I FIRST ENCOUNTERED Swadesh Deepak – the playwright and icon of Hindi literature, known for his hyperrealist stories – through his Sankalit Kahaniyan, a collection of short stories published by the National Book Trust, an Indian state-owned publishing house. It came in an off-white cover with a spiny-tailed green beast printed on it, and was given to me by my dadi – my paternal grandmother. Not quite as a gift but more to be rid of it. She had read the collection on the first day after her knee replacement, when the effects of the anaesthesia hadn’t worn off, and consuming all the stories in one quick gulp had filled her with a dread that her legs would never move again.
Back then, I hadn’t started writing, and my reading list was heavily influenced by the Western canon. But Deepak’s stark and succinct stories drew me in with their hypnotic charm.
Deepak was born in 1942 in Rawalpindi, in undivided Punjab. His gun-wielding family had to migrate after riots broke out during Partition. After a brief period in a refugee camp in Kurukshetra, in what is now the north Indian state of Haryana, the family shifted to a nearby town, Ambala. There he lived for the rest of his life with his wife and two children, before a “convoluted social life” and the dark side of his brain pushed him to withdraw and run away.
Recently, Vani Prakashan, one of Hindi’s largest publishers, headed by the inimitable Aditi Maheshwari, acquired the rights to Deepak’s entire works – 17 books, including nine collections of short stories, two novels, five plays and a memoir. The publishing house even succeeded in selling the French translation rights to his memoir, Maine Mandu Nahi Dekha (I Have Not Seen Mandu), Hindi’s answer to Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. Speaking Tiger, a boutique Delhi-based publisher that specialises in books with a high literary quotient, has published a collection each of Deepak’s short stories and plays, titled A Bouquet of Dead Flowers and Court Martial and Other Plays respectively. Both are translated from the Hindi by Jerry Pinto, Nirupama Dutt, Pratik Kanjilal and Deepak’s son, Sukant.