‘Songs Our Bodies Sing': The lightweight ambitions of a promising writer

Mint

2 days ago

Lindsay Pereira's new book, Songs Our Bodies Sing, is a collection of nine stories, several of which are set in Mumbai, the city he grew up in, while the rest is a motley bunch that portrays the trials of Indians in North America, England and Europe. The stories are easy to read—at times, a little too neat—and vary in length. Butterfly is only a few pages long, and If You Don't Weaken is as detailed as a novella.
If you pick up this volume expecting the energy of a typical short story, which serves up a slice of life with a twist at the end, you will be disappointed. Admittedly, all the tales here are slices of life, but with little to no surprises. More often than not, you can see the ending from miles ahead. Or else, a promising story like The Antique Shop, with which the collection opens, simply peters out with a whimper.
Himanshu, the protagonist of the first story, is a wily antique-seller, running a decades-old family business near Chor Bazaar in Mumbai. In the course of one morning's transactions, his internalised prejudices against white foreign customers, Muslims and homosexuals flare up. But, in the end, these details amount to little more than anthropological insights, with not much fictional substance. This failing to transform close observation into arresting stories, unfortunately, is endemic to the collection. The characters remain either too flat or too textbookish for the most part.
If, on the other hand, you decide to read Songs Our Bodies Sing as an admirer of Pereira's style, you will be sorely disappointed again. None of the stories has the piquancy that marked his debut novel, Gods and Ends (2021), set among the Goan Catholic community living in Orlem, a suburb in Mumbai. There is no kick to the language spoken by his characters, no spiciness to the prose. It's almost as though the writer has undergone a sea change in his voice and decided to opt for bland reportage instead of mischief and gossip.
In If You Don't Weaken, two Sikh men, both immigrants from Punjab, rent a basement in the house of a white couple in Canada. One of them is a student who works at Tim Horton's, the Canadian coffee chain, to cover his expenses, while the other is a long-distance truck driver, who had come to the country after incurring heavy loans for the visa but has nothing to show for all the trouble he's put his family through, nine years later.
Paul and Marjorie, the elderly couple whose tenants they are, have lost their son to an accident. Embittered by grief, Paul has no interest in the lives of the renters, until a tragedy brings them closer. It doesn't take much to guess how things will turn out. If the cliched ending doesn't bore you, the commentary on Canadian politics and the misguided ambitions of immigrants who fall for it, will do.
A similar feeling is inspired by Love of an Orchestra, where a Parsi music teacher, fallen on hard times, stews in self-inflicted miseries. His wife, Khushnuma, offers a glimmer of interest to an otherwise well-worn plotline, but she can't redeem the ending. The entire story reads like a salutary lesson in why it's best to avoid writing about a community as an outsider to it.
Sadly, Pereira's decline has been steady since the bravado triumph of his debut novel. His second novel, The Memoirs of Valmiki Rao (2023), had begun to show cracks with its weak characterisation and poor pacing. It read more like a potted history of modern India, especially the troubled years in Mumbai following the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya in 1992, than like a work of fiction. The storytelling was uneven, compromised by a padding of historical context, though Pereira did leave the reader with a sense of the past entangled with the present.
In contrast, Songs Our Bodies Sing is undercooked all through, with its lifeless plotting and uneven curation. A story like Butterfly, which was first published in The Indian Express, may have worked in the limited space offered by a newspaper, but as part of a collection, it comes across as too cryptic, with no inwardness to the central character Karthik, or insight into his lifelong obsession with Elvis Presley. Like several other dull stories—Have a Nice Day being another—it feels like a force-fit in the collection. The large font size to add to the bulk of the book ironically accentuates the collection's lightweight ambitions.
Except for the last two stories, Pereira's acuity as a writer is conspicuously missing. Rivers to Cross describes the misadventures of a snooty Indian man in Paris. It is told with tight control, with something of Pereira's edgy brilliance glimmering from time to time. The ending, with its reversal of fortunes, hits the spot.
The title story, Songs Our Bodies Sing, is an account of a tragedy that befalls a Sikh couple living in London. It gives a peek into working-class life, the struggles of first-generation immigrants to the city, in the 1960s. But their lives are transformed by the power of great music—specifically by Hey Jude by The Beatles—a theme that runs through a few of the other stories, too. The beauty and sadness of the final pages of the collection gives the reader a glimpse of what it could have been.
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