Maths rarely makes for good fiction, but author and psychologist Sheila Kunjur Srinivas’s debut anthology, 1 More Than 8 and Other Stories: Exploring Navarasa - The Nine Emotions, relies entirely on an equation.
Now the sum, of course, is nine—a direct nod to the navarasas in Indian aesthetics—but it is the significance of the one and the eight that slowly dawns on you as the pages turn.
Crafted with clinical precision, the book drags out the nine emotions into the vicissitudes of ordinary life, rather than keeping them hidden behind tough concepts and verbosity.
Each emotional state gets its due, as stories of love, sadness, wonder, disgust, fear, humour, heroism, anger and calmness flutter past you like a montage of lives lived and musings on nothing, anything and everything.
Srinivas’s activism and experience in theatre and creative writing also find their voice in many of the stories in this collection.
Though each story has a dominant emotion, such as Dr Achala Sachdev’s explorations of past lives having wonder at their core and ‘The Ancestral Serpent’ showcasing the use of folkloric fear, the other rasas often trickle in, giving you a rich kaleidoscope of what it means to be human in nine shades.
‘The Ancestral Serpent’, for example, explores the blurry lines between reality, belief systems, cultural transmission and folklore in the case of snakes protecting ancestral treasure. “So strong was the belief that a curse would fall on any family who tried to steal the gold, that for many generations, all feared our home and did not try to dig and search for treasure,” says the uncle of the protagonist, Dilip. Yet, there is more to this story than meets the eye, as it also evokes a sense of wonder at the weight of old myths and how they can still stare you in the face.
It is also not only stories you get, but also free verse poetry, internal monologues, alternate endings and parts that read like a film. It is perhaps to the author’s credit that the tales are as imperfect as humans, with some filling you to the brim with the emotions they promised and others leaving you numb and empty.
Choose this book if you want to discover the meaning of the one, eight and nine, beyond what the author says in the first few pages, or even just to sit with the quiet, messy business of being human.
1 MORE THAN 8 AND OTHER STORIES: EXPLORING NAVARASA - THE NINE EMOTIONS
Author: Sheila Kunjur Srinivas
Publisher: Redgrab Books
Pages: 230; price: Rs275
