I don’t think I truly understood the meaning of the word ‘surreal’ until I read ‘Return of the Salesman’, the first tale in a collection of short stories by Maithreyi Karnoor titled Gooday Nagar.
The story, about the effect of the arrival of a vacuum cleaner salesman on the people of a small town, was not just ‘familiar but different’ — which is what I had previously understood by the word ‘surreal’. It was familiar and other. Totally out of my experience. This, combined with the humour in the story, added just what I needed in my life at the time: cool oxygen in my lungs, a fizz of excitement in my veins.
Gooday Nagar is a set of ten stories all set in a fictional place called Gooday Nagar, which is sometimes a country, sometimes a region, sometimes a town or a village. It’s a place that each of us knows well, but also a place that means different things to different people. Not all the stories are as exquisitely surreal (I love this word now) as ‘Return of the Salesman’. In fact, some aren’t surreal at all. For example, the power of the story ‘Ladies of Love’ comes from the O. Henry-like twist at the end of the tale. ‘The Visitors (A Strange Murder Non-Mystery)’ reminded me of stories written by children whose imaginations have yet to acquire bounds. Some of the stories are downright sad, and sadness, unfortunately, does not lend itself to the effervescence of imagination. And some of them — ‘The Man Who Dreamt He was Gobhi Manchurian’, for instance — are just funny. No more and no less than that.
Running through all of them, though, is the kind of humour that doesn’t just make you laugh out loud, but also offers perspectives that, for some people, might be just as surreal as the stories in this book, for others, stark reality staring them in the face, and for yet others, simply jokes. That doesn’t matter, because if there’s anything Gooday Nagar shows us, it’s that everything on this planet can be perceived in myriad ways.
If you intend to read this book, here’s a suggestion. Don’t read more than one story at a time — two at max. That’s because Gooday Nagar is like a glass of chilled freshlime soda on a hot day. We all know that for the first few sips, the bubbles, citrus, sugar and salt are pure magic. Soon, however, the soda goes flat and the citrus turns dull. So read Gooday Nagar in small sips, whenever you need a shot of literary electrolytes.
Gooday Nagar
By Maithreyi Karnoor
Westland Books
pp. 232; Rs 499
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: deccanchronicle.com
