Art does not explain. It illuminates. A great artist sees the world as a mystery, not as a problem. His work offers not solutions but a deepened sense of wonder. That is why those who try to forge art out of formulas soon fade away and never bear reviving.
To realize that what is obvious and given is also endlessly mysterious is to be fortified against the temptations of a metaphysical closure. The artist is a seeker, not a believer: the current of his faith does not allow the stasis of a coagulated belief. He experiments and innovates and tries to reach ever farther, seeking to illuminate what is without violating its mystery. This is one of the reasons many in politics and religion despise and fear art. They find it to be useless and dangerous. They cannot manipulate—take in hand and use—it. They know they cannot know it all. It doesn’t let itself be safely exploited.
Every mature story of Paul Zacharia—and he seems to have matured super-fast in handling depth, light, structure and complexity—is an adventure in search of a way. The surprising thing is he always succeeds and has his way. And he has it because he follows no way, not even a way dug out with his own delicate spade of a pen. After reading forty-nine stories in a critic’s disorderly, sceptical sequence, you can hardly anticipate what will happen in the fiftieth.
Neither can you anticipate the form the next story will take. It can be a fable, a checklist, a parable, a letter, an allegory, a personal essay, a fantasy, a document stocked with bureaucratic ‘realism’, a first-person narrative in an oppressively enclosed present, a memoir, a dive into humour, a report, a weirdly delightful marriage of the comic and the gloomily philosophical, an exuberance of audaciously crafted formal impurity, or a naked bouncing narrative free of the constraints of conventional logic and wind-blown by the pleasures of sheer telling.
Zacharia is incomparable when he engages with the impossible. The fruit of such engagements is the invention of extreme probabilities that enlarge the art of storytelling and stretch the reader’s imagination and empathy. ‘Annamma Teacher: A Memoir’, ‘Till You See the Looking Glass’ and ‘Who Knows?’ are three such masterpieces.
The first brings pettiness and divinity, death and eros face to face. The self-sacrificing spinster, ‘her family’s milch cow’, finds in Christ, as she outgrows the age at which he was crucified, a younger brother she can reprimand and confide in. It is a personal miracle of innocent faith in Christ’s timeless—immortal—humanity. And Christ reciprocates: he arrives to console her with his words and touch during her anguished last loneliness and ‘to lay her to rest in her final fatigue’.
‘Till You See the Looking Glass’ harvests rich ambiguity by making a parable gaze into the mirror of naturalism. Christ flees the mirror the barber offers him to see his face. He is afraid, and cries. The story leaves you strangely fulfilled in its irresolution, the mystery buttonholing you wordlessly. The story has drifted into silence and gone on to tell you more than can be told.
‘Who Knows?’ augments a Biblical parable by penetrating its paradoxes. ‘Is this how a saviour should appear? In the blood of a thousand children?’ A prostitute asks a soldier who is looking to find and kill the saviour. Zacharia’s reticent evocation of the atmosphere recalls Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment: a prostitute reading to a murderer, in the dim light of a candle, the story of the raising of Lazarus. Here too evil is unable to disown good.
‘Once Upon a Time’ is a dark Orwellian fable of the internalized craving for sacrifice for the sake of the clan. The dying young frog’s cry ‘stirs like a blind worm’ (an image of futility distilled) against the muteness of the pond and the indifference of the gods. In ‘Reflections of a Hen in Her Last Hour’, the bird confesses, in a euphoric monologue, her wish to be killed and consumed by a jackal. Surely, these are also compact political allegories of enchantment.
‘One-eyed Cats’ is a part-surrealistic tale of sin and forgiveness, the forgiver a one-eyed cat who ‘oozes’ into the narrator’s dream in ‘a silent procession’ of identical cats in order to hug him. ‘A Complaint About the Public Library at Yesupuram’, crafted as a letter of protest and affirmation with Borgesian shades, is a prescient testament to the general decay of India’s public libraries in the wake of neoliberalism. ‘Some Mechanical Inventions for the Benefit of Mankind’, written in 1982, could be read today as a humorous take on the startup fever.
The first story in this collection is ‘Bhaskara Pattelar and My Life’. It is a gossip-like unrestrained narrative cast in the grey zone in which power and humanity meet and light up the dark core of Hegel’s master-slave bond. ‘A Day’s Work’ is a son’s letter to a prospective nurse for his aged mother’s 24×7 care. It is a neurotic’s over-detailed checklist, which incidentally also reflects his meticulous concern as it does the extreme demands of a nurse’s vocation. The exactness and clarity of the minute-to-minute routine, put down without apparent emotion and as if mechanically, is like a clock face that hides the force wound up in the spring. ‘The Death and Funeral of Sister Alphonsa’ is a post-mortem memoir written, in Flaubertian free style, with the breezy freedom of a sentimental fairytale teller.
Many stories end without a resolution, generating shock waves that live on to stun you long after the reading. Others resolve as they end, but even they remain open and unexhausted, loaded to spring a surprise in your unguarded moments of spontaneous contemplation.
Paul Zacharia has distinguished himself in both literature and journalism. He writes in Malayalam and English. The stories gathered in this collection have been translated from Malayalam by five translators and himself. The translators are AJ Thomas, Gita Krishnakutty, S Gayatri Devi, SP Ramesh and Anupama Raju: each one, as their work shows, is a translator of exceptional discernment and cultivated sensibility. This is a book to keep and return to; a book to gift and to recommend. The Indian short story will stand taller in world literature after its arrival.
Rajesh Sharma, critic, essayist and translator, is former Professor of English, Punjabi University, Patiala. His latest book is Dekhna Hoga (Autumn Art, 2024), a collection of poems in Hindi.