Rachita Swain
There is a hue and cry over film celebrities’ deaths in the past few months but hardly anyone is aware of, or cares to, lament the death of Manoj Kumar Panda who just passed away, at the age of 65. A great Absurdist of Odia literature has a laudable corpus of short stories to his name collected in “Hada Bagicha”, “Maya Bagicha” and “Barna Bagicha”.
Though abstruse, Panda’s stories bring out the play of words to rescue the harried mind in times as these, when uncalled-for deaths have questioned the existence of a finality and hence, a non-entity. Swayambhuba, the protagonist of “A Day inside an Igloo” has planned a vacation to a hill-top, with his wife. Now, he is a person obsessed with “planning” which he believes leads the way to a desire for “organization”, though both are similar words, they, by usage, hanker after the methods employed by the author, creating a maze with no gates. However, he can cancel and postpone plans. The reluctance to give birth to a “child” as a separate entity in all its nudeness ultimately leaves his wife’s sobs and his mad laugher- precisely the reason why Mathieu of Sartre in his “The Age of Reason” seeks to delete the final outcome of a misshapen text(through Marcelle) that will curb his freedom. Self-appreciation overtakes him as there is an insistence on his transparency where love for an entity requires camouflage-an unretired art which reduces him into an object and thus accounts for his failed relationships. Harping on his absurdity, he wards off Khalil Gibran and God as non-entities, who have ceased to exist; symbols of a finality that he deliberately intends to destroy. So will the “child” of his be: a “product of the future” whom the author fears will cause an imbalance of power in the marital-bliss-binary. As with “planning”, his very obsession with the word, his “freedom”, presents him as a narcissist like Ravi who deftly postpones the destination to “tomorrow” in “A Handful of Rice” by Kamala Markandaya. A happily hostile universe for the author to contend himself with.
His protagonists are wandering clouds, floating in the sky with hardly any introspection of whether love is compassionate and whether death is an apocalypse resulting in absurdity and sordidness. If World War II triggered immense despondency amongst surviving kith and kin, the Odisha cyclone too devastated the mental balance of many, metamorphosing them into stoic characters. Ruben, in “Ruben and a Supernatural Cyclone’s Beauty”, has acquired a “freedom”, never experienced before or after, either by him or by anyone. Not bothered by the corpses of his mother and sister, his search of his beloved, Chumki too becomes futile as soon as it begins as he finds her not just alive but all dressed-up. Enabled by a strange sense of emotional strength and freedom, he is able to see maggots sprouting on his sister’s corpse– entities thriving on non-entities–fills him wonder, as do the activists who benefit from the catastrophe. If challenging God, a non-entity, brings about the fall of Ruben, in another story, the same activity achieves victory at the cost of Premashila’s naivety. Either way the bureaucracy regulates absurdity through narcissism. In the murder case of Jessica Lal, who was to blame ? “Nobody”.
Self-appreciation, in the stories of this Sarala Awardee of 2015, is a vehicle of satire on the manufactured version of absurdity arising from adulterated societal norms. Is it all about being Sartre’s free man? Or, is it simply about being Kafka’s trapped bird? Ours is a pan-optic surveillance State operating on the dichotomy of power in a self-created hostile universe. Vultures swoop down on Premashila and drag the illiterate woman through unexplainable legal procedures in “The Testimony of God”. The court challenges God’s witness and hangs her to death. “Seven Paperweights” in this story suspended in mid-air do not seem to make a lot of difference or cede space to utilitarian negativity. In still pressing words, characters are reduced to serving functions as merely the narrator’s “father” and “mother”, without names to identify their existence in a society, with reverence and most likely, address. Such haziness enhances the absurdity imposed upon them. The officials are drawn to the narrator’s house by a thin stream of his father’s blood and pus; in the wake ceremony, they are only worried if “progeria” is contagious. Colossal waves of sadism suck out the vitality of reiterated ignorance thus retaining the Kafkaesque etiquette, which has also permeated into our native culture.
As the one who coveted playing with the temperance of words and language, Panda has created a character, who has been given myriad names as “In the Shadow of the Tamarind” in a non-descript village with over-grown pathways, where he warns the readers to beware of the peril that lies in tying down the signifiers to the signified– in case, the underlying absurdity misleads to an undue formulae of importance. Aware of the beauty of existence, Panda travelled extensively and infused the western literature harmoniously into the native one, where settings are archetypal villages with tribal folklores and its ancient goddesses but not without the urban share of official lives or current scenario even of judicial delays and its repercussions in the affected lives. He is precocious without stooping to banality for its own merit. Stories that cannot be bogged down to the unnatural transformation as in the story of a spouse’s turning into stone, which reminds one of Ionesco’s fertile corpses unless one attempts to break down the centrality of meanings in the death of his being.
( Rachita Swain is a young writer and critic)
