THE SHEHNAI VIRTUOSO

A curated collection of 26 stories from Dhumketu (1892-1965), a celebrated Gujarati writer who wrote more than 500 in his lifetime.

The book begins with “The Post Office,” Dhumketu’s most anthologized work, about an elderly man waiting for a letter from his daughter, who'd married and moved to her husband’s faraway town years earlier. The opening line sets the tone: “The hazy dawn sky was glittering with the previous night’s stars—big and small—like happy memories shimmering in a person’s life.” The title story invokes the beauty of nature, with the shimmer of moonlight, and of music, with its sonorous joys and sorrows, and the way they can stir the soul; the rest follow suit in demonstrating the ways literature can do the same. While many of these stories portray the lives of ordinary folks, others feature leaders engaged in questions of politics and power. What unites them is their lush language and the author’s skill in addressing a myriad of subjects with hope and humility. Bhatt selected at least one significant story from each of the author’s 24 published volumes, setting out to demonstrate his stylistic and thematic range. She accomplishes her mission with grace; the stories are as varied as they are rich with description about everything from their characters’ inner struggles to their settings, whether a small lakeside village, the Himalayas, or an alternate reality where individualism is eradicated, as in the “The Rebirth of Poetry.” This story is a love letter to the power of art and the human spirit that feels like the engine of the whole book. Gujarati speakers represent a large portion of the Indian diaspora in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada, and Bhatt’s translation is a significant contribution to an English-speaking audience’s appreciation of Indian literature.

These stories invite readers to rediscover the wonder in the quotidian.