Review | Paul Zacharia’s ‘50 Stories’ is a rich blend of the ordinary and the bizarre

For more than five decades, acclaimed Malayalam writer Paul Zacharia has been unsettling conventions, challenging certainties and reshaping the possibilities of the short story. Fittingly, this anthology of 50 stories written over the years provides a sweeping introduction to one of Indian literature’s most inventive and iconoclastic voices.

Zacharia’s forte is the short story. His work is genre-defying, blending dark humour, magical realism, surrealism, satire and philosophical inquiry into narratives that evade easy categorisation. Comparisons with Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges are not entirely misplaced. Zacharia, like Borges, delights in blurring the boundaries between reality and imagination, the sacred and the profane, the ordinary and the extraordinary.

This collection is a rich assortment of short and very short fiction — some translated by the author himself and the rest by A.J. Thomas, Gita Krishnankutty, Dr. S. Gayatri Devi, Dr. S.P. Ramesh and Anupama Raju. Here, everyday life effortlessly coexists with the bizarre. Conversations are held with the dead; historical figures and divine beings wander into contemporary locales; animals assume human characteristics and inanimate things come to life. Yet, the extraordinary is absorbed into the rhythms of daily life by the characters with typical sangfroid.

Beneath the whimsy, however, lies Zacharia’s sharp critique of politics, religion, power and human folly. His biting wit, irreverent humour and profanities can be both amusing and unsettling, exposing hypocrisies that society often glosses over.

Failed dreams and human desperation

The opening story, ‘Bhaskara Pattelar and My Life’, sets the tone for much that follows. It is a brutal exploration of power and servitude, chronicling the toxic relationship between a lower-caste worker and his sadistic landlord. The worker remains unquestioningly devoted to his master despite relentless humiliation and exploitation, even offering his wife at his command.