East of love West of Desire
Author: Dinesh Prasad
Publisher: Tara Press, Rs399
This collection of eight tales takes us through the horrors and psychological undoings of the most macabre phase in Indian history, the Partition. The stories attempt to bring out the humane on both sides, writes ANANYA BORGOHAIN
The tension between the Congress and the Muslim league stoked such communal flames that it continues to smash to smithereens the much required harmony between India and Pakistan. And the discord traces back to the Partition of India, the event which led to the rapes and slaughter of innumerable innocent people and displaced millions of them. Dinesh Prasad’s collection of short stories titled East of love and West of Desire revisits the dreadfulness of Partition and gives faces and voices to the sundry people who had to bear its excruciatingly painful burden. It entails eight short stories named after important characters in them: Kasturi, Kailasiya, Darvish, Meiral, Beeran, Chaitanya, Husna, andMadhurangi.
Each story is set around the theme of Partition and almost all of them focus on the loss of loved ones. Other key premises are a sense of misplaced identity, the struggle to be accepted, the trauma of coming to terms with man-made catastrophe and acknowledging the tragedy.
The opening story of the collection, Kasturi, is the most evocative one and is written with emotional conviction. It narrates the story of young Sikh Jeeta who helps a Muslim woman deliver her baby. He adopts the infant after she is separated from her mother and brings her up as his own daughter. All hell breaks loose when one day she (named Kasturi by Sarojini Naidu in the refugee camp) reunites with her birth mother. Similarly, the story Meiral too explores human emotions through the art of letter writing. Meiral and Abdul, now in India and Pakistan respectively, exchange a series of letters through which Prasad sets the post-Partition mise-en-scène. It also underlines the essence of the postman and the lost culture of letter-writing. The postman, privy to the lives of two separated lovers, undergoes a personal metamorphosis during the course. Another story titled Darvish contains sections in itself, each named after the narrator of the section: Darvish, Saihaj, Zubair, and a section titled The Present.
All of the stories scrutinise human sentiments and actions and establish how pain and loss are universal and alter lives on both sides. Prasad’s protagonists are mostly Indian but he also paints a picture from the other side, like the mother in Kasturi or Humza in Darvish. Darvish is also one story where narrative techniques have been engagingly employed. Not only it includes multiple narrators offering multiple circumstances and judgements, but it also presents a direct conflict of religiosity. It’s intriguing because the clash between both sides come together in a very pronounced combat.
Prasad’s women, however, still struggle to find an agency to establish themselves. Although their presence is imminent in all of the stories, they are mostly confined to inaction and conventional roles. Though it is not surprising given the phase the stories are set in. He also has a dramatic imagination and is a flamboyantly descriptive writer. Given the theme, it works in Prasad’s favour since his narration elicits from the reader a profound sentiment of grief. However, the stories turn monotonous at times, particularly because the reader begins to realise that all of them would eventually crumble in the face of the macabre bloodshed. That makes the stories predictable and the complexities of human relations is an overplayed and a repeated subject in them, which leads to unnecessary redundancy. Grammatical errors in many pages which have not been rectified lessen the zeal in reading the stories at the same time. And like in many Partition narratives, this collection too focusses on the primary three communities, Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs, and not much on the Sindhis, Parsis, the Christians or the Anglo-Indians of the time. Although in Beeran, there is a strong reference to the dargah of Shabaz Kalandar or Jhulelal, whom Sindhis pray to.
Having said that, a lot of thought has been put in the cover design of the book. The cover has what seems to be smeared ink on it and a wilted flower in the front. The wilted flower ostensibly represents the past life that has been wiped off while the ink seems to metaphorically represent the chronicling of the same displacement. The hardcover is of faded yellow colour, the colour associated with old books, and thereby stories. The pages collectively create a glaring orange, the colour which in the Rasa theory refer to heroism, the Veera rasa. Orange is also said to be the colour of hope, which actually justifies what the seeks in its outline: “…above all, they make you hope and want you to believe that all will be well even though the reality points at quite another outcome”. As the title suggests, love and desire have now reached two opposite ends. Each story opens with a translated verse composed by Allama Iqbal and the stories are laden with poems and music. Both Raasleela (as seen in Darvish) and Sufism (in Beeran) and American missionaries (Chaitanya) are important to the stories.
Reading Partition stories have always been overwhelming and agonising, as the tales of Saadat Hassan Manto, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Amrita Pritam and even contemporary writers like Salman Rushdie have ascertained. Prasad’s characters too document the turbulence and trauma of the common people, the under-resourced and not educationally equipped lot. However, his stories do not delve into political overtones. He paints the historical picture by craftily using human emotions. This collection deserves a read because of its stunning descriptions and thoughtful detailing in the stories.