Title: A Day in the Life
Author: Anjum Hasan
Publisher: Penguin Random House India
ISBN: 9780670090402
Genre: Literature, Fiction, Short
Stories
Pages: 256
Source: Flipkart Review Program
Rating: 4.5/5
A
Day in the Life by Anjum Hasan, is a collection of short stories, fourteen tales of human conscience
transport you into another world where you meet with different characters. They
are going through many experiences, they questioning themselves, and exploring
their life simultaneously. It’s fascinating
how Hasan placed her characters into different states of India, yet each
character shared a sense of strangeness.
As far as writing is concerned, I don’t
want to make any comments as I underlined most of the paragraphs and simply
treasured them. It felt like, as Hasan has worked on each sentence with great sincerity.
I could visualize the characters and their aura, and I loved how Hasan applied
the poetic touch to create the surroundings of protagonist.
A Day in the Life by Anjum Hasan,
begins with “The Stranger” — I am like some old time explorer who has
located the object of his search and having found it, now wants nothing more
than to live among the natives, sending our dispatches celebrating his discoveries—
It is a story of retired accountant who comes to a small town to experience if
he could live in a hilly drenched area after spending his life in a metro-city.
Hasan writes “But I know this to be
true, despite all the hulking new constructions filling the air; it is actually
memories that form a deeper permanency.”
Second story of this collection, Sisters,
explores the complexities of female friendship; Hasan initiates this with an enigmatic
line that says “the sick and the healthy have nothing in common”
Main protagonist of this story, Jaan had
left her village in Andhra Pradesh and
came to Bangalore on the promise of making more money than the pittance she
earned wearing her back out on the fields every day.
Here she had been leading her life.
Suddenly she found herself sick with some unknown disease; then she met with Janaki,
her maid. A special kinship developed between them, and story took some twist
and turns, although these stories are about ordinary people still Hasan created
her characters with so much depth and beauty, I found them extraordinary, and
each story ends with some uncertain conclusion.
In an interview with Firstpost she
says “I am often preoccupied with that German word – and idea – the
zeitgeist. How to find it in fiction? One element of the zeitgeist is certainly
this sense of inconsequentiality – the feeling that the important things are
happening elsewhere, in the news or in other people’s lives, but not to us.
There is something poignant to me in this sense of uselessness; I am fascinated
by characters who feel wasted or out of sync with the times”
In Another story Yellow Rose, Gulfam,
23 years old girl, quit her job and decided to employ herself, She rarely
looked out at the view. Infact, having moved house so many times, she had more
or less forgotten what the prospect from living room balcony or kitchen window
was like . I found this story weird in a good way. It tells the complex nature
of a person who continuously struggles amidst reality and her thought process. Where
she actually live?
There are many Voices in Anjum Hasan’s
A Day in a Life, yet you find them related to each other, in terms of lack of
direction, purpose of life, identity, and belonging.
At last, I want to mention, My most
favourite story, titled—ELITE, It begins with “Each of us, the guiltily
innocent, has own means of getting away from the news” Story placed into a
bar, which reminded me of Nirmal Verma
(Master of Short stories)
Magic begins when Protagonist finds a
girl, sitting alone into a bar.
It goes something like this “I want to ask
what brings her here but I am enjoying this enigma. A woman in a bar, sharing
her table and her cigarettes, not self-conscious not waiting. This town is easy
with a lot of things but this is still weird.
Anjum Hasan added something for food
lovers, the final pages of book filled with mouthwatering tale “A Short
History of Eating” it is a story of couple, shared the same passion for
food of love.
Hasan writes “My husband and I
often make salted porridge for dinner. We don’t eat French fries more than once
in four weeks. We still speak of food — remember the risotto in Verona, that
bag of smoked prawns in Waxholmen, that dumpling soup in the old quarter of
Beijing, remember that…? We go out for a meal now and then. We order a plate of
something and a drink or two. We share a main course, we skip the sweet. And
after we have finished, paid the bill, are walking home through the drizzle, it
occurs to us that we are full. That is, we realize we are no longer hungry.”
All in all, it is a powerful compilation
of short stories, nobody wants to miss. Do meet with these quaint yet familiar
characters. Highly Recommended.
ABOUT AUTHOR
Anjum Hasan is an Indian poet and
novelist. She was born in Shillong, Meghalaya and currently lives in Bangalore,
India. She has also contributed poems, articles and short stories to various
national and international publications. She is the author of three novels, The Cosmopolitans, Neti Neti and Lunatic in My Head. As well as a book of short stories, Difficult Pleasures.