5 august 2019 http://www.openthemagazine.com 55
t
he presence of death looms
large in this voice-driven collec-
tion of thorny love stories, written
under the pseudonym, ekarat. ekarat,
the author bio tells us, ‘is an alter ego
with a million stories to tell.’ it appears
that a Banksy-like author has debuted in
the world of indian short fiction.
the narrator of the first story reveals
more about ekarat: ‘i am a humble
editor of a travel magazine and a strug-
gling writer after dusk. i live in a neat
bachelor pad in south Delhi, with a
terrace built for evening dos, and i have
the most awesome housemaid in the
world. two dogs, Blackie and Joey,
guard the gate of my house. sex
is plentiful.’ Keep in mind
though, that this is a
book of fiction.
in these grip-
ping tales, love
turns cold, love
turns sour, love
kills, and yet
ekarat, or rather
his characters,
continue to believe in
the redemptive power
of an emotion, which
provides fodder for a million
pop songs. indeed, love also blooms.
the stories come tinged with pop song
corniness, and in a good way. the story
titles are like names of songs: ‘perizaad’s
lover’, ‘love has come to town, ‘Baby
Did a Bad Bad thing.’
not a trace of cynicism and yet dark-
ness lurks at every corner; the pursuit
of love is an essential part of self-knowl-
edge and self-discovery; the road forward
lies not in sitting in paralytic judgement
over others but in the acts of forgiving
and accepting, or simply moving on.
ekarat takes as his starting point a
truth that is contested in contemporary
times, that human beings are flawed
and messy creatures, especially in love:
‘By accepting her past, what great fa-
vours had i done her. and who the hell
was i to accept her? i had merely been a
bystander in her narrative. she had built
and broken her life, and built it again.’
in the stories here, the terminally-ill
owner of an fM radio station tries to find
a lover from his past; a famous editor
falls in love with a junior colleague; two
seven-year-olds bicker over a marriage
proposal; two 12-year-olds, trying out akiss for the first time, get their braces
entangled; an army cantonment
romance falls prey to the hindu-Muslim
divide; an indian student in Brussels
strikes up an unlikely virtual friendship
with an indian girl in america: ‘then i
find out that she’s not just pro-american
but right-wing, which i have a very hard
time connecting with.’
in a story inspired by robert Brown-
ing’s Porphyria’s Lover, adulterousperizaad doesn’t protest when her lover
‘tied her hair around her neck and
gently pulled’ with murderous intent.
she gently encourages him instead:
‘“please... do it,” she completed her
death sentence.’
the stories have a strong sense of
place. Delhi is as much of a protago-
nist, from amar colony digs, a flat in
Munirka DDa, a saket coffee shop, an
unknown Gurgaon bar, to a chattarpur
farmhouse, a Jorbagh bungalow and the
india habitat centre.
The Book of Love is a triumph of
straight-on infectious storytell-
ing—the writing is low on
description, shorn
of metaphor and
literary pretension.
it signals the ar-
rival of a bold new
voice, an outsider
artist banging on
the closed doors
of indian writing
in english.
the quick fire
dialogue draws the reader
in. there is a relentless raging
momentum in even the shortest of
stories; the reader is carried along in
its sweeping arc. ekarat’s narrative
fluency though at times suffers from a
breathlessness that could have benefit-
ed from editorial temperance. resort-
ing to cliché, then calling out oneself for
doing so, does not absolve the author
of the crime of using the cliché in the
first place: ‘it might seem like a cliché
that europe would be a vacation and
africa a punishment...’ and later, ‘he’d
lost weight, had a shaggy beard and
smelled like a sewer. he was a walking,
fumbling cliché of a wreckage.’ nPassion Plays
Love is a dish best served cold
By Palash Krishna Mehrotra
The book of
love sToRies
EkaratSpeaking Tiger
173 Pages | Rs 250