Contemporary Fiction Views: A divine gift

"At some point you have to accept it. The real world isn't made of poetry."

So a doctor tells her best friend, an assistant professor, before she is diagnosed with terminal cancer in "Talinda", one of the stories in White Dancing Elephants by Chaya Bhuvaneswar, who is herself a physician. The friend finds herself in just about the greatest conflict that the friend of a childless, dying woman can get herself into. The friend, Narika, has not told herself any stories to get into this conflict, nor has she told any stories, true or not, to her friend Talinda. But she is telling herself a story by trying to make a narrative with at least a beginning and a middle to what has happened and is happening. The end? She tells herself and Talinda one thing but there is no conviction that this will be how the story ends.

Finding a story that matches parts of what is going on in a character's life, and then trying to make sense of life by making it into that story, are what happens to the characters in the first three stories of White Dancing Elephants. Pregnancy and upcoming motherhood also play major roles.

In the title story, the narrator tries to deal with the difference between what was happening and what has not occurred. She is not handling it well. She dreams of white elephants that dance, those symbols of good fortune with the dancing that brings to mind Ganesh and wisdom. That the characters are often not wise is not a condemnation of them. But the characters are shown to be sincere in their feelings and the wishes of their hearts and souls. These wishes are often thwarted by real life or the opposite of what usually happens in real life. They are shown in such a way that the ability to recognize and celebrate the recognition of the wishes makes them more real, more tangible.

That is especially true in the second story, "The Story of the Woman Who Fell in Love With Death", as a boy who grows up missing his sister, who disappeared. The title refers to a book he has grown up obsessing over. It is as much a part of him as his physical heart and his mystical soul. Whether, as a grown doctor, he discovers his sister is not the point of the story. The point is that the story that is dear to him is an essential part of him.

It is an acknowledgement that the art, the poetry if you will, that has his heart is as much the real world to him as the objects he handles.

The important part, Talinda observes, is making sure the story in which one is living is one's own story and not that of someone else.

These stories are proving to be windows into other souls that sometimes, if the sun is at the right angle, shine a reflection back to me of myself. They don't have to be my stories for that to happen. It's a gift.