Dark nights in Puducherry

Ari Gautier brings out the seamy side of this seemingly pretty tourist town in his collection Nocturne Pondicherry.

In this collection, Gautier becomes the Baudelaire of Puducherry misfits, recording the fetid smell of the flowers of evil in the gutters of the seaside town. | Photo Credit: Getty Images/ iStock

Ari Gautier is the self-designated purveyor of “le thinnai”, the semi-open platforms attached to traditional Puducherry homes, and he takes another look at these fertile spaces in this collection. This time, however, he has become the Baudelaire of Puducherry misfits, recording the fetid smell of the flowers of evil in the gutters of the seaside town.

The collection belies the promise of its elegant cover image painted by Anarkali Checkrahmatoula to present a Puducherry marked by streets of insidious intent. The title, Nocturne, suggests a dreamy, romantic engagement between two lovers, unrestricted by sex or caste affiliations. But what unravels in these pages is very different: episodes of lust and longing darkened by the perverse.

Nocturne Pondicherry: Stories

By Ari Gautier, translated by Roopam Singh

Hachette India

Pages: 144

Price: Rs.399

Gautier has the rare ability to convey the smell of what another French writer called “nausea”: the stench of being too much in this world. It serves him well as he intuits the grosser acts of bestiality. We do not see what happens to Viji, the young girl who has escaped her scheming mother to find refuge with a seemingly kind autorickshaw driver, as the doors of her new home open and her nostrils pucker at the odour of a drunken client. Or the episode where a young girl escapes the stigma of caste to make a life for herself, and we are told tangentially: “In this society, where ugliness is hereditary, her battle against destiny was titanic. But she had won!”

Cover of Nocturne Pondicherry | Photo Credit: By special arrangement

The story “Mani Enna?” is one of the most casually brutal in the collection. The title forms a refrain as a young man, Arjuna-Jacques, swings between hope for redemption and fear as he waits against a filthy wall, where his humiliation takes place. It has echoes of T.S. Eliot’s “Hurry up, please, it’s time” (The Waste Land).

The corrupt and the vile

In his earlier full-length novel, The Thinnai, Gautier chronicled a Puducherry not described in tourist brochures: the working-class district of Kurusukuppam whose inhabitants have multiple identities, like Gautier himself, who was born in Madagascar, lived in both India and France, before settling down in Norway. He traversed the white town-black town ambiguities of Puducherry with a certain grace.

But in Nocturne, he gives himself over to the depiction of the corrupt and the vile as he examines the caste system in all its polluting perversity, with race as its colonial counterpart.

When Puducherry was finally uncoupled from its French embrace in 1954, its inhabitants were given the option of either staying French or becoming Indian citizens. Even before that, some families down the caste scale had the option of learning French, converting to Christianity, and travelling to France. One ironic story describes how, by changing his name to La-Porte, one gentleman finds the doorway to a new identity. Yet, as Gautier describes it, the door half opening into a kitchen full of intoxicating aromas could also be a portal into nothingness. Baudelaire once said: “Looking from outside into an open window one never sees as much as when one looks through a closed window.” In these stories, Gautier is more of a flâneur, occasionally resting outside on thinnais, hoping to be let in.

Geeta Doctor is a Chennai-based writer, critic, and cultural commentator.