Meghna Pant’s short stories stick like burrs. They are small, dramatic pieces that hook into the skin with urgent claims that are not easy to resolve or brush off. In Dented and Painted Women, a dying, repentant widower offers a live-in prostitute a chance at redemption.
Will she take it? In Hoopsters, a hard-as-nails teenager undergoes a transformation and gives her poor servant girl the opportunity to reach for the stars, but only if she commits a criminal misdemeanour.
The stories are set in India and America and cover a rich variety of situations, some more believable than others. The ones that work best are those that keep the story line simple, as in The Gecko on the Wall where Pant vividly suggests a recently widowed and pensioned father’s nervousness at having to entertain his daughter and grandchild on their vacation. In Happy Birthday, the story after which the collection is named, a wife re-examines her marriage on her birthday when she finds herself to be of no consequence to her husband at a social event. Pant ends both these stories well, leaving the reader caught in the forward momentum of the plot and action.
Some short story writers have good openings, like the well-planned entrances of VIP guests at a party, but Pant stands out for her well-timed exits. You are never entirely sure of where the story ends or even if it does. The most successful stories in her collection are the ones that remain inconclusive yet not unsatisfyingly so. In Dented and Painted Women, the prostitute’s decision is communicated, but not the result: “Meenu didn’t reply. She stood by Pramod’s bedside and waited for whatever had to come next”.
Things get a little sticky when Pant turns up the drama too many notches or attempts the esoteric. In After Ashes and Shaitans, she takes an unconvincing dive into the workings of the spiritual world when trying to portray a cycle of karma and redemption. In both these stories there is premonition that hangs over the protagonists, a chance offered to them by the universe to change the course of their destiny. Gurujis and village centenarians are time-honoured vehicles of such communication but what they imply is difficult to swallow. The larger themes are clunky in treatment and the plot mechanics show too obviously
in these stories for them to be credible.
In Lemon and Chilli, she produces a moving portrayal of what it means to be an elderly Indian in America. The unnamed narrator attempts invisibility at home and only discovers comfort in the social group called the “Mall Rats”: his fellow Indians who meet outside a mall every weekday to
swap stories. Unfortunately, Pant drives the story to a sob ending, which her writing cannot absorb, so that the sudden drama remains undigested and ugly.
Similarly in Friends — Here she attempts to portray the bond between two women that is so deep that one of them decides to conceive and bear a child for the benefit of her childless friend; all this without discussing it beforehand. The infertile woman rejects the gift from her friend assuming it to be a result of profligacy not generosity. She then learns that the pregnant friend bore this child out of noble intent and is terminally ill. Stories like these feel more soap opera than short story.
The best thing that can be said about the prose is that it does not get in the way of the storytelling. Pant wields her words deftly and her writing is well tuned to the plot line, delivering opening motif, complication and conclusion without offering any excess explanations. The quotidian language makes the stories accessible and a decent read. In keeping it simple, however, Pant fails to make her mark in an area that many good short story writers excel; she does not offer prose with a transformative power. Her stories linger because her plots are full of tenterhooks, not because her language evokes associations or observations.
Among the best in her collection is The Message where a routine play date turns into a tragic-comic event for Tanya whose life has taken on a meaningless routine: “This cannot be, Tanya thinks. This straight line standing cockily before her needs to be smudged. She has to stop being a coward and make mistakes, openly”. Pant skilfully describes Tanya’s repulsion and then attraction to her son’s play date’s father Dinu. Woven into the story is a moment when Tanya was on safari with her husband many years ago and may have glimpsed something in “the yellowing day, the green foliage…” that might have been a message for her. It is hard for her in the present world of the story to go back to a point of meaning; the message is “forever lost, no sign that it had ever existed”.
Characters in a short story have a limited life, and Pant creates moving, lifelike characters whose motivations and actions seem in sync. Her characters’ ruminations keep the stories ticking with life. Says the narrator in Lemon and Chilli, “Death has become so predictable that I have neither the youthful reverence of it nor the middle-age fear.” Pant’s real triumph in this collection is that she brings forth a set of voices that are entertaining and readable.
Karishma Attari is a book critic and writer living in Mumbai. She is working on her coming-of-age novel, I See You.