In his book ‘Mood and Temperament’, published in 2000, David Watson clearly states the mood patterns of a person during the course of a week. Our association with others depends a lot on what emotion or mood we are in that particular moment. Navarasas ‘Navrasa’ as it also spelt, at times, are the 9 emotions that define our daily life. Peter Gordon is editor of the Asian Review of Books. “If life were different …”, but it isn’t. Even the odd ghost or two serve as reminders of stories past.īut in them all, the protagonist has something somewhat out of sync with her (and it is usually, but not always, her) situation: hoping that that things aren’t quite the way they seem, or are. Judy Dench and Maggie Smith might play the two elderly women sitting in the faded hotel in Yorkshire. It’s partly the vocabulary-the Malaysian Wongs have their television in the “drawing-room”-partly the crisp syntax and partly her drawing the stories from the banal: school plays, troubled marriages or three-generation families. Even when set in a jackfruit blossom-bedecked Malaysian courtyard, they resemble country watercolors rather than anything harder-edged or avant-garde. There is something old-fashionably comfortable in Menon’s writing. Menon, thank goodness, doesn’t disrupt the story-telling by explaining what a pontianak is, or kueh lapis or padang. I’ve conjured up a carful of women bent on revenge. Not ghosts, then-not with those sharpened teeth-but pontianaks. Long hair drips from their perfect skulls and they blow fanged kisses to me in the rearview mirror. Miss Working-Late, Miss Tennis-Partner, Miss She’s-Just-A-Friend-My-God-Shalini-Give-It-A-Rest-they’re all very much alive and fleshy, going home right now on the Ampang Line and crossing their legs at retired businessmen. Not, of course, that they’re truly ghosts. “Excited, Shalini?” Dilip shifts up a gear and all the ghosts crowded into the back seat rock together and nod their invisible heads.
Moods of a story windows#
It was the bored waitress… It was their last evening and there was an end-of-things look about the hotel, with greenery dimming the windows and blurring the sepia photographs on the wall.īut Menon’s talent is best illustrated when she takes England, Malaysia and India and gives them a mix, as in the book’s virtuoso lead paragraph:
Moods of a story cracked#
It was the hotel dining room, full of dusty tables and cracked teacups. Such a Tamil smell, Mrs Wong said once when she thought we were upstairs … Next door, my own quiet house reeks of coconut oil and turmeric.
The hall behind it smells of silence, of lilies and rosewater and cool polished wood, and Peony disappears down it like a breath against the wind.
A stone lion guards the door, and I stroke its face, already blurred from years of our hugs.
… she steps toe-heel out of her shoes on the shallow steps of the Wong’s verandah. The Farne Islands are jagged lumps of blackness against a murky sea and there’s a tang in the air and a taste of devils on my tongue.Īnd Menon captures all of multiracial Malaysia in a couple of sentences. The monsoon is coming, and the water will soon be ankle-deep and silted up with rotting fruit She can conjure up a scene in just a phrase, whether Malaysia: Menon has won a clutch of prizes along the way to this first book it is not hard to see why. The characters are divided up as well, although some have crossed borders, while other ethnicities-Russian exchange students or Cantonese-speaking Malaysians-make appearances. A detour or two to someplace like Australia aside, the stories are more or less evenly divided between a mostly Indian Malaysia and a musty England she seems equally at home in either. Menon, born in Australia of South Asian extraction by way, it seems, of Malaysia (her given name of Catherine is, perhaps subjunctively, reduced to initials), crosses cultural and geographical boundaries with seamless ease.
This is an accomplished and satisfying collection. Subjunctive Moods, CG Menon (Dahlia Publishing, July 2018) Most of Menon’s protagonists are none “too steady on their feet”, as two of them say of themselves, whether literally or as an existential condition: if lives could be conjugated, these would be in the subjunctive. In grammar (albeit less so and increasingly rarely in English), the subjunctive is used when a condition of uncertainty or conditionality prevails “if I were the author,” for example, “I might have chosen just this title.” Even a slight perturbation in reality can result in a different verb conjugation or, as it is called, “mood”. Although “Subjunctive Moods” is the name of the second of the stories in CG Menon’s debut collection, it is apt for the entire collection.
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