The plots are often disjointed, and the ends abrupt and anti-climatic.
Book: The Woman Who Thought She Was A Planet And Other Stories
Author: Vandana Singh
Penguin
l 216 pages
l Rs275
They are all outsiders, at odds with the ordinary, everyday world. Kamala, in the autumn of her life, hallucinates that she is a planet and therefore dispenses with her clothes, even in public places, to reach out for other planets.
She finally flies away like a balloon into the vast beyond. The abandoned wife of a professor finds solace in the cool woods behind her house — “the lifeline of dreams”.
An unhappy sculptress, stark naked, sinks, forever, into the rain-soaked earth, drawn in by clay hands that mould her just like she has shaped figurines earlier. Susheela, wife and mother, can’t resist the call of the river where she surrenders herself to an orgasmic dance with snakes and other water creatures.
Others go through the process of confusion to finally come to terms with the world around them. Divya, who reads “trashy science fiction novels” and finds it tedious to socialise with her husband’s superficial office colleagues, has an inexplicable hunger.
After an old man in the servants’ quarters dies of starvation, she tries to quell that hunger by distributing parathas to other hungry souls; while her science fiction reveals “in a convoluted way” that you don’t have to go to the stars to find aliens.
Aseem, with suicidal tendencies, has visions of times past wherein he talks to mad emperors, colonising British officers, and old women from Prithviraj Chauhan’s period. Finally, a futurologist helps him to find his calling — to prevent others from ending their lives.
Thus, Aseem comes to terms with his own life. Mathematics teacher Abdul Karim gives up his lifelong quest for the infinite when he realises that “no finite mind can, in one meagre lifetime, truly comprehend the vastness, the grandeur of Allah’s scheme”.
But Vandana Singh’s stories about misfits fail to grip the reader.
Like Divya’s science fiction, they are too convoluted. And they don’t leave you feeling enlightened in any way. The vast unknown, into which many of Singh’s protagonists escape, remains unknown. The physical does not lead to any illuminating, metaphysical truth. The imagery is repetitive with rain, earth and creepy crawlies appearing in story after story.
The plots are often disjointed, and the ends abrupt and anti-climatic. Her language, too, often falls short of literary standards. For example, in ‘Thirst’ she observes, “There was only the sound of rain, sparkling on the lake’s surface.” How can sound sparkle?
Those with a yen for science might be able to separate the grain from the chaff and enjoy some of the metaphors drawn from zoology and botany but for others The Woman Who Thought She Was A Planet And Other Stories may not offer much reading pleasure.
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