Mridula Koshy’s new book of short stories, If It Is Sweet, is a well-paced, strikingly original collection that navigates locales between Los Angeles and Delhi, using several voices to mark out its thematic and stylistic ground. “Jeans” bounces between various milieus in which jeans could signify anything from having money to unbridled sexuality to independence, while “Today Is the Day” features a seven-part, non-chronological narration by a servant boy named Suraj about the family for which he works.
Koshy clearly pays extremely close attention to detail. In fact, it’s almost as if she uses layers of description to affect action, the measured prose serving to pressure-cook a single theme or image to the point of explosion.
But the detail isn’t always there to help you understand what’s going on. In “Companion”, about an old widow and her companion, the latter is alternately described as human and animal. The unease grows as you realise you know as little as the old woman, thus rendering the end even more unsettling. “When the Child Was a Child” examines a similar clash between seeming fact and what the protagonists believe or remember.
Koshy starts by skirting the edges but then dives straight into the traumatic and the cruel, leading the reader to the instant in each tale at which everything unspools to reveal violence and incomprehensibility. But even in the gentler stories in this collection, there’s an underlying core of instability that drags the reader in, as the layers part to reveal it. This riveting collection, at once nuanced and adventurous, will stay in the reader’s memory for the way it probes away at the complexities of class and money, transgressions and violations. Naintara Maya Oberoi
Source : Time Out Delhi ISSUE 11 Friday, August 20, 2010
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