He has, in addition to these, also retold traditional Indian tales in two collections:
Indian Fairy Tales
(1946) and
More Indian Fairy Tales
(1961). This retelling has been, in a sense, a ‘tribute of the current to the source’, for Anand has, in more than one place, acknowledged his debt to the traditional Indian tales. In his preface to
Indian Fairy Tales,
he observes:

Only by going back to the form of these stories, told by mother to son and son to son, could we evolve a new pattern for the contemporary short story. Of course, the Modern short story is a highly developed folk tale, if it is a folk tale at all. But a revival of the short story form, like the present, seemed to be a fit occasion to relate it to its more primitive antecedents which, surprisingly enough, seem to lie in the source of the sheaf of tales which I have gleaned… Although I have taken in much new psychology into my own writing of the short story, I have always tried to approximate to the technique of the folk tale and the influence of these fairy stories has always been very deep on my short fiction.
²

The preface to Selected Stories contains an even fuller statement. Characterizing the ancient Indian
Ocean of Stories
as “a symbol of the highly finished art of story-telling in India", Anand adds:

I read it at an early age and was inspired by it to read and hear many of the folk tales told in my country… I wanted to write stories as finished in form and as rich in content as the stories told among my people. In fact, the folk tale form has seemed to me the most perfect form of short story… The folk tales of India… interpret the joys and sorrows of a peasant

people of the long eras of Indian feudal life. And in spite of the wit, wisdom and morality which they represent, they are not typical of modern sensibility. Therefore, while accepting the form of the folk tale, specially in its fabulous character, I took in the individual and group psychology of the European conte and tried to synthesise the two styles. And thus I sought to create a new kind of fable which extends the old Indian story form into a new age, without the moral lessons of the Indian story, but embodying its verve and vitality and including the psychological understanding of the contemporary period.
³

Another possible and obviously allied influence was that of his mother. Anand once described his mother an ‘illiterate but highly skilled story-teller who could feel a situation passionately.’ He recalled an incident. Once, as a boy he was accompanying her, when they met a woman who had just lost her son. Mother stopped to talk to her, but young Anand, getting impatient, hurried her along. When they reached home, she said to him: ‘Why did you rush me like that? Didn’t you see the dead son of that woman in her eyes?’
⁴

Anand has also indicated other possible influences on his short stories:

One of my favourite folk tales was the
Adventures of Raja Rasalu
and I would pester my mother to tell me this over and over again. The humorous anecdotes concocted by one of our teachers, Master Shah Nawaz, based on the legendary incidents in the life of Raja Birbal and Akbar the Great, impressed me with the gift of laughter that one could bring to bear on human foibles. When I read some of the stories of Tolstoy in his
Sevestopol Sketches
as well as Gorky ’s stories,
Creatures That Once Were Men,
I began to conceive the short story as I would write it, by combining the framework of the folk tales with concentration on character and situations of contemporary life. Then I read the fables of Theodore Powys in London and tried to apply the Indian fables of… the
Panchatantra
to my human beings… I adapted the prose poems of Turgenev and my own allegories to the lyric story… Altogether the allegory, the fable, the lyric short story, the satire and the long short story, in my hand, are all, in a peculiar style of my own evolved under various influences, typical of the neo-folk tale, which is my ideal of the short story. The whole concept was built on the hunch that the old Indian short story remains the deepest reference back to various layers of consciousness. Only it had to take in the disintegration of mind and body of the present age and bring flashes of illumination into the dark to reveal layers and under layers of suppressed feelings. The bardic narrative with its moral lesson at the end had to yield to the revelation in which the neo-psychology, which has taken the place of morality, is implicit… What I left for the novel was the epic theme; the story expressed the lyric awareness and a compassionate sense of humour.
⁵

In addition to these, Anand’s short stories reveal other modes also, such as strong social satire, uproarious laughter and acute psychological perception. The present selection is an attempt to represent the wide range and variety of Anand’s short stories. The first group represents the stories of ‘Lyric Awareness’. In these stories the element of incident is almost minimal, the emphasis being an imaginative and emotional apprehension of an aspect of life — either on the human level or on that of animal creation. As in all lyric poetry, the themes here are elemental, such as birth and death, beauty, love and childhood, and the treatment often reveals a symbolic dimension added to realistic presentation. There is also an appropriate heightening of style, in keeping with the mood and the tone of the narrative.

The first story in this
group
—
The Lost Child
— illustrates almost all these features and is easily one of the most memorable of Anand’s short stories. It is a fable in which the traumatic experience of a child also symbolizes the eternal verities of the human condition. The child which has gone to the fair along with its parents wants a toy and a sweet meat and many more things and keeps up a chorus of ‘I want’. Then it gets lost, and though friendly hands now offer to it the very things it coveted only a few hours ago, it rejects all of them, all the while crying, ‘I want my mother, I want my father, I want my father’. The narrative here moves effortlessly on two levels of significance, even like a typical Robert Frost poem. While the story is utterly realistic — in fact, Anand has told me that it is based upon his own childhood experience — it has an obviously symbolic dimension too. This is suggested by the fact that neither the child nor its parents, nor any other character in the story has a name; they are evidently representative figures. The fair — the scene of the child’s experience also does not have a specific local habitation. As all this indicates, the child in the story is ‘father of the man’, for in the fair of the world, one often covets many things and then the loss of a near and dear one suddenly makes all coveted prizes appear totally worthless. As Guru Nanak says, ‘ we are all children lost in the world fair’. The story has a neat and balanced structure and the descriptions in a lyrical vein in the earlier half effectively bring out the moods of wonder and joy the child feels until the final blow falls.

Economy, brevity and a rich poetic vein characterise the story,
Lullaby
in an equal measure. Exhibiting a rare delicacy of touch, this is a fine evocation of a young working mother ’s state of mind as she sits rocking her dying child in her lap and recalling memories of her lover, while she feeds the machine with handfuls of jute, in a factory. Her persistent lullaby,

‘Sleep/Oh sleep/My baby, sleep’ has for its background music all the harsh sounds in the factory: ‘the engine chuk-chuked; the leather belt khup-khupped; the bolts jig-jigged; the plugs tik-tikked’. Both the human song and the machine jazz are repeated in the story, and no sensitive reader will miss the telltale symbolic significance of the fact that at the end, the lullaby stops when the child dies, but the machine jazz goes on uninterrupted. The machine has ultimately triumphed over the human being, heedless of human hopes and frustrations.

Birth
sows another working mother in a crisis, but this time far more fortunate in the upshot of her ordeal. Parvati, a poor peasant woman in an advanced state of pregnancy, is compelled to work at breaking stones, owing to the straitened circumstances of the family. The birth-pangs start as she is proceeding to her work alone; but, in this hour of trial she refuses to panic. Her native, rustic ruggedness is reinforced by an inner strength derived from her deep-seated, simple peasant faith in the gods. As she lies writhing on the ground, she sees a vision of Goddess Kali in the sky above. This gives her so much courage that when the child arrives she is even able to manage the necessary midwifery herself, and at the end, we find her putting the baby in the basket and going to break stones again. Like Gauri in Anand’s novel,
The Old Woman and the Cow,
Parvati too is sustained by her traditional faith in her hour of need. The imaginative description of Parvati’s ordeal lifts the entire narrative to a higher plane where the supernatural touch of her vision of Kali blends harmoniously with the emotionally charged atmosphere. Apart from this, the story also demonstrates how Anand’s best work reveals a deep apprehension of what is enduring in the Indian folk tradition. Parvati is a representative figure; she is traditional rustic Indian womanhood at its very best.

A different mood characterizes
A Village Idyll
, a story most appropriately entitled. The imaginative opening, ‘splashes of red and orange mingle into an aura of burning gold and, in a flash, the sun rises over the rim of the village pond, resplendent’ sets the tone of this delightful picture of youthful love in a rural setting. While the ‘manure cart’, the

‘lentil field’ and the ‘hay barn’ make the story rooted in native soil, Govind and Gauri are more than rustic lovers. The lyrical descriptions make them archetypes of love: ‘There is the voice of Siva in their curly throats. And in their bodies is the sinuous disunion of a broken moment between the lord of storms and his consort, Parvati. And in their touching is the burning of several planets, the extinction of worlds.’

In the
Five Short Fables
and
Little Chicks
, the scene shifts form the human to the animal world, though these short narratives often have human life as their ultimate point of reference, in spite of the fact that the protagonists belong to the beast Kingdom. The fables, obviously modelled on the
Panchatantra
and Aesop, however, show a variety of treatment.
The Golden Cockerel and Little Chicks
are almost pure description

with no inherent symbolism, though the first has a touch of humour in its account of the cock frustrated in a love-fray, and the second depicts with tenderness three little chickens as

‘miracles of littleness’ learning the rules of the art of survival. Each of the rest of the fables ends with an explicit moral,
a la
Aesop, with a difference, however.
The Butterfly
pin-points the pathos of the law of ‘beauty vanishes, beauty passes’,
The Peacock
is a sermon on vanity and humility, and
A Leaf in the Storm
underscores the necessity to have roots but not to get rooted in barren fields". These fables differ from those of Aesop, in that the hard, clear cut contours of allegory which are so characteristic of the latter are replaced in them by lyrical description steeped in symbolic overtones.

The second
of stories in this selection is of those the prevailing mood of which is the consciousness of the ‘tears at the heart of things’. These stories are naturally allied to the brief tales of ‘lyric awareness’ but with a difference. The treatment here is in the main, not symbolic but realistic (though symbolic overtones do occur) and the emphasis is on bringing home to the reader the pathos of the plight of men and women crushed by forces too strong for them to fight against.
Lajwanti
is the story of a young, motherless rustic girl, whose husband is away at college. She finds herself an easy target of the amorous attentions of her lascivious, pock-marked brother-in-law; discovers to her horror that her mother-in-law connives at his doings; runs away to her father’s house but is sent back; and, in the end, tries unsuccessfully to drown herself in a well. As she is fished out, her plaintive cry is, ‘there is no way for me… I am… condemned to live’. The caged
maina
which she carries with her in her flight, is evidently symbolic of her own situation, but the stark realism

of her plight is unmistakable. Equally realistic is the portayal in
The Parrot in the Cage
of Rukmani, an old woman who has lost her all in the holocaust of the partition of India and whose sole companion during the migration from Lahore to Amritsar is a pet parrot. Like the
maina
in the previous story, the parrot here carries a symbolic suggestion; it perhaps shows how the old woman’s deprivation is so total that her nearest and dearest now is not a human being but a bird.
The Gold Watch
presents an Indian clerk working in a British firm, who is forced to retire prematurely because a better connected replacement has been found for the job. On his retirement, he receives from his British boss a gold watch which he drops and breaks while receiving. The little mishap is symbolic of all that has gone wrong in the twenty-year long relationship between Sharma and his British superiors, with the Indian’s pathetic inferiority complex being complemented by the white man’s superiority complex. The breaking of the watch is perhaps also symbolic (like the shattering of Quentin’s watch in
The Sound and the Fury
) on the protagonist’s unconscious desire that time should stop, so that the future so painful to contemplate, should never materialize.
Old Bapu
and
The Cobbler and the Machine
are stories of two aged outcastes. Bapu, a weakling with a shrivelled leg has been deprived of his land by his uncle; he comes to a city in search of a livelihood, but since he looks as old as seventy (while he is only fifty), he cannot find work and is condemned to starve. Cobbler Saudagar ’s problem is the exact opposite one; it is over-work that kills him. The machine is his
La Belle Dame Sans merci
. Lured by it into contracting a huge debt’, and soon, ‘drained of his life-blood by the sweat that was always pouring off his body, he fell stone-dead one evening’.