Book review: 'Lost Men'

Book: Lost Men
Author: Rajorshi Chakraborti
Publisher: Hachette
Pages: 253
Price: Rs350

All books, I maintain, are not meant for everyone. Rajorshi Chakraborti’s new short story collection Lost Men is no exception. It’s not for those with an attention span of a goldfish; and certainly not for those hooked to fairytale endings. On the other hand, if you like writings that linger in your head long after you’ve read them and, possibly, drive you to connect the missing dots in their narratives — think Paul Auster, think Chuck Palahniuk — Lost Men is a good bet for you.

The title sets the theme for the collection. Between the covers you will meet several men and (very few) women who are, as a character in one of the stories says, “victim[s] of accidents far outside [their] control”. The book opens with a cracking story titled ‘Knock knock’, where a bank employee turns an ordinary couple’s weekend into a nightmare and Chakraborti balances the quotidian with the abrupt with great finesse.

The stories that follow are vignettes of the characters’ past clinging on to their present. As a result, they are perpetually suspended in time, struggling to locate their place in either realm. So, in ‘The last time I tried to leave home...,’ a young man setting out on a life-changing journey becomes a hostage to his memories and desires, which change his life but in a manner he didn’t envisage.

Similarly, the sight of a schoolmate sends the central character of ‘Half an hour’ back into his yesteryears in a way that compels him to set aside the important task at hand.

However, as in real life, these characters’ memories do not come without baggage. There are strong undercurrents of anxiety, grief, guilt and helplessness, besides “a quiet sense of something lost”, as Alfred Tennyson famously put it. These emotions are most aptly illustrated in ‘The third beside us’ and ‘The good boy’, stories whose protagonists reminisce about lost opportunities, which become apparent to them quiet late in their lives. ‘The good boy’ — which starts with the lovely line, “I might as well begin here, because this story is about nothing else” — suitably demonstrates the author’s ability to sweep the readers off their feet with his simple-yet-challenging prose.

The title story, ‘Lost Men’, is a mesh of memories, glued together loosely with a host of varying emotions. The narrator is coping with his wife’s death in every possible way he can, including masturbating to her photographs. The spectrum of his experiences while on the journey he undertakes to distract himself includes a chance meeting with a man in pain due to a terrible groin accident, having breakfast with Peter, who boasts about a file that the FBI maintains on him, and dreaming about his wife getting mowed down by a car near a bistro. The last experience becomes the nub of the following story, ‘A good dry-cleaner is worth a story’, my favourite of the lot.

The shortest in the collection, this tale is as random as it can get — and then some. It’s here that you wonder whether the various tranches of the book are conversing among themselves and pointing at a meta-narrative.

But Lost Men is not just about gloom and doom. A chance encounter with the family doctor from childhood, in a different city, brings back pleasant memories for the narrator of ‘City lights’. Later in the day, this joy is compounded by the memories of a friend’s letters that help him reacquaint with his city. It’s quite possible that Chakraborti’s latest offering may not be your cup of tea. Or you may take some time to get past your conventional notions of ‘good’ writing. But, can that be a reason to not give its several characters — with all their uncertainties and crises — a chance to be heard, or read, in this case? Clearly, not.