two short stories

It is amazing to go through two short stories at a stretch – fluently and more or less hurriedly also -- having the author – Mr. Aniruddha Raha – at the table next to me at Writers’ Buildings.

Both the two, probably, have been written in recent times and they got published a few months back in two different periodicals. It is the dramatic climaxes and anti-climaxes which dominate the important sequences of both the stories. In the shorter one, the septuagenarian professor discovered the secret love of his deceased wife with one of his closest friends from the pages of an old book, while in the other, a senior officer identified the son of his one-time fiancée as a job-seeker at the doorstep of his office and also saw that boy having affair with the officer’s voluptuous lady-secretary for whom the officer himself had been nurturing some weaknesses.

Raha – a middle-aged bureaucrat – deserves rapturous applause for developing successfully the subtle feelings of love and languishment, agony of heart and melancholy of mind. The characters of his stories feel more, express less. They belong to urban-life and they belong to cyber-age too. They run fast, grow faster. Despite that, they can feel and they can weep even and they can make the reader moved.

And that is the u.s.p. of Mr. Aniruddha Raha – here he is different from the others. I have the          espint-de-corps for him.

11/6/2011