‘The Mistress of Phoolpur’: These short stories promise interesting ideas but fall short on delivery

A friend once described watching an Odissi dance troupe perform the same piece in multiple locations over the course of a few weeks as an experience that provided diminishing returns. The initial appreciation turned sour by the third viewing – he summed it up as a lot of yearning for a distant lover with the dancers dashing from one corner of the stage to the other. The only thing that briefly perked him up was the lead dancer spraining her foot and bravely limping through the the final performance. She kept up the yearning though, he said.

Odissi and two of its great contemporary practitioners, Surupa Sen and Bijoyini Satpathy, are the muses of “You Were My Death”, a story in Pratyaksha’s new collection of short fiction, The Mistress of Phoolpur. The author is inspired to write rhapsodic, sensual prose (interspersed with verses by Paul Celan and Anne Sexton) after witnessing a performance: “We lose our bodies; we flow into you…When you raise your arms heavenwards, we soar. You fling us, throw us, and we follow every step of the way.”

Unlike the rest of the stories included in this book, “You Were My Death” is not strictly fiction — it reads as an appreciation of...

Read more