Resumo de Penguins Who Lost The March

Comparisons are always odious, as they say. And yet, while going through the thirteen short stories by Kerala-based writer Sangita, one cannot help drawing parallels with the great Hindi-Urdu short story writer Krishan Chander who wrote about the underdog with such acute sensitivity that his stories lingered in your brain like high-powered incense. Unfortunately, that?s where the comparison ends. Sangita?s stories lack the vitality of Chander?s narrative force. Her plots too, are a bit too thin at times. Take the case of Bride Among Crimson Hibiscus, for instance. Here, a thirty-five-year-old new bride defies age-old taboo by shredding her soiled sanitary napkins to ribbons and festooning them outside her spinster sister-in-law?s door. The story?s denouement does nothing to touch the heart, to alter one?s cognitive sensibility.
Or take the case of Memories of a Friday Night which is about a childless couple making a forced choice to part ways for no apparent reason. Memories of their association continue to haunt the husband who is too spineless to reason with his (one time) better half and (almost) voluntarily gives in to self-pity and abjectness. The enthusiastic reader might well feel duped and wonder: what was the point of it all?
Self-pity runs like a leitmotif in a large part of the narrative, be it the sorry saga of the fourteen-year-old school girl who, on being raped by a factory watchman, gives birth in the school toilet, or the really bizarre story of The Existential Tadpole who is actually a country boy longing to escape into the city jungle and into a different gender.
For those unable to deal with stench-filled scatological references Penguins who lost the march should best serve as gifts. The excessive coprology, to be really fair, is justified in stories like A Blue Treasure which is about a rag-picker whose pursuit of a pretty blue bird leads to tragic consequences. Elsewhere, especially In the Making of a Political Movie it is grossly redundant. Yet the same story is noteworthy for its humor as its protagonist ? a spoilt brat female politician, rather amusingly referred to as Ministrani ? goes about her daily duties giving top priority to her appearance before anything else, slip-disc and arthritis notwithstanding. The story is punctuated with humor as in: ? ?Cosmetics and jewels flew from foreign lands to help the Ministrani with her morning touch-ups. But the leaders showed up with overnight growth over and around the chin. Some of them even forgot to put on their pyjamas before switching on the video viewer??
The imagery is quite compelling at times as in Melancholy Chants of Yard Bird. Witness this - ?The steel factory popped out of the vast and parched wasteland, which spread like an antique grey rug with black spots?? And in The Magnificent Elopement the author conveys her young protagonist?s state of mind through her attire ? ??But nobody turned their eyes towards her and so the new white skirt with blue flowers yawned unnoticed.?
The language, despite some minor hiccups, flows with the ease of water from a pitcher. That, more than anything else, saves the book from being a lost cause.

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