D(r)eadly Tales

Writing the dread can be self-consuming. Reading it is no-less nerve-wracking. Swadesh Deepak’s ten stories, collected under the portentous title A Bouquet of Dead Flowers, venture to configure the unnamed dread with their slow-paced seductive prose. The stories are so intelligently sequenced in the anthology that once a reader takes the plunge, he/she is drawn compulsively into the blackhole of dread, layer-by-layer. Readerly choice becomes redundant; the writerly authority and the editorial scheming simply take over. ‘Hunger’ offers a rather bold beginning to the collection as it unfolds the abject levels to which destitute children are sexually exploited by the police. In the story, ‘dread’ is dramatized, and its gory violence is too apparent and tangible. The story hits the moral sensibility of the readers, but it does not disorient them into a state of inner psychological confusion. It is in the subsequent stories, that ‘dread’ takes a subtler haunting Kafka-esque form, and its uncanny tentacles begin to enter deep into the subconscious of the readers.