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Moods for stories3/4/2023 ![]() A funny enough scenario, until we learn how and why Leila died. You don’t have to have visited Malaysia to know that a pontianak is not a good thing, but this vampiric spirit sits well in the story ‘Aunty’, the tale of the unfortunate Leila who ended up in a plastic ice-cream box once cremated. She uses simple yet detailed descriptions of settings or surroundings, which makes each story visually rich. ![]() ![]() Much of Menon’s writing is poetic, with worlds and emotions understated and beautifully constructed. It is a rare gift indeed that an author is able to do this without creating a cliché. Menon does this extremely well through all the stories in this collection, so many of the endings being a moment of self-awareness for the protagonist, or the author herself letting us in to their worlds where we catch a glimpse of that moment of personal enlightenment. The story changes direction entirely with that last line. The final line in this story feels like some sort of retribution for main character Sara, yet at the same time creates a disquieting sensation of unease for Katya’s welfare. She was born somewhere else – she’s Balkan, or Serbian, or maybe even Croatian. The stories are wistful and powerful at the same time: the over-confident Katya in ‘Subjunctive Moods’, whose future is foreshadowed by the statement but she isn’t really Russian. All the characters in this collection have veins of vulnerability running through them, from Sara in ‘Subjunctive Moods’ to Anjali in ‘Watermelon Seeds’ (my second favourite after ‘Rock Pools’). Author CG Menon subtly and gently layers emotion upon plot upon more emotion, until we too experience the pain of her protagonists. Dilip grunts with satisfaction…It’s the sort of arrangement he likes everything laid out with the crusts cut offĬommunicating the gulf between Shalini and her husband without explicitly naming those differences. That’s all gone now, replaced with a sterile birdbath in a lake of lawn and a lap pool scrubbed chemical blue. The house is unrecognisable…I remember a thicket of hibiscus shoots and dizzying deep-water ponds where the mineshafts used to flood. Her husband, Dilip, only sees the place as it is he has no emotional attachment to it, whereas Shalini is englufed by her childhood memories: In ‘The Ampang Line,’ unappreciated and unloved wife Shalini is revisiting her childhood home that was sold by her step-mother to a hotel chain and is now a modern hotel. From the opening story, ‘The Ampang Line,’ to the final, ‘Rock Pools’, we feel the melancholy of misunderstandings, of lifetimes of loss. In this collection of short stories writer CG Menon explores love in all its guises: unrequited love, true love, self-love as well as self-loathing and loss, through different cultures and across cultures, in a way that speaks to every reader.
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