Book Review by Somdatta Mandal
Title: Once Elephants Lived Here: Stories
Author: Geetanjali Shree
Translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell
Publisher: Penguin Random House India
When an author residing in India writes in Hindi and then gets translated into English by a foreigner who resides in the United States, the result is awesome. When Geetanjali Shree along with her translator Daisy Rockwell managed to secure the International Booker Prize in 2022 for the novel Tomb of Sand, the first thing that struck the readers is the exceptional stylistic experimentalism that made the book unique. Now with this new publication entitled Once Elephants Lived Here, comprising of eleven short stories that covers a wide variety of themes, the first thing that draws our attention is how the author dismisses conventional storytelling patterns and unfurls before us entirely new ways of conceiving and presenting storytelling to the readers. Interestingly, the stories included here were published in Hindi way back in 2012, proving the fact that experimentalism is the author’s forte where there are layers of subtext and one often must grasp the unwritten meanings floating around the words and phrases.
The titular story, ‘Once Elephants Lived Here’, is about the narrator and an old woman — about two generations –encompassing the destruction of an old city and it’s reconstruction. The topographical changes on both sides of the river remind one of the destructions after the Partition, and in the end the old woman is found literally and metaphorically dead on the bench. ‘These Days’ talks about the day before Holi, when there is a curfew and it is a period of community divide. A man sits quietly on the veranda of an old house belonging to his friend when he watches a shadow jump over the boundary wall and goes into the house to collect some things in a duffle bag. The twist of the tale comes in the end when he realises that it was his Muslim friend who had come as a shadow in order to break into his own house.
‘The End’ is a wonderful tale about an eighty-five-year-old unnamed patriarch of a house who after his retirement seems a misfit and annoys everyone with his behaviour and feels that giving orders is his birthright. The real twist in the tale comes after his death and the reaction of Ma, his wife. Another domineering grandfather is found in the story ‘And I Saw Myself Running’ where the grandson narrator, Raja, tells us about an out and out patriarch who worshipped Lord Shiva and played with snakes. The twist in the story comes when he suddenly passes on.
Middle-aged angst comes out clearly in ‘Out for a Spin’ where a woman spends all day compulsively walking in circles around her housing complex. She is a misfit of sorts, basically a loner who can’t communicate with anyone in the housing society. She gives us detailed observations about the different kinds of morning walkers but there is no introduction, no explanation, no denouement. In another story ‘So Much Sky’, a woman goes on a writer’s retreat, and in a pseudo-sci-fi turn of events, falls passionately in love with the sky. The other participants in the retreat are like robots. In ‘Butterflies’, a narrator staying in a cottage in Kerala is overwhelmed with the grief over past events but is surprised out of her self-indulgence by a mysterious group of young women who are either nurses or diabetes patients; she’s never sure which, but they come to the charity hospital to die. In most of the stories, plots break, sentences shatter midway, new words are formed, and new narrative structures are erected and felled.
The three final stories are set in Japan, which are spare and elegant and remind us of Japanese minimalist aesthetics. In ‘March, Ma and Sakura’, we have a mother who blooms with the cherry blossoms. In ‘Bulldozer’, a patient travelling on the Shinkansen train to Tokyo comes with her family for further treatment, narrates the sights and sounds she sees outside and is reminded how as a child she had complete faith that her Papa’s daily promise was true, and each day, she was convinced he would bring her a bulldozer. The last story in the collection is called ‘Fatigue’. It beautifully describes the ambience inside a Japanese graveyard built of gleaming grey stones and covered with offerings of bowls of water and vases full of flowers. The conversation between the nameless narrator and the visitor is interesting to read.
The book, therefore, presents a great challenge to the layman reader who cannot simply pick it up and start reading at leisure. One must read meticulously, ponder over the distortion of the usual short story genre, keep track of the convoluted or sometimes half-finished sentences and wonder where the narrator or the protagonist of the story is leading you – sometimes round and round and without reaching a denouement. All said and done, one must pick up this book to savour how post-modern storytelling can become an art in itself. The bond between the writer and the translator has worked out so nicely that one expects such collaborations in future as well.
Somdatta Mandal, critic and translator, is former Professor of English at Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan, India.
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