A Master Storyteller

Namita Gokhale's new collection of short stories—Life on Mars-is peopled with an interesting set of characters

- Aditya Mani Jha

The titular story in Namita Gokhale’s Life on Mars: Collected Stories follows a woman who befriends an unusual young man the same age as her emotionally distant sons. The story derives its name from a passage where Gokhale makes a poignant connection between the stereotypical imagery of Martians as ‘little green men’, and a group of doctors in their green-hued scrubs, huddled around the woman as she enters the hospital.

“Before I knew it, I was in hospital, being wheeled around on a rattling trolley—well, not a trolley but a stretcher, and there were arc lights and men in green overalls wearing masks. As the anaesthesia got to me, I discovered that I was on Mars, there were masked men in green overalls everywhere, and life on Mars wasn't really so different from life in Delhi. It was difficult, tedious and painful.”

It’s a particularly clever narrative gambit also because the woman's new friend, Udit Narain, is a “genuine crank”, a conspiracy theorist who would no doubt chuckle at his friend invoking Martians in a relatively mundane medical situation. Life on Mars contains stories Gokhale wrote through the 1990s and the 2000s, as well as several new stories written in the last few years.