Humour seasoned with a dash of satire

Curry Is Thicker Than Water
Jasmine D’Costa
Bookland Press
130 pages

This collection of six short stories is by a Mumbai-born, Canada-based writer, and not one of them has anything to do with the worn-out theme of alienation.

Hallelujah. Why, none of the characters even whip up an improvised bhel puri with Kellogg’s Rice Krispies (yes, Jhumpa Lahiri has scarred me for life). All the stories are set in India instead, and are seasoned with a nice dash of local flavour and loads of satire.

Being anal retentive, I started with the very first story. And honestly, I wanted to stop there itself. ‘The elephant on the highway’ is a crazy caper about a talking elephant that’s sick of begging and decides to protest by lying down slap bang in the middle of Mumbai’s Western Express Highway, making the traffic situation infinitely worse.

A beggar (who earns an astronomical amount a day) befriends him. There are some faintly amusing sketches of chaps from the BMC and animal rights activists wondering how to move it or save it, but this is certainly not the best story in this book and I cannot for the life of me imagine why it took the lead. Oh right, I’ve just got it: it was published in Canada and elephants are exotic there. Tsk.

Must we always pander to the West?

After that, I had to steel myself to plough through the rest of the book and randomly picked a story tucked towards the end: And it was this story that made me want to hug the author. ‘She married a pumpkin’ is a sparkling satire and gets you in touch with your inner-feminist.

It’s about an exceptionally beautiful girl in Nagpur who has a lousy horoscope: her first husband is destined to die within a year of the marriage. Her harried parents eventually get her married to a pumpkin and the heroine decides that she’d like to keep her first husband, thank you very much: “Being a married woman is wonderful — especially when your husband is in the refrigerator.”
‘Eggs’, my next favourite story, is dark and poignant. A little boy with a club foot hates his mother because he believes that she could have had his deformity fixed. His resentment hits a crescendo when she kills his only friends (two pet eagles) and he plans a brutal revenge.

The rest of the stories are okay with some nice bits — I mean, imagine a Hindu-Muslim clash that leaves you with a smile. D’Costa has a strong social conscience and tackles issues with a sense of humour. As a story teller, she’s gifted.  As a writer though, she leaves not a lot, but a little to be desired. While you can’t fault her grammar, her prose is pedestrian, her dialogues are stilted and her compositions need a spot of polish. Even so, she’s a pleasure to read.