REVIEW: Grey Areas

REVIEW

Grey Areas: An Anthology of Indian Fiction on Ageing;
Ed. Ira Raja
OUP
Rs.695
Pp 400
ISBN: 0195689585
Hardcover

Blurb
This anthology broadly focuses on the question of ageing by bringing together an impressive range of stories and poems from across the Indian languages. It constructs a comprehensive collection of representational writings on ageing from contemporary India while drawing attention to the central importance of age as a category of identity that is complex, fragmented, dispersed, multiple, contested, and conflicting.

The six sections in which the stories and poems are categorized are relevant to both a sense of the content and to the experience of ageing in India. The wide range of stories included here look at ageing from the multiple, overlapping perspectives of intergenerational relations, homes, belongings, poverty, dislocation, memory, madness, nation, illness, and death. With a detailed introduction by the editor, Ira Raja, this well-thought-out, well-structured, and superbly-chosen collection represents some of the best contemporary writers from across the Indian languages. It will make an extremely valuable addition to the anthologies of contemporary Indian writing on a topic that is of particular interest to the academia at this time.

Review
No dying of the light Hindu
It's that time of year when you must slow down a little. As the summer peaks, nature demands that you take it easy. So sit back, arms pillowing your head, and think of age, of mortality, of the obliteration of the self. That is what Tyeb Mehta's Woman on Rickshaw, used so aptly on the cover of Grey Areas: An Anthology of Indian Fiction on Ageing, appears to do.
And as you look on,
the cracks that begin around her eyes
spread beyond her skin.
And the hills crack.
And the temples crack.
(From ‘An Old Woman', by Arun Kolatkar)

That poem, early in the anthology, extends the age marked in the crow's feet near a woman's eyes to the whole world.

If the women inspire poetry, the old men make for some remarkable tales in this anthology. Abdul Bismillah's ‘The Second Shock' is a story simply told, yet it leaves you reeling. A classic tale of age and youth, of community life and endless ribbing suddenly silenced — not by death, as you might assume, but by something worse. Read it, for any attempt to describe it would only detract from the epiphany that comes at the end.