Skip to main content

From beyond the grave to beyond galaxies

Book Review

Sitharaam Jayakumar
This is a collection of short stories numbering to over thirty. They are divided into five categories: Horror/thriller; Sci-fi/humour; Sci-fi/public welfare; Sci-fi/miscellaneous; and General. Sitharaam Jayakumar, the author, is an accomplished storyteller who has published a couple of short novels.

The first section in this collection is likely to remind the reader of Somerset Maugham with a hangman’s noose. The stories in this section reek of cynicism as they narrate stories of human wickedness. Betrayal and fraudulence are the themes of these stories. The wife is unfaithful to the husband or vice-versa and then one goes to the extent of murdering the other. In a few stories the ghost of the murdered person returns to take revenge. Jai (as the author is known among his friends) builds up the whole plot so adeptly that the conclusion lands on our face like an unexpected slap. He is also an expert at creating the apt environment. There is an eerie feeling dominating most of these stories. See the opening sentence of the first story, ‘I will always be with you’: “I climbed up the steep mountain slope moving away from the burning wreck of the car I had left my wife Kathy’s dead body in.” Or look at this from another one: “The tale went that the last occupant of the villa was a failed painter couple who lived there as recluses.”

The stories grouped together under ‘Sci-fi/Humour’ can make us smile with humanoids that behave like real humans. Romeo and Juliet in ‘Give me five!’ and Andrei and Steffi in ‘The Five-Set Thriller’ are humanoids with a nice sense of romance. The irony of our possible future falling back on the past of Swift’s Gulliver as hinted at in ‘The Evacuation’ is also amusing.

The third section tries to convey some serious messages. ‘Lesser of two evils’ has a superior extra-terrestrial creature throwing out some serious warnings to the homo sapiens on earth who have destroyed the planet enough already. ‘Four corners of the world’ is a powerful plea in favour of women. A humanoid in ‘The Peace-Queen’ has better sense than his actual human creator.

‘Adam and Eve’ in the fourth section tells us about a possible end of the earth. Ironically two scientists named Adam and Eve – one each from America and Russia – begin the human race once again on another planet. The last stories in the collection make up for all the cynicism that oozes out of the first section. A touch of spirituality graces some of these pages too.

Jai sustains the reader’s interest throughout and that is one of his strengths as a storyteller. The stories in the first section of this volume are meant to shock and horrify and hence the cynicism in them cannot be blamed. The stories grow into increasing sobriety as we move on.

The collection can be downloaded here: Jai’s Assorted Tales

My contribution to the series to which Jai’s book belongs is: Great Books for Great Thoughts




Comments

  1. The stories sound interesting. Would read them soon. With this review, may be picking it sooner.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sounds like a riveting read. Downloaded and will read soon.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Have a nice time with Jai's stories. By the way, my next review is going to be on your book in this series.

      Delete
    2. Ohh thankyou. Waiting. :D

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

India in Modi-Trap

That’s like harnessing a telescope to a Vedic chant and expecting the stars to spin closer. Illustration by Gemini AI A friend forwarded a WhatsApp message written by K Sahadevan, Malayalam writer and social activist. The central theme is a concern for science education and research in India. The writer bemoans the fact that in India science is in a prison conjured up by Narendra Modi. The message shocked me. I hadn’t been aware of many things mentioned therein. Modi is making use of Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan’s Centre for Study and Research in Indology for his nefarious purposes projected as efforts to “preserve and promote classical Indian knowledge systems [IKS]” which include Sanskrit, Ayurveda, Jyotisha (astrology), literature, philosophy, and ancient sciences and technology. The objective is to integrate science with spirituality and cultural values. That’s like harnessing a telescope to a Vedic chant and expecting the stars to spin closer. The IKS curricula have made umpteen r...

Two Women and Their Frustrations

Illustration by Gemini AI Nora and Millie are two unforgettable women in literature. Both are frustrated with their married life, though Nora’s frustration is a late experience. How they deal with their personal situations is worth a deep study. One redeems herself while the other destroys herself as well as her husband. Nora is the protagonist of Henrik Ibsen’s play, A Doll’s House , and Millie is her counterpart in Terence Rattigan’s play, The Browning Version . [The links take you to the respective text.] Personal frustration leads one to growth into an enlightened selfhood while it embitters the other. Nora’s story is emancipatory and Millie’s is destructive. Nora questions patriarchal oppression and liberates herself from it with equanimity, while Millie is trapped in a meaningless relationship. Since I have summarised these plays in earlier posts, now I’m moving on to a discussion on the enlightening contrasts between these two characters. If you’re interested in the plot ...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...