You should know how i feel- An offering of love!

Anu Lal is an emerging Indian English short story writer who made his debut by publishing the short story collection Wall of Colours and Other Stories. With this single work of fiction itself, he has proved himself as a foremost short story writer of the sub-continent. We, readers, have a problem all over the world: we can’t understand anything without categorizing the writing or the writer. We will identify the writings as Indian English, American, Black or Hispanic, and after that we will formulate theories and movements. Thus, we have post-colonial, black aesthetics, and so on. The proponents of this would say that there is nothing as ‘universal human art/ literature’. In other words, the readers can grasp the writing only through classification and categorization. However, here is a writer who discards all such categorizations, any attempt to limit the creative craft. Thus, the stories in the collection Wall of Colours can be consider as ‘universal’.

Anu Lal now comes up with a new collection titled You should know how i feel with another promising writer Dhanya Krishna. After reading it, I pondered over one question: Is Love Universal? The answer depends on how we define ‘love.’ The unique feeling one feels towards someone special is undoubtedly universal, but the situations and circumstances that one encounters while realizing it affect many socio-cultural and psychological conditions. As I mentioned above, Anu Lal’s writings in a way escape most of the theoretical categorizations, but here, if one wants to understand the particular work along such lines, we can have them, because the socio-cultural and psychological levels of the characters and situations can be grasped more fully if we know the cultural scenario of Kerala, especially, the story titled Rukhsana’s Husband. Being a multi-cultural society with many religious groups and religions, the conflicts and confusions between those very groups and the successful resolving are a common thing in Kerala. Here, the conflicts are because of the inter-religious marriage between the lovers, Rukhsana and Peter. In the story Like an Arabian Tale, the political situations can be seen, and political violence is so common in the Malabar Coast of Kerala. In the story I Am You, we can see the cultural conflicts, in which the consent of the family is of great importance in the relationship between the hero and the heroine. The story My World is Called You is about love-after-marriage. Here also, the cultural notions about family playing a crucial role.

The above observations are not for showing that the particular piece of work can be read as a typical Indian English writing; on the contrary, what I want to convey is that, for those who can read a work of fiction only through the socio-cultural scenario, they can read it in the same way, but on the whole, this is nothing but an offering of love, pure love. Analysing the underlying feature of the book, i.e., this offering of love, would kill the beauty of it, so I am not trying that. Read, enjoy, and live the fictional world of love yourself.