One Point Two Billion - Mahesh Rao

‘There are 1.2 billion people living in India; more than 1.2 billion stories in one country’

Mahesh Rao’s first collection of short fiction attempts to tell the stories of the men and women who make up modern India; each of the thirteen stories is set in a different Indian state, crossing class, gender, religious and social boundaries. As in his debut novel The Smoke is Rising, Rao explores the tension between India’s history and attempts to modernise. Throughout the collection, we see characters attempting to come to terms with incidents from their past, and the way they impact on the present.

This theme is most graphically illustrated in Golden Ladder, the story of a young woman, Falguni, who has returned from America because a mass grave has been found on her family’s land. Her uncle Veerendra is a prominent local politician, who believes that his standing will enable him to bluster his way through the scandal ('thousands of hectares of land and we are supposed to be responsible for every leaf... are they the first mysterious death in this country? Will they be the last?'), but Falguni is forced to confront her social privilege, and the methods her family have employed to gain and maintain their elevated status.

Fizz Pop Aah takes a very different approach to the same topic, telling the story of Shakti Cola, the fizzy drink conceived of as an Indian alternative to Coke after the American company pulled out. The inventor declares that Shakti Cola will embody the New Indian spirit: 'modern but rooted, traditional but rational, local but universal', but unfortunately his plans are endlessly delayed by bureaucrats more concerned with increasing iron and steel production. Shakti Cola eventually makes its way onto the shelves, and enjoys a brief vogue, but is swept aside the moment that giant American manufacturers make their return; a domestic product is considered inherently inferior to an imported one.

Eternal Bliss satirises the gap between the romanticised Western idea of India and the reality. Set in a yoga centre, the story shows the staff, plagued by worries, broken marriages and all the things that their foreign guests are hoping to escape. They are concerned with the everyday, struggling to understand why their guests ‘would leave their countries - places where buses left on time, power and water flowed without interruption, and policemen genuinely apprehended criminals - in order to exercise together in a hall'. Then crisis strikes: a guest dies during a visit from Directorate of Spiritual Affairs inspectors, setting in motion a brief Fawlty Towers-esque panic before a timely bribe resolves the matter (the inspectors’ report states that 'one of the centre's guests had been so committed to selfless devotion and contemplation that he had departed his corporeal form and achieved enlightenment while they were having their lunch'.).

As The Smoke is Rising showed, Rao is a skilled comic writer, and that ability is on show again here, especially in his depiction of The Pool’s teenage narrator. When we first meet her, she is lounging at her father’s leisure resort, ignoring the guests to concentrate on reading The Color Purple: ‘It's sort of confirming many of the things I know about men but I need to get to the end'. The story plays out in an amusingly catty series of diary entries, with a sinister twist, which capture the awkward and surly adolescent tone brilliantly. Elsewhere, The Trouble With Dining Out wryly observes the elaborate yet unspoken protocols of socialising, capturing the delicate interplay of class, gender and age, while The Agony of Leaves introduces a narrator who is 'not a perverted fellow. It has never been my habit to move with prostitutes or other women of that type... unfortunately for me, I am in love with my daughter-in-law'.

Rao is adept at shifting voice and tone, meaning that One Point Two Billion avoids the sense of burnout that can sometimes develop towards the end of a short story collection. He also maintains a nice balance between comedy and serious writing; there are plenty of beautiful phrases as well as laugh out loud passages. I was particularly taken with his description of a night sky which ‘looks like it would rub off on my fingers and smear on my forehead'. This collection is a huge enterprise, balancing modernity and tradition, and crossing multiple boundaries to give the reader a picture of a nation as the author understands it, but fortunately Rao’s writing is agile and engaging, and his characters never feel like ciphers.