By Dr. K. Javeed Nayeem, MD
Having long been a story-teller myself on this page, today I am writing about another story-teller friend, Sujata Rajpal and her latest book. To most Mysureans, the now Mysuru-based Sujata does not need a long or elaborate introduction, because anyone in our city, who has any interest in books and reading, will know her as a writer and literature enthusiast, involved and quite active, in any literary activity that goes on in our city.
Originally hailing from far off Chandigarh, she has made Mysuru her home for the past twenty-five years and has now for all practical purposes, become a home-bred Mysurean. She has written two other books; ‘The Other End of the Corridor’ which is a work of fiction and ‘The life I Saw’, which is a biography of her mother, who is a partition refugee, in addition to many short pieces about various topics, a good many of which have appeared in Star of Mysore from time to time.
This book, Things Left Unsaid, that I am writing about, is her third book and according to my hunch, a few more seem to be in the pipeline. Unlike most other books, this book begins without a preface, an introduction or even a foreword and, it also ends with just what it says very briefly, about itself, on the back cover, to anyone who picks it up with the curiosity to know what it is all about.
This is indeed very unusual because although I have a fairly large collection of books, I have very few books where the writers do not tell or at least get someone else to tell the reader, what their book is all about, in the very first few pages, before embarking on the main narrative. So, I shall myself embark on telling you a little about the book and its author too, with the hope that my narrative will do justice to her work, without putting the writer herself to any kind of discomfiture that someone is doing what she has very modestly chosen to refrain from doing herself.
The book that I’m talking about has fourteen short stories, every one of which is really short, which is rather surprising. Why it is surprising is because a great many so-called short stories, penned even by some of the best-known short story writers, are anything but short.
So, very often when I pick up a book of short stories, I quickly flip through the pages to see how short they really are, only to very often find that they are anything but that! To write what you call a short story, in a manner that keeps it short and yet good enough to come out as a tale well told, is really an art which should be the most essential forte of any good short story writer.
In this respect, Sujata seems to have done full justice to what one would expect of her in her latest book. Her book is a compendium of fourteen poignant and touching tales of love and loss, that portray ordinary, everyday people we see all around us, without knowing what kind of lives they lead, let alone the ups and downs they face while going about them.
Yes, every single person in this world, important or unimportant, known and unknown, has many incidents and anecdotes that mark his or her existence, that make them happy or sad and this is an integral and inescapable part of living. And, most often, no one, not even the ones they live or work with closely, knows what has been making them happy or sad.
It is exactly about fourteen such lives, that Sujata has written, in her book, in a way that portrays both the elation and pathos that make them interesting, not only to read but more importantly making them worth pondering over, long after you have finished reading them.
According to the author’s own note on the back cover of the book, these relate to the complexities of love, betrayal, loss and redemption, that are invariably enshrined in all human relationships. So, these are stories of love lost, trust broken, friendships tested and families torn apart, that portray the triumph of hope over despair, the coming of relief from pain and the transformation of vulnerability into resilience.
Like the famous American short story writer O. Henry’s tales, each of Sujata’s tales too has a twist in the tail, that leaves a tiny bit unsaid, doing justice to the title of her book. You cannot read them without being left wondering what would have happened to the lives and emotions of the characters in them and how they would have fared, had they been from real life.
And, here I’d like to say that after reading them, I somehow could not help feeling that a good many of them may have been based on some real-life stories of people known to the author, which she has very deftly disguised as fiction, to protect the identities of the people who are hidden in them.
Although I know her well enough to do it, I have not ventured to ask her if my presumptions or suspicions are true because as a fellow writer, I feel that all writers, except perhaps the most indiscreet and inconsiderate ones, prefer to have an aura of secrecy around the identities of the people they write about, which they prefer to keep sacrosanct, as a patch of untrodden, untrampled and thus unsullied terrain. Thankfully, like Sujata, I happen to be one among them!
e-mail: kjnmysore@rediffmail.com
This post was published on August 23, 2026 7:30 pm