Of Solace in Stories

Raj Kamal Jha's debut novel, “The Blue Bedspread” is an evocative, stilted and seemingly aimless soliloquy of a man who is not young anymore; his stomach droops over the belt of his trousers.
Jha seemingly tries to understand life though stories, and that is also what his narrator is doing. The frame story itself is powerful and poignant; the tributaries that come out of it, not so much.
The narrator gets a telephone call at night from the police station, saying his sister has died from childbirth. The baby is alive and he is supposed to take her. As he lays the baby down on a blue bedspread where she'll sleep, he waits for the next morning when the baby's new set of parents will come to take her away. He decides to use this time to write stories so that when she, the baby, grows up, she'll know her past.
This is the story of those stories. The stories aren't perfect or polished. The narrator is having trouble narrating them; he is straining to tell his story. The stories read like they are still in the process of being shaped. The prose is hesitant.
Jha divides the stories into parts -- “Father”, “Mother”, “Sister”, “Visitors” and “Brother”, with every part revealing some haunting info on the respective family members.
Ultimately, the story is about companionship, about loneliness. At times, the narrator longs for company. At other times, he does not want to let go of solitude. He thinks the city he's living in “likes” lonely people, and the instant he'll find someone, it will desert him for another lonely guy.
Jha's city isn't a bustling metropolis where street children play with discarded plastic tires, but a lonely colony crawling with life, all mired in a romantic aridity. In one of the stories we meet an old man who used to work at a factory. The factory closes down due to labour protests, but he decides to stay back to look after the factory owner's pigeons.
These are haunting accounts of people. Maybe Jha is doing all he can to stamp it down as a black comedy, but the pain, the discomfort of his characters perforate the plastic sheet of comedy and glide out like ghosts. It is evident that Jha wants to strip all social trappings off his characters and leave them barren, all of them living to simply live; he wants to understand their life by turning them into stories. Because in this macabre world of Jha, it is okay for a person to gouge someone's eyes out for a few moments of “pleasure”, and it is okay for a husband to leave footprints in the bathroom so that his wife may think they were made by a ghost.