Chandan Pandey's intense stories that morph into parables
Buffy the Vampire Slayer as a child and one of the stories that made an impression was a first season episode titled Out of Mind, Out of Sight, where an extremely shy high school girl becomes literally invisible after being ignored by teachers and classmates alike. Of course, this being the 1990s precursor to modern-day superhero fare (Buffy creator Joss Whedon went on to direct the first two Avengers movies), the episode ended with the invisible girl becoming an FBI assassin-in-training.
But the larger point was solid: people really can forget that you exist, even if you are right in front of them. I was reminded of this episode more than once while reading Forgetting, the opening salvo from Chandan Pandey’s The Keeper of Desolation, a collection of nine Hindi short stories translated into English by Sayari Debnath.
In this brilliant, unsettling story, a family living in a modest single-room house “forgets" about one of its members, the studious and introverted Gulshan. His academic talents and the family’s mounting bills (his sister is chronically ill) means there’s a lot of pressure on Gulshan to make it into a good engineering school.
Eventually, the family becomes incapable of seeing Gulshan, even when he’s just a few feet from them, nose buried in his books. He, in turn, responds to their infrequent queries less and less, until the narrator (Gulshan’s elder brother) declares that the family “was never in a position to infer correctly who was eventually forgetting whom", the metaphorical point being that an overdose of projected responsibility eats away at individual agency.
The forgetfulness snowballs into confrontation and eventually, tragedy. What’s going on can technically be called “surrealism" but I am
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