Siddharth Dasgupta's collection of short stories invokes many kinds of sorrow through the narratives of people in different cultures, says Reena Agarwal
Book: The Sacred Sorrow of Sparows - A Collection of Lives
Author: Siddharth Dasgupta
Publisher: Niyogi
Pages: 254
The Sacred Sorrow of Sparrows is a strange title, you'd think. And yet the alliteration in the title beckons you, the cover enchants and the colours calm.
In his prelude to The Sacred Sorrow of Sparrows, Siddharth Dasgupta sets out his intent — "These aren't particularly sad stories. At least they weren't meant to be...."
The 10 stories in the collection speak of love, loss and fear. In the story, In Symphonies We Flow, Dasgupta speaks of several kinds of sorrows — poetic sorrow, nostalgic sorrow, ravaged sorrow, tempestuous sorrow, inevitable sorrow, drunken sorrow and, the most compelling of all — divine sorrow. But there is also, in the stories, freedom from sorrow, which is a form of healing. This is what makes the book a compelling read.
The stories are set in Afghanistan, India, Japan and Turkey, and the writer delights with descriptions of the cultures and the peoples. He seems to know the cities intimately and captures their pulse accurately. For instance, Tokyo, in the story, One Deep Sleep, is called "a mad undercurrent of deference and defiance"; In Symphonies We Flow, set in Istanbul, Dasgupta writes about "the recognition and realisation of the overpowering melancholy that grips the city"; while India is described as "the high definition, surround sound ambient — abstract country".
The stories also hint at the writer's own ideas. In Once upon a Mystic Sky, Dasgupta talks about "a secular India, a sensual India at that, sometimes swaying under the weight of its own complex cultural fabric but somehow always regaining the essence of what it was to be, undeniably, India. "Your attitude decides a lot of things too. Just remember, not everything in this world can be explained", he writes in One Deep Sleep.
Dasgupta's stories often stand on the threshold of time, place and relationships — the state of insomnia, between sleep and rising, where life is utter disarray; of dawn and twilight which carry a sense of time standing still. They also cover a wide range of relationships, whether between generations, siblings or just acquaintances. He writes from the heart. His characters all enter your hearts and stay with you.
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