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Harper Collins Publishers. Rs 195

The Elegance Of Regret

The smoothness of a rosepetal, the whisper of a leaf in the breeze that’s how easy Nisha Da Cunha is with the short story. She lingers lovingly over each word and phrase. Her canvas is small, Jane Austen’s ‘two inches of ivory’. Smaller perhaps, because this is not the novel we are talking about, nor are we talking about someone who wrote all her secluded life and ran house.

Nisha da Cunha began her first collection of short stories when she was in her late 50s, and in her own words, "traumatised and going round the bend". She had just quit her job as English professor in St Xavier's College, Mumbai, after a very messy argument with the powers that be. Though she needed to do something, she was "not good at just running the house". It’s not easy to embark on a new career in the autumn of your life. Youth after all is resilient and can recover from all kinds of shocks. However da Cunha discovered the short story. And it gave her exactly what she needed to fill the sudden void in her life.

It is a form that she has held on to over the last 13 years. "Telling a short-story writer to be a novelist is like telling a water-colourist to paint in oil or a wood sculptor to carve in marble," she says. Though people have told her that short stories don’t sell, that novels are easier, she has refused to venture out of her form. And her stories reflect the ease of a form she is comfortable with -- right from her first book Old Cypress:Stories (1991) through Permanence of Grief (1993) to her latest labour of love, the just-published No Black No White.

In story after story, readers encounter the angst of ordinary people dealing with longing, sorrow, grief and disillusionment, loss, despair and letting go. The stories in No Black No White are shrouded in melancholy and have a wistful and fragile delicacy. "They are sad stories as people would call them," says she. "My temperament tends towards grief."

Her themes here are on the predicament of being Anglo-Indian, with one foot in either culture, belonging to neither, and on love and loss. On being an older woman who let her young lover go 'for his sake' only to discover that she condemned him to a lifetime of loneliness. Da Cunha draws heavily on memory -- of students in "Letting it Go", of convent school. The stories are set in places far and near -- Kew Gardens, Mussoorie, Mumbai or Goa, her husband's ancestral state. "The Roman Catholicism in Goa is fascinating. The majesty of the structures attracts me at the same time it's symbolic of dominion which repulses me. But being a Hindu I can talk about things like rituals with a different perspective." Which is why priests appear again and again in these stories.

The stories are not about great dramatic events. Their canvas stays small. They are not about great evil or great good - they have, in fact, like the title of the book, No Black, No White in them. Or perhaps like the Anglo Indians who recur throughout the stories, they are neither black nor white but one single entity.

The stories are reminiscent in vein. Perhaps age has something to do with that - looking back through a glass darkly and drawing lessons from the reflections seen therein. Though some are short notes to stories rather than stories themselves. And always, in the background is the presence of a lifetime spent in teaching literature. Mending Wall takes its title from a Robert Frost poem. "It's frightening as it is to have a late start. And if you have taught literature, it becomes more difficult to write because you can never measure up to the writers you love and admire. There is always the feeling that you are writing pedestrian stuff," writes the writer who discovered her craft later than others. However, the road she has taken so far seems to be full of promise with every reason for the journey to continue.

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