Body bags it all!

I AM AN EXECUTIONER

Rajesh Parameshwaran

Bloomsbury

259 pages

Rs 499

A book of short stories is never easy to review. Each one has a different story, presented in a format that is succinct and easy to digest, so cannot be dissected for too long. Each should ideally have a slightly different style, so as to keep the reader riveted and happily so. All this, without the writer losing his or her identity and - most of all - voice, even though that could take on various tones according to the character in centre-focus.

I Am An Executioner as a title echoes with visions of bodies, hangings, maybe even a guillotine or two, some blood and much grief, all spiced with some drama and a whole lot of background history. The tag line of ‘Love Stories’ makes it rather confusing, since you as a reader would expect a little romance gone wrong perhaps, or even a little honour killing or trans-racial weeping and wailing. But none of this happens. There is an amazing array of pictures created with the words and concepts boggle not just the mind, but any perception of reality as well. Along the way you, as reader, need to stop, adjust those glasses that bring into focus 3-D, an alternate universe, a past-present tesseract and a huge heaping helping of madness that filters from each page into the imagination. And the emotions swing wildly from laughter to devastation, even as you marvel at the strange kink in the writer’s head that produced such work.

There are nine stories in this collection, with interesting, intriguing names. Four Rajeshes, for instances, invites reading. It tells the story of a memory of someone, somewhere – or was it I, here? The images are fuzzy, the emotions clear, somewhat like the paint on a building spelling out letters that read Rombachinnapattinam. You stop, you think, you suddenly get it – very small town, it says in a language you learned from your mother. And then you race through the narrative, through stops in the line that is the road to the world that is all about trains, routes, railway timetables, sexual impropriety and clerks who are eerily familiar, still fuzzy, like experiences never fully lived. And the story never ends…”Don’t leave off the story here, blame you! Conclude it!” You echo the author’s words flavoured with frustrated need, almost like the station-master who wants to go to a new level with thoughts of his junior in his…err…mind.

The title story is tinged with an oddness of language that feels awkward, interrupts the flow of the narrative, not quite reaching its goal of being true to the character of the unusually inept executioner and the way he thinks/speaks. It is perhaps too deliberate, inducing stop and starts that are labored rather than natural. Of course, there are gems hidden within, like “But one time there had been a bad happening in the friendly house. Madam had a new lady, one short plumpy girl with whom I liked to do squinchy squinchy.” A quick giggle later, any likely faults are forgiven.

Just like the ‘friendly house’, there are innumerable pictures created by the writer that populate his strangely bizarre universe of the imagination. Some of these are fodder for some new nightmare – the oversized butterfly floating through a dystopian landscape, a Bengal tiger who redefines the concept that is ‘love’, the Thanksgiving feast in America that takes on a new meaning that the hick wife cannot imagine would change her life, the spy who spends forever trying to figure out who he is and so much more. The characters are all peculiarly, idiosyncratically Indian, people we have all met before – perhaps even in the mirror – but now see through a new prism.

This may not be the most sophisticated debut writing there is, but Rajesh Parameshwaran certainly ranks among the most interesting minds that created it!