CHAPTER
7
SHORT STORIES
ISO
X)
INTRODUCTORY :
Arun Joshi*s output as a short story writer is
meagre; so far he has published only one 'selection of,
stories' entitled The Survivor
1
which contains ten stories.
Two other stories are published m different' magazines.
Though a few of his stories really merit serious consideration, they are yet to receive the recognition due to them.
2
Arun Joshi has no 'theory* of the short story.
However he firmly believes that the short story is
as
effective a literary form as the novel is':;
i
1
i
Each has its own place.
In my case it is the theme
which determines whether it would be a short story
or a novel.
For example, I wrote a short story called
"The Gherao" which was about students ghe'raomg a
principal. Thematically I would hot'like to handle
a novel about the academic world which I,'don't know
3
about; so a short story.
In fact 'The Gherao' is the only story of Arun Joshi
1. New Delhi; A Sterling Paperback, 1975.( '
All the page references to the stories i in this chapter are
,to this edition.
References to the uncollected stories
are specified.
'
2. So far there have been not a single full-length study of
the short stories of Arun Joshi except'; M„<3.Gopalakrishnan ' s
'The Short Stories of »run Joshi' (Arun Joshi-A Study of
his Fiction^(Ed) II.Radhakrishnan, Madurai; a Scholar Critic
Publication, 1984, pp. 68-72) - which is j'too ! sketchy.
i
i,
I I ,
; (
3. "A Winner's Secret: An Interview with|Pu'rabi Bannerji",
The Sunday Statesman, Feb. 2n, 1983, .P.ivj
181
which is about the academic world.
Most of his stories
deal with the decaying upper upper-crust of the Indian
society.
Even when he writes about the lower class - say
a servant,
'The Servant'_J7 or the peasant boys /_ 'Harmik'_/
or a poor young widow whose suppressed passions could find
an outlet only xn the institutionalized prostitution ^~"'The
Frontier Mail is Gone'_/, - it is viewed from the point of
view an essentially aristocratic narrator.
Thus we have
a
'case study' of the servant £_ 'The servant'_J7, a business
executive's account of Leela l_ 'The Frontier Mail is Gone'^,
and a superficial presentation of the confusion of the two
peasant boys in London while the glitter of London itself
comes alive /_ 'Harmik'_/.
On the contrary, Arun Joshi
allows a first person narrative while writing about the
affluent society.
This explains the conviction of Arun Joshi
to write only about the world he is really familiar with.
The impelling credibility of his fiction thus stems from his
very conviction.
Like his novels, Arun Joshi's short stories too
satirize the glittering flimsmess of the Indian affluent
society.
Arun Joshi brings home the point that in a society
m which all scruples are given up m favour of making money
neither a genuine human relationship nor an authentic
182
existence is possible.
Pseudo-Westernization, which has
devitalized the individual by curbing his creativity, is
yet another target of Joshi's satire.
Sensitive
protagonists of Arun Joshi's stories survive the modern
Indian society by rebelling against it as in 'The Survivor'
or m 'A Trip for Mr.Lele'.
Antiquated moral codes which
do not take into account genuine human feelings are also
indicted as m 'The Frontier Mail is Gone'.
Also, Arun Joshi's short stories show him to be
singularly conscious of technique and experimentation.
Not all these experiments achieve a uniform success.
But
the successful ones are those which force the readers to read
between the lines, to see beyond the story.
A good short
story, as Hemingway put it, resembles an ice-berg : The
one-ninth above the surface suggesting the eight-ninth
below, iArun Joshi too seems to agree with this for somewhere
in The Last Labyrinth, Som Bhaskar, the protagonist muses:
'Reality was so like an ice-berg.
You never saw the whole
of it. '
II)
'The Gherao'
:
That Arun Josha forces the reader to see beyond the
story can be illustrated by an analysis of 'The Gherao' and
183
'The Homecoming'.
'The Gherao1 is an objective account of
a shapeless/ unpremeditated confrontation between the
principal and the students of a college.
From the point of
view of form it belongs to a class of the short story which
can be called 'the story of situation'.
Here Joshi
perfectly catches the violence, hostility and incomprehension
m the atmosphere; convincingly depicts the amorphousness
and in-explicability of the student-mob; and successfully
probes the disturbed and the injured sentiments of the
gheraaed principal.
Moreover, as the story develops, one
finds it assuming an altogether new dimension and the
combination of circumstances gives Joshi the privilege of
witnessing,
and making the readers see, in a tragically conce­
ntrated form, the encounter between the principal and the
president of the Students Union Chiru Pandey, which,
virtually, is a confrontation between the older generation
and the younger generation.
At ,one point m the story, the
narrator becomes aware of this and remarks ;
For the moment,
the fifty yards that separated us
represented all the agony and th'e hopelessness that
divide one generation from another, (p.21).
It is m the fitness of things that Mr0Chatterjee,
the young lecturer, should be the narrator of the incident
184
because as a participant m the actions he is an insider
and he is also an outsider as he does not belong to either
of the sides.
Thus he is somewhat like Romesh Sahai, the
narrator of The Strange Case of Billy Biswas.
So, while
his account is objective, his ironic comments are the source
of humour m the story.
A perfect English teacher that he
is, he has an eye on the linguistic peculiarities of both
the principal and the students and that is the other source
of humour.
What is unconvincing about the narrator, however,
is his undisturbed tone.
In the last part of the story
Mr. Chatter]ee receives a letter from a complete stranger,
one Dr. Sharrna of Mussoone which brings him the news that
the principal Ravi Mathur has passed away.
This leaves
Mr. Chatterjee in a reminiscent mood and he decides to write
about one of his meetings with the principal - which obviously
has left a lasting impression on his mind - hoping thereby
to ease his own oppression.
flash-back.
The whole story, thus, is
a
We come to know of the death of the principal
only at the end and this sudden turn intensifies the tregedy.
But the point to be noted here is that if Mr.Chatterjee is
narrating this story to ease his oppression, it is this
sense of oppression and the urgency to write that we miss in
the early part of the story.
Indeed, the narrator begans casually, stressing
135
the triviality of the whole episode.
gherao is also equally trivial.
The source of the
On the day of the gherao
Chiru Pandey, President of the Students Union writes on the
college notice board certain demands of the students which
includes 'We don't want an old owl for a Principal'.
On
his way back from lunch the principal notices this and asks
Chatterjee to wipe the demands off.
Chatterjee obeys
the
principal but as soon as he enters the principal's chamber
the students start writing on the board again.
Now the
principal asks Chatterjee to bring the black-board into his
chamber.
Chatterjee does so, however, not so much because
he wanted to enrage the students as he wanted to obey the
principal.
Consequently the students gherao the principal.
But as the story develops it is the long verbal
monologue of the principal - occassionally punctured by the
uneasiness of his old age and oppression - which moves the
story on ;
"Please don't destroy my world", he sobbed, losing
once again the thread of his thoughts.
minutes passed.
A few more
"When I was your age they locked
me up for five years just because I asked for freedom
not merely for ruvself but for you and your father
and the rest of us.
When I came out I had asthma
and for two years I lived on gram and water because
186
I had no money0
I am not saying this to impress
you or to seek your pity.
I say this only to tell
you who I am and where I come from.
Millions like
me toiled to create a world where children like you
could grow up m freedom.
that world, Chiru, please".
Please don't destroy
Sobs choked him off.
(PPC 27-28)
The boy and even Chatterjee are 'embarrassed'.
The problem
that confronted them is very different from the one that they
have gathered to resolve.
Probably the earlier problem is
not a problem at all m the presence of the newly confronted
problem for which, obviously, there is no answer whatsoever.
The symbol employed m the story also justifies this point.
'A hot wind carrying the first dust of summer' m the beginning
of the story now blows again, but this time 'carrying with it
the dust of our civilization'. )/~29 - emphasis added_7
It ig very significant that the narrator has no
comment to make on the Principal after the monologue, whereas
he has commented on each of the earlier responses to the
mishap.
The change m him is very clear :
'But night seems endless and, I am afraid, I do
not feel all that young any more'.(29)
187
III)
'The Homecoming1
:
The coherence with which narration, analysis and
dramatization are hung together and the orchestration of
different 'Elements' of a successful narrative like charac­
terization, the atmosphere, style and tone, make 'The
Homecoming' a brilliant contribution to the genre.
'The Homecoming* records the impressions of a young
,man just returned from the Eastern Front with a load of his
ifirst and the first-hand experience of war.
He has seen
i
‘several hundred dead, gashed, charred, bloated, hacked, shot
through with
a hungry
their hands behind the backs'
(98).
He has seen
mob starving to death, and half of his men being
killed m his very presence.
His return to a world
of
affluence with its arty-arty girls and week-end parties,
speeches and talks, poetry and flowers, movies and dances
does not make much sense after what he has been through. He
does not feel at home on his homecoming.
Instead he is
thoroughly disturbed :
He did not know how to fit it all together
or whether it could be fit together. Ever (104)1
The point of the story is not that war has ruined him for
133
normal life; it is, paradoxically, that he finds the socalled "normal life" abnormal and unreal.
The thematic concern of 'The Homecoming* calls for
a compansion with 'Soldier's Home' 4 , one of the early
stories of Hemingway.
When Harold Krebs, m 'Soldier's
Home', returns to Oklahoma, he returns to an atmosphere that
he feels emotionally and intellectually suffocating.
seen war and men suffering and dying.
He has
And back home,
he
suddenly sees that the entire business of living means
i
striking some kind of a pose, a farce ;
His town had heard too many atrocity stories
to be thrilled by actualities. Krebs fobnd that
to be listened to at all he had to lie and after
he had done this twice he, too, had a reaction
against the war and against talking about it.(61)
So he is no longer interested m anything, even m courting.
He withdraws not because he wants to cut himself off from
life but because-he has‘acquired the nausea in regard to
experience that is the result of untruth or exaggeration* (62).
He does not want any consequences ever again.
live along without consequences.
prays for him;
He wants to
He snaps at his mother who
'I don't love anybody'.
Finally, when he
4. The Enduring Hemingway, (Ed.) Charles Scribner, Jr.,
New York : Charles Scribner Sons, 1974, All the page
numbers referred to are from this edition.
189
agrees to go to Kansas to find a job it is not so much
because he feels to do so as because he wishes to avoid
another ’scene'.
Harold Krebs is a much more complex and better
realized character than the Arun Joshi protagonist.
Also
m 'Soldier’s Home' it is Kreb’s metamorphosis that we see.
But Arun Joshi's concern, as will be shown below, is1 much
greater than this.
His concern is to project the reader's
imagination beyond the limits of the story, to make him see
the two aspects of reality: reality as it is experienced in
all its piognancy, and reality as it is artfully and'artis­
tically talked off from a comfortable distance.
'The Homecoming' fashions the response of the reader
by a careful juxtaposition of what the soldier has been
through on the Front and what he sees around him on his home­
coming.
On their drive home from the station, hi's'tiancee
says that 'she had been eating too much and would now have
to
diet'.
And in the place where he has come from,
'he had
not met a man, woman, or child who had not been hungry; alway
hungry'
(98).
He was, as his mother has been, keen on his
marriage until before the war.
But now he wonders a's to 'the
meaning of one man's marriage; one man's life'
(99).
190
a party which he attends, he finds people speaking
of war using big words.
When he says how the war is actually
fought, they do not even believe him.
There is a poet among
them and he - the one who has not seen a gun m his life with all his pose, reads out a war poem : ’Golden Bengal
bleeding under a violet sky'.
But the soldier remembers many
more horrible things he has seen and experienced on the Front
and says ’if one were to write poems one would have to get it
all m, all this and much else'
(102).
He visits the subedar's family.
He has seen the
subedar bayonetted right in front of him in a trench by an
enemy soldier.
He does not know what the Subedar’s widow
and his two children would do„
1He wondered what a girl did
when she got widowed at twenty and couldn't marry again'(104).
Evidently, Joshi has tried here the interspersed
method of spacing out the two movements of narration.
The
ultimate purpose, it appears, is to make the reader conscious
of the vital disjoint m the ways of the world seen through
what happens to the protagonist.
The story, then, operates at three levels: at the
level of characterization it dramatizes the metaphysical
191
anguish of the war-torn protagonist :
’.,... what life was all about, who ... could
possibly be running the world’
(99) $
at the level of plot - which derives its strength by a carefu_
juxtaposition of the thoughts of a man who has actually
I
participated in the war and the talks of the peqple who[ are
placed m a comfortable distance from the war - it implies a
■ stark contrast between the two attitudes to war? and at the
tonal level it implies ’the vast unbridgeable gap between
life in its starkness and suffering, and the cushioned
unreality of affluent life1
of the world.
5
- the vital disjoint m the ways
It is the third aspect of the story,which has
lent it a universal significance and tends to make the
protagonist a representative figure.
From the point of view of narrative strategy,
Homecoming's is a curious experiment.
’The
Though the story is
narrated by the omniscient narrator, it is narrated from the
vantage point of the protagonist "he".
Nowhere in the whole
narrative do we find a distinctly authorial comment.
Thus
the author or the narrative voice is only a passive and non­
committal reporter.
This unique device has yielded a
5. Meenakshi Mukherjee (Ed)} Let’s Go Home and other stories
Madras: Orient Longman, 1975,P.126.
*
\
192
marvellous result : while the vantage point of the
protagonist has put a check on the possibility of
idealisation and rationalization on the part of the
narrator, the narrative voice of the author has put a check
on the possibility of sentimentalization on the part of the
protagonist.
Hence the subdued tone of,the narrative and
hence a ’clinical objectivity’ which is so typical of a
Greek drama.
It is because of this hybrid narrative strategy
that Joshi has admirably succeeded in probing the nature of
,a predicament in an objective manner.
Secondly, as his direct intellectual or emotional
i
,
or moral involvement is avoided, the narrative seif of the
author remains non-committal and the reader derives
'the
!
meaning' from what he sees and hears for himself from behind
the arras, as it were., what the character does, or speaks; or
thinks,and the story achieves that ideal sp forcefully stated
by J.W.Beach : "The story shall tell itself."6
IV ) The * Survivors’
:
The title story of the collection^
'The Survivor',
6. J.W.Beach, The Twentieth Century Novel, Ludhiana j Lgall
Book Depot, (Indian Reprint) 1969, P.l6.
Rene Welleck calls this the "enacted fictiion" in his
Theory of Literature.
193
which first appeared in between the publication of The
Apprentice and The Strange Case of Billy Biswas, 7 treats
one of the key motifs - corruption - in both these novels.
The problem of Kewal Kapur, the protagonist of the story
is that,like Billy,he is sick of 'that fantastic racket
that passes for the Modern Indian Society'
(96).
His
sickness is accentuated both by his job at the public
relations department of a drug company in which all he has
to do is to give a phoney reply 'I remain yours faithfully,
Sir ... or madam' to the complaints of the people, and by
his wife who like Meena, Billy's wife, always talks of money.
'Nobody in this world wants to hear the truth'
(82) is the
conclusion he arrives at by his experience.
In such a suffocating atmosphere,
'gasping for one,
just one blessed breath of life', he lets himself loose in
the make-believe world of the movie® and the film songs
untill one fine morning he is sacked - ironically, not for
being insincere to the duty, but for not clowning for his
wife.
The wife then promptly drives off to her influential
father, taking all their money in the bank and their only
daughter with her.
Unable to sort out things for himself, and urged by
a desire to see his daughter, Kewal Kapur joins the underworld
of criminals - which incidentally reminds one of Ratan Rathor
70 In 'The Illustrated Weekly of India' in 1972,
Vol.XCIII, Noo27, PP.29, 31, 33.
194
of The Apprentice - and manages to get into the house of
his father-in-law one night, to see his daughter.
Thus
he survives : "I am happy to say, gentlemen, that in spite
of heavy odds I have survived this deluge of progress,1
11 (95)
The story thus is a severe indictment of mechanized
existence and a sad commentary on the modern Indian affluent
society.
The story is told in retrospect by the protagonist,
keeping the chronological order which fits the straight­
forward and dashing narrator - a man much given to calling a
spade a spade.
The style, rough and colloquial, is indeed
a curious experiment in the context of Arun Joshi.
One even
i
hazards imagining that Arun Joshi is exploring the
possibilities of a style for a sustained monologue when ,one
considers that Joshi was then working on The Apprentice - the
one novel which gave him maximum trouble.
1
Mr. L'ele, a middle-aged travelling salesman in 'A
Trip for Mr,Lele' , is yet another survivor in a rather
humbler way.
Very much like Kewal Kapur he is attached to
his daughter and sick of his sales job where he experiences
a frontal assault on his self-respect almost every day.
still he does not resign because of his wife.
But
She keeps him
back not by tears or threat but by simply letting him know
195
where she stands :
Mrs.Lele stood in that wasteland between western
emancipation and oriental indolence which some Indian
women have so majestically come to claim as their
very own. (72)
The sales of toothpaste going into a tQrough ,
Mr.Lele
is asked to go on an extensive tour to contact the distributors.
But as his daughter's birthday is only five days away# Mr.Lele
is reluctant to go.
He has no courage to spit on the face of
his adamant boss either.
On his way to Couchin Mr.Lele meets a very sensitive
young boy who aspires to 'get it all straight : the sea# the
sun, especially the night' m his paintings.
wants to do all his life.
That's all
he
The boy's 'vision*, if that can be
called so, reminds one again of Billy Biswas.
boy has a point and Mr.Lele could see-that.
After all the
He catches the
first plane to Delhi and on the mid-night of his daughter's
birthday he is at home.
Needless to say he is fired from the
Office.
In 'The Frontier Mail is Gone' Arun Joshi points at
another malaise of modern Indian society.
The story is set
in a representative new industrial town - Faridabad - in
196
which there are a few rich and many poor as is usual with
our new industrial towns.
The poor here have a bristling
edge of discontent :
They appear perpetually to be striving towards some
new middle class possessions, burning themselves out
in the process, without probably achieving very much
more than others who proceed more peaceably to the
inevitable end. (31)
One such unfortunate poor is Leela, the daughter of an old
man who manned a level crossing at the entrance to Faridabad.
The girl is sixteen and is already a widow.
Prembabu, the narrator, who is deadlocked with the
Frontier Mail nearly every morning discovers that Leela
possesses a suppressed passion for men 'rich men, big men'.
But he falls to respond to her passion for -
An occasional chat was all right but I certainly
did not want to get too involved with these lower
class people. (38)
Finally one fine morning Leela darts into a carriage of the
Frontier Mail going to Bombay.
She becomes a resident of
Kamathipura, the red light district of Bombay.
concludes :
The narrator
197
If that is where she can meet men like me
isn’t that the only place we would ever dare
to meet a girl like Leela ? (43)
Leela too is a survivor in her own right.
She is
a survivor of traditional morality which pays no heed to
human emotions.
And her sad story is again a bitter commentary
on the modern Indian society where human emotions are often
dissolved in the smog of industrial existence and what is more,
m the name of morality.
V) Anecdotes :
As has been rightly observed by Dr.M;K.Naik; some of
Arun Joshi's stories ’tend to be merely anecdotal - the
besetting sin of the Indian English short story in general’.
Also, as we have noted m the first section of this chapter,
it is only when Arun Joshi writes about the world other than
the industrial that he merely skims on the surface.
However
his recent story ’The Only American from Our1 Village' is
exception..
Among the anecdotes,
one.
'The Servant' is the longest
It is a sensitive case study of a young servant who
has been arrested for causing the death of his mistress 8. A History of Indian English Literature, New Delhiy
Sahitya Akademi, 1982,p.250.
an
0
198
Mrs.Khanna.
The story - essentially a case study - is
evidently yet another curious experiment by Arun Joshi.
Various view points have been brought in for the analysis
of the case of Mrs.Khanna and her servant.
And the narrator
mearly marshalls these facts and opinions into a convincing
order.
The young servant, coming from a poor family in a
village in Garhwal, works for the Khannas.
Though initially
he is afraid of the Khannas and their affluence# soon he
learns his job because of Mrs.Khanna’s training.
is infatuated by Mrs.Khanna#
at thirty five.
Also, he
still ’charming’ and ’glamorous'
Each and every movement of Mrs.Khanna#
distorted in the mirror of his imagination, whets his hunger.
Finally, one morning his attempt to seduce her drives her
•two-
offAbalcony.
Told m a dispassionate tone the story gives
a very convincing picture of both Mrs.Khanna and her servant.
The two other anecdotes,
'The Eve-Teasers' and
'Harmik', deal with the exploits of the young boys who feel
m their muscular bodies the longings of spring and the
phases of the moon as only the young do.
In 'The Eve-Teasers'
Ram and Shyam are the children of their venereal times and
they carry on their exploits on the bus that takes them to
the college.
The climax of the anecdote is that Ram teases
Shyam's
199
sister without knowing who she is.
When Shyam comes to
know of this he is ashamed :
And presently his shame turned into a primordial
terror, a terror that chokes all those who have
sisters, wives or daughters, the terror of talonclaws that might any moment strike out of dark,
decaying mass of the universe and tear at the
fragile flesh we have so tenderly loved.
The terror
and the shame moved him co tears and then to sobs
so that men who met him rurned to look and said
among themselves : What a hellish torment,
what
inconsolable sorrow smote this son of man ! (48)
One wonders if Shyam*s character can bear the burden of all
this that Joshi imposes on him suddenly at the end.
In *Harmik',two young peasant boys from Punjab run
away from their houses- one Harmik followed by the other
Harmik six months afterwards.
They fly across the seas,
smuggle into England chasing their fortune like many adoles­
cents.
The story is told from the vantage point of the
junior Harmik who has illusions about England and also about
the career of the senior Harmik in England.
Finally he turns
hysterical when he finds that the senior Harmik has achieved
nothing more than what he himself has achieved.
However
200
'Harmik' is more successful than ‘The Eve-Teasers’ i
It
captures the fear and the nervousness of the young boy on
an alien shore with sympathy and understanding.
VI) Fantasies :
As we have noted in the analyses of The Strange Case
of Billy Biswas and The Last Labyrinth Arun Joshi often
blends the elements of fantasy and realism;, to dramatize his
vision.
Fantasy is mainly brought in wheni Joshi tries
to
communicate the inexplicable reality beyond the range of
human language.
However, the implausible and the irrational
association in Joshi's fiction, as it is true of any fantasy,
i
1
springs from the basis of reality only'! to illumine the truth
that lies beneath the surface of life.
The seed of Joshi's
latest novel The Last Labyrinth could in fact be traced to
one of his early experiments on a much smaller scale through 'The Boy with the Flute', which was first published as early
as 1971.9
Mr. Sethi, barely fifty but already a legend m the
business world, is seized with an unaccountable fear of death,
strangely at the prime of his career :
9. Imprint, Vol. X, No.11, Feb.1971.
4
"1
He knew his fears were irrational ...
But the
more he tried to reason with himself the fiercer
the spasm spread. (51)
Caught in this irrational affliction, in this primeval
terror, that he might be face to face with a situation that
may have no solution, Mr. Sethi, as if to reassure himself
that all is well and that he belongs to this life as any
other, surrenders himself to a surge of sexuality that is
quite unknown to him hitherto, even in liis younger days.
Thus Shanta, his latest mistress appears on the scene.
However, on a rainy night, annoyed by Shanta’s schemes to
extort as much money from him as she can, Mr. Sethi walks
out of her apartment only to fall into the clutches of
gangster.
The gangster imprisons him in an unknown house,
robs him of all he has and quietly walks out.
darkness on a dirty floor,
bonds
a
Lying in
struggling in vain to break his
Mr.Sethi suddenly remembers the long forgotten hymn:
•From evil lead me to good j
from darkness lead me to light ?
from death lead me to deathlessriess'.
Now, mysterously enough, he hears someone playing the flute
and then a boy, his face dark with soot, appears there.
Mr.Sethi could not place the boy ’either by his face or his
J
2G2
language.
And yet he seemed profoundly familiar as though
he had known him all his life'* (68)
of his cap^tivity.
The boy releases him
Thus m a moment of distress and
helplessness, when he prays putting aside all his guards,
help comes to Sethi from the boy with the flute.
That the
entire experience has wrought a spiritual sea change in
Mr.Sethi is clear by his admission that the smile of the
boy reminded him of "all the goodness that he had ever
known and somehow lost.
He wanted to be good, decent."(68)
The last word heard from the boy "I will come.11 (69) and his
disappearance all of a sudden when engulfed by a traffic
jam never to be found completes rhe picture of "the boy with
the flute."
'The Intruder m the Discotheque' is pure fantasy.
It is about the futile attempt of a rich old man Shambhu to
live his dream.
Like Sethi in 'The Boy with the Flute,
Shambhu is afraid of death.
haunts of the young.
So he visits brothels and the
When the discotheques come to the city
he is among the first to visit them for he is sure amidst
that elfin splendour death would never creep m.
falls in love with a young girl.
he should be young too.
of dreams.
There he
But to love a young girl
So he visits Mr.Gomes, the seller
By his magic Mr. Gomes makes Shambhu look young,
203
but warns him that his youth would go the moment he touches
his love.
dreams’
For, Mr.Gomes explains,
(109).
’none has touched his
From then on, night after night the old-young
man dances with his dreams.
But finally one night- in his
endeavour to touch his love he is exposed and dead*
After
all how long can a dream last unexploded ?
In both these stories the protagonists allow themselves
to be imprisoned m their self-woven web of make-beliefs to
escape the fear of death.
But soon they are disillusioned
when the web melts to the starkness of reality and their
hollowness exposed.
However if an Indian, reader is more
impressed by ’The Boy with the Flute' rather than
The
Intruder in the Discotheque’ it is because of the spiritual
regeneration which is hinted at the end of the story.
The
assurance of the Lord of the flute - "I will come" - is quite
well known.
In fact, humanity and religion have always been
projected m Arun Joshi's fictional world as the saving
grace of mankind.
VII)
’The Only American from Our Village :
An element of abiding Indianness in idiom as well as
sentiment with which Arun Joshi suffuses 'The Only American
i
t i i
from Our Village’^0 has lent it a haunting quality only to be
found in Raja Rao's celebrated "Javni
Though the story
unfolds from an omniscient point of view# soon that marvell­
ously realized character ashtamp farosh1s breathless narration
of events hushes the omniscient voice reminding one of the
narrators of Raja Rao’s early stories and Kanthapura and also
the spell-binding intensity of the tribal headman Dhunia's
narration in The Strange Case of Billy Biswas.
Dr. Khanna, the most outstanding immigrant physicist
at the University of Wisconsin, comes to India, which he has
left fifteen years earlier, on a four week tour along with his
family.
At the fag end of his successful trip,after his final
talk at a college m his former home town, he encounters an
old man.
The old man introduces himself :
’I am the ashtamp farosh of the town ... your father
and I were close,
like brothers, and I was not then
the ashtamp farosh because I had property and I did
not have to be an ashtamp farosh and I lived m style.
Of course, all this does not interest you.
that.’ (69-70)
I know
The ashtamp farosh tells Dr. Khanna that Khanna's
father Kundan Lai was very poor then and could not have
10. 'Quest* - 94, May-Apl? 1975, PP. 69-72 (All page references
are to the 'Quest') This story is included in Contemporary
Indian English Short Stories, (Ed) Madhusudhan Prasad,
New Delhi, Sterling Publishers Pvt.Ltd., 1984,PP.64-70.
continued his education but for the scholarships.
made a mark as a brilliant student.
And * If he had made
a mark he did not let it get to his head*
his graduation# Kundan Lai took up a job.
his village only after retirement.
But he
(70).
Soon after
He came back to
He was proud of his son
who had settled in America :
’He used to say you would be a big Government man
when you come back. He would say you were coming
back m one year# in two years, any time. Then
you got married and he was quiet for many months.
But he started talking again.
He said you were the
only American from our village.
I asked him once
what was so great about being the only American
from our village.
He said it was an honour*.(70)
A more shattering blow is yet to come for Dr. Khanna.
Unwittingly the ashtamp farosh remarks :
We had foot in the grave# all of us.
What did we
care for your achievements - what you did and what
you did not do.
I told him so one day.
angry with me. (70)
He was
206
The old man continues his narration dwelling m detail on
Kundan Lai•s expectations to get a return ticket to the US
from his son; his disappointment and shame when he did not
receive one; and finally on his illness.
The ashtamp farosh
tells how m spite of his illness Kundan Lai revisited the
school where he studied and how while coming back he crossed
the boilling sand of the cho with dhak leaves - as he used to
do in his school days and had no money to buy shoes :
He walked the whole half mile.
off on the way.
The leaves fell
God himself could not have stopped
him.
He had fever by the time he got home.
next day he died* (72).
The
In spite of the perfect training in the new civilisation
i
Dr. Khanna winces.
Back in US, •cells the omnicient narrator,
he has generally come to be known as the man who does
i
'nothing but stare at his feet.
I
Evidently, wit and irony, humour and pathos have
gone into the making of this poignant piece.
It is also clear
j
that Arun Joshi is consciously experimenting with the
traditional art of story telling, trying, to adapt the tone,
I ‘1
tempo and rhythm o|f a traditional Indian story - a breathless
and seemingly endless narration of events; Ithat brooks no ’buts*
and'ifs’
but flows interminably.
However, though the
207
psychological dimension of the story is very typical of
Arun Joshi, as far as its style is concerned, the story
stands out as an isolated experiment - not very represent­
ative of Arun Joshi.
VIII) Summing Up :
Since as a novelist Arun Joshi appears to be
singularly preoccupied with an agonizing quest of his
protagonists, with forging an aesthetic pattern, the variety
of themes, technique and style of his stories strike the
attention even on a cursory glance.
Also, as the germ of
all his novels could be traced back to one or the other of
these stories it could be argued that Arun Joshi experiments
with various narrative strategies on a smaller scale which
eventually lead him to the finished triumph of his mature
novels.
It is m this sense that his stories have a signi­
ficant place m the context of his artistic career.
His
stories have an important place m the context of Indian
English short story m general too.
For, no other Indian
English writer has given such authentic vigQnettes of modern
Indian industrial world with a consistent seriousness of
purpose as Arun Joshi has done, the authenticity of which
could only be compared to the vignettes of pre-Independence
rural life m Raja Rao’s short stories.
Arun Joshi has
created an exhilarating variety of characters with, of course,
203
varying degrees of success.
The portrait gallery includes
rich industrialists,travelling salesmen, Westernized
intellectuals, poor peasant boys, young eve-teasers - the
survivors as well as the victims of modern Indian society.
Irony and wit,
satire and humour have gone into the making
of these characters.
Taken together, Arun Joshi's stories
give a sure insight into the pseudo-Westernized affluent
society of India where decadence has set in.
His narrative
strategies include first person narrative, omniscient author
narrative, multiple perspective narrative, and objective
reportage.
He experiments with style too which varies from
the typical rhythm of English prose to that of English
adapted to the rhythm of traditional Indian story-telling.
In short, in spite of his brief corpus of short stories, with
such finished models like 'The Homecoming' and 'The Only American
from Our Village', Arun Joshi takes an honoured place among
the best of Indian English short story writers.