I’ve been “teaching writing” for years now. I put teaching writing in quotes, though I’m against them. Such emphasis is rarely necessary. That goes for air quotes, too. I’m making an exception in this case because I’ve never taught writing.
All I can do, all I’ve ever done, is expose my students, and myself, to the mysteries. The mysteries of why a certain poem or story or novel or play or memoir or non-fiction or piece of uncategorizable literature works to break through our emotional skin—most of us are made of elephant-hide—and gets us to feel something. I’m no closer to truly understanding precisely why a particular piece works as opposed to why another doesn’t than I was when I taught my first class in 2000. This doesn’t tend to engender confidence in my students, but I’m just being honest. Your guess is as good as mine.
This said, I’ve been lucky. Very lucky. Because I’ve had so many students far more interested in reveling in the enigma of literature than in mastering some non-existent algorithm. Last night I read a story by one of those students, Shruti Swamy. It’s called “Blindness” and it’s the lead story in Swamy’s 2021 collection A House is a Body. Swamy was a graduate student at San Francisco State where I taught for fourteen years before relocating to the Upper Valley.
What’s “Blindness” about? That’s hard to explain. Say a woman and a man are happy together. Sort of happy anyway. (Which seems to me the only honest happiness. I’m in a mood. Must be the weather. I don’t have to look out the window, all I’ve got to do is read Daybreak. The Scots have a word for this: dreich.) Things turn less than sort of happy when the man leaves. Meanwhile, the woman is pregnant. The story then shifts to the woman, her name is Sudra, taking a train to a city called Rishikesh. “Blindness” is set in northern India. At first, we don’t know why she’s going to Rishikesh but it turns out it’s a place where she’d once had (sort of) a good time with her now gone husband.
The town was made for honeymooners. She had gone there with Vinod before they were married. They had pretended they were in order to get a room. She had been wearing a sari to make herself look more wifely. Vinod brought brandy and they drank it from the bottle; later she had been sick.
Sudra, now alone, takes a room in a hotel and goes to sleep. The story takes a turn at this point, one that teachers of writing, including myself, might counsel against. Oh, no, not a dream. Please no. The last thing I want to hear about is someone else’s dream, in a story or anywhere else. Swamy doesn’t care. People dream. Anything people do is fair game for fiction, so long as you do it well. How do you define this? See above. Sudra’s dream in “Blindness” is a dream within a dream within a dream. Pregnant Sudra imagines herself already mother telling her children a story about another mother also with children—and it’s horrifying in an almost a mundane, expected way, the way horror sometimes manifests when we conjure it in our restless sleep. Nothing shocks us the way it would if we were awake.
So where do we end up in this story? A vaguely happy couple split up. There’s a clue as to why that runs through the story and it has to do with whether or not we look at other people. The story essentially asks some difficult questions: Do we look at other people? Even the ones we love? Truly look? Truly see? How often? If we don’t, why don’t we?
Sudra woke up. The light was shining on the river, shining hard through the window. It was still early dawn. She dressed and went to the river. She was in the foothills and they were green. She climbed down the narrow concrete steps of the ghat until she got to the last one that remained above the water. It was always quiet here, an early morning stillness that lasted into dusk.
What I’ve always admired about Shruti Swamy’s work is her patience. She never rushes a moment. At the river something small yet monumental happens. Why the story works, why it induced me, last night, the book still in my hand, to get up from my desk and turn off the lamp and go to the window and look out at the dark brook that flows past our house. You know I can’t explain it. You wouldn’t want me to. I leaned my forehead against the cold glass and waited.
Peter Orner is a novelist, story writer, and essayist—as well director of Creative Writing at Dartmouth. He’s just published Still No Word from You: Notes in the Margin*, a highly personal collection of essays about literature that Kirkus Reviews calls a “wise, welcoming, heartfelt book.” He is a volunteer with the Norwich Fire Department.*