Just a review
Purely by accident, I came across this review of one of my short stories published in an anthology....
if you want to read it in full, here's the link
No Ying for This Yang
Here's an extract...
This anthology tells their story. It's an unrelenting gaze writers as diverse as Vikram Seth, Rakesh Ratti, R. Raja Rao, Bhupen Khakhar and Frank Krishner fix on the meetings and the matings, the horror and the hypocrisy, the sadness and the sensuality, the abandon and the absence that in forms gay lives. Not prettified soft focus Chien Win Lee. This is brutally direct, merciless no-holds-barred Sebastio Salgado vision that destroys artifice, disallows subterfuge. Khakhar throws open the Pages from a Diary: men meet and mate here. But amidst all that meat is a mind that somehow ennobles, infuses with dignity, even tenderness, what is essentially a primal carnal rite. There are sexual schizoids like sexy, silly, willing-to-wound but fearing-to-strike Khalid, who Rao delineates with bemused pen in Moonlight Tandoori. Unforgettable Khalid! One orifice spouts the scriptures, the other begs entry into Saturnalia. The old professor waits, watches, wins and leaves resigned, indifferent, as the inevitable denouement unfolds. Khalid clings to his "unknowing", the departing older lover to cherished moment that will soon be memory. The doomed emotional dialectic of Gay Eden.
It's the same vision, call it harsh, direct, even wistful but never cloying, that writers like Krishner bring to their stories. His The Sweetest of All is about the best document of the rollercoaster bittersweet ride that's the average gay boy's life. Beautiful boy head over heels in love seeking sex change in response to if-only-you-were-a-girl refrain of macho lover being cautioned by surgeon—" If he's so keen on women what's he doing in your bed?" He loves on. Learns about double-dealing, self-deceiving lovers. Some leave troubled by religious guilt, others with equally cavalier nonchalance to sire children to whom they want him to be uncle. Mark, the protagonist , emotionally wise and old, knows, accepts, plays along. He'll keep old memories. And new men. After all, isn't the next man and moment "the sweetest of them all"?
[By the way, that's not the reason why the story was titled - the sweetest of all - but, well, a review is a review....]
if you want to read it in full, here's the link
No Ying for This Yang
Here's an extract...
This anthology tells their story. It's an unrelenting gaze writers as diverse as Vikram Seth, Rakesh Ratti, R. Raja Rao, Bhupen Khakhar and Frank Krishner fix on the meetings and the matings, the horror and the hypocrisy, the sadness and the sensuality, the abandon and the absence that in forms gay lives. Not prettified soft focus Chien Win Lee. This is brutally direct, merciless no-holds-barred Sebastio Salgado vision that destroys artifice, disallows subterfuge. Khakhar throws open the Pages from a Diary: men meet and mate here. But amidst all that meat is a mind that somehow ennobles, infuses with dignity, even tenderness, what is essentially a primal carnal rite. There are sexual schizoids like sexy, silly, willing-to-wound but fearing-to-strike Khalid, who Rao delineates with bemused pen in Moonlight Tandoori. Unforgettable Khalid! One orifice spouts the scriptures, the other begs entry into Saturnalia. The old professor waits, watches, wins and leaves resigned, indifferent, as the inevitable denouement unfolds. Khalid clings to his "unknowing", the departing older lover to cherished moment that will soon be memory. The doomed emotional dialectic of Gay Eden.
It's the same vision, call it harsh, direct, even wistful but never cloying, that writers like Krishner bring to their stories. His The Sweetest of All is about the best document of the rollercoaster bittersweet ride that's the average gay boy's life. Beautiful boy head over heels in love seeking sex change in response to if-only-you-were-a-girl refrain of macho lover being cautioned by surgeon—" If he's so keen on women what's he doing in your bed?" He loves on. Learns about double-dealing, self-deceiving lovers. Some leave troubled by religious guilt, others with equally cavalier nonchalance to sire children to whom they want him to be uncle. Mark, the protagonist , emotionally wise and old, knows, accepts, plays along. He'll keep old memories. And new men. After all, isn't the next man and moment "the sweetest of them all"?
[By the way, that's not the reason why the story was titled - the sweetest of all - but, well, a review is a review....]
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