The fictional world of L. N. Gupta

Way in 1980, Writers Workshop of Calcutta gathered the stories of L.N. Gupta and presented it to the readers under the title The Stench and Other Stories. One reviewer called this first volume of 14 stories “Exploration of Middle Class Life”. Another branded it “Stark Realism”. Yet another titled his review “Vignettes of a Cross-Section of Indian Society”. And the Statesman concluded its review with the following words: “Behind all the stories we hear Gupta’s laughter, sometimes rambunctious, some­times ironic. He laughs at himself, he laughs at things as they are, he laughs at things as they appear to be.”

It is said that a short story must “invest a brief sequence of events with reverberating human significance by means of, style, selection, and ordering of detail, and – most Important of all–­present the whole action in such a way that it is at once a parable and a slice of life, at once symbolic and real, both a valid picture of some phase of experience, and a sudden illumination of one of the perennial moral and psychological paradoxes which lie at the heart of la condition humaine.”

What marks the short stories of L. N. Gupta eminently readable is the faithful portrayal of human condition. Much associated with protest, against hunger, poverty and the excessive long suffering endurance of man every story of his evolves round a problem – the problem we witness and sometime face in our day to day life.

The title story “The Stench” speaks about the painful life of a clerk. Caught between a consistently unkind boss and a ceaselessly nagging wife, the clerk has to pull on his way for he knows pretty well that he has “to live with them till nobody knows when”? The best way to overcome temptation is to yield to it. The clerk reconciles with the stenchy way of life, for worry is more dangerous than a killer-disease. And what we witness here is the “life” encircled by frailties and frustrations, tragedy and despair.

Stories like “A Private Sunday” and “On the Crossroads” show how even a few minutes of bodily pleasure – the only solace – is denied to the lower middle class couple living in houses where there is no privacy of a bedroom. L.N. Gupta stresses that money, of course, can buy privacy. But what about all those who have no money? Lack of privacy is not only an embarrassment but also an outrage against the dignity of the individual. Cursed be the financial stress.

“How I Became a Minister” and “Death of an Illusion” bring to light the exploitation of “big brothers” who make a cat’s-paw of the poor and the innocent. In the former story L.N. Gupta gives a short account of the rise and fall of a minister. We encounter a young village boy, shy but idealistic growing in power as a tyrant landlord helps him to it. He is kicked up to hold the post of a powerful minister. But soon he realizes to his dismay that “it is the invisible but all-powerful group of bureaucrats and vested in­terests that rules the country leaving no chance to democratically elected person to help the people who voted him to power or the individuals who are truly in distress.” Amidst “big brothers” the minister is a failure and that leads him to his village and its life. From power the boy is pushed down to obscurity. But the process gives him a sound education into the realities of life. In the short piece “The Grocer’s Politics”, the author poohpoohs the politicians who always spot out others’ easily while unaware of their own.

The portrayal of women as nagging, nympholeptic and deserters of husbands brings to light the misogynist in L.N. Gupta. “The Brigadier’s Wife” is a pungent attack on well-to-do women who go under the garb of social workers and Lionesses. They are the best example of “Practise what you do not preach”. Mrs Verma, the Brigadier’s wife, preaches kindness to animals but in her privacy beats her cow to the degree of killing it and practises dire cruelty on servants. The story ends on a hint of triumph for the servant Madho whose parting serves as common laughter at Mrs. Verma: “You are forgetting that Mrs. Verma is the president only of the Board of kindness for animals, Not Human beings.” “Mrs. Arora”, an entertaining piece, is about a rich, vain, flirtatious and pompous woman. The entire story is about her vagaries. Her im­pulsive likes and equally impulsive dislikes reveal her shallowness.

A few stories such as “God’s Agent”, “A Private Sunday” “Cyclones” and the title story smell salacious and a few lines here and there titillate. But there is no sex for sex’s sake in his stories. Unlike Harold Robbins. Irwing Wallace and many other writers of modern sizzlers or pot boilers, L.N. Gupta makes his juicy lines creep in only when the story demands them.

The wife who rains fire while the husband longs for a smile, the industrialists who rattle and rant against one another out of professional jealousy, a high-caste girl in love with a low-caste tribal, the poor clerk-father stealing his boss’s book to please his daughter, the police constables who get a fixed monthly bribe and therefore not feared at all, are a few of the many characters that we encounter in the fictional world of L.N. Gupta. They are people one sees everyday, if one is not blind to one’s surroundings. His characters have life in the round.

“Every work of art is a piece of the author’s biography. To reveal the art and conceal the artist is the art’s aim,” thus said Oscar Wilde, the Irish wit. L.N. Gupta’s stories reveal the writer’s craftsmanship and constitute a distinct chapter of his life, for they are drawn richly on his personal experience and serve as a record of his tragic view of life.