Bereft, Ayon Banerjee: A reading experience

Mr. Ayon Banerjee in his work "Bereft" has made sure, you still try to scroll up or turn the page even after reaching the final page. The aura, the enigma & the craving for more lingers on you even after you finished the word count.

Bereft is a collection of eighty-one short stories, counting 325 pages, ending with a white blank page, in perfect sync with your state when you reach the last page. Yes, you feel a little blank, a little empty, or a little "bereft" in the end, perhaps, it is designed that way, perhaps the book somehow has managed to touch some raw nerves or nurse them a bit.

Love is an endless mystery, for it has nothing else to explain it. However hard we try; we fail to structure or figure love for its vagueness. The fuzziness allows love to assume many forms, in literary fiction as it does in our ever-evolving human mind or heart? Or wherever the chemistry occurs. It is as diversified as teenagers love emerging from newly found hormonal upheaval, platonic love emanating from a common love of art, or Voyeurs love of exhibitionism; "Bereft" has it all with utmost empathy towards the protagonist, so much so, that you feel a tug in your heart despite the apparent flaws in the characters; or maybe, because of the flaws in the characters; who knows!

Mr. Ayon Banerjee weaved short stories around Love and many possible forms it can take in the contemporary hyper-connected world. While Lust has fifty shares of grey, love is a rainbow of thousands of shades. “Bereft” captured some of these shades. In a good number of stories, he strategically inserted a time-gap to evoke nostalgia, to create a contrast between old & new, to revisit the places and sensibilities which, like old wine, keep on maturing over time. And as you are transported to your beloved lost world of love by excellent storytelling; “time losses its math” and silently place you in a time-wrap, you pleasantly notice yourself in the protagonists.

Time is a queer commodity; it smoothens even the roughest of irregular rocks in the riverbed transforming it rounded and sober. Likewise, time seasons our memory amplifies the void that we carry and associate the void with an old song of forgotten lyrics. We rewind our stories time and again whenever the song accidentally played on the radio during our everyday commute to our office. The everydayness of life manages to bury the song and the story into the secret chambers of our brain, but can never kill it to oblivion. Ayon, used time with a mastery of an artiste and precision of a surgeon to play with the song, story & the void of the readers who, in return, found their love in “Bereft”.

As a reader, I prefer fiction as they are truer than meticulously created agenda-driven non-fictions. As if, data interpreted and chosen to suit the central idea that the author chooses to present, a careful narrative building whereas fictions ARE the narrative with a soul. In fiction, the author with her magic touch leads us to unreal & unknown territories which feel real & known. We become the characters or the characters become us. "Bereft", to me, an amazing detour from our mundane life, it takes you to places, puts you in different situations, introduces you to strange people. And among those strange people, you search for a part of yourself. You want him to win his battle while you are busy fighting your own war with the world. And the characters lived up to the promise, winning your heart in the process.

 A novel usually has an innate time pressure within itself, an urgency that leads you from start to finish, "what happens next" drives you to the end quickly, whereas short stories offer you a breather in-between to reflect on your thoughts to wonder about the plot. But "Bereft" is a rare page-turner that compels you to flip through the pages in the sheer wonder of the variety of plots and brilliance of the stories. Every story is unique in the situation, treatment, and equations, leaving the reader wondering "What's next"!

Kafka came and went; Dostoevsky appeared here and there; Tolstoy lingered on for sometimes but what remains till the end is the imperfect characters with their yesterday-ness and a struggle they go through as they try to nudge their ships loaded with love to the safety of the shore. As Tolstoy was rightly quoted saying "Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness is a story". " Bereft " allows you to be the story within its 325 pages of wanderlust.

It was difficult to pick ten stories from the brilliantly sketched eighty-one stories, still, the following is the list of mine; a list, not a rank though. I know, the list of your favorite ten will vary from mine, and would love to hear from you about yours.

1.      The Storyteller: A successful writer on a fine morning found his characters do not behave the way he wrote or imagined. In real life, they are drastically different from the way he painted them. The fast-paced story is a confession of a storyteller about how na?ve he is in imagining characters to suit his own worldview.

2.      Ahaan : I will have to discreet here; not divulge the main story. Elegantly knitted thriller of a teenager who struggles with his stutter and associated clumsiness of behavior. How he takes care of himself, devising a way to face the ridicule of the people and emerging triumphant with self-improvement. There is a catch though, go figure yourself. For me, this is a story of self-love taking care of ourselves from our own misery.

3.      Bloodline: Masterfully depicted two polar opposite characters who are desperately in need to keep a connection. Bloodline is the only thread that connects him with his uncle. With no one else to connect to; they found a father & a son in one another.

4.      The Tall Guy at the Book-store: Two strangers met in a bookstore, initiated by exchange of favorite books which found their places in each other's mind and bookshelf for decades.

5.      The Wrong Town: Well! Among the fiercely competitive 81 stories, I could somehow manage to pick my number 1. The wrong Town is the story about the choices we DID NOT make. The deliberate denial of the paths we choose not to tread. The songs we never enjoyed, the movies we avoided, the books we did not pay heed to, come back as a delayed wish fulfillment to remind us that our world could be a different place altogether if we would have chosen it differently. Sometimes, your "could be" self meets you in an idle evening when you miss your scheduled routine train of 07: 04!

6.      Eigen : The shortest short story in the collection. The story is just a way to describe the German word which cannot be expressed in a single English word; which is not just a word, rather a feeling of loneliness. The story IS the tone of the entire collection.

7.      The Man-woman Thing: A dinner table discussion of two couples. The dynamics of the characters are built by vivid imagery. The author handles the characters so beautifully here. The half-smile that does not reach the eyes or the impish smile in the eyes, the characters reveals themselves through their gesture rather than their words.

8.      Lilian : 2nd in the rank, in my opinion. It is about poetry and why should you not fall in love with the poet! He creates magic with your sensibilities, and you can never meet the poet in the same plane. Lilian is poetry in the guise of a short story.

9.      Meanwhile, At The Corner Table: The world can go on without a purpose, but cannot run without an illusion! The illusion of a story? Perhaps Yes, because you cannot measure everything through a yardstick of need!

10.  Meanwhile, somewhere else: The last story of the collection; with a lasting impression. Totally conversational with sublime subtlety. So much so, I prefer not to reveal the plot as the couple in conversation do not want to meet ever for the sake of keeping the enigma intact.

All the other stories also have their moments of brilliance, conflicts, and glories; making the experience of reading worthwhile. All the stories are razor-sharp, fast-paced in contemporary settings, yet had an old-school charm coupled with nostalgia. The author used melancholy of rains, striking of the thunderstorm, loneliness of setting sun, or drowsiness of whiskey, setting the tone of the scenes.

As the great thriller writer Dan Brown quipped, every story is read in different ways with unique interpretation and perhaps that's the beauty of storytelling, and this is my take in limited 1500 odd words. Have your copy, meet yourself over a cup of coffee or whatever drinks suit your idle Sunday afternoons, relive your yesterday, for you have left a part of yourself in the muddy football ground or in the abandoned bicycle stands, oblivion of that part of you have surrendered to the abundance of life.