Iron in the Soul

Yes, creative minds don't function like ordinary people. But I will draw the line when the crime is as heinous as paedophilia and rape

- Satish Padmanabhan

IN the short story Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage—in the collection of short stories by the same name—by Alice Munro, two young girls, Edith and Sabitha, the first callous and the second conflicted, play a mean prank that changes many lives. To kill boredom, they write hoax love letters to the lonely and plain spinster Johanna, forging the signature of Sabitha’s father, Ken Boudreau, a drifter who lives in another town.

It’s a delicate story of the casual cruelty of the young, sparse and hard life of the poor in the outback of Ontario, the small and simple hopes of Johanna, longing for identity and meaning. It ends on a note of optimism, Ken and Johanna are going to be married, but it may be that Johanna is only going from one life of hardship to another, maybe this time with a little bit of love.

This story stayed with me for many days. I would see Johanna in many people I knew, and in many other characters in books and films, like say in Iris played by the other-worldly Kati Outinen in Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki’s devastating film The Match Factory Girl. I love the short story. I love its distilled thought and compact form; the writer bringing to life characters and locations with just a few flourishes. I have devoured everything from the warm and humane stories of Anton Chekhov, O Henry and Guy de Maupassant, the stinging stories of Ambai (C S Lakshmi), the twisted tales of Italian writer Dino Buzzati (in the collection Catastrophe). Stories that can take place in one afternoon like Saki’s inventive The Open Window or Roald Dahl’s Lamb to the Slaughter, or many lifetimes, like so many by Annie Proulx.