When you love the first story of a collection of short stories, you wish to keep reading, and Saraf hooked me from the beginning, with ‘Solitary Confinement,’ which was almost spiritual in nature, with a dystopian feel: a lone girl- getting over her addictions.
‘I remember the air that night, and how it was so brisk that it could revive the dead. The fragrance of eucalyptus stoking a home fire, the smell of wet grass, of dung fuel, of tobacco, of swamp air, and the perfume of hundreds of roses— this was the scent of Missing. No, it was the scent of a continent.’
It is here that the first fluttering of love is felt. Her aunt says, “Being defiant can be a good thing sometimes. Defiance is like Marijuana- it is not a bad thing when it is used right.”
As one has known, not all is ever lost. If there’s even one who believes in us, and loves us, it is enough to bring us back from the dead, as it were.
It draws you in very gradually, and then you know. Your heart beats hard, as you read on, the gradual development of young Arjie, and the blossoming of his self-awareness.
Klara is not just intelligent and insightful, she is also noble, which gives rise to the thought that perhaps we undermine those we consider robotic; we humans tend to disregard those very folk who display emotions with difficulty.
Perhaps it is an error to deem them less sensitive?
There is a freshness to her writing; a simplicity in it that belies the depth of what the story carries in its womb- the profound pain and the undying will to live on with it, as second skin.