Thought-provoking and real

Sonal Parmar

many talents. He graduated from the National Defence Academy and was commissioned in the Indian Navy. After eight years of service, he resigned his commission and joined private sector industry in Kolkata. He went on to become the Managing Director of the company, and then switched to be the President of a Joint Sector company in Srinagar, Kashmir.
Kumar always continued to pursue his love for literature. His first novel 'Shikhar aur Seemayen' based on his experiences in Sikkim won the literary award of the Delhi Hindi Academy.
In the present collection of short stories he explores a host of subjects that range from the human longing for happiness, to the joy and power of sexual intimacy, to the role that choices and actions play in individual lives, to age, loneliness, death, separation and finally, what he describes as "The glory of a malefemale bond."
Kumar explores man-woman dynamic in several of his stories, and he does so with striking insight and sensitivity. A great believer in literature (fiction in particular) being a suitable space to engage with the "conflicts of the human heart", he does so by investing his characters with a depth and vulnerability that makes them as real as they are varied.
What adds to this depth is the honesty with which his characters - men and women alike – express their own failings and limitations, even while recognizing their need for human companionship and therefore, emphasize on the possibility of such relationships existing beyond the institutionalized structure of marriage.

Sharat Kumar's collection of stories is a coming together of ideas, characters and language. It makes one embark on a journey that is thought-provoking, beautiful and real, all at the same time, and leaves one feeling both fulfilled yet hoping for more.

Sharat Kumar "If we stay together", says Aparna in The White Marble Burzi, "you will divorce me before we get married." The simple honesty with which she says these words is typical of Kumar's insightful representations.
In The Homecoming the narrator speaks of how "Love, uncorrupted by the responsibilityreciprocity- obligation syndrome" was a "pure joy" and celebrates it by allowing a glimpse into a relationship, easy, honest, erotic, that exists beyond that paradigm.
And in The Affair, the protagonist considers marrying a woman he might possibly be in love with, only to dismiss the idea because he realizes that: "They had a free relationship. And the fragrance came from that freedom. And then one wanted to encroach on the freedom out of fear, and one lost the fragrance."
Another area of human interaction that Kumar engages with is that of parent-child relationships. Delving into the complexities inherent within these relationships, he explores ideas of loneliness, introspection, memories, nostalgia, shifting perspectives and belonging.
In My Life a man revisits his relationship with his own children in the shadow of his mother's impending death; in Teju's letter, an eleven-year old boy writes a letter to his father using the hope for a better future to escape the uninspiring reality of his day-to-day living; in

The Return Journey a man negotiates the sadness of a mother left behind and a family raised abroad and their fragile moments spent together; and in The Siberian Crane, the strong and spirited Svetlana faces the challenges of her life while drawing joy from the innocence and love of a daughter born of sexual abuse.

In each story the characters are placed at different stages of life and their perspectives, while being intensely personal, serve as a lens that throws light on the precarious potential of beauty and pain inherent in all human relationships.

Kumar's collection of stories is a coming together of ideas, characters and language. It makes one embark on a journey that is thought-provoking, beautiful and real, all at the same time, and leaves one feeling both fulfilled yet hoping for more.