Etched In Gothic Ink

Shankar uses words like the caresses of a lover, stroking them out on his fingertips, sensuous, intoxicating, heavy with the seductive promise of unnamed sensations. At their best, they coalesce into phrases of stunning imagery and resonant sound, prose so richly cadenced as to have few parallels among contemporary Indian writers. At their worst, they become like the importuning touch of the lover, which carries on its skin the follicles of falsehood that help to hype and hasten what the true would carry laboriously and slow. Lovers exalt; but lovers also lie.

But all this comes into play only if we try and see Shankar's stories as high literary fare, subject to the difficult verities of literature. Some reviewers have done so, to Shankar's disadvantage. This is perhaps a little unfair. What he has written are essentially fantastical stories about ghosts, ghouls, spirits, and the supernatural. It is a genre that allows wide liberties, in order to create effects and to conjure atmosphere. What is important is not fidelity to experience, but the drumming up of illusion. To this end, everything is legitimate game, vampires and churails, the pterodactyl and the dragonfly. When a sleek man in a suit at a farmhouse party in Mehrauli can turn out to be a panther in disguise, it's of little consequence whether or not brambles line village roads in India.

Within the parameters of his genre, Shankar excels. In the fine tradition of the best living writers of the supernatural, of Clive Barker and Stephen King, he has layered his tales richly with morality and sin, and then run a rake through the evil that resides within us all. Horror stories are the most frightening when the seeds of their stirrings lie in the ordinary things we do, for then nemesis could be crouching in wait wherever we go. Do we kill animals for their skin? Could they then return garbed in the skin of people to deliver retribution? Do we dissect dragonflies for sport, ears cocked to catch their screams? Could we then one day be hunted by fluttering swarms that choke our voices in our throats? Do we jilt love for our petty ends? Could we then become captive to spectral love? Do we disturb the peaceful sleep of the dead? Will we all, therefore, die before our time?

In his best stories, Shankar builds a brooding mood superbly with an incantatory use of language studded with haunting words like the night, forests, ancients, ancestors, leaves, mountains, mists, myth, memories, ageless, eternity. Cocooned in the sinister setting, the narrative jogs along impressively, not, mercifully, to a grand, neatly-tied up finale, but to an open-ended, ominous threshold.

But every now and then Shankar's need to indulge his language overwhelms him, and the excesses of his apocalyptic tone begin to exhaust. At times like these, as he overloads his sentences with abstractions and overwrought images, there is a nagging vision of Shankar running his cursor through the cheaply-earned bounties of a thesaurus. One story in particular that sinks under this indulgence is Night Fevers, a parable of the struggle between the modern and the ancient, with the machine and the microbe being the warring weapons. Shankar bogs down the narrative, centred on a rural doctor, with so much psuedo apocalyptic spiel that a potentially fine story is immobilised in sloth.

On the other end of the spectrum, a story that suffers from formulaic simplicity is The Same Gods, crafted as a retributive tale about terrorism in Punjab, revolving around two killers making a night journey through the countryside. Shankar fails to take it beyond a B-grade horror film, neither surprising us with plot, nor seducing us with language.

But that's not what can be said of the other stories. In fact, marrying two different sensibilities and influences, western and eastern, Shankar consistently raises the standards of his chosen genre. It may not be literature, but it is compelling writing. And prose so sensuous must have its virtues, even if its moorings in reality are suspect.