My Kind of Girl by Buddhadeva Bose (1908-74) is a charming Bengal quartet of tales, a sort of truncated Indian version of the Decameron. Four upper middle-class men, all professionals, are stranded in a cold train station waiting room all night; they tell each other real-life stories to while away the time. They have been inspired by the sight of an attractive pair of newlyweds who are also waiting hours and hours for the next train. The couple has hollowed out a little cozy space in which to sleep, but even in sleep they seem tenderly aware of each other.
In all four tales recounted by these elderly gentlemen burns the bright flame of first love, sometimes of hopeless love. We’re in the land and epoch of arranged marriages, of slender, naive adolescent girls and the young men who dote on them. One girl pines after a strikingly handsome male heartbreaker, but she ends up (happily enough) with the heartbreaker’s best friend, a shy young doctor.
Or a band of three provincial boys fall deeply if innocently in love with a local beauty whom they dub “Mona Lisa.” The ebb and flow of her precarious health rule their days and constitute their destiny. Even though the boundaries in “good” families between male and female are high, nearly impenetrable, the girls are daring for the period and even hard-headed. But a kind of sweetness, of decorum, of chivalry characterizes these stories of a past colonial world that preceded Independence, in which the men sometimes wear trousers and sometimes dhotis, in which the children alternate between Bengali (laced with Hindi) and English, in which a poor professor’s daughter is deemed too good to marry a rich merchant.
That the writing has an old-fashioned generality about it and avoids the spikey specificity of our fiction makes it all the more mellow and seductive, the tone of fairytales. Just as Chekhov’s characters are caught between up-to-date Western ways and retrograde Slavic manners, in the same way these colonial Indians are torn between an English forthrightness and a thoroughly Bengali muted sensuality.
Edmund White
__________________
Click here to read Rick Moody on LENZ by Georg Büchner!