There are organs and organs
This attractive-looking hardcover book turned out to be a surprising treat. Each of its eighteen stories, all written in verse, are about people who are different. Not just different but significantly so, some quite peculiar, and the stories deal with different aspects of how the difference arose, how it was dealt with, and what happened in the end. Along the way, each story has earthy overtones. It starts quite naturally – I was surprised at first and then admiring, but as it went on and the bonking got more intense, I wondered whether it wasn’t just to say that people who are different are actually like everyone else – or that by virtue of their difference they are more highly sexed. Though the question occurred to me while reading, I forgot to ask it to the author when I had the chance. The former, I suppose, based on what she revealed of herself and her book through the discussion.
Aparna told
us that she woke one day about a year and a half ago, with a strong vision of a
character. “It was about 5 in the morning,” she said. “I tapped my husband on
the shoulder and I said, ‘Subramanyam’. So he said, ‘No, darling, it’s Abhijeet,’
and he turned around and went back to sleep.” The Strange Case of
Subramaniam the Crocodile Man was forming rapidly in her mind. Noyon, their
son, was not yet four and though Subramaniam was clamouring to be let out,
Aparna was a busy mommie and did everything she had to do until finally, at the
end of the day, she could sit down at her computer and write down the story.
Over the next
three weeks, she had written eighteen stories, waking every morning with new circus
people and village freaks performing various antics through which they conveyed
meaningful messages about human beings and the way we lead our lives. After a
rapid, fully-charged run, Aparna stopped and only looked at her stories two
months later: “The first thing I said to myself is, ‘You are sick!’ I could not
believe I wrote these stories.” (And her mother would moan, “Where did I go
wrong, was it I who filled such nonsense in your head?”) For Subramaniam had
turned out to be a ‘Crocodile Man’, a source of income but unable to gratify
his wife, who had to make her own arrangements. Pablo the Clown had a
‘foot-long schlong’ which women thronged to view and engage with. Vishu, the
Village Exterminator, came between a husband and wife in an unusual way.
Urvasi, the Devadasi, developed culinary skills that threatened to make the
entire village and its surroundings obese. Miss Rita, born a bonny, baby girl, developed
a ‘fertile chinny-chin-chin’ which sprouted a thick crop of hair. Murali, the
Metal Eater, is a reverse-Midas who eats and coolly digests metal: Sweet Murali, with a whistling throat and surreal digestion within –Never ate a bit of meat or gran, but gorged himself on mountains of tin
Miss Luxmi,
The Daredevil Dart Thrower, highbred, born wealthy and fancy free, happened to
be too dusky-toned to attract any good Brahmin boy.
Of Sita and Gita, the Siamese Twins,
Who separated themselves in a bid to winLove, and for half a heart each, a home –
Instead, lost it all and grew old alone.
Twisted
passions, lustful charity, drunken brutality, servitude and fawning delight,
accommodating girl, dumbstruck wife, furiously praying, gilded cage – these are
a few themes; they are also phrases picked at random from these tales – or fable,
allegory, parody, if you will.
People
close to Aparna told her that the book reads like an autobiography: “I grew up
feeling like an outsider. I dealt with mental health issues for a very long
time. I have major recurrent depressive disorder, and it took me a very long
time to find a kind and compassionate neuropsychiatrist. Growing up, I felt
like a square cog in a round hole. So the book addresses a lot of issues to do
with a person not fitting in – a freak, as it were. I grew up in a conservative
town and people would look at me and say, ‘What is this?’ So I guess this reflects
my experiences. Issues are important to me, whether the LGBTQ community, caste,
physical appearance or others.”
Aparna’s stories
veer towards South Indian motifs including names, features and other hints, and
this Aparna explained by saying while she had tried to be geographically
neutral, she had grown up with the work of RK Narayan and when constructing
this world, the visuals that came to her said, “Malgudi”.
While each
one had turned out pretty much whole in terms of its theme and content, the
rhyme in which it manifested was lacking. Aparna said that her work had been
published in international journals like Pen Review and others, but more
abstruse and in free verse. She now began a rigorous study of metre with the
help of a mentor, Shantanu Anand, and every syllable in the book was read and
re-read at least eight times to put it into the exact metre. Still, these
eighteen pieces do not follow a satisfactory structure. They are not in the
same metre; some verses change metre in the course of the verse; in some, I was
unable to stretch them to fit a metre at all. Aparna is not, she said, a master
like Vikram Seth who wrote Beastly Tales from Here and There, and maybe
one day would be skilled enough to write in a particular metre. Meanwhile, her
next book is short-form prose and is on the theme of variations in ways people
torture each other.
This book
is hugely amusing but it’s also strewn with pathos. Its plots are inventive, and
the illustrations by Rachna Ravi, aesthetically pleasing, are a great lead-in
to each story. Most interesting, a stroke of genius I felt, was that while the
male organ is bandied about quite lasciviously, when female organs are brought
to the page, they turn out to be brain, lungs, liver and heart. 
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