A slightly-edited version of this appeared in the latest issue of TimeOut Mumbai.
BOATS ON LAND Janice Pariat
With
her debut short story collection, Boats
on Land, Janice Pariat joins the company of those such as Anjum Hasan and
Siddhartha Deb, Indian writers who have written evocatively about Shillong in
English. From colonial times to recent past to present, the so-called Scotland
of the East and its environs are a significant presence in these pages. Where
Pariat differs from her forebears is in her folkloric style that depicts “the
marvellous real”, in the words of the apt epigraph by Alejo Carpentier.
BOATS ON LAND Janice Pariat
With
her debut short story collection, Boats
on Land, Janice Pariat joins the company of those such as Anjum Hasan and
Siddhartha Deb, Indian writers who have written evocatively about Shillong in
English. From colonial times to recent past to present, the so-called Scotland
of the East and its environs are a significant presence in these pages. Where
Pariat differs from her forebears is in her folkloric style that depicts “the
marvellous real”, in the words of the apt epigraph by Alejo Carpentier.
Pariat’s
stories are suffused by legends, spells, charms and winds blowing over barren
hills like restless spirits. Messily and uneasily, the old gives way to the new
as her characters navigate walkways pitted by ghosts of the past. Here,
retribution is visited upon boorish British overseers of a tea plantation; a
doctor attends to a teenager who dreams of firebirds; water fairies are
believed to make people disappear; a schoolgirl and her classmates hunt for a
secret passage; and tales are told at funerals of the hunter who killed a shape-shifting
tiger.
These
stories are also about relationships and oppositions: between lovers, between
families, between friends, between impressionable girls and blue-grey-eyed boys
who play the guitar like Slash -- and, significantly, between outsiders and locals.
As such, they’re peopled by an eclectic lot, drawn from various communities and
professions.
Many
stories are narrated not by their protagonists but by young observers or those
looking back at their youth: vignettes of a time when innocence yields to a
more nuanced understanding. Pariat’s prose is lapidary, and this rescues some
of the tales from flimsiness. One story begins with a “corpse-cold” December evening
with skies “the colour of razor blades”; elsewhere, chicken momos sit on a
plate “like fat, happy priests”.
“I
don’t know if Shillong has caught up with the world or the world has caught up
with Shillong,” muses one of Pariat’s characters. The fifteen stories here are
an elegant record of interactions between Shillong and the outside world.
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