Chicken mama and other stories
By Margaret Bhatty
Puffin Books, Rs 175

The first thing you’ll notice while reading Margaret Bhatty’s collection Chicken Mama and Other Stories is that the author has a keen eye for detail. And this is a quality that’s apparent in each of her 12 stories in the collection.

The next thing you’ll notice is that each of the stories in the collection can be classified as one of the other: it’s either purely fantastical or it’s extremely down-to-earth.

In the former kind of story, Bhatty lets loose her imagination and even the sky is not the limit. The opening story, Chicken Mama, belongs to this category, as do three others. It is a story of a woman deep in the jungles of Africa who hatches chicken’s eggs. She is a creature who has complete mastery over time. She can make time flow in any direction she wants it to, and can even make it stand still. Indeed, she sees time as a “river flowing over the Waterwheel of the World.” The story talks about how she saves a Zonkey (one part zebra and five parts donkey), a Seldom Seen (a very rare species of ape) and a Mokel-embe-embe (the world’s last dinosaur) from being set up as exhibits in a zoo.

Spooky and the Professor is a ghost story with an interesting premise: ghosts cannot exist without humans believing in them. It’s a funny story with a twist at the end. Similarly, The Genie of the Yantra and The How-D’you-Do Birds — the other two stories that belong to the fantastical — are enjoyable, especially the latter, for its quirky eccentricity.

But there’s something missing in each of these stories, and it can be summed up in four letters — P-L-O-T. You get the feeling that Bhatty has put so much effort in creating atmosphere that the stories have become pretty simplistic in comparison. Chicken Mama, for example, begins well, but flounders towards the end. And as for Spooky and the Professor, I can guarantee that you’ll find out what the twist is, long before the author intended you to.

However, Bhatty is really in her elements when she weaves stories about the down-to-earth. And thankfully, most of the stories are of this category. Whether it’s the lovable Adelie Penguin who becomes everybody’s favourite in a scientific base deep in Antarctica, or the funny-but-sad story of the Degree Master, who runs a “heir cutting saloon”, or when she talks about the “gentleman thief”, she paints adoringly bright vignettes from mundane, everyday colours. And though nothing much happens in most of these stories, she does manage to strike a deep chord.

All in all, a rather entertaining book.