Writer, painter, journalist Prakash Bal Joshi
It is with considerable pleasure and anticipation that I received this morning a PDF of dear friend, fellow journalist, writer and painter Prakash Bal Joshi’s collection of short stories 'Mirror in the Hall and Other Short Stories.' (Ratna Books, Translation Series, Delhi)
Originally written in Marathi by Prakash, who is a highly regarded writer in that language not to mention a celebrated painter, I have a personal but tangential connection with the collection. Prakash wanted me to translate it and I even began doing so but found my grasp of Marathi was not strong enough to do justice to his rather unusually intriguing themes. It became clear to me rather quickly that one needed to have grown up in Marathi to get to the essence of the mood that Prakash was capturing. Eventually, the book titled ‘अरसा बैठकीतला आणि इतर कथा’ (Arsa Baithakitalaa Aani Itar Katha) was translated—and with competence and flair—by Smita Karandikar.
In less than an hour I read the first three stories titled ‘Mirror in the Hall’, ‘Short-term Memory Loss’ and ‘Raatraani.’ The first thing that struck me was that they read like a painting fusing between abstraction and Impressionism. They become lucid and blurred interchangeably but eventually attain a remarkable cohesion as one whole. Yet, they remain unresolved. I wouldn’t go into the specifics of the first three short stories in order not to spoil them for other readers, but it is safe to say that they capture atmospherics with the dexterity of a writer who has observed life in an unhurried fashion. Prakash had told me at the time he wanted me to translate that the stories are moody and not necessarily typically structured. He was right and those are the very qualities that drew me in very quickly.
The first three short stories that I read in order to give him a quick shout-out, do not resolve in the manner short stories do. Be it a child/adult confronting his apparition-like parents in ‘Mirror in the Hall’ or an office worker experiencing a short-term memory loss in ‘Short-term Memory Loss’ or a lonely, painter wife of a mine engineer dealing with her heightened senses in ‘Raatraani’, they all altered my mood in a strange way. I am not sure mood-altering was Prakash’s intention, but it appears as if he himself might have experienced that while writing them.
I will do a longer piece once I finish reading them all. Interestingly, while in the midst of them I imagined the late master filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky doing justice to the visual atmospherics of the short stories.
For me personally, one particular edification, apart from the stories themselves, are the compelling illustrations at the top of every short story done by Prakash.