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.