Review by Dr Chitra Krishnan
Compiled and Edited by: Geetha Nair G and Vineetha Mekkoth
Publisher: Folio Publishers, Thiruvananthapuram
Year of publication: 2024
No of pages: 211
Cover picture: Bay Traffic, oil on canvas by Mohan Sivanand
Cost: ₹ 350 INR
ISBN: 978-93-82356-43-1
It is famously said that the “short story is like a sprint while the novel is like a marathon”. This amazing collection of 31 short stories having as its title Aquality suggests the central theme of water running through it. It is a series of breathtaking sprints.
Three of the 31 short stories are written by native speakers of
English, while K Satchidanandan's "The Land” (p.11) is a translation from Malayalam. The book opens with this
story and it sets the tone for the rest to follow. The contributors have been
drawn from various continents - USA, Africa, Asia and Europe while the large
majority is from the Indian subcontinent.
Geetha Nair
The art of the short story writer requires one to create the characters, set the plot, weave the ambience and resolve the tension, all the while engaging the reader with an endearing tone and style in less than 7500 words. A tall order indeed! But if you take any one of the stories in Aquality they do this and more! They open a tiny window into another world, other minds and other dreams. As Gaiman says, “The stories are journeys you can make to the far side of the universe and still be back in time for dinner!” You accompany the barnacle picker in Spain as she scrambles over dangerous rocks (Abigail Thorne, p.69) or you wail at the wall with the fatherless child hoping to find a Noah who listens to you (Jacinta Meredith, p.49) or you are wary of any water body lest the “Jala Pishachu” is waiting to drag you into its watery depths. (Lathaprem Sakhya, p.161)
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| Vineetha Mekkoth |
Murakami claimed that his short stories were like “guideposts to his heart” and in Aquality we understand exactly what he means as we yearn for love or companionship like Parikh-Mundal’s lonely teacher (p.155), or understand love and adoption like Moselle (p.167) or wait for the water to break at child birth with hope in our heart (p.135) or conquer a language like Anas did beginning with the word water (p.151)! They do gently tug at your heartstrings, sometimes cause you to smile or recoil in horror or even bawl…they certainly don’t leave you unmoved!
In Aquality, the ideas and the language in which they are couched vary from being poetic and beautiful to scary and Chernobylesque and everything in between! We have the image of “the ethereal beauty that emerged from his fingers signalled an eye that saw a far richer universe…” (p. 88) as India’s beloved elephant God blessed the blind sculptor with all his heart or the agony of “I felt fear build cobwebs with my nerves…I have no dreams. Dreams! Flimsy as rose petals they bleed us like money lenders!” (p.105) We have the bleak, futuristic landscape of desolation. The after-Chernobyl character, “Atrax didn’t see herself the same as previous humans. She was the new generation, something half submerged and watery, born of flame and doused by determining…her bond was with the Earth and her molten heart. “I won’t let you down.” The Earth heard her and quiet on her axis she sighed”. (p.123) We also have the beauty of hope, “A star rose in the East as though to guide their ship. They felt a new land being born somewhere. They sat peering into the darkness. There between the clouds in a valley filled with mango trees and plantain they saw the serene face of a guru looking down on them”. (p.14)
Editing an anthology is a most
difficult task as one has to set the theme and parameters and decide its shape
and tone before throwing it open for writers! Both the editors Geetha Nair
(poet, writer of short fiction and CEO of Folio Publishers) and Vineetha
Mekkoth (poet, creative writer, translator and a state government officer) have
done a great job in choosing the theme of Aquality
which is an umbrella covering so many crucial and topical aspects. The
editing is superbly done and through their choice of stories and authors a
wonderful coherent collage of water has been created. The eye-catching cover,
with its multi-hued shades, predominantly variants of blue, draws us in
immediately. As we leaf through this volume we can appreciate the substantial,
intense and meticulous work carried out.
Chitra Krishnan
Water as a theme takes on protean forms in this anthology from covering sexual abuse in ‘She’ (p.140) to the hyper-celebrated Ganesh Festival in ‘Broken Bappa’ and traversing space and time in between. As Sreedevi K Nair mentions in her perceptive foreword, “Water keeps moving … it moves on and on creating unique pathways of life and memory.” Just as water can be constructive-destructive-still-flowing, the stories have been chosen to reflect all these aspects and more in an easy readable style and format that is at once evocative and pleasing.
The stories presented in Aquality invite you to delve into their watery depths to find various hidden treasures that will appeal to our diverse moods. We can open the book at any page and we are drawn into the world of water, ecology, equality, poetry, art, mysticism, fantasy, reality, grimness and laughter all at once. In short, a microcosm of the enchanting, complex world we live in. As Sreedevi K Nair mentioned, we hope these “water stories too move on from reader to reader and live forever in human minds.”
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