No one an outsider in the holy city
Spun with compassion and realism, the stories from Varanasi in Vivek Nath Mishra’s collection No One An Outsider ask contrasting questions of belonging, compassion, self-destructiveness, and death.
In No One An Outsider: Varanasi Tales (Hawakal Publishers, 2021), author Vivek Nath Mishra portrays the lives of the people of Varanasi where ‘nobody is a stranger’. Mishra’s Varanasi is often poor, troubled, but also a cosmopolitan colony. The tales are spun with compassion and realism, as fictionalized snapshots into lives of people who exist in the concrete world. Each problem presented in No One An Outsider is possible and does not involve supernatural intervention. Each piece is interwoven with poetic lines of wisdom about human nature and circumstance.
The collection’s title could signify an ironic note about the human condition. We are in fact part of the human family, interwoven with the next person. Therefore, no one is an outsider, no matter how angelic or demonic. We find the poor and ill-treated throughout these stories; so, as readers we may wonder why some are neglected in a world without outsiders, why some characters face captivating moral dilemmas that invoke moral substance.
In “Smell of Leather” a father’s son is murdered because of his faith and willingness to stand against persecution. “One has to shed all the timidity to live peacefully in this world,” the author writes as if to share a vision. What is called ‘the world’ is a dark space. The father’s dreams are even crueler than the reality, thus adding fearsome depth to the subconscious world that does not exist in the material world. This suggests that our inner world may be crueler than external conditions.
The father, who is accused of killing bulls, loses his son to martyrdom after the son stands to a mob on the father’s behalf. Faith intermingles with the tranquility of the community. This highlights a central concern in contemporary India about Hindu nationalism, and there could be no city more appropriate to highlight these conflicts.
Family drama strikes again in “Bloodline”, it is the biological relation to a thief that punishes a mother and father. The story opens with a situation where the police are left wondering if the parents of a thief look like aliens. In symbolizing appearance, the author compounds the force of the plot. After all, the story is about biological family.
Tragedies and death are prominent themes elsewhere in the collection, including the burden of suicide. In “The Culprit”, the reader is never informed who the actual ‘culprit’ is when a young man Bhanu—after he scored low on his tests, disappointing his father—is swallowed up by the Ganga River. Perhaps the culprit is the river itself, thickened by the heavy monsoon rains. Could the river really be at fault? Is it nature or the gods who kill? Or is it us? Did Bhanu die in the river because the river was tempting, because the gods pushed him to suicide in neglecting him, or because his society expected more than he could give? In this sense, he is an outsider.
Stories such as “It’s Time” focus on the religious wealth of the city, which in turn, attracts a number of visitors. By the final piece in this collection, however, it seems that the gods—if they indeed exist—may themselves be sinners.
Perhaps the collection’s sardonic title is meant to highlight the alienation of natural, social, and economic inequalities. Another possible suicide in the collection is in “It’s Time” where a young man befriends an older gentleman who happens to be a tourist of sorts. The narrator of the story muses, “I believe Krish must have had this understanding that this place could make the death look like a simple and uncomplicated happening. Perhaps as casual as birth.” This story has undertones of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. The older man, Krish, is mentor to his unflinching admirer yet he dies at the end leaving nothing terribly impressive behind him to testify to the emotional impact of his life. Stories such as “It’s Time” focus on the religious wealth of the city, which in turn, attracts a number of visitors. By the final piece in this collection, however, it seems that the gods—if they indeed exist—may themselves be sinners.
Beauty, truth, and love are not omitted from the stories, either. In “Flood of Silence” a troubled couple is presented to the reader in their agonizing conflict. The author writes, “It needs more guts to talk about the truth than a lie.” The narrator further reveals, “A sensible human being is always a sad affair.” Do we not all consider ourselves ‘sensible’ and is this the crux of the couple’s problem? Stubbornness is a stumbling block in many of these stories as people refuse to correct their own errors. However, in “A Fake Lotus” we are shown an alternative. The narrator, a grown woman named Sunanda, finally faces a childhood fear that emerged from her father’s rage. She at first refuses to allow her husband to plant a lotus in their garden because she was tormented with a fake lotus by her parents. They used the fake lotus to humiliate and punish her after she was accidentally struck with it during her father’s temper tantrum. The story ends with this final observation once she chooses to let go of the fear, “If there’s something to blame, it is human’s will.”
The final story “An Apology” is a trifecta of apologies, not only one. When his mother passes away, the narrator Krishna offers his namesake god an apology for an early error. The gods are a source of guilt and contention for the narrator. Does his father owe him an apology or is the apology due for Krishna, the god? Are our sins our own, or do they find their source in the gods’ existence?
This story is open-ended, like many others in the collection, allowing the readers their own imaginings and conclusions. One may elaborate on religious traditions and their social meanings, or decide that religion is at fault for many of these human errors.
Mishra presents the reader with a series of true-to-life fictions that aid the philosophical mind but do not make decisions for it. The language is startlingly charming and concise. We read ideas in the fiction and can also appreciate the plot forces constraining them. Several contrasting questions remain at the core. Are we witnessing continuous dangerous folly and hypocrisy, or are these conflicts and situations universal, and therefore only the substance of fiction? Is an inclusive society possible, with our current tendencies toward humiliating those who differ? What leads anyone to self destructive behavior, and should we sacrifice our humanness for security of society? In our current seemingly-dystopian world, we must face the trials and issues emerging from these inquiries.
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Dustin Pickering is founder of Transcendent Zero Press. He has contributed writing to Huffington Post, Café Dissensus Everyday, The Statesman (India), Journal of Liberty and International Affairs, The Colorado Review, World Literature Today, and several other publications. He hosts the popular interview series ‘World Inkers Network’ on Youtube. You can find him on Instagram: @poetpickering and Twitter: @DustinPickerin2.
