When A Story found An Author

Fri, Apr 22, 7:34 PM

From: Emma, Commonwealth Short Story Foundation

To: me

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Dear Ramanjaneya,

Thank you very much for submitting your story to this year’s Commonwealth Short Story Prize. It was our privilege to read every story and we hugely appreciate the time, effort and talent that you put into the submission.

This year saw a record number of over 6,700 entries, and we had a tough time shortlisting stories from hundreds of great submissions. We regret to inform you that unfortunately your story did not make the shortlist this year. We hope this will not deter you from entering the prize in the future, nor from continuing to write. Writers like you keep the tradition of story-telling alive and we wish you the very best in your writing career.

Thank you again and our very best wishes,

Emma

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                                                                                                              ***

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Based on real events, the story that I had submitted mirrored my own journey: that of a migrant to Mumbai. It was the story of taxi driver Ram Singh who ran away to Mumbai at the age of fourteen and worked his way up to a life of respect, comfort and steady income: something that every migrant to this colony of two crore humans aspires to. Aspires to, not dreams, for those who come here cannot afford the luxury of worry-less sleep that is the pre-requisite for dreams. If they had a belly full of food and a pillow free of worry, why would they migrate to a narrow strip of land where 65% live in slums more crowded than a bee-hive? 

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With this background, I was confident that my story would at least make it to the shortlist. It was not Slumdog Millionaire stuff, but more real, more within grasp and therefore, more hope-filled.

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In that 10-line 124-word e-mail that Emma had taken the trouble to write, to 6,675 people, one line jumped out: ‘…we regret to inform you that unfortunately your story did not make the shortlist this year…’ My story was about one in a million, actually one in ten million because Ram Singh was one of the few who reached the finishing line of a contented life, but it did not make the cut to be even one in less than ten thousand? 

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Why?

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Despite being kind enough to write an e-mail to 6,675 people, good Emma would have neither the bandwidth nor inclination to elaborate. Therefore I turned to the one woman in my life, kinder than good Emma, one who has been with me through thick, middling, thin, wafery thin and everything in-between. My wife M.

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“Did you like the story?” I asked.

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M was sitting in padmasana, her eyes closed, the tip of her forefinger touching the thumb in dhyana mudra, her breathing even, deep. “Yeah,” she replied.

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I watched her closely – the breathing continued to be even. She was not lying. “Then why didn’t Emm… erm… they like it?” I was worried that she would be worried that I was worrying about the opinion of another woman.

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“Did you like it?” She asked between an exhalation and inhalation cycle.

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I nodded.

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“Did you like it?” She asked at the junction of the next cycle.

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I slapped my forehead. Just because she could sit in padmasana, unflapped, did not mean she could see with eyes closed. “Yes, a lot.”

“You also like Diljeet Dosanjh’s movies. And Sunny Leone’s acting,” she said, stressing on the word ‘acting’.

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“So?” I asked.

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No response. People who practise pranayama grow ear-lids the way ordinary mortals have eye-lids. Continued staring proved futile. They say that when you sit in the presence of a zen master, you get answers without asking questions. Pranayama people are not much different – because they find answers in the silence, they believe that others do too.

 

Undeterred, I plodded on. So what if the Commonwealth Short Story Prize rejected my story? The Brits never understood India and Indians in any case. Off went the story to a lit-magazine. Two months later an e-mail that read suspiciously similar to Emma’s landed in my mailbox. Another, and another and yet another.

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Why were people not getting the story? No one appreciates Diljeet Dosanjh’s acting skills is understandable, but what’s not to like in the story that I had written? It was time to rewind the memory tapes back seventeen years to the day when I heard Ram Singh’s story to see what, if anything, I had missed.

 

                                                                                                                *

 

M had come to Navi Mumbai on work and stayed the weekend before she was to depart. This was March 2006. Since my regular cabbie was off to his “native place”, I hailed a black and yellow taxi from outside M’s hotel. Those days Premier Padmini, the compact box cars from the 80’s transformed into taxis, plied the streets of Mumbai. 

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“Sorry saab,” the cabbie said, “the waiting for return bhada at the airport is 3 to 4 hours.”

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“I live here near Teen Taki. After we drop madam at the airport, you can drive me back,” I said.

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It was 4.00 PM, and a return trip from Navi Mumbai to the airport and back would take at least three hours, if not more. Behind rectangular scuffed metal rimmed bifocal glasses, the cabbie’s eyes looked uncertain.

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“Please,” I said, “my regular cabbie has gone to his native village and it is time for madam’s flight.”

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“Ok,” he bobbed his head. Salt and pepper hair from his neatly combed hair, parted on the left side, dropped on his forehead. He brushed it back up, revealing a broad forehead in a squarish face.

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We were in time for M’s flight. I hugged her goodbye and waited until she disappeared into the pale-yellow distemper-painted milling-with-people entrance to the Mumbai airport. 

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“We can go now,” I said, settling into the back seat of the taxi.

 

“Was it your wife, saab?” the cabbie asked, half-turning his head towards me.

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I was sure he knew it was not “wife”. He was probing. “No, it’s my fiancée,” I replied, closely watching his eyes in the rear-view mirror.

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He nodded, and looked satisfied by the response. Did he have anything against boyfriend-girlfriend coochie-cooing in the rear seat of taxis? 

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“Where are you from?” I asked, not wanting the conversation to veer towards my marital plans.

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“Haryana saab,” he said and mentioned the name of his village which I will withhold for now. 

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“How long have you been driving taxis in Mumbai?” I asked.

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“More than 40 years, saab,” he said, turning his head back.

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Calculating in my head, I figured that he must be in his 60’s. 

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He turned his head back. “I am 58 years old, saab,” he said, as if reading my mind.

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“Oh, but you don’t look that old.”

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He turned his head back again. “Can you sit in the front seat if you don’t mind saab? I am a little hard of hearing and don’t want to turn back every time you speak.”

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Amusing. I chat with cabbies every time I take the ride from the airport to Navi Mumbai, but no one has ever placed such a request. “Sure,” I said, “what is your name?”

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“Ram Singh,” he said, manoeuvring the taxi to the side on the south-bound arm of the Western Express Highway. I shifted to the front seat.

“It is easier to speak this way, saab,” he said, his eyes now fixed in front of him. And he spoke, without having to turn his head back every time.

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We spoke for the next two hours – Ram Singh doing most of the speaking. Traffic was uncharacteristically heavy and for the first time, I was glad that it was. In those two hours, sitting in the front seat of the tiny Premier Padmini taxi, I listened to Ram Singh’s story – how he ran away from home at the age of fourteen because his step-mother was abusive; how he got into a train without knowing where it was headed and reached Mumbai, then called Bombay; how he scrubbed taxis for a living, making just enough money for two vada-pav’s, a tea and spare change to use the public toilet in the morning; how kind taxi drivers taught him to drive during their spare time; how he cobbled enough money for a driving license; how he drove rented taxis, driving more than 18 hours a day, saving enough money to buy his own taxi – a second hand taxi; how he married a woman chosen for him by his bua – his father’s sister; how his wife, as hard-working as he was, set up a small tea stall near the kholi – the single room tenement they lived in; how they made enough money for him to buy another taxi and another one after that; how he bought a one bedroom hall kitchen flat in an apartment complex; his two sons; how he bought the adjacent two bedroom flat and combined it with his one room house; how he bought property – another house and three small shops that he has rented out; how he got his sons educated in an English medium school and now one works for Air India as a ground engineer and another is about to complete his B.Com; how his sons want him to stop driving taxis but he wants to continue “working” until his last breath. 

Ram Singh lived in his native village in Haryana in poverty. He came to Mumbai seeking escape. This is the story of every migrant into Mumbai. Statistics claim that over a thousand migrants arrive in the city every single day. Some meld into the city, some hold out but still eke out a survival; but everyone finds livelihood in Mumbai, which many call a karma-bhoomi. However, Ram Singh is different from these others: while most other migrants come here to escape fate, Ram Singh rewrote his fate. His resolve is an example for all, irrespective of demographic and economic class.

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                                                                                                                *

 

Long after I heard Ram Singh, his story continued to pickle in my head. His was a story that I wanted to write. In September 2021, I decided to submit an entry for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. What better than Ram Singh’s tale. I wrote the story and got rejected by Emma.. Undeterred, I submitted the story to another contest. And another. And yet another. Only to be rejected every time.

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What was missing? Going back to the submissions, I realised that I had become the owner of the story when it was Ram Singh’s. My story was getting rejected, not Ram Singh’s because the story on the page was not his! 

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Though the story that I wrote was Ram Singh’s story, it was a story in my words, my voice. It was the voice of the English-medium educated, well-settled urban Indian. The voice and the story were at odds with each other - it was inauthentic. In my voice, Ram Singh’s story was a mildly interesting tale, far from the inspiring story that it should have been. In my voice, it was my story, not Ram Singh’s story.

Should I write it in Hindi, I wondered, peppering it with the rustic Haryanvi that Ram Singh used? But that would have a limited reach – the Hindi speaking, Hindi reading audience. There was another problem – my Hindi is not of literary quality by a stretch. 

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What to do?

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The answer came during another cab ride, this time an air-conditioned Uber. The cabbie was a young man from a village near Mathura. Though I conversed with him in Hindi, he used as much English as he could, not embarrassed by his broken “butler” English. He was proud of the English he spoke, because it was English after all.

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How would Ram Singh narrate the story in English, I wondered. It would be broken English, syntactically incorrect, with broken phrases, and often, Hindi idiom and phraseology translated word-to-word into English. The resultant would not be correct English, but it would be Ram Singh’s voice.

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This was not easy – the auto-correct in MS-Word and the auto-correct in my head interfered in every sentence. Disabling the spell check and grammar check helped. Ram Singh became Durges in the story and his native village moved from Haryana to Bihar. Some fictional elements were added to heighten the circumstances he came from, and to give a logical closure to the story. I titled it ‘Myself Durges’, reflecting the voice of the story.

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The resultant first draft was not my voice, but the voice of a rustic Indian. In the process of relinquishing grammar, I had also renounced the craft of writing: the story did not have a single sensory descriptor; it did not describe the environment the story was set in. Comprising almost entirely of Durges’ monologue and peppered with occasional dialogue, the story did not follow the three-act structure. There is no crisis before the climax, no dark night of the soul. Looking back, the narrative progresses in a linear fashion. There is conflict, yes, since Durges has to grapple with circumstances stacked against him every step of the way. However there is no single identifiable antagonist: no corrupt traffic constables demanding a bribe, no local goon extracting hafta, no inter-taxi driver rivalry. The politics of religion, caste and class is absent too. The only antagonistic element is fate if that can be called one, but it is not mentioned overtly. 

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Thrilled, I submitted Myself Durges to a short story contest. Durges’ story did not make the cut. I was disappointed. What could be done better, I wondered. A re-read revealed the missing element: the story ended abruptly. And it was preachy. Was Ram Singh preachy? No. He simply narrated his tale. He did not take a moral high ground. He did not expect adulation. In me, he probably saw another aspiring migrant, much like his younger self. Or maybe he spoke to me out of boredom – chatting with another human is certainly more appealing than listening to an RJ yakking on the radio. 

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Why Ram Singh spoke about his life did not matter – how he did mattered. Though Myself Durges captured Ram Singh’s voice, it did not capture the spirit: the sense of achievement in his voice when he spoke about the taxis he rented out or the properties that he had purchased. There was an unmistakable glint in his eye and pride when he spoke about his sons. His was a story that had a happy ending, a hope-filled ending. Myself Durges needed that.

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Ram Singh did not blame God. He did not blame fate or the government. Not once did he mention them. That self-reliance needed magnification in the story. Elements magnifying Durges’ reliance on himself and his resolve had to be added by juxtaposing it with the blame-god blame-fate blame-the-government attitude that many, including those of our demographic have when faced with seemingly insurmountable hurdles. 

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In May 2024 I re-submitted the story for an anthology call by a literary platform in the UK. They wanted South-Asian stories on a specific theme for their upcoming anthology. Though Myself Durges fit the theme of the anthology, I was not sure if a story in broken English would appeal to the curators in the UK, the home of queen’s English. 

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Maybe it was time for Ram Singh’s story to reach the world – Myself Durges made it to the anthology bypassing the shortlist. Above all, the voice appealed to the curators of the anthology. This was an experiment, a risky one, but it paid off. The credit goes to the strength of Ram Singh’s story, for the voice and language provide at best the casing for a jewel, for a gem will sparkle irrespective of the casing it is set in. My fears about the language not appealing to UK based editors were laid to rest when I received the edits – there were only 3 edits in the 3,000-word story. 

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It took eighteen years for the story to find an author and then its audience. The story that was first rejected by a UK based contest found home in an anthology curated and published in the UK. The story had come full circle. Does life do too? I don’t know. What prevailed was mehnat aur zidd, as Ram Singh might have said, though he never did for he never once pontificated. Mehnat aur zidd – unyielding effort and gritty determination. That is Myself Durges. 

 

The anthology ‘Bridges not Borders’ curated by Writers Beyond Borders, UK, that is home to ‘Myself Durges’ has stories from 15 authors of South Asian origin. Seven of these stories are from India. The anthology was released in the UK in September 2024 and online in mid-October 2024. Myself Durges has since been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.