‘Songs Our Bodies Sing’: An uneven yet memorable collection of stories about lives on the margins
Vivek Pinto
Lindsay Pereira’s collection of short stories walks the reader through unexamined lives left behind by a discriminatory, self-centred, and capital-driven world.
Living in a hostel with a bunch of twenty-somethings in the middle of nowhere means that it is impossible to get through the week without talk of the metropolitan cities that we once called home. Friends and professors alike complain of missing the familiarity, the fast-paced work culture, and, most importantly, the love that they find in them. The characters in Songs Our Bodies Sing have lived in these same cities long enough to resent them, betrayed by what so many others seem to be enchanted by.
Lives on the margins
This collection of short stories, written by Lindsay Pereira, walks the reader through unexamined lives left behind by a discriminatory, self-centred, and capital-driven world. These characters are forced into decisions disguised as choices and often sacrifice conscience for scraps of happiness. Though I think that these premises are all interesting, Pereira’s stylistic choices and reliance on clichés and stereotypes steer the reader away from the depth the collection could have reached.
Each story begins with a hook that piques the readers’ interest and pulls them in. An Indian techie in Canada, frustrated with his boss; an antique shopkeeper staking claim to exorbitant prices; the Maharashtra Police Department’s incompetent portrait artist. These fairly non-remarkable protagonists are made unique through the theme that ties them all together: they are, like others in the stories, living on the margins. The characters – may they be Muslims in a polarised India, a gay couple, women, Parsis, or immigrants in an unwelcoming land – are pushed away and left with only music, cinema, and art to cling to as a temporary refuge. The final, eponymous chapter, for example, the most powerful in the collection, is about a Sikh family navigating immigrant life in London during the release of The Beatles’ Hey Jude. The story brought tears to my eyes as it pulls threads from across the collection into a moving reflection on art as fleeting freedom from a cruel world.
Dashed hopes
However, the compelling premises of the stories are undermined by uneven execution. The dialogues feel too spoken, and while this might have helped with authenticity in some instances, it grows tiring in others and hinders readability. The stories slip into long, descriptive passages, rely heavily on dependent clauses and “-ing” verbs, often telling the reader what to feel instead of letting the writing do the work. This creates stretches of dryness and disconnect, where the momentum falters. The capitalised dialogues that are meant to convey heightened emotion end up diluting it instead, and repeated exposition often clogs otherwise strong narration. Characters that begin with promise are flattened by stereotypes or underdeveloped storylines that deny them complexity.
I found myself wanting more from both the plot and the characters themselves that would push me to understand the drastic steps they took, root for them fiercely and despise the antagonists with more venom. Troubling, however, were moments where the writing felt less thoughtful. A character’s exotic fantasies of Pamela Anderson after unnecessary and jarring digs at the bodies of Indian women left a sour aftertaste. I couldn’t help but wish there were better ways to imagine an artist’s fascination or attraction without reducing women to their bodies in such a blatant manner. These occasional lapses sit uneasily alongside the collection’s otherwise empathetic gaze and remind the readers how fragile that balance can be.
In this collection, Pereira strikes an interesting contrast between the versions of cities we are so used to romanticising and those that wound and fracture just as easily. In many instances, the uneven writing, stereotypes and stylistic choices take away from the story that he is trying to weave. At others, he displays the power the book would hold at its best, especially in its final chapter, which paints music and art as moments of exhilarating freedom from the realities of life, giving us reason to carry on. The result is a collection that wavers in execution, but settles instead for being uneven yet memorable.
Songs Our Bodies Sing, Lindsay Pereira, Penguin India.