The Women in Cages: Collected Stories by Vilas Sarang, Penguin Books India.
Even many dedicated readers know little or nothing about Vilas Sarang, a talented writer who is equally at home in Marathi or English. This neglect may be in part because Sarang's writing style is largely influenced by Western writers like Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, even Lewis Carroll, rather than rooted in any obvious Indian tradition. Perhaps the surrealism and absurdism that runs through much of Sarang's work, together with his interest in European modernist themes, tends to alienate some Southasian readers. For the unprepared, after all, the content of the stories can be very unsettling, even offensive – particularly for those for whom religion is taboo as a subject.
Many years ago, this reviewer was struck by a short story titled "An Interview with M Chakko", which told of a strange island somewhere in the Indian Ocean where the titular protagonist had once been shipwrecked. On the island, all of the women only had half-bodies: those with only lower bodies were the Ka women, while those with only upper bodies belonged to the Lin class. Through Chakko's experience living with a member of each class, the nature of the sexual arrangements on the island are discussed. "It seems to me," he notes, "that the half, the partial, gives something that the whole, or what appears whole, doesn't." The reader never learns whether the author meant to project the island as real, or simply to accept it as an elaborate fantasy. Although the name of the author of that tale had never registered, finding The Women in Cages allowed for the unexpected rediscovery of M Chakko's strange tale – along with a host of Vilas Sarang's other delights.
Sarang's short stories are simply but compellingly written, and the variety of themes covered are often infused with fantastical elements. In "The Odour of Immortality", a prostitute – with the help of a tantrik and the blessings of Lord Indra – grows dozens of vaginas all over her body, to allow her to service her customers more quickly and make more money. A second story echoes this precarious connection between sex and worship, when a man wakes up to find himself transformed into a giant phallus, and is eventually mistaken by religious villagers to be the severed lingam of Shiva. At one point, Sarang tells the reader about a particular Ganesh festival, where clay statues of various deities come alive and escape from their worshippers; at another, a vulture is refused treatment at a bird-hospital because of his carnivorous ways.