Apparently this is an updated version by the same editor. It has been meticulously compiled by Kohli over the years, given the shortage of quality short stories from regional authors - a fact that is acknowledged by him in his introduction. I was unable to understand, however, why these are 'modern' stories, as most of them are at least a few decades old.
It is an eclectic collection of short stories from practically every nook of India. It covers several themes: old age, marital issues, mythology, love, prostitution, bureaucracy, politics, etc. It also covers stories from a wide range of regional languages; so you get to taste a slice of Assamese, Bengali, Hindi, Gujurati, Punjabi, Kannada, Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, Oriya, Urdu, Sindhi and even Dogri literature. And these are prominent authors in their respective languages that contribute to the book here.
One of the touching stories is by Padma Sachdev - Care Taker- which is about the relationship between an older ex-wife and the present wife of a man. RK Narayan brings out his tale of woes with the erstwhile Mysore state bureaucracy in his own inimitable style. Bhisham Sahni - who gave us the unforgettable Tamas - regales you with the story of a poor mother who has to put up with her son's admonishments as he tries in vain to impress his white boss. Aabid Surti talks of old age relationship and how one widower becomes the stick of strength to a grieving widow.
Manoj Das, whom Graham Greene described as being on par with R K Narayan, 'with an added touch of mystery', lives up to his reputation with a satirical take on ministerial egotism. The Kannada master story-teller, Masti Venkatesha Iyengar delves into mythology and takes Shakuntala's tale forward by adding to it a tale of love and victory over desire. Happy New Gear by Ashokamitran is a hilarious tale of a bossy driving instructor and his bumbling student-servants who go for a driving class in a rickety car with several mishaps along the way.
But perhaps the most touching story is about the poor government clerk, who, having failed to keep up an honourable existence in the midst of corruption in the system he is part of, commits suicide by jumping from his office building. Ajeet Cour provides the right dose of humour, satire and sarcasm in this story - a style of writing which appeals to me - a hard-hitting, no-holds-barred dressing down of the corrupt system.
The Bed of Arrows, by Gopinath Mohanty, is about a dying woman and her apprehensions about her husband's affairs and his unwritten rules for her. It is boring and is a difficult read, not least because it is riddled with spelling and grammatical errors. For some reason, and rather surprisingly, the most disinhibited tales come from the two Urdu writers; Ismat Chugtai, who tells a tale of a prostitute-turned-housewife, and Sagar Sarhadi who tells a first-person account of such delicacies as getting beaten up by the women-folk of his family, having the 'hots' for the fat next-door woman, scrounging money from a tale-spinning unkempt neighbour, drinking cheap liquor fermented by battery acids, and having tiffs with prostitutes and eunuchs over 'credit services'.
These appealed less to me, because as far as I am concerned, any story - long or short - should have a sense of purpose or a message to it; I find it difficult to understand the merits of excessive violence, misery, suffering, atrocity, torture, disinhibition or scatology, just thrown in aimlessly to make up a story. This, and the fact that some short stories end rather abruptly, with the reader having to pick up the pieces of the missing narrative to reach his or her own conclusion, rankles.
Or, as my wife experienced while reading this book, if the stories leave you dumbfounded as to the purpose of such writing, then it brings down the readability quotient of the book. And this applies to short stories not found in this volume too.
Mercifully, if you leave out the few exceptions, the other stories in this collection do have a sense of purpose and do induce emotional warmth in you. If you want a feel of regional literature and culture of India - a land that is richly endowed with different languages and cultures - then this book would provide ample material.
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