A House is a Body & Night Garden
Image credit Workman.
Book: A House is a Body
If you google interviews with Shruti Swamy you’ll find a plethora of them about her book, A House is a Body, a collection of her short stories published by Algonquin Books in August. Many of these interviews wade into the topics of dreams and their importance; about motherhood, particularly in the title story, “A House is a Body”; and into the wider influences of her second generation Indian-American heritage. When I sat down with the collection, I had set myself the task of pulling from it one story to discuss and look at, thinking that, like other collections, one may fairly represent the whole. The easy choices, I thought, were “A Simple Composition” or “Night Garden”, both of which won her back-to-back O. Henry Awards in 2016 and 2017, respectively. But as I read those, and then the others, I soon realized one would not stand for the whole. These are stories that move so effortlessly through time, leaping years ahead through white space or that adhere tightly to a terse moment in time, and some that wade into myth and fantasy where blue-skinned gods are topics of tabloid gossip and queens have prophetic dreams. Certainly, each story stands apart, but the entirety of the collection harmonizes together like a choir, each voice strong and plangent and yet, when taken in together, complementary in such a perfect, concerted way that it’s hard to single one out.
…I took a chair and set it by the window, so I could sit while I watched the dog and snake. It was a strange dance, stranger still because of its soundlessness….Their focus was so completely on the other. I wondered if they were communicating in some way I couldn’t hear or understand.
— From “Night Garden”
The language of these stories gives them an ethereal quality, and, at times, so much so that I felt as though I became untethered, and a little lost, forced to turn back a half-page to find my footing again. To trace my way forward with more caution and attention. This isn’t a flaw of Swamy’s stories but a feature. They ask you to take your time. To pay attention. Listen. What happens on the page is complicated and immersive, and it requires you to go in, all at once, for the duration. They ask you to commit. To give yourself over in a way that might feel frustrating at first. But there is reward at the end of that investment. Between the words, the sometimes dream-like quality of her prose, and the way time stretches in a flash or flows slowly like honey, a little bit of magic happens. Between the words, their forward flow, an energy arcs and a connection is made, and each story is felt as much as it is understood. Perhaps, more so.
While there are many moving parts to Swamy’s stories, a great deal of subtext, the most interesting to me throughout the collection was the consistent underlying current of need within the characters. Deep desires drive these stories, as in all strong fiction, and while many desires abound the most prominent here is the need for connection, to feel connected. In “The Neighbors” the narrator, a mother, recognizes the “ghost of a bruise” under her new neighbor’s right eye and, later, “on the underside of her arm…a constellation of yellow marks”, and she tries to show the neighbor her own bruises that her husband has given her. A woman, in “The Laughter Artist”, becomes a professional laughter artist after a sexual assault. “Like a professional mourner?” her mother says to her; “Sometimes, when you lose—when people die—it is very hard to make tears….When you hear them cry your body starts to make tears….[and] that weight on your chest decreases.” In “The Siege” a queen seeks connection to a woman the queen’s husband has kidnapped, herself the queen of another king who leads an army towards the capital to free his wife, and to destroy all that the main character knows and loves. These characters, and all the characters in this collection, are seeking that type of complicated connection, and through those connections a form of purpose and meaning, to see themselves echoed in the world. To feel whole. And whether the act of connecting is done through conversation or ritual, through sex or in a dream, it is always humanizing and compassionate.
Again, I shifted the baby in my arms, more clumsily, less carefully, to show her where, three days ago, hands had squeezed my neck as though pulping a fruit….Then I looked at her and realized she was refusing. Not only to say it, but to see, just to see it, to see me. Her eyes were hard and faraway, the eyes of a stranger—which, of course, she was.
— From “The Neighbors”
These attempts to connect, sometimes successful and sometimes not, are meaningful regardless of their success, the act itself necessary. An act, however, that is time consuming. Exhausting, sometimes. Not unlike the art and act of storytelling, really, in the way a short story or novel, a show or movie, demands your time to convey its meaning, to connect. And, of course, that’s what we connect with in Swamy’s stories, our own need for connection with others echoed in these wonderfully needy characters. Perhaps these stories don’t merely reveal the underlying need for connection within us but presents a solution for our disconnectedness, a cure for those spikes of loneliness; that what connects us has to with patience and listening as much as it has to do with being heard.
Cocktail: Night Garden
There’s a concept in Hinduism called “darshan,” where just sitting in the presence of someone holy is a blessing.
— Shruti Swamy, in an interview with Pen America
In a Pen America interview, Shruti Swamy briefly discusses the Hindu concept of Darshan, the tenants of which require quiet observation and patience. In a way, the waiting for a storm to clear and reveal the day ahead is itself a gift. A blessing. These stories, I feel, reveal their depths only through patience. They are sweet and they are bitter; they reflect the best and most complicated parts of ourselves.
Night Garden, the cocktail paired with this collection, is also bitter and sweet. It’s designed as something to sit with as you read. Built with gin and fortified with sweet and herbal Yellow Chartreuse, the drink is balanced with bitter Salers Aperitif and brought together in harmony with grapefruit and lime juices. It’s a complex drink that unfolds on your tongue, a flavor that changes once more after a swallow, spiced, bitter notes lingering on the pallet. Like the complex stories of Shruti Swamy, this cocktail unfurls the longer you sit with it.
Recipe
1oz Gin (London Dry or citrus forward)
0.75oz Yellow Chartreuse
0.5oz Salers Aperitif (or Suze, any gentian liqueur)
0.5oz Grapefruit Juice
0.25oz Lime Juice
Add all ingredients to a shaker tin, then add your ice. Shake for 10 to 15 seconds and strain into a glass.
Sit and spend time with a person or idea, and enjoy.