Review: A Bouquet of Dead Flowers by Swadesh Deepak

In theatre circles, Swadesh Deepak is best known for Court Martial (1991). His plays and his stories too often featured high ranking army officers with the author himself appearing to have deeply internalised their anxieties and the personal and mental crises they face. A rare Hindi writer whose work presents fratricides, he was a dark story teller notorious for killing off his characters. Perhaps this was a manifestation of his own prolonged struggle with bipolar disorder.

With his 2003 memoir, Maine Mandu Nahi Dekha, Swadesh Deepak established himself as an eccentric yet significant figure in the Hindi literary world. Jerry Pinto’s 2021 translation introduced the author to the Indian English literary milieu, which has belatedly been discovering gems from bhasha writing. The generally positive reaction to A Bouquet of Dead Flowers, a recently translated collection of 10 stories by four translators – Jerry Pinto, Pratik Kanjilal, Nirupama Dutt and the author’s son, Sukant Deepak – is another example of this new interest that is now driving much translation in the Indian English space.

Kisi Ek Ped Ka Naam Lo (Name a Tree, Any Tree) is the highlight of this collection. For those who know Deepak’s memoir, this piece will read like a frame story: Maya Bakshi, a beautiful girl, who has just returned from the USA, falls in love with Ajay, an army man who is being court-martialed for fratricide, a crime usually punished with the death penalty. If the story were to be viewed as a subtextual narrative, Maya Bakshi would correspond to the Mayavini (seductress) of the author’s memoir, who entered Deepak’s life to avenge the treatment he meted out to Ajay. The narrative gains meaning from layers of fact and fiction. Kisi Ek Ped Ka Naam Lo is a complete show though the reader might wonder how a girl who has just returned to her native land can fall in love with and decide to marry someone within just three days. Still, this story is gooseflesh inducing.

The volume’s four translators all seem to know the author’s craft and persona and the works selected for this collection cleverly provide a summary of all of Deepak’s literary work. In Bagugoshe, (Pears of Rawalpindi), it seems like the English teacher of the story is the author himself, someone who is struggling to come to terms with his illness. The protagonist’s mother snivels about the lost charm of his face, and he just smiles.

Jungle is about a reticent army captain avenging the killing of fellow army men in a fake encounter elimination of a rebel in Nagaland. A straightforward believer of simple and linear sentences, thematically, Swadesh Deepak’s stories are more about “how it happened” than “what has happened”. Especially shocking and vivid is the scene where the captain rapes the rebel’s sister with his gaze, never once laying a hand on her.

The social and political criticism of these stories is unnerving. No News of Untoward Events is about a prime minister’s visit to a small town. Instead of causing excitement, the news brings much discomfort to the townspeople. Hunger, the collection’s first story, sets the tone by offering a realistic doom. Two siblings, a smaller boy and his 12-years-old sister are raped by guards of a railway godown in exchange for grain. The children’s disabled mother, aware of their fate, lets it happen to placate the family’s hunger.

This is the sort of story Jerry Pinto is pointing to in the book’s introduction when he writes that Swadesh Deepak maintained that Hindi literature had to be forced out of its comfort zone.

Swadesh Deepak has often been compared with Hindi author Nirmal Verma. Both are known for their legion of enthusiastic women readers. While Deepak had sparkling eyes and a masculine demeanour, Verma was baby-faced, fussy, mildly short-tempered, and often wrote about Europe in his works. What set both of them apart was how they treated their characters: Deepak invariably killed them and, as a result, was often chased down by the spectres of those very characters.

Verma lets his characters suffer in a melancholy world but never kills them. And unlike Deepak, he believed in real fights of the dishoom dishoom type as we learn from Suragi, UR Ananthamurthy’s autobiography. Both authors are significant figures in Hindi literature, and continue to be popular with young readers too. While Verma garnered a greater fan following, Deepak offered something profoundly pensive and disturbing. Unsurprisingly, his memoir takes the reader into a masochistic meditative space.

Swadesh Deepak whose work looks at socio-political corruption with a piercing eye really should have been translated much earlier. His memoir reveals that he struggled tremendously, and lived with an awareness of the apathy of the world. His bipolar disorder infused confusion even into familial spaces. He would eventually leave the house to go for a walk in 2006, and never return. He was 63.

A Bouquet of Dead Flowers is a timely collection that deserves to be read widely.

Mayank Jain Parichha is an independent bilingual journalist. He writes about the environment, wildlife, culture, literature, and politics.