You have to admire a short story writer who crafts titles for his tales long before they are gathered into a collection that serve to indicate the overarching thematic concept linking those efforts together. A more than serviceable analysis of the short fiction of Satyajit Ray can readily be composed simply by noting a recurrence among the titles of his stories. From “The Hungry Septopus” through “I Am a Ghost” to “The Scarecrow” as well as most of the various and stories in between, the titles of Ray’s stories implicitly promise at least the likelihood of making the familiar seems strange or the strange seem familiar.
The story “Bhuto” is a perfect example. Like any good writer of the 20th century, Ray produced an unsettling story about a ventriloquist and his dummy. This, of course, was already intensely familiar ground even by the time “Bhuto” appeared and yet Ray manages to do something innovative with the trope and make this familiar territory seem almost unexplored. The way he managed to pull off this magic trick seems obvious in retrospect, but is actually almost revolutionary. He situates his story of the psychologically tangled relationship between belly speaker and his doll back in time when the act was still such a novelty that people probably actually did refer to it “ventricollosium or whatever it is called!”
“The Hungry Septopus” is a title alone that creates a whirlwind of conflicting perception between the familiar and the strange. It may take a moment or two to latch onto the idea that the title creature carries the familiarity engendered by its real-life inspiration, the octopus. But even after that connection is established, the average reader is unlikely to be prepared for just how far into unfamiliar lands this connection treads. And lands is appropriate because unlike its eight-tentacled cousin, the seven tentacles of the septopus is found in “a dense forest near Lake Nicaragua in Central America.” Not in Lake Nicaragua, notice, but in the woods nearby. And that pretty much encapsulates the effect of reading Ray’s short stories because unexpected sense of alienation and dislocation within a perfectly recognizable reality is the fuel that powers the engine of Ray’s literary inspiration.
Ray’s imagination was such that his stories run the gamut of just about every imaginable topic. There are con men trying to sell dinosaur eggs, android butlers, vicious vampires, lonely ghosts, math teachers, actors, and various eccentrics, chameleons, and comedians. Characters intensely familiar to most readers, all, and yet by the time their stories are done, one may feel the dizziness or nausea associated with a world suddenly turned upside down.
