Express News Service
Twelve magnificent, interconnected stories constitute Cockatoo––Delhi-based writer, poet and teacher Yashraj Goswami’s debut book. While the tales signal both obvious and understated queerness, the sheer pleasure is in the palpable genius of the craft.
The book begins with a prologue that informs us of someone who has recently been laid off. Then, readers are introduced to an everyday encounter with a chatty Delhi cab driver in The Invitation.
Neera, a middle-aged widow, is looking at the driver ‘intently’, and observes how the ‘pale-yellow light from the street lamps filtered through the windshield’ flirts with his face. The undertone of grief— she has recently lost her husband, who was an unlikely man in the sense that he let his wife be her own person––is unmissable. Meanwhile, the driver tells her why his aunt doesn’t approve of Shabina who, we learn later, isn’t quite a woman one would like as their partner in a transphobic and casteist hetero-patriarchal society. But, Neera wonders how she’d be called ‘ungrateful’ for not attending Aditi’s wedding reception.
Aditi happens to be one of the principal characters in the following story, Score. It is particularly striking in its exploration of how newlyweds manipulate the circumstances they get married in. To one up the other, they invent ways they can feel superior. Sample this: “Aditi had learned to deny her husband the perverse pleasure of humiliating her. She knew how desperately Anirban sought these moments, but by now, she had mastered the art of foiling his attempts.”
Goswami deftly creates the characters and settings in April Fool, which is told by an eight-year-old boy. He is trying to understand the conversations that adults have around him. Domestic violence and abuse are the themes that are adroitly woven into the story that never lets the humour escape.
Take this observation the child makes: “She says the road is very busy. Busy road means risky, Papa told me. But Mummy also says the same thing about Papa–– that he is always busy. But he doesn’t look risky.”
But it’s the stories that follow, which establish the collection as a literary gift, be it the conversations Angai is having on Planet Romeo (an erstwhile popular gay dating app) with Samar, whose handle is ‘Delhi_Guy’ in Unruly Sun, or how Goswami manages to showcase the polarising views of openly and closeted queer people before the reading down of Section 377 in The Debate. Additionally, there’s also a commentary on the casteist and racist ways in which heterosexual marriages are conducted.
Throughout the book, the author demonstrates how he has the requisite skills to surprise the reader with his twisted humour and introduce an inevitable yet unpredictable change of scene in each story, announcing the arrival of a great literary talent.
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