Skip to main content

Strange characters like ourselves

 


Book

Title: Marquez, EMS, Gulam & Others

Author: Benyamin

Translated by Swarup B.R.

Publisher: Harper  Perennial, 2023

Pages: 214

There is a kind of fiction that shows you life from an angle that you wouldn’t ever have thought of. An unexpectedly new way of looking at situations and people. Yet what you see is real life and real people. The usual human emotions are all there. There is a touch of humour too, though it tends to be of the dark kind mostly. Not too dark either. This is the kind of fiction that Benyamin offers us.

Right now a Malayalam movie [Goat Life], based on a novel of the same title by Benyamin, is running full house in Kerala. I watched it too with intense emotional and aesthetic involvement. I had read the novel many years ago. It is a rather sombre work that tells the story of a man who went to a Gulf country to take up a job but ended as a slave who didn’t even have the comforts that his goats had. The work was so depressing that I never read Benyamin after that.

Years later, I read another novel of Benyamin and loved it for its sweeping continuum of human emotions and motives as well as the tickling humour.  Now this collection of short stories, Marquez, EMS, Gulam & Others, landed on my desk as part of a project I have undertaken. I relished reading it.

This is a collection of 15 short stories. Each story has a unique flavour to offer. If one is set in Kerala, another takes us to the Gulf or Kashmir or Israel. There is invariably a twist awaiting us towards the end of each story. Some of those twists may remind us of Somerset Maugham whose stories without exception ended with extracting a gasp from the depth of the reader’s heart. Benyamin’s stories have the power to do the same.

The characters are not exactly the ordinary chaps we meet on the way. Marques, the first story, for example, presents to us a mediocre journalist who lives in a bubble he has created by trying to be another Gabriel Garcia Marquez until his wife is forced to take a drastic step. Gulam of the last story is a man who became a zoo-keeper in spite of himself and ended up spending years and years looking for a lost tiger cub in as unlikely a place as under a table in a restaurant. The genius of Benyamin lies in his ability to make such characters absolutely real and credible.

Meet Hanumanta and Shobhi who are trying to sell their own bedroom action to the porn industry and are cheated. They are told that the video is of such poor quality that they cannot get much money for it. Moreover, Shobhi has an ugly scar in her belly which will put off viewers. Hanumanta explains that the scar was the result of her selling one of her kidneys for their son’s treatment. They were cheated that time too. They were promised Rs3 lakh and were given Rs30,000. And then? Shobhi says, “I lost my kidney, I lost my money, and I lost my son.” And now they lose their honour to the shady industry of pornography.

Benyamin
Benyamin is a genius in narrating stories of losses. Without pathos. With just the right sort of humour. What about a thief who loses his integrity? Bukkaram’s Son tells us the story of one such person. Bukkaram belongs to a caste in which every man is taken to be a thief by others. There is no escape from this destiny simply because no one will give these men any job because of traditional mistrust. Bukkaram wants his son to be different. Bitturam Vittal, the son, tries his best to take up another job. But it’s not easy to wash away your caste-given destiny in India.

Every story in this slim volume has the power to make us laugh and cry. Every story reveals the dark as well as the comic sides of human nature. Benyamin is an intelligent story-teller with a quirky imagination. He won’t disappoint you, that’s for sure.

Labels:

Comments

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
44 comments
Read more

The Second Crucifixion

  ‘The Second Crucifixion’ is the title of the last chapter of Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’s magnum opus Freedom at Midnight . The sub-heading is: ‘New Delhi, 30 January 1948’. Seventy-three years ago, on that day, a great soul was shot dead by a man who was driven by the darkness of hatred. Gandhi has just completed his usual prayer session. He had recited a prayer from the Gita:                         For certain is death for the born                         and certain is birth for the dead;                         Therefore over the inevitable                         Thou shalt not grieve . At that time Narayan Apte and Vishnu Karkare were moving to Retiring Room Number 6 at the Old Delhi railway station. They walked like thieves not wishing to be noticed by anyone. The early morning’s winter fog of Delhi gave them the required wrap. They found Nathuram Godse already awake in the retiring room. The three of them sat together and finalised the plot against Gand
6 comments
Read more

Vultures and Religion

When vultures become extinct, why should a religion face a threat? “When the vultures died off, they stopped eating the bodies of Zoroastrians…” I was amused as I went on reading the book The Final Farewell by Minakshi Dewan. The book is about how the dead are dealt with by people of different religious persuasions. Dead people are quite useless, unless you love euphemism. Or, as they say, dead people tell no tales. In the end, we are all just stories made by people like the religious woman who wrote the epitaph for her atheist husband: “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.” Zoroastrianism is a religion which converts death into a sordid tale by throwing the corpses of its believers to vultures. Death makes one impure, according to that religion. Well, I always thought, and still do, that life makes one impure. I have the support of Lord Buddha on that. Life is dukkha , said the Enlightened. That is, suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Death is liberation
4 comments
Read more

The Final Farewell

Book Review “ Death ends life, not a relationship ,” as Mitch Albom put it. That is why, we have so many rituals associated with death. Minakshi Dewan’s book, The Final Farewell [HarperCollins, 2023], is a well-researched book about those rituals. The book starts with an elaborate description of the Sikh rituals associated with death and cremation, before moving on to Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and finally Hinduism. After that, it’s all about the various traditions and related details of Hindu final rites. A few chapters are dedicated to the problems of widows in India, gender discrimination in the last rites, and the problem of unclaimed dead bodies. There is a chapter titled ‘Grieving Widows in Hindi Cinema’ too. Death and its rituals form an unusual theme for a book. Frankly, I don’t find the topic stimulating in any way. Obviously, I didn’t buy this book. It came to me as quite many other books do – for reasons of their own. I read the book finally, having shelv
10 comments
Read more

Hate Politics

Illustration by Copilot Hatred is what dominates the social media in India. It has been going on for many years now. A lot of violence is perpetrated by the ruling party’s own men. One of the most recent instances of venom spewed out by none other than Mithun Chakraborty would shake any sensible person. But the right wing of India is celebrating it. Seventy-four-year-old Chakraborty threatened to chop the people of a particular minority community into pieces. The Home Minister Amit Shah was sitting on the stage with a smile when the threat was issued openly. A few days back, a video clip showing a right-winger denying food to a Muslim woman because she refused to chant ‘Jai Sri Ram’ dominated the social media. What kind of charity is it that is founded on hatred? If you go through the social media for a while, you will be astounded by the surfeit of hatred there. Why do a people who form the vast majority of a country hate a small minority so much? Hatred usually comes from some
8 comments
Read more