* Book: Dolls’ Wedding and Other Stories
* Author: Chaso
* Publisher: Penguin India, pp 216
* Price: Rs 299
When I got Chaso’s Dolls’ Wedding and Other Stories, I did what any self-respecting reviewer would do. I went to my father.
For, if the reputation of my grandfather, the real Devulapalli Krishna Sastri, and his home as the transit lounge for all things literary from the 1930s to the 1970s, was anything to go by, my father would have something for me to work with.
“Tell me about Chaso,” I said. “He came along with his daughter, Tulsi, and stayed at our place in Kakinada in 1944, I think for a week,” he said. I may not have read the Telugu originals but, dammit, having played host to the legendary writer when I was a mere glimmer in my father’s eye, I was now qualified to review the translations. Thus armed, I dived into the book. And what a book it is.
Take my advice. Skip the scholarly intro by the translator-editor team of Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman. Save that for later because you will go back to it when you’re done reading.
The first story in this collection is Got to go to Eluru in which Purushottam, a young man on a train, encounters a most unexpected blast from the past. His journey must end in Eluru but, luckily for you, yours has just begun.
From then on, Chaso takes you on an extraordinary journey through the serrated northern coast of Andhra, through the lives and love of ordinary folk.
In Dolls’ Wedding, a great-grandmother talks of her youth to eager kids who have heard the story a hundred times before while The Violin is an O’Henryesque tale of a sickly housewife who yearns for a little melody in her life.
A young man, a mama’s boy, comes into his own in A Shirt and a Towel — as good a coming-of-age tale as you will find anywhere, while in Choice you realise that there is a pecking order even among beggars.
Every story is a little gem. But my personal favourites are Festival and Why will I lose it, Dad? In the first, a rascally boy hurtles through a packed life, playing with his top, stealing almonds, teasing widows, being abandoned by his friends and finally even falling in love briefly — all in the course of a day. In the other, heartbreaking story, a boy who’s been forced to discontinue his studies stands outside his school with the resolve of a satyagrahi. Will his wish come true? Will he be able to overcome his circumstances?
In this book are some of the finest short stories I’ve ever read: tightly plotted, devoid of sentiment or judgement, and displaying a uniform empathy for every character, whether shopkeeper or prostitute, artist or quarry worker, housewife or illegitimate child.
Almost every story, however grave the circumstances of its protagonist, ends on a note of hope, with the writer leaving a window open in the dark lives he explores. Well-known poet Arudra has said it all: “Chaso will be forgotten only when Telugu itself is forgotten.”
Though written between the 1940s and 1970s, not one of these stories feels dated. Chaso is very modern, even progressive, in his depiction of people and relationships. The introduction tells us that Chaso was so self-critical that he tore up many of his stories as not being good enough.
What a pity that he did this and what a pity that more writers published these days don’t do this.
Krishna Sastri Devulapalli is the author of Iceboys in Bellbottoms
