Lose Your Clothes and run Naked

Between the two opening stories of “delhi noir,” I found “How I Lost my Clothes” to be ‘better’ than “Yesterday Man” in every aspect—from sheer entertainment value to quality of writing. Though I do suspect my enjoyment of “How I Lost my Clothes” may be, at least partially, due to its literal juxtaposition with “Yesterday Man,” which this I found to be a tedious, slow moving, somewhat predictable, story (I apologize to the readers who enjoyed it). Sorry for the digression. I’ll stop bashing the opening story and proceed by discussing “How I Lost My Clothes.”

From beginning to end, Jha constructs a consistently surreal, dreamlike, bizarre, hallucinatory (what have you) narrative. And the aesthetics of this narrative lie hand in hand with the content of the story—Jha matches “what he says” with “how he says” it. Accordingly, Jha’s writing affects readers in the same way the content of the story affects readers. Through the aesthetics of his writing, Jha enables readers to experience the same feelings that his doped-out, deranged perhaps, protagonist experiences.

But I do not find the story to be neatly resolved. If the protagonist’s dreamlike state of consciousness is the result of the heroin he’s ingested, I cannot find a way to rationally explain his lengthy state of intoxication. He only ‘fixes-up’ once, near the story’s opening, but the drug’s effects last over a day, until the story’s final paragraphs—surly he would be sober by then, and probably be experiencing withdrawal. He continues to wander around the city, naked, and his bizarre narrative never reaches any sober state of understanding until the story’s closing paragraphs, which make a chronological jump into the narrator’s future, and give his previous story the feeling of retrospection (especially with the final paragraph’s shift into the present tense).

The story ends: “And I wonder whether he ever realized the gift I’d given to him or whether he simply wrapped the dead man’s sheet around him…” Apparently, even in this latter state of sobriety, the man is still convinced of the authenticity of the meaning he’s derived from the preceding story, despite it being drug-induced. I find two ways to make sense of this. 1) for the readers who believe any ‘enlightened’ state of understanding, if drug induced, is inauthentic, then the story as whole becomes ‘drug-porn’ with no higher meaning, and the narrator’s retrospective interpretation of his story works only to prove his permanent insanity, or, 2) for the readers who believe meaning can be achieved—and perhaps augmented—by a state of hallucinatory intoxication, then the narrator’s insights are authentic. Either way, the story is emotive, compelling, artistic, etcetera. Well done, Jha.