Chandan Pandey’s intense stories that morph into parables

I remember watching plenty of Buffy the Vampire Slayer as a child and one of the stories that made an impression was a first season episode titled Out of Mind, Out of Sight, where an extremely shy high school girl becomes literally invisible after being ignored by teachers and classmates alike. Of course, this being the 1990s precursor to modern-day superhero fare (Buffy creator Joss Whedon went on to direct the first two Avengers movies), the episode ended with the invisible girl becoming an FBI assassin-in-training. But the larger point was solid: people really can forget that you exist, even if you are right in front of them. I was reminded of this episode more than once while reading Forgetting, the opening salvo from Chandan Pandey’s The Keeper of Desolation, a collection of nine Hindi short stories translated into English by Sayari Debnath.

In this brilliant, unsettling story, a family living in a modest single-room house “forgets” about one of its members, the studious and introverted Gulshan. His academic talents and the family’s mounting bills (his sister is chronically ill) means there’s a lot of pressure on Gulshan to make it into a good engineering school. Eventually, the family becomes incapable of seeing Gulshan, even when he’s just a few feet from them, nose buried in his books. He, in turn, responds to their infrequent queries less and less, until the narrator (Gulshan’s elder brother) declares that the family “was never in a position to infer correctly who was eventually forgetting whom”, the metaphorical point being that an overdose of projected responsibility eats away at individual agency.

The forgetfulness snowballs into confrontation and eventually, tragedy. What’s going on can technically be called “surrealism” but I am hesitant to use the term because Pandey’s style isn’t really about melting clocks or disturbing abstractions. Instead, his method is to nudge socially and psychologically “realistic” narratives into the realm of the sublime.

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Pandey’s intense, impeccably crafted stories slowly and imperceptibly morph into parables. In the titular story, set in a lawless land “from a town shrouded in darkness”, an entire local population starts losing their minds following the disappearance of a gold ring belonging to a police officer’s wife. The Poet sees a curious game of professional one-upmanship between two yuppies, one of whom used to be a poet in his college days. The canny Pradeep spreads the word that quiet, sensitive Alok used to be a poet, following which people start to see Alok as inherently lazy and in constant need of a “corporate pep talk”. Funny as these scenes are, the story becomes a much stranger beast by the end, at once a psychological post-mortem and an unironically tender appraisal of the power wielded by transcendental art.

A pair of stories tackles the psychic scars inflicted by debt, The Mathematics of Necessity and The Alphabet of Grass. The former sees a farmer-turned-teacher writing to the prime minister, requesting a change in the formula to calculate compound interest. The latter has the hapless, debt-riddled narrator contemplating the staged amputation of his leg in order to commit insurance fraud. Tonally, both stories favour black humour, and because of the plot of the former, it sometimes resembles a vastly-better-written version of The White Tiger.

Perhaps the best story in this remarkable volume is The Land Was Ours, a nightmare version of the “road trip catharsis” story. A pair of deranged neurotics offer a lift to young Aniket, who’s travelling from Bhatinda to Delhi for work amidst widespread communal riots. At first, you think the lunatics just want Aniket to prove that he’s Hindu, but this zigzagging narrative defies expectations at every turn. The exchanges between Aniket and his captors are reminiscent of Michael Haneke’s harrowing Austrian film Funny Games (1997) about two sadists holding a family hostage.

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English-language readers’ first exposure to Pandey’s writing was through the widely-praised 2021 novel Legal Fiction (Vaidhaanik Galp in Hindi). The Keeper of Desolation confirms Pandey’s status as one of the most exciting new voices in the world of Hindi literature.

Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based writer.