Rajesh Parameswaran chats with Shana Maria Verghis on his first short story collection. It features futuristic scenarios, along with animals struck by cupid — and why notIJ
Many creatures are caught in a vice-grip of amour, in the world painted by Rajesh Parameshwaran.The author of I Am An Executioner, (by Bloomsbury) was in town to discuss the book, which has been described as a collection of love stories.
Rajesh himself described them as, “relationship and roughly, comic tales.”They were brought over 10 years. A decade ago, being the date of the oldest one. Parameshwaran, based in the US, got them published in various literary journals, including Granta.
In the first, and best one, Infamous Bengal Ming, a tiger is the narrator. He describes falling in love with his keeper. It’s a deadly love, which can only result in murder or injury. But doesn’t this happen with humans tooIJ
Parameswaran said he got the scenario, “from a drawing of a tiger that he saw in a museum.”Other stories have been variously inspired by classics by authors such as Nabokov.
One of them, called the Four Rajeshes, is about men whose names are variations of each other, working in the same dull office. They are all attached to each other in different ways, through their job. Though there is more than a suggestion of homosexual love.
And the man most out of synch with others — with his habit of scribbling numbers all over the place — winds up in the US as a well-known mathematician. Parameswaran has said he was partially inspired by the story of Srinivasa Ramanujan.
The title tale, I Am An Executioner, had shades from Of love and Other Demons, by another famous writer, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. In that a young woman bitten by a rabid dog becomes the source of tragic affection of the priest sent to exorcise her. In Rajesh’s story, an executioner develops a kind of love for a very young victim.
While the macabre, The Strange Career of Dr Raju Gopalarajan, a quack (who got there, because he enjoyed trying to heal people), finds himself doing surgery on someone. One story is set in another galaxy, some time in the future. Parameswaran told us he is, “working on a novel next.” He turned the technique of writing footnotes into a second story inside a story, of Elephants in Captivity, reminding one of about readers on Dryden and Swift. About that he explained, “I felt two voices though some might find style irritating.” After flitting between various jobs, including a stint as production coordinator for films, which Rajesh felt would get him into movies, (“I mostly wound up driving buses”), he joined law school, and was a judge’s clerk. Now he is jobless but has a fellowship to help him write more stories which have a last century voice.