Book review: Oddities with a twist in each tale
‘The Magic of Medicine’ is the title of one of the short stories in Anirban Bose’s collection, but it might well serve as the author’s pet muse.
Book: Mice In MenAnirban BoseHarper Collins210 pagesRs199
‘The Magic of Medicine’ is the title of one of the short stories in Anirban Bose’s collection, but it might well serve as the author’s pet muse. A doctor of medicine, Bose’s first novel Bombay Rains, Bombay Girls was a coming-of-age story set in medical school.
Mice In Men delves into the idiosyncratic personal histories of unrelated characters, most of whom have some association with the practice of medicine. Loosely strung together, the stories in the book form an off-the-wall collection of the uncanny and the slightly uncomfortable.
‘Mice in Men’, which gives the book its title, is perhaps the most extraordinary story of the lot. It tells the story of Basuri Lal Chowdhry, a man “who feels cursed every time he has to introduce himself” because “with a name like that, who wouldn’t?” He is an obsessive creature of habit, until the day the unexpected appearance of a mouse throws him off his schedule and into the adventure of life lived intrepidly.
Bose demonstrates his range as a storyteller by shuffling between points of view across each story in the collection. In ‘Neologisms’, he writes as a first person narrator, Dr Siddharth Kumar, the first backward caste doctor from rural Bihar who may have “inspired a revolution amongst the untouchables” but is saddled with a secret remorse and awaits death. In ‘The Faithfulness of Traits’, Bose narrates the story of the selfish Dr Singh in the second person, giving us reasons to dislike the man even though he “wakes up at five every morning and the first thing he does is wishes he were dead”.
‘The Temptation of Fate’ is a story told by an attention-grabbing narrator, who introduces himself as “…Fate, Destiny, Karma, Kismat, Luck…” stating, “I am what will happen in the future, and true to the narration, the story ends with a twist in the tale.
Almost all the stories have a twist, if not at the end, then in the telling. Mice In Men is an enjoyable collection of oddities; snippets of life that bear unexpected fruit.