The Pink, White And Blue Universe

By Meira Chand
Short Stories/Marshall Cavendish Editions/Paperback/277 pages/$18.49/Amazon SG (amzn.to/3Is7lnD)
5 stars

Of Swiss-Indian parentage, the itinerant Meira Chand, who received the Cultural Medallion in 2023, has lived in the United Kingdom, Japan, India and, since 1997, Singapore.

Each country has supplied fertile soil for her writing. Her last two novels, A Different Sky (2010) and Sacred Waters (2017), were fully or partly set here. The former was a panoramic page-turner of the lives of three families in the tumultuous 30 years leading to Singapore’s independence.

But perhaps no country has left as indelible a mark on Chand as India, where she lived for five years in the 1970s.

The Pink, White And Blue Universe, comprising mostly stories she wrote while she lived there, returns her to this period of rapid adjustment, shock and trauma. She writes about Mumbai with confidence, straddling insider and outsider perspectives with panache.

The stories parachute readers into diverse milieus, from exclusive British clubs – members lamenting “Indianisation” as their influence wanes – to poor ramshackle communities, where a chair has to be borrowed and a bejewelled visitor is seen as a goddess.

The first story, High Ideals, conjures up a city where even the best intentions and most determined convictions are ruthlessly run over.

A British woman, Louise Wallis, who recently moved to Mumbai with her husband Will, bristles at the overbearing manner with which he and his friend speak to their Indian servants.

Yet, left alone, the tension between her and her environment builds and builds. She finds herself by the end of the story running into the safe embrace of the club to get away from the lewd phone calls and angry beggars – “the taste of iced rum already filling her mouth, the sights in the road beyond the club at last thankfully receding”.

Later, in another story, there is a terrorist attack on the Taj Mahal Hotel, and readers enter the narrative squashed up with friends Tilda and Blanche in a broom cupboard as the rat-tat-tat of gunfire is unleashed outside. Instead of precipitating Tilda’s departure from her unhappy marriage, it prompts relief as she finds solace in her husband’s predictable presence.

Each of the 13 stories here is substantial, notable for its intriguing amorality.

Men cheat – successfully or otherwise – and go unpunished. One finds fresh love for his family and feels “suddenly at one with God’s great plan”.

Unmitigated disasters lend further justification to superstitious beliefs; women find love and excitement in a cult; a mentally disabled girl observes her sisters’ sadness in her marriage and tries to wreck a reconciliation, to bittersweet effect.

The strength of Chand’s prose is in her focus on the fundamentals of storytelling – creative premises and unpredictable story progression. There is no sense of repetition of either characters or ideas, and it is all communicated in measured prose, balanced amid the chaos it describes.

If there are themes, it is the poverty that clashes with opulent wealth at every turn, and the low status of women in a highly patriarchal society. But these are secondary to Chand’s masterful storytelling. It is one of the most satisfying short story collections I have read in a while, refreshing in its subversion of notions of human progress.

If you like this, read: Sacred Waters by Meira Chand (Marshall Cavendish International, 2018, $23.22, Amazon SG, go to amzn.to/3T4qfWJ). Stretching from India to Singapore to Burma, the novel explores two women’s struggles to assert themselves in male-dominated societies past and present.