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    The Buffet and other stories
    The Buffet and other stories
    The Buffet and other stories
    Ebook120 pages1 hour

    The Buffet and other stories

    By Norby Nayar

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    About this ebook

    Though the stories in The Buffet are set in India, their themes are universal: family and personal relationships, the realities and effects of the environment and the individual in relation to society, country, economy, migration and culture.

    Grace and a succinct yet vivid style are acknowledged to be the characteristics of this writer. Her prose and poems had been praised by editors in England.

    The stories, for the most part, depict the lives of post-1940 generations with sympathy, delicacy and humour. They may be analytical and psychological, but the author writes from the heart, not for the purpose of serving genres. However, they seem to be rather in line with Dutch paintings such as those of Vermeer where reflection is set off by or revolves around a thing or a daily act. The general tone of the narrative is far from omniscient; in fact the reader is invited to partake of the reflective processes, the conclusions being open-ended and receptive to the reader’s own conclusions.

    For readers interested in details, we provide a synopsis:

    The Buffet: The life of a college librarian in Kerala who- in the intellectually stimulating air of the university- owns the facilities to embark on his own novel. The record bears glimpses into the writing process, the middle-aged bachelor’s solitude and his emotional dependence on his family.

    The life of Sister Lizzie: A brilliant, attractive, young nun in Kerala channellizes her private grief into the improvement of youth.

    The Beauty Shop: Reflections on beauty and the career of a beauty parlour-owner in Kerala... though her attitudes to beauty are challenged towards the conclusion of the story.

    The beloved and the after-life: Three educated, middle-aged women in a Bombay café speculate on relationships with their loved ones in the life to come. The tale vibrates with the spiritual and material issues of our times.

    The single bed: The lives of two college friends. One makes an impetuous marriage; the other remains single throughout her life. This is may be a story of disenchantment such as those in the wear-and-tear of years are apt to feel, but the two women accept the lessons of experience with resilience and courage.

    Good Christians on Good Friday: A college student reflects on the effects of our consumer-ridden society in the severe setting of Good Friday.

    The second baby: The eldest child’s reactions to her new-born brother.

    Murder, she wrote: A tragi-comic account of a woman writing a murder tale; in part an ironical set of reflections on the public’s fascination with murder-thrillers and violence.

    A glass of lassi: A young college lecturer reflects on country, love, the economy and migration while he drinks a glass of lassi in the vindictive summer heat of Bombay.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNorby Nayar
    Release dateApr 14, 2014
    ISBN9781311776365
    The Buffet and other stories
    Author

    Norby Nayar

    I was born and educated in India. I am the author of a book of poems, Darjeeling Tea-Leaves. My first prose collection,The Buffet was composed in New York City.

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      Book preview

      The Buffet and other stories - Norby Nayar

      The Buffet

      and other stories

      Norby Nayar

      Copyright 2014 by Norby Nayar

      Smashwords Edition

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      Alas, our youth was what we made it,

      something to fritter and to burn,

      when hourly we ourselves betrayed it,

      and it deceived us in return;

      and all our fresh imagination,

      swiftly decayed beyond recall

      like foliage in rotting fall.

      – Eugene Onegin, Pushkin

      Table of Contents

      The Buffet

      The life of Sister Lizzie

      The after-life and the beloved

      The beauty shop

      The single bed

      The second baby

      Good christians on Good Friday

      Murder, she wrote

      A glass of lassi

      About the Author

      THE BUFFET

      At fifty-six Thomachan found a melancholy sweetness and some kind of repose in singleness.

      In his younger days, he had set his heart on a marriage proposal which melted in the manner of tender things of this world; and consequently found the girls his parents persuaded him to see too timid, loud or provincial for his taste. To compensate for the status of family man, he took with great earnestness his post of Chief Librarian in a college in the district of Palakkad, whose greenery and physical graces enhanced the heartfelt, fertilizing exchanges of ideas between the librarian and the professors. And in the languid laissez-faire of tropical evenings, he attempted to filter his observations of life into a burgeoning novel, guided by a few icons of Malayalam literature.

      Whether it is relevant or irrelevant to the sketch at hand, it enhances the warmth and coziness of a tale to throw in- as a cook throws salt and turmeric into the stew- a few lines about the appearance of our unassuming hero who had the soft tones of a tenor (without the flash). He was of medium height, pleasantly spectacled, with a fresh face for his years though not without the messy prints of their disappointments and snubs. He was honest though not absolutely immune to corruption in a world where one can hardly earn one’s plate of rice and tumbler of tea without a tiny measure of haggling and ogling at Virgin Honesty. Yet, my readers, let it be said, he was one of the most respected men of our slow picturesque town, tranquil to his neighbours stoutly enclosed in estates of coconut and banana plants, with considerate words for the elders and a hardly exhaustible handful of coins for the poor of his district.

      The cooking and cleaning of his flat was done by an elderly, god-fearing widow so that when Thomachan returned from the university at six and headed for his bath consisting of two large buckets of cold water and a bar of Lifebuoy soap, he was appreciative of the well-regulated set of spacious, airy rooms, the just-washed floors exuding that puritanical aura of phenyl, softened by the conciliatory lights of sunset and the maternal cheer of a kitchen with sparkling vessels, a black cat with a proprietary air and all-supervising eyes (unmindful of their native status of stray!) and dinner singing on the gas-stove.

      After his tea, with a certain dryness of vision he read the local paper while listening to his favourite music programme on his seven-year old radio. When he was done with them, he opened his books under soft shaded lamp lights, their shy suggestiveness and hide-and-seek impulses reminiscent of the kerosene lamps of his grandmother’s house in Kozhikhode… and the smoky, swarthy, eye-stinging odour of these long-gone lamps sometimes came over him like the precious incenses borne by the three kings to Bethlehem. For in his heart of hearts Thomachan always linked simplicity, if not innocence (especially in the new decade he found himself in, the 1980s which slowly, albeit hesitantly and not light-heartedly, was deflecting from an orthodox past) to his mother and grandmother.

      Our gentleman had one niche denied to millions of purposeful and promising men and women in India, in the sense that he had, ten or eleven years ago, at an auspicious moment purchased a flat with funds from the sale of his late father’s estate of tapioca and rice. To write, Virginia Woolf said, a woman should have a room of her own. So should man, be he prisoner, pariah or parish priest. Butterflies have whole parks and forests to roam, the peacock spreads his plumage in the rich man’s garden. Why should man’s wings flutter (to flounder) in a one-room home with an ill-functioning lavatory, a plastic bucket placed under a leaking floor or in a dirty hut?

      You would think, my readers, our gentleman from age thirty deteriorated with the galloping years, especially at a time when a good number of our elders were still quickly borne off by strokes and rigidity of limbs, usually caused by the inactivity which they mixed with the privilege or wisdom of age! If such were the case, this particular sliding-down had elements of buoyancy, even celebration! For like certain practitioners of the arts, Thomachan was artful enough to glean the best from solitude and society, his weekends accommodating like one of those modern, soft expandable travel-contraptions family get-togethers, visits to cousins and aunts, a hardy, so-far unvanquished contingent swaying their hips from Trivandrum to Tamil Nadu and sandalwood-tinted Mysore. And in his own town, he was often called to dinners which seated him before his own elder sister, who sadly shook her lovely chignon at images of barren kitchens in a region of agricultural plenitude, in wonderment of her country-men who, despite their college education and intelligence in various difficult, labyrinthine careers, foolishly sought the non-existent ideal wife. To top all this, his male friends- mostly married and from time to time desiring the wondrous pliancy of bachelordom- often barged into his suite of rooms to talk over glasses of beer… those long glasses with deep bottoms and frothy tops and the bracing, pale coolness of the liquid complementing the thick, starry, luxurious texture of the rain-softened tropical nights.

      Naturally strong social buzz needed its opposing, pulling back-towards-centre virtues if there be a centre in virtues: detachment and solitude. So it is no wonder our writer, under the restrained glow of his night lamps, scribbled rapidly, if not furiously, into a journal with the precise, stinging yet delicate sensibility of a scientific man in the laboratory. Into this plain notebook with a blue or yellow cover, costing half-rupee… one of the liberal things man and woman is fated to own!... trickled the rich, odourous swamp of the human consciousness. (This journal also had a section for the observations of ancients like Socrates and Marcus Aurelius, &c. whom life troubled no more.)

      Copious were the notes about food and nourishment this little notebook took, like a tiny basin accommodating a swollen stream: the ties of food and drink, open and covert to man. Yet our author remained at a loss to grasp why good food and good beverages satisfy and enrich souls and hearts, as these units of the spirit are supposedly sustained and strengthened by austerity and fasting. Thus he reflected one dull lonely evening, one of those evenings when a daylong deluge of rain drives a needle of sadness into the veins- but the phone rang and deposited like a fresh shining silver coin an invitation to dinner.

      Dinners or teas prepared by loved ones or intimate friends are one of the joys of life, as millionaires and paupers know. So when he pictured the platter of appams, dishes of mutton stew and fried fish, the plate of rust-hued, glistening cutlets, he recalled his school-days. The irregular-shaped, one-storey earthen-walled villa plastered in white where primitive, ill-mannered wood-stoves crackled and spat on the warm blue terra-cotta tiles from dawn to night, and his mother, uneducated in the modern science of gastronomical restraint (compensated by a surplus of womanly virtues) pressed upon husband, children and guests full plates, especially delicate things like hot banana fritters served on the banana leaves of the trees in their own backyard. Yoked to the loss of his childhood home came, as it often does to celibate lives, the loss of a regular family life such as his wedded sisters and brothers had, family life replete with good suppers at which the wife and children inanely chattered to the point of pushing head-over-heels

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