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Business News/ Mint-lounge / A translated country
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A translated country

A translated country

Off the boat: Jhabvala’s stories examine moments of crossover. Photo: Evening Standard/Getty ImagesPremium

Off the boat: Jhabvala’s stories examine moments of crossover. Photo: Evening Standard/Getty Images

Comparisons have often been drawn between the work of Anita Desai and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. A gentle melancholia pervades most of their tales, whether set in India or elsewhere, with characters being drawn into relationships and predicaments that leave them more alienated than before. In their quests for rootedness, many such characters, one imagines, would echo the words Jawaharlal Nehru so famously wrote in his autobiography: “I have become a queer mixture of the East and the West, out of place everywhere, at home nowhere".

Desai’s latest collection of short stories, The Artist of Disappearance, was released earlier this year; now, as a handy counterpoint, we have Jhabvala’s own collection, A Lovesong for India. Translators, civil servants and others ill at ease with the ways of the world find a place in both volumes. To read both is to find that Desai is the better craftsperson at the level of sentence and structure, while Jhabvala, less delicate but no less evocative, is more accomplished in creating the sweep of a life in just a few pages.

Off the boat: Jhabvala’s stories examine moments of crossover. Photo: Evening Standard/Getty Images

The stories here are largely divided between those set in India and those set elsewhere—primarily New York’s Upper East Side—as was the case with Jhabvala’s earlier East Into Upper East. A last section comprises what could be said to be a combination of the two. Given the number of stories that feature variations on the theme of unequal alliances, the collection could well have been titled Odd Couples. An Oriental scholar from the US comes to Delhi to be drawn into the muddled private life of a charismatic, ageing poetess. A lonely talent agent in New York takes under her wing a strange, waiflike aspiring singer. An influential film critic is drawn to a conniving actress. A 50-something widow of a Hollywood studio head takes up with a young Indian writer-director in Los Angeles. An ageing Bollywood star starts to rely more and more upon his daughter-in-law (though many of the characters are drawn from the worlds of film and entertainment, Jhabvala, as before, manages to keep her scriptwriting and fiction writing in separate compartments. The stories here are anything but cinematic in the telling, being more concerned with interiors than exteriors).

The story with which the collection ends is an odd, ethereal tale of an unlikely courtship between two wraithlike individuals, with much more being implied than said. The spectre of AIDS, the contrasting ties of blood and marriage, and the enervating effects of time are all encompassed in a somewhat eccentric mix. It’s deftly done, but undoubtedly strange in its wide-ranging arc.

As with Desai’s stories, here, too, there are no pat endings. Rather, one is left with the plight of those who find themselves in scenarios not of their choosing, with a sense of life going on after the printed stories come to a close. It has been said of Anton Chekhov that at the end of his stories, he returned his characters to life, and he himself once wrote that “obligatory for the artist is not solving a problem, but stating a problem correctly". Bearing the burden of their problems, Jhabvala’s characters continue onwards—as one of her titles puts it—in search of love and beauty.

Write to lounge@livemint.com

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Published: 11 Nov 2011, 10:47 PM IST
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