Everyday Madness: Seven stories, 30 years

Hyderabad: Seven short stories written intermittently over a period of 30 years, surprisingly having a common theme of “derangement”, made author Cyrus Mistry compile them into a collection titled Passion Flower. And so you have Percy, who meets a ghost in the washroom of a public library; Jacintha, on being stalked by mysterious strangers, believes her enemies are out to eliminate her because she knows too much; Bokha, who tries to counter the powerful black magic of his wicked old mother in order to shield his helpless lover among others.

“All the protagonists are kinky, bizarre, cruel or downright insane. Perhaps ‘deranged’ (as suggested in the book’s subtitle) is a strong word to describe characters whom one might as well encounter in one’s day-to-day life. Yet, I felt it to be an appropriate description because madness blooms all around us, and in ourselves too, all the time, in so many multifarious shades, whether or not we are truthful enough to call it by its name,” adds Mistry, who wrote the stories while working as a journalist and then as a freelance writer.

Around the time Salman Rushdie released his book Midnight’s Children, Cyrus Mistry had been planning a novel that would be, “just as vast, complex and groundbreaking.” But somehow, he never got along to completing it. “I felt I didn’t know how to write a novel. The mysteries of the form were too overwhelmingly elusive for me,” says Mistry, who had started off his career as a playwright.

He finally completed his unfinished novel in 2005, and published it under the title of The Radiance of Ashes. The book was shortlisted for the Crossword Book Award, only to be followed by his second novel Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer that won the prestigious DSC Prize for South Asian Literature.

Mistry informs that the feeling has “more than sunk in”. He admits, “The kind of attention a big prize like that gets one can be terribly distracting and time-consuming. But I’m not complaining. I know once the dust has settled, I’ll soon be able to retreat once again back to the kind of serious writing I aim to do.”

Cyrus, whose writings have frequently observed the Parsi community from close quarters, feels that it is important to write characters and stories which extend beyond one’s zone of familiarity. “I do believe that one can write well about a milieu one is intimately acquainted with. However, writing fiction is also an outreach programme of the imagination, investing other realities with life.”

Although Cyrus and his brother Rohinton Mistry went on to become acclaimed novelists, he says all the four siblings shared a mutual love for reading and writing in their childhood, “My eldest brother, Aspi, had actually published a short story in a youth magazine, and my sister, Firuza, had written a short skit which was performed at her school’s annual day. Our parents were readers too.”

“Also, I should mention that as a family, we were all quite crazy about music,” he adds.