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BOOK REVIEW
Vivid and alive
 Unforgettable encounters:
Title: Samugath Suhadiniya
Author: Seetha Mahendra
Genre: Short story collection
Publishers: Godage Book Emporium
Page count: 96
Price: Rs 250
Are novels necessary when life can be glimpsed clearly and vividly
through short stories like these?
Ever read the last page of a book and felt like calling the author to
tell her or him how much you liked reading the book? Seetha Mahendra's
debut collection of short stories Samugath Suhadiniya is bound to make
you feel this way, with a single exception; you would want to call her
by the time you reach the sixtieth page.
In a book which has a mere ninety-six pages by the time you reach
page sixty you have read half the book, or in other words, you have read
nine out of the fifteen stories that make up the collection. By the time
you begin to read the ninth story you would have encountered
Chandrakanthi, elated and eager to tell her liberal minded husband she
had found the perfect tenant for their annex, Soraya with her dreams of
studying to become a lady doctor and Mrs. Samarasinghe who runs the best
and cheapest clothes shop in town. By now you would begin to feel
slightly anxious the number of pages remaining to be read is fast
diminishing. You wouldn't want the stories to end. Not just yet, not
just when you have begun to forget the world around you, when you have
begun to step out of yourself (and even if, for the briefest of
seconds), be a part of someone else's world.
This 'someone else' might be Benjamin, Meesha or Mrs. Rogers; the
vivid characters who inhabit the world of Samugath Suhadiniya, whose
paths, (if they have not already done so) might one day cross yours.
There is Kamani who gives birth to her first baby in St. Mary's Hospital
in Paddington,London, there is Uthpala, the ill treated wife of a
politician who lives near the Police park, there is Uthara and the
benevolent nun, sharing a room in a hospital and there is Seetha
Mahendra herself, telling us about a visit to Poland leaving her three
sons at home with her mother, and how, when she used to live in Notting
Hill, she almost loses her son at the Whiteleys shopping centre in
London. The most striking among these is, "My Son's Dissertation." The
twenty minutes that follow after she begins to read the first chapter is
shrouded in mystery. Is she dreaming or is she recalling an old memory?
Could he have really done what he does? Keep guessing.
This then is the essence of Seetha Mahendra's stories. Skillfully
written and well structured they are effortless narratives in which the
author does not ask us to like, dislike or judge her characters. She
simply wants us to know they are there; vivid and alive and
unforgettable.
By the time you reach the last page you would be asking yourself one
single, long question. If short story writers like Seetha Mahendra can
pack so much of life into two or three pages, if a sentence or two is
enough to create the kind of "emotional involvement" Stephen King
applauds, why bother with volumes and volumes of prose narratives? Why
bother with the novel?
- Aditha Dissanayake
[email protected]
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