Cryptic conversations

Siddhartha Gigoo's Umbrella Man, this year's winner of the prestigious Commonwealth Short Story prize for Asia region, is a whimsical tale about a man in an asylum and his yellow and red striped umbrella. Nothing much happens in the story — the nameless man who suffers from an unspecified psychosis speaks to a ghostly child in his cell every night and picks a conversation with a mysterious "puny little fellow" in the garden, until one day, he's set free. Cryptic and allusive, simple and lyrical, the tale ends with a twist that readers must look out for.

Ironically, the only reason Gigoo sent Umbrella Man for the Commonwealth Prize was that it fit the 3,000 word length for submissions. "I had never thought I would send it. It was a personal story, unfinished and not even in the book at the time," says Gigoo, referring to the manuscript of A Fistful of Earth, the collection of stories which has now made it to the long list of the Frank O'Conner International short story award. "But all my other stories were 4,000-4,500 words. I tried to edit them, but I had to cut a lot. Umbrella Man was the only story that fit the word limit. I had been submitting stories for the Commonwealth Prize for the past four years. Every time, I would get a rejection letter — many of those stories are in the collection. It had become a habit; so I sent it."

Ironically, few people back in India had read Umbrella Man until it won the prize. "Even my publisher asked, which story is it?" Gigoo says, betraying no rancour.

Umbrella Man is an exception in Gigoo's oeuvre — it is the only story in A Fistful of Earth that does not allude to Kashmir. All the other 15 are about the experience of exile, stories about the Pandits — though Gigoo never once mentions them by name — who migrated from Kashmir in droves from the 1990s onwards after Islamic militants began a concerted campaign of killings and kidnappings against them. They were settled in tents on the outskirts of Jammu, an arrangement that was meant to be temporary but where they languish, in abject squalor.

Gigoo, a Pandit himself, was one of those who moved out, coming to live in a camp in Jammu and later Udhampur, where he completed school and undergraduate degree at the "camp college". He then moved to Delhi where he got admission in JNU and later a job with TCS, where he still works. "That was the darkest period," says Gigoo, whose work — including the novel he wrote in 2011 and two short films along with several unpublished film scripts and novel plots — draws heavily from what he saw and heard in the refugee camps.

Of late, the issue has been heavily politicised with the central government pushing a scheme to resettle the Pandits in colonies in Kashmir. It's an emotive issue, bitterly opposed by Kashmiris in the Valley, but Gigoo thinks it's being needlessly politicised. The project will not find many takers among Pandits in the camps now, he feels. "The younger generation is studying or working in different parts of India, abroad. The people in the camps will not go — the camps, though depressing, are safe, familiar, they get government pension. The only people who wanted to go back, people of my grandfather's generation, are dead."

Gigoo is now working on an anthology of memoirs of Kashmiri Pandits. "This generation, which were adults when they left, is on the verge of dying. Their children are not interested. When they go, their history and stories will be gone,"says Gigoo who has travelled through the camps, dictaphone in hand, recording their narratives. These stories, Gigoo knows, if lost would signal a tragedy no less grave than the loss of their homes.