You are in a bad mood and you start writing in long hand. Your penmanship is mad and large and unwieldy. In the course of your writing, your mood starts to settle down. Your penmanship gets stable. You think nothing of it. Then one day, maybe months later, you come across that page. And in the handwriting you see the entire emotional landscape you had traversed that day – from the cliff you almost wanted to jump off from, the mucky valley you trudged through, and then maybe the sweet pasture you finally settled at.
Reading Shy is like that. Shy is a teenage boy who is wading
into a pond to kill himself. As he walks out from his hostel to the pond, you
listen to his internal dialogues. His stepfather being disappointed with him.
His mother sobbing. His girlfriend confused about his strange aloofness in the
middle of a night of passion. His friends passing comments on the dead-end that
is their life. The brief sweetness from one of this teachers, Steve – and in
fact, it is this kindness that contrasts the dreary stuff from the rest of the
world. (Incidentally, a movie called ‘Steve’ stars Cillian Murphy. I haven’t
seen the film but am assuming it is based on the teacher. The novella though,
has Steve in a supporting, anchoring role.) Add to that, the recent development
that the hostel where Shy is, will be demolished to make way for a mall or some
other emblem of civic development.
Although the novella has sparse prose, the sense of
abandonment really courses through.
There is an inertia to the sadness…actually, not inertia. If
I had to think of a word, it would be ‘tamas’. That’s a Sanskrit/ Hindi
word and I am not quite sure what the English equivalent is. But it can loosely
be described as dead, dark energy. It weighs you down. It holds you captive.
You start enjoying the pain. You get skeptical of anything light, bright, or joyous.
There’s a part in this book that describes Shy’s mental state as such:
“He feels colossally sad.
Blisteringly sad.
Almost ecstatically sad.”
The end is a beginning and a continuum of sorts. The night
of Shy’s attempted suicide reads endless. His coming to terms with the pathos
of life also seems a fair bit unending. But within the few short pages, you
really start to wonder, what kind of world cannot accommodate young boys? If
decorum is prized to the extent that any evidence of testosterone must be erased,
if having a civilization of fatherless sons is not seen as an impending crisis,
if people continue to become parents without having the emotional wherewithal
for sacrifice – how much longer can we go?
It is a difficult read. But I did not find it as gripping as,
say, Lionel Shriver’s “We need to talk about Kevin” or J.D. Salinger’s “Catcher
in the Rye.” The desolate shittiness of existence as understood by an innocent
but wise boy is more evocative in these other books. Here, it is…architected a
little more properly I feel – despite the experimentation with typography and layout
design of pages, etc.
However, what I did like though, was the full leaning into
the experience of committing suicide. You still feel cold. You still feel
hungry. You still remember that you left the lights on or the socks out of the
hamper. As you contemplate a final death, you still contemplate an unfinished
life. And that maybe the thing that ultimately saves you.
The handwriting could (and does) get stable again.
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