Frosted Glass

This long book with 14 stories and 21 poems unwinds you like no other book. The stories are tales of loss, decay and melancholy set amidst urban settings, complex relationships and fiery emotions. The stories titled - An Improbable Love Affair / Midnight Conversation / A Meeting in a Cafe / Prank / Reunion / An Instantaneous Death - are pure classics. The beauty of the stories is also this that they do not follow the single vantage point of the protagonist as are short stories generally structured around; each story evolves through multiple vantage points of its characters including the author - the general aesthetic structure followed in novels. This quality makes the stories more layered and entertaining to read. They remind you of your own sensations as we all have experienced similar situations in our life at some point or the other. Another beauty is the betrayers and the betrayed in the stories find equal empathy and scrutiny of the writer.
The poems are written like narrations of dreams - real, surreal and metaphysical all blended together. They are deep and intense but very easy to identify with. There are a few poems which you would like to read out to your beloved; quite a few to someone whom you could never propose in your lifetime and a few others to yourself.
You can take this book on a vacation; you can gift this book to some one you care for.

The art of storytelling at its best and not simple narrations at that. The 14 stories one after the other create a vivid landscape of an emerging city life (with its attendant dreams and losses) implicitly engaged in intricate human relationships where I could see my own life reflected. When we read literary stroies we aspire to find out the essence of the mystery shrouding our own lives, to achieve a better understanding of our own lives. Frosted Glass provided me with that. Most of the stories I have read more than once to touch that sublime truth contained in them that I beleive would unravel the truth of my own life. Betrayal has been essayed in this compilation compassionately and with brilliant understanding and clarity.
I am not a poetry person. But the poems in this collection once again ignite in you a silent flame because of the strength of its visual content, simplicity and simmering stories of love and loss.

To start with a book that combines a collection of stories - most of which are written like novels - and a collection of poems - most of which are written like reflective stories - is a bit strange. The interesting part is the lead character in every story is a different man with the same name. It creates a paradox - must have been used as a deliberate aesthetic tool - of having split up the same man into 14 different pieces. Some of the female characters are very interesting - Nayantara, Vidya, Bimala Sen. Most of the stories are structurally very different from each other. But the mood and temperament are very similar. The poems are very visual although not graphic.

As one reads one story after another and then one poem after another, one is constantly in search of the book's illusive center. Although it is a compilation of stories and poems the book essentially reads like a novel where a huge urban landscape has been drawn to look at our modern lives of hopelessness and treachery. My personal favourites are - Act of Revenge (story), The Last Plunge (story), Clouds of Life (poem), Killer and a Cop Story (poem) and Mainal and I, a Night in the Ocean (poem). Kuddos! Cheers! It washes down your darkness like wine does.

Like going for a long walk through a mountain forest thick with tall trees, magical play of light and darkness and sudden proddings of sharp rock outcrops. Reminds us of our disintegrating lives. We are always swinging on an eternal pendulam crossing betteen spells of hope and hopelessness.