The Elixir Maker and Other Stories: Soul-searching terrain
Ajanta Paul’s debut fiction, The Elixir Maker and Other Stories, a collection of 12 short tales, is, in a single phrase, poetry in motion. What stands out implicitly is the language, through which she paints her metaphors and images with the ease and cadence of a poet. That the author is working on a book of poems thus comes as no surprise.
Each story has a distinct subject that ranges from broken marriages, gender dialectics, female foeticide, the freedom movement, travails of street children, a family lawsuit and many more.
But each one is a searing soul-searching episode, where Paul constructs a bridge between reality, emotion and vision to explore a macrocosm that is the universe.
Storm, with which the book begins, is actually two stories of a home tearing asunder, one literal, the other symbolic.
The title story, The Elixir Maker, goes into time lapse, where in a burst of magic realism a painter morphs inside one of his own paintings. This particular story is my personal favourite and is invested with almost cinematic attributes.
Freedom is a searing tale set against the backdrop of the Partition when a violent misfortune engulfs and eventually holds a family captive forever in their ignorance of the fate that befell two of their own.
In Escape, the railway station, becomes, in the author’s own words, “a tremulous threshold” for a kid reared on its pavements. It is a cusp separating the child’s known world from the unknown, imagined one.
However, Misunderstanding is rescued from becoming too maudlin by its evocation of a single, working woman’s humdrum life in the bylanes of central Kolkata. The last story, Chair, is more a soliloquy than a short story, interspersed with engaging portions of wit.
On the whole, Paul is an interesting story-teller, in that she takes you to places you may not have easily visited, within the terrain of your soul. It would be interesting to see what more she has to offer in future.
Ajanta Paul
The Elixir Maker and Other Stories
Publisher: Authors Press
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