A Quality Encore

In elegance of printing and production, Civil Lines 2, published by Ravi Dayal, is as attractive as the inaugural edition. Its editorial menu though, has quite a different flavour. For one, there are a number of new names, whereas the first issue had arrayed the time-worn stars, from Khushwant Singh to Allan Sealy to Amitav Ghosh, Bill Aitken and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. Secondly, while the inaugural issue boasted a variety of literary forms—including memoir, reportage, short story, travelogue, and essay—the second edition has a preponderance of short stories.

To the face of it, this seems like a formula for disaster, for the short story, like the poem, does not excite readability, mainly because everyone thinks they can write one. That short stories do not sell is a hard truism known to publishers worldwide. But Civil Lines 2 does not encourage such scepticism. The editors—the sure touch of Rukun Advani and Mukul Kesavan is evident—have done a fine job of picking the stories. And though there is nothing here to match Mehrotra's brilliant fragmentary memoir Partial Recall in the debut edition, the second volume does maintain the quality expectations raised by the first.

New discoveries always enthral. Just as Radha Kumar, unexpectedly, impressed with her Bhopal prison diary in the first volume, Ruchir Joshi delights with an obviously disguised memoir of his childhood, My Father's Tongue. Joshi sets his story in Calcutta during the Emergency. His narrator is a schoolboy obsessed with the martial arts, smitten by Zeenat Aman, touched by the first intimations of distantromance, whose father is a writer with a line more lethal than any karate chop. The old man is idiosyncratic, unpredictable, and finally a source of great pride for the boy when he flamboyantly stands up to the literary toadies of the authoritarian regime. Joshi's touch is wonderfully light and funny, and the story is a treat.

A number of the other stories in this volume tramp that favourite twilight zone of writers where cultural shadows overlap, creating grotesquerie. The finest of these perhaps are by Manjula Padmanabhan, though to be fair, her concerns go beyond culture frictions to issues of gender distress. In fact, at times her two stories Stains and The Copper-tailed Skink, read like odes to the ovum. While in Stains, set in the US, the menses of a black woman brings out the fault lines in her relationship with an Indian, in The Copper-tailed Skink, a white biologist doing field-work in India wrestleswith the mysteries of procreation, bowing in a final gesture to the maternal principle over the scientific. With fine moments of insights, her stories are extremely controlled and competent.

Susan Vishvanathan's stories have little of Manjula's female existentialism. More water-colourish in texture, set in Kerala, they are chiefly veined by nostalgia, of vanished childhoods, of landscapes out of sight. More than characters, they evoke a mood. Shuddhabrata Sengupta in Recess is also harking back to childhood, but there's busy prose here. Excavating rich memories for all missionary school products, Sengupta's story tells of the tragic fate that befalls little Cyril Toppo, the runt of Six-D, and son of the school peon, when he taunts one of the lalas' sons, who are part of the school's power structure. Rather thin in comparison is Neelu by Sunita Thakur. Set in England, it's about the fleeting friendship between an expat girl and a recently arrived married Indian woman. It promises layers of hidden meanings, but then delivers itself flatly hemmed in cliches.

Among the rest, M. Krishnan's Verse for a Living starts off pedantically, but then settles down to an interesting account ofTamil poets down the centuries who have sung for their supper. A Visit to Lucknow by Rosie Llewellyn-Jones recreates an Englishman's visit to Claude Martin's house in 1795, but the effort fails to become anything more than a pale period piece. Dharma Kumar's Scenes from Scholastic Life follows the rhetoric of the ultra light prose, and consequently has its moments of fleet-ing engagement, and no more.

And then there's Amitav Ghosh, in his avatar of translator, with a Tagore short story: putting his approving imprimatur on a good literary journal.