Of Age And Merry Wisdom

For a slim book of 13 short stories (parodying the unlucky number?), Nisha da Cunha packs in a tremendous amount of narrative texture and memorable people. Experience, remembrance, introspection are the stuff of age but it is a new voice in Indian English writing that elderly women can laugh with irreverence at marriage, sexuality, social skirmishes, female friendships and all the wonderful little pieces that make up life's larger design. Many a tale opens literally with the click of a door and leads to settings in a garden; it gathers momentum with the rustle of diary pages or the leaves of a painstakingly preserved letter. The location is often Goa and the sounds of a piano often merge with memory. Nisha da Cunha's background as a former university professor of English occasionally links the tales to the great names—Bronté, Austen, Frost, Spenser, Wordsworth—but on the whole, the learning sits lightly.

This is a book about merry wisdom. Of course there is pain in lost love, loneliness in bereavement, despair in the encounters with life's lengthening shadows but there is also confident self-sufficiency in "letting it go". The title No Black, No White captures the pervasive mood of liminality where simple equations no longer exist. A young girl never expresses her infatuation for a rheumatic fingered piano teacher (Ember Days), a middle-aged woman disallows the advances of an ardent man 20 years her junior (A Woman of My Age), a college romance resurfaces as a possible home-breaker (The Dearly Beloved). The other side of silence is spunk, which da Cunha's characters have in plenty. Em's story is perhaps emblematic: "She looked young. She looked old," and her favourite quote is, "Love is a thing you don't save for a rainy day."