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Enigmatic Fiction on Pregnancy and Childlessness
‘White Dancing Elephants’ by Chaya Bhuvaneswar
Four years ago, I wrote about Chaya Bhuvaneswar’s short story collection White Dancing Elephants (Dzanc Books, 2018). The website that published my remarks has gone offline, so I’m reposting them here.
The magical realist stories of ‘White Dancing Elephants’
A number of these stories focus on pregnancies that are illicit, fraught with danger, sadly lost, or merely wistfully imagined and on hoped-for children as seductive ghosts who lure women and men to their fates. The power of this theme, combined with Dr. Bhuvaneswar’s glittering sentences, led me to read the collection several times from beginning to end.
Some stories are on the theme of childlessness. The first story, from which the book takes its title, is in the voice of a woman speaking to her small, miscarried embryo (“only enough blood for me to know”), an ephemeral being she generously imagines would have grown into a man who one day would have had a son of his own. “The Life You Save Isn’t Your Own” is about a fortysomething art collector, a divorcee who feels sadness in the solitary life she’s made for herself. “Heitor” is about Indian slaves in Portugal five hundred years ago facing life-and-death choices. “Adristakama” is about a young woman who feels she must go to India to accept an arranged marriage rather than stay with her girlfriend in New York City. “Asha in Allston” is about a sexbot.
“A Shaker Chair” and “Orange Popsicles,” set in the United States, are about extortion. Each features an Indian woman as perpetrator or victim. They cause me to reflect on Bhuvaneswar’s epigraph: “the exact / and tribal, intimate revenge” (from Seamus Heaney’s poem “Punishment”). There is also “Talinda,” in which the narrator, recognizing herself as “this wretched person…sleeping with her best friend’s husband,” learns that the thirty-something woman she has wronged has been diagnosed with an aggressive cancer. This narrator’s voice is fierce and imperious in its self-justification and, even as she indicts herself, has a comic inadequacy of empathy.
“The Orphan Handler,” set in India, is about girls who have “the powers to change into wild creatures…
