When Ajanta Deo – whose poetry I have come to cherish over the past year – said she has written a “novelette” in Hindi – a piece of writing longer than a short story, and shorter than a novel, I was intrigued by this choice of form. What kind of a story needs that kind of length of time – not too long, not too short, I wondered. When we sit with friends to share or discuss something important, we often ask “Do you have some time?”
We want to lock in a certain amount of time that we feel we will need, and without the certainty of which we do not want to proceed. Our need varies depending on the story, its urgency, and how much of it we want to share. Sometimes the available time determines the form of the story. So yes, I got thinking of the short novel – novelette form and its implication on Deo’s story. I also wondered when a poet seeks prose to tell a story.
Story in poetry
Reading Deo’s writing for a while now I can imagine her being brilliantly able to share any kind of story in poetry – such is her skill with words and expertise in extracting insights from the mundane and quotidian. Thus Kharij Log arrived quietly in its slim form with much anticipation, its cover illustrated in burnt sienna and brick red images of a camel, people and havelis suggesting a tale from the deserts in the west of the country.
From its very beginning, Kharij Log sets you up for a quest that you know will neither be easy nor comfortable. The terrifying trial of providing the government with evidence of citizenship is fresh in our minds. As the sword of the CAA continues to hang over many people’s heads, a number of them are languishing in detention centres. There is also the memory of the resistance against these draconian laws that stormed across the country not so long ago in the past.
This is what the first few pages of Kharij Log contextualise, without once mentioning the actual incidents in this country. It is the artistry of the author who can reveal without telling, and entangle without twisting – the trauma inflicted on millions of people in this country in the name of gathering proofs of belonging.
From here begins the journey of this book to unravel what the evidence of belonging to a land could mean for a person. It is told with the narratives of a small town and its varied people, language, spaces, rituals and minor everyday occurrences. Deo builds an elaborate architecture of time and space through the memory of the absent protagonist of the book. Like a playful raconteur, she takes us through the history of the town as it changes over the decades of her growing up in and with it.
Destinies and fates
The stories move from insignificant happenings in the lives of ordinary people every day in a small town to the larger consequences of being in a town close to the border during wartime. There is a sense that nothing is changing even as it continuously changes – so typical of every place. It’s like one never quite captures the ageing of a person one lives with every day. It is only when suddenly one day, perhaps sipping tea, one abruptly looks up to see an aged face that one wonders where all the years have gone. Deo’s small town in all its dawns and dusks lives like a million other towns in this country – intimate to its people, irrelevant to anyone else. This intimacy, instead of a piece of governmental document, is what the protagonist offers in the file submitted for the registration of citizens to the jury who will decide her fate.
As I finished reading the book, I understood why Deo had chosen the novelette form for this effort. The story is an urgent one – it can neither wait for the gestation of a full-blown novel, nor its prolonged period of reading. It also needs more space – it cannot fit into a short story. Thus, this novelette form is just right for its length and can be read breathlessly in a few days.
I also realised why a powerful poet like Deo has sought out prose for Kharij Log. Poetry often has a coded language, a winding road to its meaning within meanings, in a twilight zone of half shadows. This story, however, needed the sharp sunlight of prose, a straight telling of its exigencies. (Though I must confess I did consider this to be a very long poem by Deo.)
Kharij Log is a chronicle of a small town’s journey from one insignificant existence to another, and it carries the stories of various people whose destinies meet, crash and tumble in time. Kharij Log is also a set of questions about what it means to be from a certain place, and whether being a witness to the life of that place over decades can also be considered proof of belonging to it. It asks whether government-sanctioned papers are more valuable evidence of belonging than lived experiences; and whether papers that can be so easily counterfeited must decide one’s relationship to a land more than knowing the map of memories hidden under the skin of that land.
Kharij Log in its poetic eloquence creates a world so similar to ours, yet not quite; its people so much like us, and yet not quite. This blurring of boundaries between the known and unknown is like the haze between sleep and wakefulness where one wonders what is real and what is just a dream. The novelette lives in this liminal space of the in-betweens, much like the rejected people of the land whose evidence of belonging it is.
Kharij Log, Ajanta Deo, Sambhavna Prakashan.