The book begins with two lines in verse: I need to do something/What should I do? It ends thus: Let us play that game together/The one that never ends.
The last two lines are not part of the story, they’re part of the overflow, a postscript to the book, titled ‘A Memory and Five Poems’. But the quoted lines encapsulate what they flank.
For anyone unused to the writing of Vinod Kumar Shukla, it’s one lazy, crazy romp in the world of unexpected childhood happenings that operate as if in a dream world, noted down as if rooted in reality.
Sometimes you want to ask, who has the more fun, the writer or the reader. But you have to be a special kind of reader, one who graduated to adulthood carrying his childhood.
There’s a housing merry-go-round here. Or musical houses, with intent or dreams. Not surprising, since houses are as mindful and opinionated as children.
This book will work only if the reader having fun matches the writer having fun.
It’s a book every writer wants to write. There’s a sombre co-positioning of realities — real and extra-dimensional. Vendra asks his wife if she’s afraid of a stone snake. “I want to show respect to the carving. I want the snake to think it is real and I’m afraid of being bitten,” Niya tells him gravely.
Later, you may talk about social commentary, philosophy and clever disclosures. However, if you don’t have the leisure to leave your governing ropes and run loose with the current narrator or observer, you may not last out.
This is the story of children: Yasi, Rasa and their little cousin Ta; and the captive girl Chuggi whose reflection (Chugga) saves her with the help of the boat-girl Lormi. And Bachchu, the vendor’s son, who accompanies Ta into the jungle. But it’s also about adults with unfettered minds, the parents Niya and Vendra, and the uncle Bhoona whom no one can awaken once he rests his back.
Bhoona has to eat his meals half at table and half below, to satisfy his two little nieces. There’s a fire-eater (with a wart “as precious as the Kohinoor”), runaway cycles and rickshaws, coy shoe-shops, a man addicted to walking, whose long arms stretch out to serve as rest-houses for birds, and, of course, windows that serve as little doors to enable traffic of the imagination.
We’re blessed to be privy to all this, because next time we’re at the crossroads staring at the Done-Thing and the Fun-Thing, Fantasy will guide us.