Literary Bunnychow
An edited version of this book review was published in Sunday Times (8 July edition). Here’s the original :)
Pravasan Pillay doesn’t like to be labelled as an Indian writer — but the man writes about charou life like nobody else. Chatsworth, his debut collection of short stories, is a beautiful love letter to the miscreants, the mothers, the uncles, the girls and the chaos of both life and living in Chatsworth, an Indian township on the southside of Durban.
The stories, to my relief, did not reduce being Indian in South Africa to stale caricatures — no mention of cricket, Bollywood, spices or indenture. That’s not to say those are things I don’t like or find interesting, but that there is more to us than that alone. Although apartheid flattened the nuances between Gujarati and Telugu, upper-class merchants and lower-class dockworkers on the Bluff into one mish-mash of identity mediated by whiteness, there is no single story of Indianness in South Africa.
Chatsworth works so well because it attempts to and succeeds at capturing life as is. Absurdity and all. Acknowledging difference and adding substance to difference is where Chatsworth excels. The book goes a long way in highlighting depth, instead of relying on narrow narratives of working-class people of Indian origin in South Africa.
The multiplicity of characters in the collection add to the sense of intimacy between people and place that Pillay conveys. And intimacy, or how we care or do not care for each other, is highlighted in some form in all the stories. Sometimes it is heart-breaking and punishing, like in ‘Chops Chutney’ or ‘Mr Essop’, at other times, tender as seen in the story ‘Girls’. Such is life. The timeline of the stories sets them in the near-past, but the interactions and scenarios could be placed in present day. Some tensions highlighted in the collection, such as xenophobia, are painfully contemporary. One story that might be my favourite (and I say ‘might’ because it’s tough to choose a favourite child) is ‘The Albino’. The suspense catches you in your throat and the story ends in a decidedly precarious place.
Pillay’s masterful use of what’s colloquially known as Durban-English is another strength of the collection. The rhotic R’s and hybridity of Tamil, Hindi, Afrikaans, isiZulu, and English that animates a particular South African Indian dialect is written in a way that rolls off the page, as it does off the tongue. Never dumbing down his characters or the ways they articulate themselves, Pillay manages to capture the lilting accent perfectly. The funny-kind boys in ‘The Fence’, the Durban Westville student in ‘The Green Ghost’ and Ambi in ‘Crooks’ all speak variations of this kind of speech. The subtlety of the variation is key to their characters, and reflects their education level, gender and class. Chatsworth is the sum of a lifetime’s worth of observation, and scenes in the stories come alive not because of the expansiveness, or grandness of storytelling, but the close attention to detail that is a characteristic of all the stories in the collection. Pillay notices difference and the small gestures that show these are thinking, active characters who live entire lives off the page.
While the majority of the collection has been published previously in literary magazines, seeing them sit side-by-side in Chatsworth lends the book a pleasant weightiness. Like a platter of treats — you can choose to savour each piece, and wait in between, choosing the next one. Or you can binge, and finish the slim book in half a day. Either way, Chatsworth is a delight.
