Book review: 'The Counsel Of Strangers'

The Counsel Of Strangers
Gouri Dange
Omo Books
178 pages
Rs250

A motley group of guests at a typical Indian wedding move away from the celebratory hustle and bustle to a quiet spot away from the main venue. After the initial ice is broken, they begin conversing with one another. Soon social chitchat gives way to deeper outpourings about their lives.

The format is not new — strangers sharing confidences in railway waiting rooms, etc has been done before. What Gouri Dange brings to this style of storytelling is her experience as a family counsellor.

So, after each narration, the rest of the group comments on the narrator’s experience, like a counsellor would, but with one difference: though objective, the comments also reflect the characters of the commentators, thus lending several dimensions to particular experiences.

Peppered as each story is with sardonic comments and blunt opinions, the story-tellers grow on you. For instance, there is the lovable, retired Wing Commander Brahme who detests being slotted as a senior citizen, especially when visiting his daughter in San Francisco.

“I had realised quite soon that if I don’t learn to entertain myself and move about by public transport, then I was going to be dropped off by my daughter or her husband at only two places that they think are appropriate for me.

The Senior Center and the Mandir,” relates the retired Air Force officer. His is a sweet-sad story about parents being straight-jacketed into pre-conceived roles by insensitive children.

Brahme is not the only victim of this syndrome. Most of the stories are about protagonists forced into situations they dislike. Fourteen-year-old Kartik is resigned to being a model child because his older brother is “a serious bad-ass”; but he carries his troubles quietly in his kit-bag. Anandi-Mohini, christened with a double name, ponders over the irony of her name. “I am definitely not happily-enchanting or enchantingly-happy,” she points out frankly, before recounting her two failed attempts at finding a compatible life-partner.

There are also delightfully sharp comments about contemporary professionals, like this pithy description of a TV anchor: “We are the judge, we are the jury and we are the hangman …shrill, strident and oh so bloody sure of ourselves in our well-cut suits and telegenic faces.”

Gouri Dange slips up sometimes. Example one: When Natarajan says “We’d taken Paran to a Raj Kapoor film retrospective to see Mother India.” Raj Kapoor was nowhere in the film! Example two: the bus numbers at the bus stop opposite the Museum in Mumbai are not quite correct. Example three: “I made a new friend on the bus stop…”

But these are minor slip-ups. Perceptive and easy to read, this collection of stories by a practicing family counsellor, Gouri Dange, is the perfect book to help pass time at airports and railway platforms.