Book Review: 'The Dying Sun Stories'

Book: The Dying Sun Stories
Author: Joginder Paul, Ed by: Sukrita Paul Kumar, Trans by: Usha Nagpal & Keerti Ramachandra
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Pages: 252
Price: Rs299

His mother tongue may be Punjabi, but Joginder Paul writes in Urdu and he has won awards for his fiction, which puts another nail in the coffin of the idea that any language belongs to one particular community.

The Dying Sun Stories is a translation of some of Paul’s Urdu short stories. Translating from one language to another, without destroying the flavour of the original, is never an easy task. Paul’s translators, Usha Nagpal and Keerti Ramachandra, might have found their task comparatively easy because Paul’s writing style is refreshingly devoid of florid flourishes and elaborate explanations. His simple, uncluttered prose lets the characters do the talking.

Even when his protagonists are the legendary lovers Heer and Ranjha, there is no poetic flamboyance that has to be reimagined in another language. Paul’s Heer and Ranjha are an old, phlegmatic, pain-ridden couple who are tired of living but cannot seek release through death because they are doomed to the immortality that is the burden of legends.

Unusual, iconoclastic takes like this are the hallmark of Paul’s stories. Brevity sharpens his satirical perception of people and situations. In The Settled People, all of five-paragraphs long, Paul is the butt of his own satire. It’s a story of two lovers who settle down to marital bliss because they have escaped the cynical pages of Paul’s incomplete novel.

But not all his characters have been as fortunate. Most of the others have their weaknesses, hypocrisy, foibles and games exposed by a writer whose eye sees beyond pretences. In Hari Kirtan, for instance, you are left wondering if the “Hari Om” chanting badi bahu has been sleeping with her father-in-law because her husband has ignored her and spent his life with a woman of ill repute. But though he lays bare a possible truth, Paul is never judgmental.

Even in the title story, The Dying Sun, in which Paul is at his razor best, he refrains from commenting. The sharp comments passed by Dadu, a man visiting his son’s family in the US are that character’s, not Paul’s. A gentle, humorous soul, Dadu pow-wows with his America-born grandchildren: “Americans do everything by themselves and then sit before their handiwork to applaud themselves.” 

Later, when the family go to watch a performance of Othello, Dadu notes nobody is watching the play. They find a rich a fellow audience member’s antics with her toy boy more entertaining. Dadu says nothing. Neither does the author. Having narrated the situation, he leaves it to the readers to draw their own conclusion. These brief but eloquently-told stories entertain because of Paul’s storytelling.