‘Nocturne Pondicherry’: In these translated short stories, night is an enabler and invader

Ari Gautier’s Nocturne Pondicherry, translated from French by Roopam Singh, is a collection of seven short stories set in the coastal town of Pondicherry: “Viji”, “Mani Enna”, “The Exile”, “Malarvizhi”, “The Golden Cage”, “Marguerite” and “The Postman, the Madman and the Drunk”. Woven around the people on the margins, these stories try to pick the extraordinary from the ordinary.

Dark is the night

In Nocturne Pondicherry, night is the author’s ally. It is an enabler, an invader, an impostor, an interloper, an interlocutor, and sometimes an enemy. Night is greed. Night is revenge. Night is love and disgust. Night is longing and a curse. Night is all things beautiful and repulsion too. Night discriminates but it dotes too. Night is the hero as well as the anti-hero. The night acts as a catalyst, bringing the twist that either ends the story or the character. Sometimes the entire action is set at night and in others, only two words a character says would bring the storm of consequences the next morning.

And since the night is a culprit, the moon of Pondicherry shares some blame too. It’s not resplendent or majestic. It’s cowardly and shameful: “A cowardly moon, completely disgusted by so much abjection, hid behind the clouds.” And the same...

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