Mithun Number Two and Other Mumbai Stories review: Shards that reflect migrant lives
Jayant Kaikini’s stories, translated from Kannada by Tejaswini Niranjana, invite readers to peer into the hidden corners of urban existence where the ordinary becomes extraordinary
For Frank O’Connor, the short story has a unique role to play in literature. In The Lonely Voice, the Irish author writes that the form has never had a hero, and what it reveals instead is “a submerged population group” — by which he means “outlawed figures wandering about the fringes of society”. In a characteristic short story, then, there is something we do not often find in the novel: “an intense awareness of human loneliness.”
The epigraph to No Presents Please, Jayant Kaikini’s first collection of short stories translated from Kannada into English by Tejaswini Niranjana, gestures towards this notion of the short story. “To all those orphaned and undelivered letters,” it reads, “lying in post offices, addresses unknown, unable to return”. The characters in that collection comprise drifters and itinerant workers in Mumbai, from a cinema-hall cleaner to a disgruntled bus driver. The city itself is an ever-present presence, with its anarchic spaces and hollow promises of advancement.
Migrants in the Maya Nagari
Mithun Number Two and Other Mumbai Stories (Eka), Kaikini’s new collection also translated by Niranjana, continues this writerly endeavour. These 16 stories, written between the 1990s and early 2000s, are distinguished by their focus on migrants in India’s maya nagari (which is also the apt title of another recent anthology of stories about the metropolis). These individuals arrive in the city “like a straw coming to shore on a wave”. Through their ups and downs, they ask themselves if this was how it felt to be “afflicted with the disease called Mumbai”.
Their city is not one of glittering malls, new coastal roads and sleek high-rises, but comprises more down-to-earth locales. They are part of the throngs at Churchgate station, eat at streetside Konkani restaurants, live in chawls or other tenements in the far suburbs, visit bustling municipal markets, and find themselves washed up in public hospitals. The so-called Mimicry Brothers of one story perform at office events, women’s associations, and housing colonies, while others make a living by working at or setting up roadside shops.
In Kaikini’s stories, plot is not the point; his approach brings to mind Chekhov’s comment that when he finished with his characters, he liked to return them to life. Mithun Number Two pulls back the curtain on a gallery of people on the periphery who are faced with uncomfortable or unfamiliar situations, sometimes tinged with the surreal. At the end, we are left with an unmoored sense of their lives continuing along the same lines.
‘The Ruse of the Ordinary’
Here, for example, a circus trapeze artist contemplates an uncertain future after childbirth; an 11-year-old domestic worker is taken to meet his estranged younger sister; an itinerant artist reflects on his life while recuperating in hospital; an office clerk in a kholi accommodates his aunt who has come to cook for him; and the titular story’s actor-aspirant wonders whether his ambition is worthwhile. All of them have limited agency because of their inferior social and economic status, yet Kaikini weaves beauty and poignancy into their attempts to come to grips with their predicaments.
In a famous passage in The Red and the Black, the French writer Stendhal described the novel as a mirror being carried along a road, and Kaikini’s collection can be said to perform the same task. It is a series of shards that reflect migrant lives, showing us the good and the bad without judgment.
Mirrors also literally appear in a few stories, sometimes reflecting an ugly reality and sometimes showing an inner world of things that could have been. The owner of a second-hand shop is obsessed by the image of an attractive woman that periodically surfaces in a rosewood-framed mirror at the shop’s entrance; elsewhere, a disabled young woman who resists getting a full-length photograph taken is disconcerted by her family’s debate on whether to buy a cupboard with a mirrored door.
In another story, a cupboard also serves as a symbolic device and elsewhere, other objects perform similar functions, such as the blank sheets of paper distributed by an artist or the paan that a domestic worker cherishes. In these and other ways, Kaikini creates worlds that encompass both the resonant and the pedestrian.
As Niranjana writes in her Translator’s Afterword, his art consists of employing “the ruse of the ordinary” and adding narrative layers to make the stories twist and turn in ways that haunt the reader. They are glimpses into the hidden corners of an urban landscape that ask us to consider the resilience and humanity of those who struggle in the margins.