Stories Varied: A Book of Short Stories

By BS Murthy

This is a collection of short stories that deals with women's dilemmas in the Indian social milieu accompanied with unique denouements.

While 'Ilaa's Ire' contrasts woman's lot of the day with her eminence in the Vedic Age, '201' Qualms" depicts her predicament, torn between personal loyalty and citizen's responsibility.

As "?" addresses woman's marital stress in an alien land, 'Cupid's Clue' is about her acting on rebound in her native place.

Even as 'Autumn Love' lets woman discover the marital void in her life, 'A Touchy Affair' makes her amenable to her man's other woman.

Just as 'Love's How's That' inflames woman's old flame, 'A Hearty Turn' brings her innate lesbian leanings to the fore.

If 'Love Jihad' bridges lovers' religious divide with a secular plank, 'Tenth Nook' creates her marital gulf on the materialistic ground.

While 'Eleventh Hour' is about woman's lust for love, 'Twelfth Tale' underscores her zest for power.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BS Murthy
• Release date: Jun 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310533877

BS Murthy

BS Murthy is an Indian novelist, playwright, short story, non-fiction 'n articles writer, translator, a 'little' thinker and a budding philosopher in ‘Addendum to Evolution: Origins of the World by Eastern Speculative Philosophy’ that was originally published in The Examined Life On-Line Philosophy Journal, Vol. 05 Issue 18, Summer 2004.Born on 27 Aug 1948 and schooled in letter-writing, by 1983, he started articulating his managerial ideas, in thirty-odd published articles. However, in Oct 1994, he began penning Benign Flame: Saga of Love with the ‘novel art' and continued his fictional endeavors in ‘plot and character’ driven novels, Jewel-less Crown: Saga of Life and Crossing the Mirage: Passing through youth.Then entering the arena of non-fiction with a ‘novel’ narrative in Puppets of Faith: Theory of Communal Strife, possibly a new genre, he ventured into the zone of translations for versifying the Sanskrit epics, Vyasa’s Bhagvad-Gita (Treatise of self-help) and Valmiki’s Sundara Kãnda (Hanuman’s Odyssey) in contemporary English idiom.Later, ascending Onto the Stage with Slight Souls and other stage and radio plays, he returned to fictional form with Glaring Shadow - A stream of consciousness novel and Prey on the Prowl - A Crime Novel to finally reach the short story horizon with Stories Varied - A Book of Short Stories.Then, as a prodigal son, he returned to his mother tongue, Telugu, the Italian of the East, to craft the short story తప్పటడుగులు (Missteps) only to step into the arena of Indian English Writing with Of No Avail: Web of Wedlock.While his fiction had emanated from his conviction that for it to impact readers, it should be the soulful rendering of characters rooted in their native soil but not the hotchpotch of local and alien caricatures sketched on a hybrid canvas, all his body of work was borne out of his passion for writing, matched only by his love for language, which is in the public domain in umpteen ebook sites.Some of his published articles on management issues, general insurance topics, literary matters, and political affairs in The Hindu, The Economic Times, The Financial Express. The Purchase, The Insurance Times, Triveni , Boloji.com at https://independent.academia.edu/BulusuSMurthyHe, a graduate mechanical engineer from Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra, Ranchi, India, is a Hyderabad-based Insurance Surveyor and Loss Assessor since 1986.He takes keen interest in politics of the day, has an ear for Carnatic and Hindustani classical music and had been a passionate Bridge player.He's is married, to a housewife, with two sons, the elder one a PhD in Finance and the younger a Master in Engineering.-----------------------------------------My ‘Novel’ Account of Human PossibilityWhenever I look at my body of multi-genre work in English, the underlying human possibility intrigues me no end, and why not for my mother tongue Telugu, touted as the Italian of the East, has no linguistic connection with it whatsoever.To start with, I was born into a land-owning family in Kothalanka, a remote Indian village, of Andhra Pradesh to be precise that is after the British had folded their colonial tents from the sub-continent, but much before the rural education mechanism was geared up therein. It was thus the circumstances of my birth enabled me to escape from the tiresome chores of primary schooling till I had a nine-year fill of an unbridled childhood, embellished by village plays and enriched by grandma’s tales, made all the more appealing by her uncanny storytelling ability. Added to that, as my great great maternal grandfather happened to be a poet laureate at the court of a princeling of yore, maybe their genes together strived to infuse their muses in me their progeny.However, as the English plants that Lord Macaulay planted in the Hindustani soil hadn’t taken roots in the hinterland till then, it’s the native tongues that held the sway in the best part of that ancient land. No wonder then, well into my secondary schooling, leave alone constructing an English sentence, whenever I had to read one, I used to be afflicted by an unceasing stammer. Maybe, it was at the behest of the unseen hand of human possibility, or owing to his foresight, and /or both that, in time, my father had shifted our family base to the cosmopolitan town of Kakinada to admit me into Class X at the McLaren High School. And with that began my affair with the English language, facilitated by Chinnababu, my classmate, which, courtesy Abbimavayya, my maternal uncle, found fruition in the continental fiction, in translation, however to the detriment of my mechanical engineering education to the chagrin of my vexed father.Nevertheless, even as the Penguin classics imbibed in me the love for language that is besides broadening my outlook of life, my nature enabled me to explore the possibilities of youth. That’s not all, all through; it was as if destiny tended to afford my life to examine its intrigues while fiction enabled me to handle its vicissitudes with fortitude that stood me in good stead throughout. Besides, in those days of yore, as letter-writing was in vogue, I was wont to embellish my missives to friends and the loved-ones with the insights the former induced and the emotions the latter stirred in me. So to say, all those letters that my latter-day novels carry owe more to my ingrained habit than to the narrative need of my muse.Providentially, when I was thirty-three, my eyes and mind seemed to have combined to explore the effect of the led on the leader, and when the resultant ‘Organizational ethos and good Leadership’ was published in The Hindu; I experienced the inexplicable thrill of seeing one’s name in print. Enthused thus by the fortuitous development, I began to articulate my views on general, and materials management, general insurance, politics, and, not to speak of, life and literature in over a score of published articles. But fiction writing was nowhere near my pen and the thought of becoming a novelist was beyond my horizon for Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Turgenev, Emily Zola, Gustav Flaubert et al (I hadn’t read Marcel Proust and Robert Musil by then) were, and are, my literary deities, and how dare I, their devotee, to envision myself in the sanctum sanctorum of the novel.All the same, when I was forty-four, having been fascinated by the manuscript of a satirical novella penned by one Bhibhas Sen, an Adman, with whom I had been on the same intellectual page for the past four years then, it occurred to me, ‘when he could, I can for sure’. It was as if Sen had driven away the ghosts of those literary greats that came to shadow my muse but as life would have it, it was another matter that not wanting to foul his work, as he hadn’t obliged the willing publisher to pad it up to a ‘publishable size’, that manuscript remained in the literary limbo.So, with my muse thus unshackled, I set to work on the skeletal idea of Pardonables, the working title of Benign Flame, with the conviction that for fiction to impact readers, it should be the soulful rendering of characters rooted in their native soil, not the hotchpotch of the local and foreign caricatures sketched on a hybrid canvas, the then norm of the Indian Writing in English. Yet, it took me a full fortnight to make the narrative flowing with the opening – ‘That winter night in the mid-seventies, the Janata Express was racing rhythmically on its tracks towards the coast of Andhra Pradesh. As its headlight pierced the darkness of the fertile plains, the driver honked the horn as though to awake the sleepy environs to the spectacle of the speeding train.’However, from then on, it was as though a ‘novel’ chemistry had developed between my muse and the mood of its characters that shaped its fictional course, and soon I came to believe that I had something exceptional to offer to the world of letters, nay the world itself. So, not wanting to die till I gave it to it, I tended to go to lengths to preserve my life that was till I delivered it in nine months with a ‘top of the world’ feeling at that. Then, when one Spencer Critchley, an American critic, thought that – “It’s a refreshing surprise to discover that the story will not trace a fall into disaster for Roopa, given that many writers might have habitually followed that course with a wife who strays into extramarital affairs” – I felt vindicated about my unique contribution. Just the same, as there were no takers to it among the Indian publishers and the Western agents, I was left with no heart to bring my pen to any more paper (those were the pre-keyboard days) though my head was swirling with many a novel idea, triggered by my examined life lived in an eventful manner.Nevertheless, sometime later, that was after I happened to browse through a published book; I had resumed writing, owing altogether to a holistic reason: while it was the quality of Sen’s unpublished work that set me on a fictional course from which I was derailed by the publishers’ apathy, strangely, it was the paucity of any literary worth in that published book that spurred me back onto the novel track to pursue the pleasure of writing for its own sake. It’s thus; I could reach the literary stations of - Crossing the Mirage and Jewel-less Crown that was before my pen, in the wake of the hotly debated but poorly analyzed post-Godhra communal riots, took a non-fictional turn with the Puppets of Faith.Thereafter, as if wanting me to lend my literary hand to other genres, my muse heralded me into the arena of translation, ushered me onto the unknown stage, put me on a stream of consciousness, took me to crime scenes, dragged me into the by-lanes of short stories, and driven me into the novella fold. However, as a prodigal son, I took to my first steps into the Telugu short story field with my ‘Missteps’ తప్పటడుగులు.Whatever, it was Michael Hart, the founder of the Project Gutenberg, who first lent his e-hand to my books ever in search of readers. But who would have thought that life held such literary possibilities in the English language for a rustic Telugu lad reared in the rural Andhra, even in the post-colonial India? So, the possibilities of life are indeed novel and seemingly my life has crystallized itself in my body of work before death could dissipate it.My body of work of ten free eBooks, in varied genres, is in the public domain: https://g.co/kgs/iA9zkd

Book preview

Stories Varied

A book of short stories

BS Murthy

ISBN 9781310533877

Copyright © 2016 BS Murthy

Cover design of Gopi’s water color painting by Lattice Advertisers, Hyderabad.

F-9, Nandini Mansion,

1-10-234, Ashok Nagar,

Hyderabad – 500 020

Dedicated to readers,

past, present ‘n future,

of my body of work,

in full or in part(s)

Other books by BS Murthy

Benign Flame – Saga of Love

Jewel-less Crown - Saga of Life

Crossing the Mirage – Passing through youth

Glaring Shadow – A stream of consciousness novel

Prey on the Prowl - A Crime Novel

Onto the Stage – Slighted Souls and other stage and radio plays

Puppets of Faith: Theory of Communal Strife

Bhagvad-Gita: Treatise of self – help (A translation in verse)

Sundara Kãnda - Hanuman’s Odyssey (A translation in verse)

Foreword

With the addition of ‘Prey on the Prowl’ to my body of work, I thought the accretion was over without short story genre. Not that I didn’t try my hand at that, indeed I did, but finding the output wanting, I didn’t refill my pen again.

Maybe, literature was keen to have my contribution in this fictional sphere as well, so it seems, as beginning from July 2015, Vinita Dawra Nagia came up with Write India Campaign of Times of India. Her idea was to let the aspiring writers build their stories on the ‘prompts’ provided by eleven of India’s popular authors starting with Amish Tripathi.

When I penned Ilaa’s Ire on Amish’s prompt, it felt like I had crossed the unassailable frontier, and thereafter, for the next ten months, thanks to the prompts by Chetan Bhagat, Aswin Sanghi, Ravi Subramanian, Preeti Shenoy, Tuhin A. Sinha, Ravinder Singh, Durjoy Datta, Madhuri Banarjee, Jaisree Misra and Anita Nair, I had experienced the joy of short story writing.

That in the end, I could pen my Twelfth Tale, sans any prompting, perhaps, is a testimony to the success of Vinita’s Write India Campaign.

Story Titles

Story 1) Ilaa’s Ire

Story 2) ‘201’ Qualms

Story 3) ?

Story 4) Cupid’s Clue

Story 5) Autumn Love

Story 6) A Touch Affair

Story 7) Love’s How’s That?

Story 8) A Hearty Turn

Story 9) Love Jihad

Story 10) Tenth Nook

Story 11) Eleventh Hour

Story 12) Twelfth Tale

Story 1

Ilaa’s Ire

Close to the city of Paithan, in a small village called Sauviragram, which lay along the banks of the great river Godavari, lived a woman named Ilaa. Being cotton farmers, her family was well to do, but not among the richest in the area. It was the harvest season, and cotton had to be picked from plants. The wholesalers and traders from Paithan would be arriving in just a few weeks, carrying gold and goods for barter. They would exchange what they carried for the cotton that the farmers grew. The bales of cotton had to be ready in time! Work was at its peak!

But Ilaa was not to be found in the fields. She wasn’t working. Instead, she was sitting by the banks of the great river Godavari.

‘I am sick of this!’ she grunted loudly, dangling her weary legs in the languid waters. [*]

‘Why not,’ she thought, ‘am I not a victim of the unmaking of the mores of yore that brought woman’s life to this pass?

Gazing at the Sun, setting by then, she felt it symbolized the loss of sheen, of woman’s high noon of life, pictured by her grandmother in bedtime tales.

‘If only things remained the same,’ she began to speculate about her would-have-been life, ‘I would have gone to a gurukula to become a satyavadini at fifteen, and who knows, I might have blossomed into a Maitreyi of the day, if not a modern day Ghosa. Moreover, I would have been entitled to choose a man I fancied in a swayamvara, oh, what an appetizing prospect it is. Won’t that prove our ancestors were wise enough to realize that woman’s liberation lay in her right over her body to entrust it to the man she coveted? But how ignoramus the progeny of the wise have become to ordain woman to remain illiterate and live in ignorance! How she’s given away in marriage, to a man of her father’s choosing, lo, when she hasn’t even matured! What else is woman nowadays if not man’s vassal? How sad that women of Sauviragram, or Paithan for that matter, can’t dare dream about things, which their ancestors took for granted. Maybe, same is the case with fair sex everywhere in the once fair land named after my namesake.’

As though to bring to the fore her dreams gone sour, the flow under her feet picked up stream.

Ilaa was born into a family of marginal farmers in Paithan. While mother earth, all along, had seemingly conjured up with the rain gods to make it bountiful in their paddy fields, as though not to deplete their meager landholding, mother nature too had ensured, over the generations, that their home had a single issue, male at that. But much before she was born, as her grandfather died prematurely, though being hale and healthy, her father, bitten by the quick-buck bug, threw caution to the winds and wagered on the cash crops. That was in spite of the protestations of his mother and pleadings by his wife. As though to prove the old adage right that greed brings in grief, coinciding with his decision to harvest cotton, the kapas market went into depression. While prudence suggested course correction, as his gambling instinct got the better of him, raising the stakes at the next outing, he took the neighbours’ land on lease for making a killing. What with the pests of Paithan too turning greedy, the failure of two successive crops, besides reducing him into a farmhand in his own land, made his mother a maid in a Brahman household. Though his wife wanted to follow suit, as his mother was averse to it, she was left at home to fend for herself the meagerness of their means.

It was in those hard times that Ilaa was born to the unenthusiastic welcome of all; though soon enough, enamoured of her charming demeanour, everyone began to hold her dear, her father included. But as gods are prone to forgive their favourites, sooner or later that is, Ilaa had a brother for company when she crossed five. While the fraternal frolics pleased her heart, it was her grandma’s tales, picked up