Diplomat-author Navtej Sarna evokes Gogol, “To write, all you need to do is look around your room.” It may have been “enough” for Gogol, but not for Sarna who is “open” to experience and dips into the vast canvas of his observations he has accrued over the years to write.
If there is anything Sarna, who is back from his stint as India’s ambassador to Israel and is now additional secretary in the ministry of external affairs, must do, he must look around the world. His latest anthology, Winter Evenings: Stories, hopscotches through Paris, Shimla, Moscow, Geneva, Bombay (now Mumbai) and Delhi to tell stories of people navigating emotional crossroads.
“A short story,” Edgar Allan Poe had argued, “must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it”. Sarna’s Winter Evenings is an anthology that delightfully, though unwittingly, appropriates Poe’s dictum. A perfect antidote to an exasperated reader’s perpetual quibble about the dearth of good short story anthologies (because of market-savvy publishers mostly steering clear of the form), it is an extraordinary amalgam of moods and moments in the lives of ordinary people, small and delicately nuanced snapshots of the everyday folks circumventing the vagaries of their lives.
The underlying idea across the 19 stories in the collection is the celebration of the invincibility of the human spirit summed up by Dylan Thomas’ lines in the epigraph:“Light breaks where no sun shines;Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart Push in their tides.”
Each story celebrates that spirit. And, in turn, becomes a celebration in itself.
A sample: In the opening title story, Winter Evenings, Anand and Rao, a doctor and a bank manager respectively, stare in the face of a long winter, their valley having been cut off from the rest of the world by heavy snow. But what weighs them down is the heaviness of their mundane routine.
The duo’s bond is unlikely and seemingly tenuous, but it passes the test of tenacity: They slap each other after the argument and yet they look forward to their other gathering the very next evening. Winter Evenings, however, is not the best story of the collection. There are other better structured stories more likely to stay with you like Madam Kitty, A Death in Winter, Delhi, The Masterpiece, and Brute.
In Delhi, for example, Ajay and Vinita, a management professional and a model, fight about money and children when they’re a family of modest means. But, when they acquire wealth, they fight again: “...there were other things. Like his heavy drinking and the weight he was putting on... Or they fought about nothing at all. Just brooding, growling fights that seemed little more than an expression of the emptiness that had entered their lives.”
Despite the fights, however, Ajay and Vinita are united in their hunger and love for more money and the need to lose themselves in the familiar parties where “people drank large glasses of chilled beer and you could vanish into the night when you wanted”. A statement on the way money has begun to govern our minds and manners and, even, corrode us, Delhi delves into a certain vacuity of modern-day lives.
Talking about Winter Evenings, Sarna says that he wanted to publish an anthology 30 years ago, much before he wrote his two novels — We Weren’t Lovers Like That (2003) and The Exile (2008) — and translated Guru Gobind Singh’s Zafarnama (2011).
Sarna, like many other writers before him, had to become a novelist first. The short story writer in him had to wait for 30 years. “When I look back, I feel it wasn’t a bad thing after all,” says Sarna, adding that the years gone by have only helped him experience writing and life better.
As a writer, says Sarna, if you don’t have empathy for your characters, you are being “unfair to readers, unfair to yourself”.
If there is one unifying theme of the collection, it’s the mood of winter: “Reflective, contemplative and solitary”.
In his fiction, Sarna sprinkles a dash of life itself. If Murakami said that his short stories are like soft shadows he had set out in the world, faint footprints he had left, he was perhaps talking about all short story writers.
For like Murakami, Sarna’s short stories, in many ways, are like “guideposts” to his heart: A heart that sees, hears and feels for his characters.