"The Love Song of Maya K and Other Stories" | A riveting journey through being and becoming

‘Don’t judge a book by its cover’ is an old adage that interestingly has almost nothing to do with a book in common parlance. But, I instantly took to the cover of Shuma Raha’s debut book The Love Song of Maya K and Other Stories as it harked back to my favourite poet and a favourite poem by him. More interestingly, the name held out a promise that the book with its 13 variously flavoured bunch of short stories lived up to, in all its colour, form and content. Short stories, as is known, need to be sharp, short, tell a story and end with a story untold. Often times, at the end, we hanker for more, or else, it leaves in its wake a promise wafting in the wind, unfulfilled and yet complete in what it has already conveyed. Raha’s bouquet is a heady mix of all this and more.

Things start warming up from the very first story – Smell the Coffee Beans, Please. Sandhya is a shop girl at a mall who spends a large chunk of her day, day-dreaming. She weaves her own tapestry where she seeks refuge to escape the mundane. And, yet, the way the author puts it, it is not an escape. It is an alternate space, as it were, which is as real as the world she lives in. Almost everyone has a secret world. But with Sandhya’s me-world, the reader’s identification is almost complete. The Kill is contemporary, real. There is a softly-veiled love story there, but the narrative manages to touch a raw nerve. The eponymous story of the collection is set in Delhi – modern, yet medieval. At least, so it is with one of the protagonists. Even as one is led into the maze of Maya’s world, nothing prepares you for the ending. And then you find yourself exclaiming, “But of course!!”

There are endings to some stories, which, when viewed critically could have been different. There are others you are hugely satisfied with, and a couple which are a tad too predictable. But when a reader gets bothered about a denouement in the first place, her sheer involvement with the book is complete. You might debate about endings, but that does not detract from the seamless flow of the narrative.

Raha’s stories are as wide ranging as they get – in terms of topics, milieus, emotions, the people being talked of and the situations being explored. The mix is intriguing: An elderly couple being forced to sell their family house because the children don’t care two hoots about its upkeep, an imaginative child caught in the bitterness of his parents with just a hint of an extra-marital, a woman in denial in an unhappy marriage, a middle-aged man fancying young girls, a qualified and successful woman strangely attracted to a cabbie and a young, rich woman marrying into poverty to experience the romance and novelty of such a defiance. Raha doesn’t just build characters, but actually goes about creating such a vibrant context, that the people seem to naturally spring from it. She has an eye for detail which you cherish as it embellishes the plot further.

What makes Raha’s stories consistently readable is her supreme command over language, expression and the ability to use appropriate syntax for the occasion. Her imagery is graphic – she plays a lot with nature – and she would pick up oft-seen objects to give an interesting twist and our imagination a delicious spin. She effortlessly slips in phrases like: ‘To their right, the river grinned broadly in the bright afternoon sun’ or ‘Behind them the golf courses stretched out like an emerald sea’ or something like ‘She let him kiss her and felt the waters under the Kalighat bridge close over her head’. These are not difficult phrases. They are simple, yet eloquent. And they go a long way in consolidating the collection. Certainly a book to cherish, Shuma Raha’s The Love Song of Maya K and other Stories is not to be missed by any lover of the written word!