No Presents Please
Author- Jayant Kaikini
Publisher- Harper, Rs 350
For anybody interested in the transition of the city from Bombay to Mumbai, in the making of urban space, or in the craft of skilled story-writing and translation, Jayant Kaikini’s book is an interesting read, believes ANUBHAV PRADHAN
Not for nothing was Bombay urbs prima in India. The subcontinent’s first truly glocal city, its first hub of industrial manufacturing and trade, Bombay for long framed the semiotics of the urban in South Asia. To adapt modernity to tradition, to be rooted as much to the city as to the country, to never be alone but always be lonely, such contraries enduringly constitute the meaning and legacy of Bombay.
It is this city which No Presents Please: Mumbai Stories evokes. Tejaswini Niranjana’s crisp new translation of Jayant Kaikini’s prose oeuvre, No Presents Please makes accessible a range of his Kannada short stories to English-reading audiences. These sixteen stories are all on Bombay, on people in Bombay and their daily interactions with the city. The selection, covering three decades of Kaikini’s work, may roughly be thought representative of his craft, his formidable hold on the simple and the strange as symptoms of routine in the city. Quietly stark, the everydayness of Kaikini’s Bombay has an unsettling familiarity, a kind of modernist surreality which is palpable precisely because this is what we are.
This is no mean feat, and both Kaikini and Niranjana deserve ample congratulations for so masterfully conveying these snippets of Bombay at its quotidian best. From a baraat in which the horse bolts and ends up making a happy tange-waalah of the bridegroom to a two-timing husband whose wife and mistress end up getting involved, from a friendless single man suddenly offered a certified virgin in marriage to an old, diseased family servant crawling towards death, the narratives in No Presents Please are an eclectic assortment of the ordinariness of Bombay. Chance encounters with luck, random kindnesses amidst indifference and contempt, the cruelty of the everyday mitigated by the tangible thrill of a break, this is what makes Kaikini’s Bombay tick at once as a city immediately one’s own.
It is this studied avoidance of extremes, of both form and content, which makes No Presents Please tick. There is, in other words, nothing filmy, nothing melodramatic about these stories. The usual stock of adjectives-searing, violent, intense, magical, unreal-which tends to frame writing on Bombay does not hold here. The uncanny quality of Kaikini’s plots and of Niranjana’s translation is rooted deeply in the remarkable urbanity of the city, in a varied ethos which effects diverse transformations. Madhubani may or may not win the quiz her father is banking upon, but she understands what it means to be in Bombay for the show. Narasimha may wake up to not find his son Chandu with him, despite resolving to not leave him in Bombay. Gangadhar may be reverentially attached to his father’s portrait, but a stranger’s need in times of violence is more than his. Santoshan and Chandrahas may have met by accident, but their humanity makes them allies with the city in a common quest for survival.
Such is the spirit of Kaikini’s Bombay: Ordinary, strange, real. Much, of course, has been said about the dialectic between Bombay and Mumbai, on how they differ from each other and if they can be thought to coexist. With his oeuvre located within this turbulent transition of Bombay to Mumbai, it is more than a matter of idle conjecture if Kaikini’s craft would have evolved similarly, would his characters and concerns been the same had he been more from today’s Mumbai. However, Niranjana chooses to not dwell on the criticality of this frame to the text. This oversight is unfortunate, albeit understandable given what Mumbai is now. Bombay, the city which was, lives only as a memory, nor is Mumbai the first city of India any more.
Yet, this minor plaint does not take away from the success of the book. No Presents Please is a powerful ode, as much to Bombay and its people as to what it means to be urban in our part of the world. Also, unlike most such translations emergent in the recent past, No Presents Please supplements the translator’s reflective note with a provocative conversation on the stories, on Kaikini’s work, and its place in Kannada and beyond. For this welcome innovation, and for the soberly attractive cover design and accessible price of the book, congratulations are due not just to the translator but also to Harper Perennial, the publisher. Not only Bombay aficionados, but all readers with an urban bent will find No Presents Please a valuable collection to keep and cherish.
The reviewer is a Doctoral Candidate with the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia.
The views expressed here are his own