About
Author: Barlen Pyamootoo (Mauritius)
Genre: Domestic
Setting
Place: Mauritius
Time: 1990s
My Rating (see what this means)
My Subjective Rating: 3
My ‘Objective’ Rating: 2.94
Introduction
Benares by Barlen Pyamootoo is a short novella, set – not in the ‘city of death’ Benares, India where the faithful go to die – but its namesake Benares – a small unremarkable village-town, in Mauritius – which is perhaps itself dying. Two friends from the said town are going to Port Louis to bring back a woman each for themselves for the night.
The rest of the plot is quite simple – they get themselves a taxi driver – an old friend Jimi, go to Port Louis – manage to find themselves the women after some effort and are driving back with them – chatting.
Their conversations – the small talk on the long drive are, as conversation with hired prostitutes can be expected to be, fairly simplistic – there is no sense of complicated philosophical explorations or grand ideas or commentary of anything in particular. Rather the conversations centres around the mundane – but that doesn’t mean there aren’t meaningful.
There is an underlying melancholy in the story – about their village’s death (because the sugar mill on which the whole village depended on for employment has gone out of business), about its mountains which are a beautiful grey – like a sky that’s beginning to clear after the rain has stopped, about football and whatnot.
This lack of action in the narrative is what perhaps makes Benares such a sweet small piece of literature worth reading.
Picture Credits:
- Cover Picture: Benares Movie by Barlen Pyamootoo