Short Stories
A DAY IN THE LIFE
Anjum Hasan
Publisher: PenguinHamish Hamilton
Published: March 2018
Pages: 256, Hardback
Short stories can either leave you feeling like you have read multiple incomplete pieces of work or there will be, at most, one or two stories to save the anthology from joining the ranks of forgotten works on your bookshelf. But Anjum Hasan’s ‘A Day In The Life’, a collection of stories recently published by Penguin, is a class apart. The 14 stories that Hasan tells of seemingly ordinary people leading ordinary lives are anything but ordinary. Though essentially about belonging and personal peculiarities, A Day In The Life draws many parallels from everyday life that make the stories relevant and relatable. In ‘Sisters’, a woman shrunk by sickness starts to see healthy people as ogres. ‘The Legend of Lutfan Mian’ is narrated over a two-day walk to Banaras in 19th century India. ‘I Am Very Angry’ sees the arrival of loud, always fighting neighbors disrupting the life of an older Brahmin man who has lost his wife. ‘Bird Love’ revolves around a newly married couple discovering new things about each other and thus reinventing their life together and in ‘Godsend’ you meet two women with completely different parenting styles trying to compare and outdo each other. As varied as these stories are, dissonance, often inwardly, is the theme that ties them together. There always seems to be an internal conflict that underlines the lives of these contrasting characters.
That Hasan is skilled in analyzing the lives of different kinds of people and telling stories that resonate was evident in her first collection of stories, Difficult Pleasures, published in 2012. And she carries that legacy forward in her most recent collection as well. Hasan is also the author of the novels ‘The Cosmopolitans’, ‘Neti, Neti’, and ‘Lunatic In My Head’, and though all her books have a finesse that just isn’t there in works of other Indian writers, it’s evident that her expertise lies in telling short stories.
It’s very difficult to tell a good story in just a few pages but Hasan pulls it off with ease. Though A Day In The Life has stories set in different worlds, be it in terms of class or place, each story is so richly crafted that you feel like you know these characters. They could very well be you or someone you know. Hasan’s writing is elegant and nuanced, ensuring nothing is over the top or dramatic and the fact that she writes with such striking confidence makes reading the stories a pleasure. This is a book you would want to keep at your bedside, to revisit the neatly crafted worlds whenever you can.
