New York Times (May 13, 2012)
A Tiger in Love
‘I Am an Executioner,’ by Rajesh Parameswaran
A compulsive and infectious narrative restlessness marks Rajesh
Parameswaran’s first collection of short fiction, “I Am an
Executioner.” Although tagged by the generic subtitle “Love Stories,”
Parameswaran’s work demonstrates about the same relationship to
traditional literary debuts as the insects in his strange and beautiful
story “On the Banks of Table River (Planet Lucina, Andromeda Galaxy, AD
2319)” do to the earthlings who have colonized their planet.
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Illustration by Daniel Zender
I AM AN EXECUTIONER
Love Stories
By Rajesh Parameswaran
260 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.95.
Parameswaran prefers first-person narration to the more detached third
person, but his storytellers are also wedded to a 21st-century
experimentalism, continually uncaging themselves from realist fiction.
From tigers and elephants to a man in a yellowing photograph and, most
simply and touchingly, just a “being” in “On the Banks of Table River,”
they form an unpredictable and often charming cavalcade, revealing both
the particularity of what they perceive and the extent of what they
misunderstand or simply miss. Raptly attentive to their own narratives,
they gradually paint us into corners. We must peer around and above
them before we can escape.
“The Agent does not try to understand what he is seeing,” we are told
in the story called “Narrative of Agent 97-4702.” “That is a job for
the Analyst.” Here a fiercely committed spy presents her report of a
fairly ordinary surveillance operation, a report that begins to crackle
when it becomes clear that she is also pursuing a chilling
self-interrogation.
Parameswaran’s decision to avoid the convention of naming many of his
characters and places serves to make the Agent, like other figures in
this collection, powerfully allegorical. When the Agent eventually
pleads guilty to “entertaining a mental state conducive to forming an
intention to disclose protected information,” she plunges us into that
nightmare world in which people need never be brought to trial because
they have already tried and convicted themselves.
The companion to this story is “Demons,” in which a harassed wife is
also seen entertaining a mental state. Having idly wished her annoying
husband would just die, she suddenly finds him felled by a heart
attack. In the aftermath, she’s consumed by the notion, common in
India, that wishing harm on another may activate such harm.
Elsewhere, Parameswaran’s characters, humans and animals both, find
themselves puzzled by love and power, devotion and detachment. The
speaking tiger in “The Infamous Bengal Ming” finds its attempts to love
a human being bloodily thwarted by its own brute strength. The
executioner in the finely mysterious title story insists that his is
just a job like any other, even while revealing, in his disheveled
English, that his bewildering power makes him “wonder the universe.”
Parameswaran’s desire to ground his speakers’ voices in syntactical and
cultural tics sometimes has the effect of turning an individual into a
type, as when the executioner supplies the registers — but also the
clichés — of Indian-accented English, reporting that “people always
marvel how I am maintaining cheerful demeanors and positive outlooks.”
At their best, though, Parameswaran’s stories combine narrative brio,
ringing voices and beguilingly looped plots. In the hilarious yet
pathetic “Four Rajeshes,” the narrator, a man called Rajesh, confesses
to homosexual passion as a railway-station manager in an
early-20th-century south Indian village even as he berates a
present-day man called Rajesh, presumably the “real” author of the
story, for making the whole thing up, inspired by nothing more than an
old photograph. Thus realist revelation and postmodern speculation
proceed in parallel, like the very railway tracks the primal Rajesh
supervises. Despite their occasional contrivances, these are very much
stories that make us “wonder the universe.”
Chandrahas Choudhury is the editor of an anthology of short fiction,
“India: A Traveler’s Literary Companion
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