Book Review - The Quiet of the Birds

This review appeared in the September 4th Hindu Sunday Magazine

The Quiet of the Birds, Nisha da Cunha, Penguin, Rs.295.

SAD may have been sweet so far as Shelley's skylark goes. Unfortunately the same doesn't hold good for Nisha da Cunha's collection of sad stories. They tell of illness, abandonment, and death in little country cottages with cypress trees, on "a lonely stretch of beach and sea and a bit of lane", in the hills, and on holiday in Goa or Greece.

Relentless tragedy


Tragedy — gentle, relentless and inexorable — comes calling, in story after story. All of which sounds sweetly sorrowful but in effect tends towards dreary morbidity. The recurring deaths and desertions, sans any of the passion and high drama of classical tragedy, make this collection tediously sad.

In "Old Cypress" the middle-aged female protagonist is abandoned by her husband of many years. "Allegra" is series of letters, most written by a young, tragically paralysed and bedridden protagonist to her mama. They tell of how tragedy struck the happily pregnant Allegra as she returned from a picnic in the sunny English countryside in a motor accident where her husband was at the wheel. Later, inevitably (for the story) he abandons her.

The title story, "The Quiet of the Birds" is another tragedy — that of Safia, a motherless innocent child of the woods. A strange obsessive father brings her up. With her father's death, Safia is thrust into an everyday urban reality she is catastrophically unprepared to handle. "The Permanence of Grief' takes us to another disturbing story where a strange brother-sister duo live together, under the shadow of their beloved dead pet, a dog (somewhat mysteriously) named Judas.

And so it goes on... Most of the stories are deeply disquieting. The protagonists inhabit an uneasy twilight world of reflective loneliness, a melancholic Neverland. Sometimes they have traitor-like names like Mordred or Judas, or Mukta, but most often they are "she" or "he" or "I". Dreadful things happen to them — El in "African Bird" loses a leg, the protagonist in "Down and Out, Washing up with Gladys" witnesses a self administered abortion and Allegra is permanently paralysed. Conversations tend to be lengthy monologues, often staccato and peppered with pedantic literary allusions.

Not gripping


Still, some stories have a haunting bittersweet feel. In "Autumn on a Summer's Day", a middle-aged couple grapple with the grim reality of the wife's terminal illness. So, also "There are no Brownies in St. Anthony", an acute and upsetting story of a just bereaved middle-aged woman. "Wedding" is touching and ends hopefully, as the young mother who ran away from an oppressive marriage leaving her five little children behind, now meets her youngest son on his wedding day. One of the few other non-illness/abandonment/death stories in this collection, "Teachers Day" with its tongue-in-cheek look at the ennui of the education system could have been effective too, if it weren't so long winded.

Indeed one couldn't use "crisp" or "crackling" to describe any of the stories here. Reading these is like walking into a melancholy maze. I struggled through the stories, many of them not particularly short. Also, perhaps unfairly, I compare them to the masters. Maybe this is because of their dreamlike timeless quality — for they have none of the gripping grittiness of everyday contemporary reality, the kind you find in Jhumpa Lahiri's portrait of Mrs. Sen in The Interpreter of Maladies or Lavanya Sankaran's "Mysore Coffee" in the recently published The Red Carpet.

So I long for the energetic verve of a Saki, the narrative vigour and cultural cameos of a Maugham, the imaginative bizarreness of a Roald Dahl or the feminine insights of a Doris Lessing. All of which seem so much more comforting on a grey monsoon day with the wind storming outside and the Mumbai streets in flood.