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Mint
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Mint
‘Songs Our Bodies Sing': The lightweight ambitions of a promising writer
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. \
Scroll.in
04-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scroll.in
May fiction: Six new novels and short story collections to cool down with in summer
All information sourced from publishers. Songs Our Bodies Sing, Lindsay Pereira A heartbroken father in London turns to the Beatles to make sense of what he has lost. An antique dealer in Bombay rejects jingoism in favour of racism. Two immigrants in Toronto look for ways of belonging with a local rock band. And, in Paris, a tourist rejects long-held ideas about trust. The East and West have clashed in innumerable ways since each first acknowledged the existence of the other. The stories of Songs Our Bodies Sing are set at these points of intersection. What they reveal are commonalities rather than differences, with protagonists on opposite sides of an imaginary divide, trapped in boxes of their own making. My Name is Jasmine, Shashi Warrier A woman wakes up confused in Malkangiri District Hospital in Odisha. When a nurse wants to know her name, she blacks out in terror at the realisation that she has no idea who she is. The next time she wakes up, the terror returns, but she wills herself to look at her world more rationally. She discovers she's suffered a head injury and lost some of her memories in the aftermath. When the police come, she finds out that she knows more about guns and violence than any common citizen should. Floating voices in her head tell her: trust no one, keep to yourself, you've been through worse and survived. When a psychiatrist is brought in to find out whether she's faking her amnesia, she's inclined to trust him. Her fingerprints lead the police to believe that she is part of a group that's planning a major operation soon. While the investigating agency fears that her former colleagues might try to have her killed before she can testify. Deciding that she needs legal help, the psychiatrist calls in a former Supreme Court advocate. Given the concern and support from the psychiatrist and the lawyer, Jasmine is torn: should she give up her group that supported her when she had nowhere else to go? Or these two people, who believe in her when no one else would? Age of Mondays, Lopa Ghosh Ten-year-old Narois wakes up to find that her mother is preparing to go to a mysterious place – a place neither too far nor too close. It is a motherless Monday. The first of many. As Narois's father struggles to adapt, as her parents' marriage comes apart, as Narois herself tries to make sense of the goings-on – is her mother having an affair; is she planning to abandon the family forever? – she creeps away into the dark, magical-real Jahanpanah forest to escape. Here, she encounters the Jugnus – legendary healers and weather-workers. Silver Samir, their handsome leader, Mian Pagla, who followed the river, Kochi who is bendy when sad, and Velu the gentle murderer mesmerise Narois with their tales; she will do what she can to belong to them. It is a world on the brink, where the mother Narois leans on may be unable to protect her and where betrayal can be love in disguise. One More Story About Climbing a Hill, Devabrata Das In 'A Night with Arpita', a beautiful young girl in a train compartment captures the imagination of the writer – but he is unable to fathom the reason for her melancholy until it is too late. In 'Ananta with His Seema', three apparently disconnected incidents take place on a railway platform. Descriptions of the incidents are interspersed with passages from a letter written by Ananta's friend, which lays bare his helplessness in the face of injustice and the loss of his youthful ideals. In the eponymous story, life imitates art with a disastrous twist. A young couple treks up a hillside to recreate for themselves the experience of two characters in a love story set in idyllic Shillong. But the beauty of the pine shrouded hills is marred by extremist violence and their climb to the top of the hill has an unforeseen, macabre end. Each of the eighteen stories in this collection provides an insight into life in an area of conflict, told with irony and ingenuity. The Dead Know Nothing, Kishore Ram Disgraced after failing the seminary exams, Thankachan has returned to his old life. On Fathima Island in the Ashtamudi archipelago, his days are clouded over by the fear of never making anything of himself, but soon, strange events begin to happen on the island. A dead body surfaces one day, then another. Soon, a murder case considered solved years ago is suddenly once again wide open. Is his evasive brother involved in something sinister? Is the fate of a fisherman's son really sealed at birth? Packed with intrigue, compelling characters draw the reader into their lives and the heart of the dark secrets that have long lain dormant. Once revealed, they threaten to shake the foundations of community life and wreck Thankachan's hopes for the future. Water Days, Sundar Sarukkai At the cusp of the millennium, in a fast-changing neighbourhood in Bangalore, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu and Hindi form a buzzing background of muted conversations as speculation mounts about what really happened that night when a girl barely out of her teens died. Raghavendra, erstwhile security guard dreaming of setting up his own grocery store, finds himself unexpectedly in the middle of it all, tasked with the responsibility of finding out the truth by his wife Poornima. And every morning, for the thirteen days that it takes for the soul to find liberation and the story its resolution, the women gather at the water taps before sunrise, collecting water and stories …
