Polymorphism: Stories

by Indira Chandrasekhar

Taboo, desire and a dead woman's saris layer the lives of women who board together in a widow's household. A cinema fan encounters his idol and the cruel, fragile world that creates and holds her. A child wonders if the discarded siblings who had once lain next to her in a petri dish were touched by the family bond that she struggles to make sense of. Lovers decide to float away into a world where the disappointments of domesticity and stale love can never touch them. A woman, resisting her family's pressure to produce heirs must confront a primal need to bear children. Polymorphism presents nineteen stories that shift realities and twist perceptions and veer on the edge of strange, slipstream, speculative fiction. The vulnerabilities and the wild, visceral anxieties of the characters that populate the stories come alive under the empathy they evoke. Textured by the author's scientific research on biological molecules and deeply informed by family stories, the collection explores humanity's driving obsessions of life, fertility and relationships with tender, surreal expression.

151 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 10, 2017

Reviews

[Rebecca Lloyd · Rating 5 out of 5]

As is true of all the best short stories, there is never anything extraneous in Chandrasekhar’s work, and furthermore, it is as if she sees everything and can write it… nothing is out of bounds to her; her reach is huge from the truly grisly to the utterly tender. Amongst the very moving stories in this collection, is the powerful Any Day Now in which atmosphere and tension is conjured up merely by the description of a few objects in a woman’s flat, and the story’s poignancy is embellished and given form by the foolish hope of a girl who helps out there. And again, Intensive Care is a tender and haunting story full of compassion and strong imagery, but in which cruelty is also plainly evident.
I believe that the more you read of Indira Chandrasekhar’s fiction, the more you realise that at the very heart of it is an understanding and sensitivity about human vulnerability that is rarely encountered in modern fiction with as much quiet and persistent dedication. Whether or not she is writing in the science fiction direction, such as in The Insert, in which characters are sucked away into vacuum triangles on the street, or in the story She can Sing, about loss and loneliness and a rescued child, it is human vulnerability that surfaces directly in her often many facetted stories.
The Perfect Shot, a realistic story about a wife’s slavish obedience to her husband, is also a story about obsession, and the same theme arises in Adoration, which tells of a boy’s obsession with a movie star and the reality he confronts when he meets her in person, and at the end of which, rather than horror, there is joy. I found this story particularly engaging as Chandrasekhar reaches convincingly right down into the character of the teenage boy.
I am as equally enthralled by her darker stories, those that could be described as weird or chilling, as I am by the more delicate works. I was very taken with Black Sari, a fascinating story about pollution and purity … or purity and danger… a magical story in which saris ‘pull the menstrual blood from the women.’ This is another wonderful piece of fiction that has the ability to startle the reader hugely, and is written in a breath-taking and simple style which adds to its impact. There are also a few stories that are tantalisingly mysterious, in particular, In 1997 which leaves images with the reader that linger long afterwards.
Family relationships, their complexities and idiosyncrasies, feature prominently in the collection. When the Children Come Home, a story told without sentiment, is about the power—despite all that is working against it— of the bond between a mother and daughter. My Kitchen, my Space, a relentless story full of menace, explores the position of a daughter-in-law in a family and tells of how the situation finally implodes. Stranger than either of the two proceeding stories, and one of the most startling, is Polymorphism, a story about a mother who appears to have a strange ‘ailment’. The writing here is controlled and elegant, with a delicate edge of humour, and Chandrasekhar does something that she does very well indeed, and that is to suddenly surprise the reader, in this case with the phrase, ‘What the fuck!’ uttered by the mother’s son.
Inexplicable and strange things happen frequently in Chandrasekhar’s fiction. The Embryotic is a singularly odd story written with great economy of language, in which a family cook develops a boil on her hand. And Should I weep is an absolutely brilliant story of sheer horror, showing how deftly Chandrasekhar can move from the most delicate, almost reserved writing to unflinching and bold expression of dark things. And here is also the place to mention We Read the News, a terrifyingly realistic story about a terrorist attack told with great restraint despite some chilling graphic descriptions such as ‘A man lay on top of Lakshmi’s legs and her head was flung back, a gory, shredded hole opened in her shining waist—moving, pulsing.’
While I would be hard-put to choose just one story from this excellent collection, if I had to do so, it would be Abandoned Rooms, a haunting and simply-told futuristic story about a controlled breeding programme in an imagined time and land. The story subject reminded me a little of The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. Although you could say that Chandrasekhar writes ‘science fiction’, the genre tag is incidental, as this story has a depth, power and gracefulness rarely found in everyday Sci/fi— and these attributes mark her out as being amongst the best contemporary literary writers.

[Beta d'Elena · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book beckoned me with its distinctive title "Polymorphism." I have come across the idea of shape shifting and transversality and I was curious about polymorphism. I am happy I cursorily brushed up my biology and found that it refers to an organism or species that can have many different forms or stages. I finished most of the stories together Embroyotic to Rockfall in one go and I think the reader would be rewarded to read this slim short stories at one go. The reader would be rewarded by being in the same chilling intriguing yet tender world it creates rather than dipping into it inbetween which can take away from power of the miliu. Especially if the reader like me is just beginning to inhabit in an embryotic way the blood, ovaries, flesh, and tubes of the body. I think the word embodiment does not suffice to convey the richness of chords, tubes, blood vessels. My favorite stories are Embryotic and Abandoned Rooms. The idea of motherhood is a theme through these stories. The former is a story of two women (outside of motherhood) one of whom had a child from a boil on her finger, perched like a dew drop. So the newly empowered woman turns busy and the other finds beauty in a flower. The latter is a chilling of a state government breeding facility, reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's Handmaid Tale. Enriched, however, challenging some of the notions we have like"the basis of love , the reason we are capable of feeling love is to maintain the specius." Also, an equally powerfull line is "even if the reproductive system has been suppressed our bodies will continue to rebel and be part of the creation of life. The last stories also have a lyrical romance about them. I would put this on instagram but I find it easier to type on a laptop rather than an android device.

[Michelle D’costa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interview- https://www.boundindia.com/scientist-...

[Pavan Dharanipragada · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author, Indira Chandrasekhar, happens to be a biophysicist as well. I am generally not a huge believer in the writing abilities of academicians; they tend to focus on unnecessary detail, boggling down the narrative, and neglect to make the reader feel. Chandrasekhar, on the contrary, renders her scientific temperament to the service of her stories wonderfully, giving them an ethereal atmosphere, while still capturing the very human suffering/emotion at their base.

The stories are in general well-written. Some of the stories have fantastical, or dystopian or other sci-fi settings, which were quite unique and original. The story 'Black sari' is about a sari that absorbs the menstrual blood from the wearer. 'Abandoned rooms' is about a dystopian future where a class of women are genetically engineered to breed since humans cannot birth anymore. A story about how the governments inserts new land in the middle of slums to build high-rises, which was about gentrification, I guess? I felt like missed a lot of subtext in the stories. It could be that the stories were not very detailed, or that I'm simply deficient in understanding them. Among those that I did get, a few were simplistic, and had nothing deep to say. Like the story about a terrorist attack, which causes a character to go into shock, or a story about hypocrisy and puritanism in villages.

[Aditi · Rating 2 out of 5]

Picked this up at the airport as the blurb on the back seemed interesting but the stories did not live up to my expectations. Their premise is interesting and the author has chosen to write about several tender, subtle emotions. However, the stories lack depth and sometimes end abruptly just for the sake of surprise. There is significant attention paid to details that turn out to be quite irrelevant, the narrative does not often flow and alas, the stories fail to make an impression or be evocative. Rather, they are cliché and unfulfilling to read.

[Tasneem · Rating 2 out of 5]

so random, I understood partially