The ‘diasporic distractions’ of a short-story teller

“Short stories are tiny windows into other worlds and other minds and other dreams. They are journeys you can make to the far side of the universe and still be back in time for dinner.”

― Neil Gaiman

The great American master of the short-story form Andre Dubus claimed, “I love short stories because I believe they are the way we live. They are what our friends tell us, in their pain and joy, their passion and rage, their yearning and their cry against injustice.” And reading Mohamed M Keshavjee’s ‘Diasporic Distractions’, one can’t but concur with Dubus.

Keshavjee’s collection of short stories plays like conversations you would have with friends and relatives about people and places that may have very little to do with your daily life but whose experiences either carry a sense of familiarity or just plain entertainment meant to be passed on like a good book.

Finding meaning in Yash Tandon’s apt description of the Indian diaspora as the “step-children of the colonial empire”, this collection of short stories nimbly charts the lives of an eclectic group of people making their way in foreign landscapes by adapting or adopting to ways of lives that at first seem foreign but then morphs into something familiar.

One could argue that this collection of short stories spanning different era is about how the “step-children” grow up and develop identities of their own. The sense of belonging or not belonging which permeates stories in post-colonial writings gives way to something else here, a weltanschauung that Keshavjee nimbly explores in narratives which are not obsessed with discovering where the protagonist fit in the grand scheme of things but rather about people who have created diasporic identities of and on their own.

Keshavjee attempts two difficult tasks with this collection of short stories. The first is the short-story form that is harder to pull off than most readers think. The second is writing about the Indian diaspora, which as a genre many argue has exhausted its charm. What Keshavjee does with this collection of short stories is to demonstrate that as a writer, he knows the pitfalls of the form but more importantly, in his own quiet way, colours outside the lines when it comes to this particular subject matter.

Malaysians familiar with the Indian experience in literary fiction need not worry. Those Indian “traits” which are so often fodder for caricature in most stories of the Indian diaspora are thankfully missing in the pages of these books. What is offered instead is the outsider perspective told not with anxiety or confrontation but with warmth and humour.

Halfway through a five-page short story of an encounter between a somewhat smuggish Indian trader and a knowing low-level African bureaucrat, the reader gets the distinct impression that the former will end up on the losing end of this encounter. It is a neat trick to pull, of allowing the reader to empathise with both the protagonist and antagonist, and ‘Diasporic Distractions’ offer readers the opportunity to do exactly that in this warm and emotionally generous collection of short stories.

In the same story, a paragraph jumps out which Malaysians would find familiar - “The argument that Asians did not know where their loyalties lay gave them the necessary time to Africanise the economy — or so they thought — while having the benefit of not appearing to be racist” – and then it hits you, the more different we seem to think we are, from one another, the more similar the modes of oppression.

‘I wish I had the bloody loot!’

What these stories offer is not some grand narrative of the Indian diaspora but rather the everyday living of a diaspora whose experience paradoxically has not changed over the years. The experience of these Indians in the post-colonial era of some of these stories is not very different from the post-millennium travellers making their way in the world today. Indeed, some stories in the collection reflect this.

While the central protagonist in ‘Caught in a blessed rain’, Tribhovan, who is most often mistaken for Saudi royalty, disarms all with “I may have the looks, but I wish I had the bloody loot!” – may seem like the befuddled Indian peddling his wares to an emerging market, we soon learn that the indignation he suffers has a deeper meaning. It goes without saying that this could not have happened to a more pleasant fellow.

This is to say that the outcomes in these stories offer more than what appears at first glance. The problems of the short-story form is that we expect obvious pay-offs in the conclusion. What this collection offers is sometimes sleight of hand that takes us down quirky roads that ultimately make sense even if in the beginning, some stories sound like shaggy dog tales.

Nowhere is this more evident than in ‘Heady conversations’, where an Anglophile Indian lawyer and his Indian friend from England begin a train journey which ends with the reader appreciating the significance of handshakes. Along the way, cultural similarities make way for commonalities of profession that point more to the meme of a borderless world than any ethereal ideas of nationhood or ethnicity.

My favourite tale, ‘Communicating with the comma’, is a contemporary tale which packs into its longish narrative everything from office politics in a tech firm, an imaginary meeting between a recalcitrant Sikh and the Pope (that involves an interpretation of hand gestures) - and which is extremely “meta” if you think about it - and finally, the uses of commas.

While I may have highlighted the more whimsical nature of some of the short stories in this collection, this is more out of personal preference rather than any sort of grand theme running through this collection.

While I have read many stories about the Indian diaspora, what I found truly interesting about this collection of short stories is that they really exemplified Dubus’s rejoinder. Read this book and you will discover stories worth passing along.

---

Mohamed M Keshavjee will be speaking at the United Nations International Day of Non-Violence on Monday, Oct 2 at 5pm, Royal Lake Club, Kuala Lumpur. The event is organised by the Gandhi Memorial Trust (GMT).

---

S THAYAPARAN is Commander (Rtd) of the Royal Malaysian Navy.- Mkini