Page 193 - DENG203_ELECTIVE_ENGLISH_IV

Elective English—IV

Notes That evening when her husband, the Brahman’s son, had finished his meal, too excited almost to
eat, and had gone to the golden bed in the bedchamber strewn with flowers, he said to himself:
“Tonight I shall surely know who this beautiful lady is in the palace with the seven wings.”
The princess took for her food that which was left over by her husband, and slowly entered the
bedchamber. She had to answer that night the question, who was the beautiful lady that lived in
the palace with the seven wings. And as she went up to the bed to tell him she found a serpent
had crept out of the flowers and had bitten the Brahman’s son. Her boy-husband was lying on
the bed of flowers, with face pale in death.
My heart suddenly ceased to throb, and I asked with choking voice: “What then?”
Grannie said: “Then ...”

But what is the use of going on any further with the story? It would only lead on to what was
more and more impossible. The boy of seven did not know that, if there were some “What
then?” after death, no grandmother of a grandmother could tell us all about it.
But the child’s faith never admits defeat, and it would snatch at the mantle of death itself to turn
him back. It would be outrageous for him to think that such a story of one teacherless evening
could so suddenly come to a stop. Therefore the grandmother had to call back her story from the
ever-shut chamber of the great End, but she does it so simply: it is merely by floating the dead
body on a banana stem on the river, and having some incantations read by a magician. But in
that rainy night and in the dim light of a lamp death loses all its horror in the mind of the boy,
and seems nothing more than a deep slumber of a single night. When the story ends the tired
eyelids are weighed down with sleep. Thus it is that we send the little body of the child floating
on the back of sleep over the still water of time, and then in the morning read a few verses of
incantation to restore him to the world of life and light.

Did u know? (1) Strict asceticism practiced for a while might lead the gods to grant fertility.
(2) Such childhood marriages used to be quite common in India, although they are illegal
today. The idea was to guarantee that the girl was married while still a virgin. The couple
were not expected to consummate the relationship (and often not even to live together)
until she reached puberty. A case like this in which the boy marries an older woman
would be quite rare, but perhaps appealing to a romantic young boy.

10.6.1 Explanation

Short stories are traditionally considered to be brief tales representing a sense of limited action.
Therefore, they become synonymous with thematic unity and concentration of effect.
Contemporary short stories, however, tend to reject these ideas of order and highlight author’s
deliberate maintenance of distance from the characters. This authorial stance of detachment
results in ambiguity and paradox. Ambiguous effects, in turn, emphasize that the short story, a
consciously created artifice, highlights this very feature of the contemporary world. This invites
us to analyse construction of contemporary short stories as expressions of the fragmented,
alienating postmodern world.
In the early days when short stories had barely started gaining ascendancy in the western
literary world, Edgar Allan Poe’s stress on ensuring ‘unity of effect or impression’ as the
prerequisite of successful story, had appeared to be all-important. Joyce’s narration in short
stories led to an epiphanic moment, a flash of recognition of some fact hitherto hidden from
consciousness. In other words, short stories not only depended on but also firmly marched
towards a single emotionally challenging conclusion. Nowadays, however, we have an

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