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The iconic title story of this collection narrates how Najab defies his father; the international border between India and Pakistan and the hostile salt desert of the Rann of Kutch for Fatimah. In When Gandhi Came to Gorakhpur Shadilal; a small-time lawyer; dithers over giving up his profession and joining the freedom struggle until his mind is made up for him. And when Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni stints on a few silver coins for the poet Abul Qasim; he is visited by terrible nightmares in Of Abul Qasim . Love across the Salt Desert; which brings together a selection of Keki Daruwalla s best-received short fiction; presents thematic variety and stunning breadth of vision. His prose is witty; precise and shot through with a unique poetic sensibility. These stories establish Daruwalla; one of India s best-known poets; as a daring and gifted practitioner of short fiction.

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Love

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Publié par	Penguin Books Ltd
Date de parution	09 juillet 2011
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9788184755268
Langue	English

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Extrait

KEKI N. DARUWALLA
Love Across the Salt Desert
Selected Short Stories
Contents
About the Author
Preface
One: Love across the Salt Desert
Two: How the Quit India Movement Came to Alipur
Three: The Tree
Four: Shaman
Five: The Case of the Black Ambassador
Six: The Ford
Seven: Of Abul Qasim
Eight: In a High Wind
Nine: The Day of the Winter Solstice
Ten: When Gandhi Came to Gorakhpur
Eleven: The Potting of the White
Twelve: The Jahangir Syndrome
Thirteen: Daughter
Fourteen: Walls
Fifteen: Going
Sixteen: The Jogger
Seventeen: Trojan Horse
Eighteen: A House in Ranikhet
Nineteen: Of Mother
Twenty: The Retired Panther
Acknowledgements
Copyright Page
PENGUIN BOOKS
LOVE ACROSS THE SALT DESERT
Keki N. Daruwalla was with the Indian Police Service and retired as chairman, joint intelligence committee, in 1995. His first book of poems, Under Orion , was published in 1970 and was followed by eight more volumes of poetry. He has also published three volumes of short fiction, a novella and two collections of poetry for children. His first novel, For Pepper and Christ , was published by Penguin Books India in 2009.
Daruwalla received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1984 and the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for Asia in 1987. He lives in Delhi.
Praise for Keki N. Daruwalla
The play of imagination, the unusual themes, the vivid language, the variety of narrative forms and the use of locales few others have used, all make Daruwalla an exciting short-story writer
- Times of India
[Keki Daruwalla is] pre-eminently the chronicler of violence and dissolution; his histories record the vagaries of the rivers, the solemn treachery of the mountains
-Ranjit Hoskote
sensitive historical and cultural understanding combined with Daruwalla s ear for enigmatic silence make [these] stories a truly valuable contribution to Indian literature
-Namita Gokhale, India Today
One is tempted to quote Daruwalla at length to point out the charm, wit, erudition and basic sympathy for the foibles of both India and Indians with which Daruwalla races from story to story and keeps us glued till the end
-Amita Malik, Statesman
deserves to be read for [his] complete engagement with this nation s present as well as its many histories
- Sahara Time
Daruwalla s command over his style never flags: the language is as sharp and biting as a whiplash
- Pioneer
Life will always be the same
With the serpent flute in the land of phantoms
With the song of brigands in aromatic groves
With the knife of some sorrow in the cheek of hope
With the pain of some spring in a wood owl s heart
-Nikos Gatsos
Preface
The trouble with a volume of selected anything; be it fiction, poetry, pornography or articles is two fold. Firstly you don t know what to say in a preface. Secondly a selected volume is supposed to toll finis to your writing.
This volume contains five stories from my first collection Sword and Abyss , eight from The Minister for Permanent Unrest and seven from A House in Ranikhet . Obviously there can be no thematic thread running through these stories, which have been written over different periods. The locales are also diverse, ranging from salt deserts to the Himalayas, Ghazni, East Anglia et al. One story, Trojan Horse , has even been washed ashore near the Aegean.
I published short stories (as a volume) almost ten years after my poems, though both verse and fiction found a place in The Illustrated Weekly of India . About two decades ago I wrote, brashly enough, the following about my stories. After saying that poetry didn t satisfy me fully, (now why did I say that? And where does one get full satisfaction ?) I wrote: One missed the remorseless logic of circumstance, the slow build up of tension, the past illuminated by a flashback and in turn throwing its light on the future, like the spurt of a match in a hall of mirrors. This one only gets in fiction. It s more absorbing than a game of chess
Switching genres got me flak. Critics said some of my poems could be read as short stories and vice versa. This may sound pedantic, and perhaps is, but I was reminded of a passage in Canto XXXI in Dante s Inferno . Nimrod, who is good at blowing the horn, suddenly tries to sing. When Virgil hears this cacophony, he says:
Stick to thy horn, thou stupid soul, Use that to vent thy breast When rage or other passions through thee roll.
Writing an introduction to Latin American stories, Carlos Fuentes once mentioned that a novel is like an ocean liner, while a short story is a boat. I spent a decade over a novel and learnt the hard way what a task it is to write one. Yet I do feel that once in a while boats have as tough a time navigating through shoal and marsh and river as a liner has traversing rough seas.
I am not used to spraying thanks around unnecessarily, but before I end I would like to say a big thank you to Ravi Singh. He has been a water diviner, if ever there was one, of good literature-after all he has published me for the third time! Jokes aside, he has been very supportive. I wouldn t have completed my novel if I hadn t been signed up by him. I also fondly remember Ravi Dayal who edited and published my collection The Minister for Permanent Unrest and Other Stories .
10 April 2011
Keki N. Daruwalla
One
Love Across the Salt Desert
The drought in Kutch had lasted for three successive years. Even when clouds were sighted they passed by, ignoring the stricken country. The monsoons had, so to speak, forgotten to land. The Rann lay like a paralysed monster, its back covered with scab and scar tissue and dried blister-skin. The earth had cracked and it looked as if chunks of it had been baked in a kiln and then embedded in the soil-crust. Cattle became thin and emaciated. The oxen died. The camel alone survived comfortably, feeding on the bawal, camel-thorn. Then one day the clouds rolled in like wineskins and the lightning crackled and the wineskins burst. Though two years have passed since the drought ended, everyone remembers that it first rained on the day when Fatimah entered the village. This is how she came.
What would he not do for her, the daughter of the spice-seller, she who smelt of cloves and cinnamon, whose laughter had the timbre of ankle-bells, whose eyebrows were like black wisps of the night and whose hair was the night itself? For her he would have crossed swords with the devil! For her he would have become a heathen in case she had decided in a moment of perversity to only take a Kafir in her arms! For her he would cross the salt desert!
He had stayed the day at Kala Doongar, a black hill capped with basalt, the highest in Kutch. He had set his camel, Allahrakha, free to crop on the bawal trees. At dusk he paid homage to the footprints of the Panchmai Pir on the hilltop. He left some food there and started beating on his thali, according to the custom here. In a few minutes jackals materialized and gobbled up the food. This was auspicious. If they had not turned up he would have considered the ill-effects of the omen serious enough to have cancelled the journey. A lamp was lighted in the Pir s honour every night on the hilltop and the flame could be seen all the way from Khavda. Over a hundred years earlier, the Panchmai Pir had trudged these salt wastes serving the people, accompanied, as legend had it, by a jackal. Reclusive by habit he used to retire to thorn jungles, where apart from his vulpine companions, none else dared to disturb his nocturnal trysts. The custom of feeding the jackals lingered since then.
Najab bowed before the flame and set out. He left behind the camel-thorn shrubs and the area once famous for its savannahs of stunted grass, but now sere and brown as the desert. He had left behind all human habitation, Kuran being the last village. For the next three days he would not be seeing any bhungas, those one-room mud-houses, circular at the base, but tapering into conical thatch-roofs at the top. Now only the sandscapes stretched out before him, mile upon mile. Water splashed in the chagals. With the name of the Pir on his lips Najab Hussain set forth.
Najab s diffidence was notorious among his friends. He was known to have blushed at the mere mention of a girl. A smutty remark made in his presence almost gave him a touch of eczema. A strangely introverted lad with dreamy eyes, no one had ever associated him with any act of bravado. His father, Aftab, would say, All that my ancestors and I have acquired during a hundred years, this lad will squander away, not because he is a spendthrift but because he will be too shy to charge money for what he sells!
He had crossed the Rann on four occasions earlier, though he had turned twenty only a month ago. But each time he had either accompanied his father or that wily old smuggler, Zaman, the veteran of a hundred illegal trips into Sind. Each time they had taken tendu leaf worth about five hundred rupees and sold it across the border for twelve hundred. But between the pay-off to officials and to the intermediaries who arranged the sale of the biri leaf, to the man who took the camel out to graze and to the friend or relative who harboured them, there was precious little left. It was just enough to buy some used terylene garments or cloves and then it was time to make the long trek back across the desert. It was during one of these trips that they had stayed with Kaley Shah, the clove-seller. He is a distant relative of your mother, his father had told Najab. Kaley Shah was tall and well-fleshed and his thick-jowled face had a purple tinge about it as if somewhere along the way it had got stuck with a discoloured patch. He always wore a tahmat of black and white checks. Within a day Najab discovered that the fellow was an absolute rogue who drove such a cussed bargain that, for the first time in his hearing, his father started mouthing obscenities.
But his daughter Fatimah was a hoor, with eyes so bright that t