What would he do with this degree? He’d become a chemist in a brewery or in a food-processing plant owned by some multinational company. Or he’d get a teaching position at a college or university. When he thought about his future, Rahul saw the image of a certain type of man take shape: fat, whiny, gobbling pizza slices like a pig, gnawing on morsels of scrumptious fish marinated in yogurt and vinegar, drinking and partying with a teenage girl he was paying by the hour, enticing her with a little dance of his by shaking his pot belly and gyrating his pumpkin-sized saggy ass.
This type of man — a bottomless pit of lust and greed, a decadent cheat, gluttonous, licentious, corrupt — that’s who this country and system were set up to serve. All the shiny stores and legions of police and battalions of soldiers all exist to feed pleasure and stimulation to that man. If I work as an organic chemist, Rahul thought, I’ll spend my whole life churning out yummy, lip-smacking, good-for-you consumables for him. This life, which the compassionate creator of the universe, acting with great kindness, has given, once and only once, to most negligible me.
The humor, polemics, and meanderings in the book are like The Book of Laughter and Forgetting blended with Tristram Shandy—and told by one of the most naturally gifted storytellers writing in any language. Among Hindi writers, Prakash, with his postmodern sensibility, has broken from a strict model of social realism that dominated Hindi fiction for much of the twentieth century, though his prose is full of lapidary detail from rural and mythical India that can only come from the mind of a writer deeply rooted to the land and its people. Prakash continues a tradition of satire recalling Hindi writers like Manohar Shyam Joshi, while inventing a humor that is all his own. As Robert Hueckstedt has written about Prakash’s work in the introduction to his translation of Prakash stories entitled Short Shorts Long Shots, “Despite the seriousness of his purpose and commitment, he has never written a story, no matter how short, that does not make the reader smile or laugh.”
After the backlash following The Girl with the Golden Parasol, life began to improve for Prakash. He published a wildly successful novella entitled Mohandas about a Dalit — untouchable — who tries to reclaim his identity stolen by an upper-caste identity thief. An English translation of The Girl with the Golden Parasol was published in India, and the Indian national literary body, the Sahitya Akademi, awarded Uday Prakash its highest honor in Hindi for Mohandas. Kindle magazine named him a top South Asian youth icon, and his work continues to be translated into Urdu, Malayalam, Panjabi, Marathi, German, and Japanese.
I have had the great pleasure of knowing Uday Prakash personally since 2005, and over a series of my visits to India and his to the United States, we have developed an extraordinary working relationship and friendship. I am extremely grateful for his unwavering support of my translations of his work, and I am thrilled that American readers finally have the chance to hear the voice of one of India’s most important and original writers.
Note on the Translation
Translation is a series of challenges and strategies, leading to possible solutions and, ultimately, choices, both large and small.
One of the challenges in translating The Girl with the Golden Parasol was the question of how to balance the needs of readers not particularly familiar with India with those who come to the book with a deeper knowledge of India and South Asia. What should I do in cases, for example, when I decided that there was a compelling reason to keep a word in Hindi? Footnotes and glossaries are two possible solutions. My general rule of thumb with footnotes is that if there were none in the original, I won’t use any in the translation. Furthermore, footnotes suggest academic writing rather than literature. Glossaries divide the readers into two groups: one that needs to use the glossary, and the other that doesn’t. Since I believe translation is an act of enlarging the conversation of literature, dividing readers into those who know and those who don’t isn’t in the spirit of why I translate. The solution I prefer, and the one I have broadly chosen to use in The Girl with the Golden Parasol, is to incorporate the needed information into the writing itself — a gloss within the text, a kind of “stealth gloss.” Ideally, this gives readers who need it enough information and context to make sense of an unfamiliar word, while those who don’t won’t find the text too intrusive or “prechewed.”
A related question is which English to write the translation in. American English? Indian English? If I were translating from, say, French or German, it wouldn’t be necessary to consider the 250 million English speakers, and potential readers, of the English translation in France or Germany — or consider that the English spoken by these 250 million people has its own history, and is different in meaningful ways from North American and UK English idioms. Translators from Hindi and other South Asian languages do need, however, to think about what kind of English is most suitable. In The Girl with the Golden Parasol, I have written with an American audience foremost in my mind without, hopefully, neglecting the needs and expectations of a South Asian audience: I have called upon Americanisms as needed, and have drawn upon phrases and cadences from Indian English when appropriate. What I hope to have achieved is a creative hybridization — necessary for any work of translation from any language — that rewrites Prakash’s Hindi into an English that realizes the voice, originality, and vitality of his prose.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the following people for their help in making this book possible: Uday Prakash and Kumkum, Becka McKay, Bob Hueckstedt, Esther Allen, Michael Henry Heim, Jennifer Lyons, John Donatich, Ulrike Stark, Valerie Ritter, Karen Hudes, Kelly Austin, Clint Seely, Idra Novey, Amit Chaudhuri, and Amitava Kumar.
I would also like to acknowledge the generous support of the PEN Translation Fund, whose award allowed me to travel to India to meet Uday for the first time.
Jason Grunebaum
ONE
Here’s the bare backside of Madhuri Dixit, the same one Salman Khan had aimed at and hit with the pebble from his slingshot. Her back stiffened at the sting, she bent at the waist, and then turned around. Her gaze held no pain but rather a flirtatious excitement, inviting him toward her. The eyes didn’t belong to Madhuri Dixit, but to a startled doe — an intoxicated, mad, silly doe who lovingly served herself up to her hunter.
Rahul had taped the photo, the center spread in that month’s Stardust, on the window in his room. The blazing sun meant that afternoons on the second floor in Room 252 were hard to take. Madhuri Dixit’s wounded bare backside repelled the intense rays of afternoon sun from his hostel room. She turned her head and stared nonstop at Rahul with those silly, drunken eyes, as if it’d been Rahul himself who’d made her beautiful wounded derriere a target.
Apart from Rahul, no one knew that during a private moment of utter secrecy, he’d had Salman Khan quietly removed from Room 252 and had himself taken the movie star’s place. Rahul shivered with excitement as he realized that the man who had wounded Madhuri Dixit’s gorgeous voluptuous backside was none other than he himself. It was his own slingshot that launched the pebble with a crack that whizzed into Madhuri Dixit, who then let loose an “Oooooooh!”—just as the image in Stardust had been snapped.
Girls enjoy being roughed up. They aren’t chipmunks or kitty cats or small furry animals that purr and roll around when you pet them sweetly. A girl is a different kind of creature: the rougher it gets, the sharper the slap, the more she likes it.