Keeping a list of talented over-achievers? Add the name Rajesh Parameswaran: He’s a graduate of Yale Law School, a former law clerk to a federal judge and (in case you’re not already annoyed) the writer of a wildly inventive book of short stories called “I Am an Executioner.”
Parameswaran subtitles it “Love Stories” to guide us where few of us would have gone on our own. Love is strange, true, but Parameswaran’s tales ask us to consider a dizzying series of situations:
- A Bengal tiger hungering for the love of his zookeeper
- A medical imposter compelled to perform one last operation
- An Indian railway stationmaster a hundred years ago obsessed with his assistant
- A hangman with marital problems (the title story)
- A wife who discovers her own demonic powers
- A secret agent, watching and watched
- A movie production designer who comes up against the limits of his brilliance
- An elephant’s memoir — with footnotes
And creatures of a foreign land (with wings and more legs than we’re used to) grappling with the complexities of mixed-species love.
It’s the situations that intrigue Parameswaran — those peculiar premises that compel us to turn the page. He writes with more flair than depth. There’s little in the language that approaches poetry; few turns of phrase stand on their own as something rare or beautiful or glowing from within.
But Parameswaran is a born storyteller: He’s got the gift. Oh sure, perhaps he taught it to himself — how to trick readers into stepping into the outstretched palm of his giant hand, then tickle them with his wet breath, knock them over with a brush of the tip of his finger. Perhaps he has a full drawer of rejection letters pinned to stories that just didn’t work — but I’m guessing he’s had this knack all along, this innate sense of how to seize and hold us.
Parameswaran crisscrosses before us on the high wire of imagination, as if real life were science fiction. He begins, say, in “The Strange Career of Dr. Raju Gopalarajan,” with a premise: a failed Indian salesman with pipe dreams instead of plans. “But what Manju [his exasperated wife] didn’t know – what none of us understood – was that Gopi had already decided to make his living by impersonating a doctor.”
No need for spoiler alerts: It’s the last sentence of the first paragraph. What follows is a weird, unsettling, twisting tale that never shows its hand, that talks you into gambling against the odds and believing in lucky breaks and hoping against hope. Just like the main character Gopi himself, who actually does borrow surgical textbooks from the public library and study them at home and rent an office in a strip mall and hang up a sign that reads, “Dr. Raju Gopalarajan, MD; Women’s Difficulties and Other Matters.” Except — and this we can’t forget, because its truth haunts the story from start to finish — Gopi is not a doctor, he has no medical training, and because he has begun to practice medicine on actual sick men and women, we know it will not go well for him. Nor for Manju, his wife, because Parameswaran in a scalpel-sharp bit of foreshadowing, writes on the story’s third page: “We liked Manju so much, and we miss her.”
Most collections of short stories contain a few thin ones, and that’s true of this one. “Narrative of Agent 97-4702” reads more like an experiment than a real tale, and “Bibhutibhushan Mallik’s Final Storyboard” didn’t pay off the way I thought the beginning deserved. And the long piece with the elephant just didn’t work for me, clever as it was. Maybe I don’t like footnotes as much as I thought I did.
It was the last story that recaptured me and redeemed the excitement I’d felt for the first half of the book. “On the Banks of Table River (Planet Lucina, Andromeda Galaxy, AD 2319)” began with another conceit that was starting to feel overly familiar: first-person narration by an unusual creature. But just when I expected to grow impatient with the cheap science fiction setup, the thing hooked me.
“Finished, I turned urgently to our child. To my enormous relief it was still alive, the eyes and striations already appearing in the fast-growing egg. I gently wrapped my feelers around it to lift it. Its round, just-opened maw was expanding and contracting, chewing the air, pulsing with hunger. I held her so she could not bite me, and walked her carefully over, placing the babe in the small hole I had dug out of my love’s abdomen, where immediately it began to eat.”
That’s outstretched-palm-of-giant-hand stuff. So it turns out I must add my squeaky voice to the critical acclaim for Rajesh Parameswaran. This Yale law graduate somehow found the time to bang out a pretty unforgettable book.