Book review: The right degree of absurdity

One Thousand Days in a Refrigerator is the intriguing title story in a collection of 14 short stories that have been translated from author Manoj Kumar Panda’s original work in Odia. Each strikes a note of oddity, whether in the subversive nature of the theme, or the treatment of it and often at the level of semantics and language. The title story is about a husband’s regrets by the bedside of his comatose wife and it jars the reader’s expectations in several ways. It opens with the unnamed narrator in hospital, telling his unconscious wife Lara a story about Eskimos and their tradition of sending the eldest man in the community on a journey towards his death.

This might seem like a fitting tribute to her current condition, a condition that can only end with the cessation of life support. Except for the fact that author Manoj Kumar Panda has nothing quite that sentimental in mind. The narrator’s dramatic mon-ologue becomes increasingly absurd as he attempts to pinpoint the moment his wife actually exited his life as a romantic partner and began to seem a stranger:

Then your epileptic stroke. The shameful irony is that it finally relieved me of the perpetual torment of watching your untrammelled interaction with your superiors. The interaction which prompted them to treat a professional relationship as a means of recreation. It would also, I thought with relief, put a full stop to the dirty comments my colleagues used to make about you and your superiors. From this point on his associations become even stranger as the narrator grapples with the question of God’s role in all this.

But see how God has intervened in the right moment when I was about to sink into a labyrinth of terrible depression and self-loathing. Will you ever find such an act of benevolence in the pages of the history of mankind? My salute to the life you live in the refrigerator!
Lara, I love you so very much!
I love you! I love you!

Elsewhere in the story there is the touch of poetry, as the story gives way to a lyrical form, mulling over how nothing earthly can make its way or find “entry” into Lara’s conscious-ness. Perhaps, most interesti-ngly of all, the narrator rises and falls in sympathy for the reader. His obsessiveness over his wife tips across boundaries of expectations until he seems, at times, paranoid, loving, passi-onate, compulsive, vindictive, crazy, rational, cruel, dispassionate. Most of the stories in this collection feature arresting male protagonists.

In The Aesthetics of a Supercyclone, a young man named Ruben believes he has “become free of the shackles of time.” He is the only survivor of his household after a tsunami strikes his area and he believes that this has made him a “detached, shapeless, supine being.” A conviction that leads him to do bizarre things.   This collection scrapes the social barrel for the absurdities of both personality and existence. Some are obviously specific social absurdities, as with Filling in the Blanks, which opens with the dramatic line, “A virgin girl of 12 was running across vast cornfields.”

The flatness of the scenario: a child bonded in disguised prostitution to a moneylender is alleviated by the flow of metaphors. Her pursuer is a man whose every footstep bears the imprint of a crushed butterfly. The prose gives way to lyricism and then returns to the dramatic immediacy of the hunt. In the next story titled The Hunt, another little girl is crushed to death, alongside her family, by the cruelty of outmoded superstitions and traditional exploitation, even as flies perform a “Naroo Dance” around her gaping mouth.

In the Alphabet Garden, a three-month-old infant is a victim of an unnamed crime and ends up abandoned in a brick kiln. The author’s interest in exploring the myriad ways in which society lets down the individual resonates through most stories in the collection, particularly in When the Gods Left, A Letter from Mesopotamia and, the absurd, The Testimony of God in which even God’s brief appearance in a court of law proves very little when it comes to vindicating the innocent.

The universe is even more obviously absurd in stories like A Picture of Agony and The Dreamer’s Tale — where individual efforts seem to come to naught when pitted against an indifferent universe. Yet there is a current of resilience that runs through the book, if only because the men, women and children in it live with such vitality that one cannot ignore their participation in the business of life. One Thousand Days in a Refrigerator is not entirely without flaws. The writing can feel stuck and repetitive at times, yet it succeeds in offering the reader just the right degree of absurdity for its story worlds to seem new and noteworthy.

Karishma Attari is a Mumbai based book critic and author of I See You a coming-of-age horror novel