Growing up and growing old in 1990s Bangalore

A debut author with a collection of short stories set in Bangalore; definitely worth investigating.

Most of the stories in Shubha Sunder’s collection, Boomtown Girl , focuses, as befits the title, on girls growing up in Bangalore in the 1990s. This is the period which transformed Bangalore from a sleepy, quiet town with red-mud paths, red-roofed bungalows, wide roads and little traffic to the apartment-building, traffic-choked metropolis it is today. What caused this change? The IT boom.

The first and last stories in the collection are linked by fear. Dragon Girl follows Mansi, on the cusp of puberty:

In public, her body did not know how to carry itself: the growth spurt that rounded her hips and chest also left her gangly and knock-kneed

Ignored by her parents who declined to attend her school performance, in a fit of pique Mansi accepts a ride from a kind aunty and tells her she lives in Kaverinagar, a district she has never actually visited. For hours she roams the streets, barely avoiding the perpetual, vaguely-intuited danger from unknown men who expose themselves and invite her to their houses.

There are two 12-year-old girls in the last story, Boomtown Girl. Koo (Kusumanjali) is a rebel, reading novels or drawing pictures in class right under the noses of the nuns, living with an indulgent grandmother, apparently subject to few rules. The more rule-bound, risk-averse Mal (Malayagandhini) is fascinated by Koo’s adventurous streak, until they end up in a building under construction.

It’s getting late, [Mal] said now. We’ll be late for assembly. We have to go back.

We have to climb to the top , Koo said. [..]

Mal tried to avert her eyes from the drop but her eyes kept bending to the blackness, as with every step, her feet grew heavier.

This too is about a girl who is left alone in a rapidly changing Bangalore, with a tense thread of danger running through the story.

These two stories are snapshots in time, but could be set both before or after the 90s; nothing in them seemed to be particularly redolent of the 90s. In contrast, most of the other stories describe the changing city. Independence Day, follows a businessman and his daughter are going out to lunch. At the new Pizza Hut, no less.

Outside her window a woman in figure-hugging jeans and a flowing sleeveless top was riding pillion behind a man, her chin hooked over his shoulder, her bare arms and head luminous in the smog. […] Her own jeans, which her mother had declared to be indecently tight, were being squeezed as well, in the sandals her father had bought on his recent trip to Florida.

Unmistakably the new Bangalore, where the father is one of the new elite:

In an essay for her English class, she had written about him, how he had finished school at her age, sixteen, gone on to IIT and Cal Tech, how, after obtaining his doctorate he had, instead of settling in the USA, returned to India to pursue his career, how the country needed more people like him in this age of the Brain Drain.

The businessman wants, of course, his daughter to follow the same path, and quizzes her on Newtonian dynamics while they drive to Pizza Hut. Meanwhile, the mother is more traditional and critical.

Where is the necessity? her mother would have said. Where is the necessity, tell me, for you to have so much?

The girls in these stories are seething with rebellion, wanting freedom, lying to their parents, wanting to smoke, but at the same time dimly conscious of the ever-present threat from men. The author very gently outlines their thoughts and behaviour, leaving enough for the reader to imagine and outline on their own.

In Final Exam, a young woman, the perfect hardworking daughter who is in medical college (in India, medical school comes right after high school), while her brother is the overt rebel, riding a motorcycle, getting into fights, unwilling to follow the prescribed path. Yet, it is the young woman who is envious of his careless bravery.

“He just wakes up and decies he’s going to do something crazy. Why can’t I be that daring?”

“Because you and he are opposites”, she said. “You’re the class topper, school captain, teacher’s pet. He’s the brat.”

“[…] Nothing bothers him. He has no shame or what?”

“Shame is only for girls, didn’t you know? Stop envying him. It’s no use.”

Three stories are from the perspective of men. In Jungleman, a young boy develops a fascination for an American visitor. The more interesting The Western Tailor watches Ramesh, a tailor who can sew Western skirts and blouses and suits, and starts working for an American woman on the sly. She treats him as an equal, but this leads to a sad ending.

One of the most delicately detailed stories is A Very Full Day, where the elderly Mr Rajagopal is

the quintessential Kaverinagar retiree. In his wool-silk trousers, navy-blue sweater, and plaid scarf wrapped tightly around his ears, C.K. Rajagopal, former Air India pilot, cut a lithe, solitary figure as he strode down Eighth Main

Mr Rajagopal is ponderously self-important, but the people around him are gently amused by his personality. His son lives ‘halfway across the world’, and Mr Rajagopal is just beginning to show a loss of faculties.

A perceptive, nuanced set of stories from this debut author.