Dear Reader,
I have decided to trade my digital dopamine loops for literary plot twists. The rule is simple: every time I feel the itch to scroll through social media, I open a short story instead.
On Monday morning, the air outside the window is still. The palm trees feel painted, not a frond stirs. Inside, at my desk, papers have not yet had a chance to pile up; I returned home only last week. A red china mug with yellow paper flowers handmade by my youngest sits by my elbow. The room smells of candied apple; I have, I admit, become Goop-like about scented candles.
I am reading Edith Wharton, the writer of favorite novels like The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence. Wharton feels to me like the American equivalent of Jane Austen, as she writes about men and women and marriage but with the greater boldness that comes with living a century later and in New York. The Other Two is a short story of a woman with three husbands. I read it and immediately long for lots of people to discuss it with.
The next day I cross the road, dodging autos and a fruit-seller’s cart overflowing with big malta oranges, bananas and blood-red pomegranates. And in a minute I am in Javaphile, a tiny low-roofed coffee shop, really more like a few tables in the foyer of a fitness gym than a café. But they serve the most divine hot chocolate with marshmallows. And besides, I can walk out in slippers and a shoulder bag and I have coffee and peace and quiet. Okay, scratch the quiet; there is always so much chatter, the kind that makes you want to eavesdrop.
“He just won’t agree,” says one slim, smart yummy mummy to another, both dressed in form-fitting tank tops and tracks. And I am hooked already.
Who is he? And what won’t he agree to?
It is the same delicious human mystery that pulls me into Vivek Shanbhag’s A Measure of Martyrdom in my copy of Granta India. A man, his subordinate, a dinner party, a young girl — a whole world captured in a handful of pages.
Short Stories
Losing myself in it reminds me of the years when the babies were tiny, when there were so many demands on my mind I didn’t dare disappear into novels.
Those days I made strict rules for myself about not reading—the only exception was short stories, one for lunch hour. Sometimes I’d cheat and read an extra one. Or I’d read Alice Munro, whose short stories are actually quite long.
Since then, somehow, I’ve read fewer.
But this week I’m back.
And back once again because of a baby—the September baby has begun a fiction writing course she’s excitedly snuck in between her Operations Management and Financial Statements Analysis.
She sends me a WhatsApp message- “My wife began making those phone calls just shy of our first wedding anniversary.”
It’s the first line of a short story.
I am intrigued and all agog to head to Bora Chung’s A Very Ordinary Marriage. Who is this wife and why is she making these odd phone calls—is the husband being unnecessarily suspicious, or is she really up to something underhand?
A day later we have dinner with our college professor who has come into town. In the hotel lobby, I am surrounded by the buzz of many tongues. A couple in their thirties walk past, British by the looks of it, both with backpacks, both wearing white linen shirts and jeans and managing somehow to look corporate yet casual.
Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, I see palm trees that sway, and beyond that the breathtaking blue of the Arabian Sea. Bombay has never looked more beautiful. We could be anywhere in the world, I think, and feel a surge of pride for this, my adopted city. This is the thing with cities: clustered within them is so much creativity and enterprise and energy.
I think back to a short story I read by Willa Cather, a gem of an American writer. A Wagner Matinée is about a moment when a woman comes back to the city - a talented woman who has left the city for love and has since then been living in the frontiers of Nebraska, trapped in a hinterland of cooking and cleaning and farming. I think of how I sometimes long for the solitude of Manali, of the pull between mountain solitude and city energy, and I wonder – is there a message for me here somewhere?
The weekend arrives, and I decide to watch everything on offer at the theatre. The plays - The Nether and Anatomy of a Suicide - are intense, theatre as short story, leaving me filled with the same sharp images as the short stories on my desk.
This week of small windows has had the widest views - Wharton’s divorcees, Shanbhag’s dinner parties, Cather’s woman trapped in Nebraska’s hinterland. A week of choosing stories over scrolling.
And I find myself wondering: why did I ever stop?
Tell me, dear reader — what short story should I reach for next?