Portraitist of the off-kilter

The poet, editor, journalist and anthologist Manohar Shetty returns this time with a book of short stories. ‘Mr Secondhand and Other Stories’ is a vibrant canvas of Goan life, with patches of Bombay, and reminiscent of RK Narayan’s Malgudi.

Shetty’s vision, predominantly comic with streaks of the lightly grotesque, is best exemplified by the stories ‘Mr Secondhand’ and ‘BBC’. He gently stretches the conventions of narrative realism to unveil the idiosyncrasies of ordinary people in everyday life. His point of view is subtly ironic and essentially sympathetic. When he deals with corruption or hypocrisy, he doesn’t fume. The characters are not demonised, but remain human. The cunning Felix in ‘Black Label’ is ultimately a pitiable, even amusing, creature of the flesh.

Character is the story for Manohar Shetty. He is a portraitist, but of the off-kilter. He has a hawk’s eye for the queer, the bizarre, the ludicrous, even the pathological. Yet, everything is cast in beauty. In ‘I Wish You Were Here’, a pen friend’s obsessive wait for mail is treated in a way that earns him the reader’s admiration as much as pity. Townspeople may laugh at Caji, the protagonist of ‘Mr Secondhand’, yet he is a charming and enviable enigma. The dissembler in ‘Innerwear’ may invite repugnance, but his silence throbs with a faint hint of helplessness and the taint of the original sin. ‘Mourners’ and ‘Personal Effects’ are meticulous studies in hypocrisy and evoke a complex emotional response. Hypocrisy is universal and forgivable, Shetty reminds the reader.

His fine ear for the colloquial gives to his characters their personal voice. The comic potential of this skill is richly actualised in ‘Lingua Franca’. To it is added dramatic irony which produces effects simultaneously of knowledge and ignorance in the reader and a character respectively — a feat difficult to pull off except by one adept in the psychology of storytelling.

An example of Shetty’s literary artistry in capturing a character indicates what is at stake on the borders between imagination and actuality: “It seemed to him that he was watching a vivid close-up of the human skin, the pores showing up obscenely, like goose pimples, like the skin of a scruffed chicken.” Elsewhere, he describes a man as “tall, cadaverous and grey-eyed”. A miserly Marilyn, in ‘Remedies’, lights up her verandah for Christmas “with one forlorn string of coloured bulbs and a small star”.

Shetty is wary of the journalist’s cliché, which can be fatal to literary art. But he overwrites sometimes. A few stories, such as ‘Weekend’ and ‘Wish You Were Here’, could have ended crisper.

The most remarkable aspect of Shetty’s art of weaving a story is formal experimentation. Of this, the most outstanding instance is ‘Lancelot Gomes’, which traces the course of gossip as it travels and mutates. The writer’s abundant gifts of exuberant invention and descriptive precision are impressive, as is his power to hold every bit of the narrative in coherent order. In the Kafkaesque ‘Mirrors and a Mannequin’, the gradual accumulation of perfumes received gratis threatens to overwhelm a man’s sanity. The controlled fantastical structure of ‘The Confessions of Kamadeva’ mirrors the story’s theme of fantasy running amok. In ‘Vikram’s Vendetta’, a tabloid story with psychological shades takes a metafictional turn before ending.

The richest of the stories is the simple, quietly suggestive and thriftily told ‘Inheritance’. A father lets his astonishment silently sink in that his sons haven’t really failed his expectations, as he had feared, but have inherited more than he had longed to bequeath.

— The writer is a former Professor of English at Punjabi University