‘Bandigoat’: This anthology of strange fiction bounces between the weird and the folkloric

Blaft Publications’ penchant for literary anomalies has solidified into a reputation for genre fiction, their catalogues featuring the speculative, pulpy, weird, and fantastic. Bandigoat: A Collection of Strange and Horrible Tales is the latest addition to this publisher’s repertoire, hosting some regulars, chief of whom may very well be the inimitable Kuzhali Manickavel, alongside Blaft co-founder Rashmi Ruth Devadasan, and some familiar and up-and-coming names in the wide field of horror.

The collection takes its name from a cross-bred, chimeric hybrid of the bandicoot rat and a goat, presented in the introduction as the figment of a child’s imagination spurred on by the half-shadowed, scuttling movement of something strange in the night and some amusing language games, saturated with history. Misha Michael does a memorable job of illustrating this fictious being into life, lined in acid green on the cover, evoking something of the ridiculousness and danger of imaginary friends and nonsense verse. The introduction, written by Rakesh Khanna, co-founder with Devadasan and Michael, is itself a curious thing. It unfolds as a vignette at a literary agent’s office, selling to her/us the idea of the book. Something self-referential about the publisher’s bid for the strange and the horrific (not all horror, more-or-less-than horror) soaks through, as it unveils its mascot and guide, who promises to take us leaping through seven dreamscapes.

The stories

The eponymous Bandigoat, running through the pages of this slim volume, brings us to a bold beginning – Srividya Tadepalli’s Deodar-prize-winning short story offers a characterful setting and the chronicle of a life told through a funeral. The life in question is that of a warrior demon, an ibuyi, a patron saint of the worker. It is a compelling portrait of a village and its social order, revealed through the recalling of the legend of said warrior and her ever-alert eyes righting large and intimate slights, insults, and injustices. Tempered with visceral happenings melding body and botanics, the short story evokes danger with remarkable lightness, choosing uncertain hope and enduring celebration over languishing in the finality of death.

Bookending the anthology, Devadasan’s short story too, speaks to the legendary life of a woman, one Rani Grace, a gravedigger by vocation. Sprinkled with popular references, Tamil- and Hindi-isms, this story too has a gentle touch, as it presents a quiet, introverted woman, armed with the tool of her trade, as she goes up against a bogeyman of children’s nightmares. Rani Grace must use her gumption and wit against a foe of mythic proportions, both hilarious and sinister, and his beguiling bargains. Much of its charm comes from the story’s near-pictorial detail with which it describes its time-keeping, many-handed monster, his bureaucratic, uncle-like sartorial choices, his vegetal lair, and outsized mount.

Staying with legend, Lungmying Lepcha reprises the folkloric threat of Muloon Mung, a shapeshifting demon, who lures his victims by mirroring their loved ones. The legend of the mung looms all the larger for being presented through the curiosity and wonder of an adolescent protagonist. The strange and horrifying in this story emerges as a part of the Sikkimese landscape, as much as the gushing rivulets, sheep-marked hills, and insect-ridden forests of the land.

Shapeshifting runs into a motif carried forward to Manickavel’s contribution, which is characteristically and unapologetically strange. It throws us into a setting familiar to her readers – the Lucy Temerlin Institute for Broken Shapeshifters, named after the (in)famous Lucy, a chimpanzee adopted by psychologists to rear as human, a failed project of human transmutation. Blaft previously published the Institute’s guide to a peculiar variety of creature, the “Starving Boys,” as part of a series of monographs on “cryptodiversity and decoherence.” With cutting and dense symbolism, the Bandigoat brings us to another genre of “tiddy-wink anomalies in the oneiromorphic noosphere,” and Manickavel offers us another broken shapeshifter, resident number 11, “Chest Pain Sumitra.” This story, the third short set in the Lucy Temerlin Institute, the second having catalogued items lost in its “containment room,” produces the many confoundments and violences of typification in the labyrinthine institute. Rendered in the manner of a girls’ hostel, a recurring preoccupation for Manickavel, the institute is besieged by a strange weather phenomenon, which meets with the staccato stoicism of a catholic convent or government office. At its heart is Sumitra, identified with chest pain, whose untimely equine transformations give way to murderous hornets, flitting in and out of the difficult work of living among others and receding into the strangeness of her own self.

Interiorities

Two of the collection’s longest stories offer a protracted examination of interiority made manifest. Miriam Kumaradoss-Hohauser’s “Cur”, told in the first person, pushes the limits of human-animal relations, presenting the tormented, repetitious movements of a woman suspended between phases of life. Poised at the edge of a turn, she remains suspended in her parents’ home in her small hometown, awaiting a return to the United States after the traumatic end of a marriage. Much tenderness and many violences project outward from her thought-world into the figure and life of a band of neighbourhood dogs who stand in for obscure and ambivalent affective states as she waits for an update on her visa application.

Jugal Mody’s short is a curious tale – it confounds its reader and suffers from too much exposition, chronicling over a decade of a young woman’s life. The protagonist first appears as an adolescent confronted with the untimely, accidental passing of her father; the grief she carries has effects of global magnitude, calling forth a decade-long winter, such is its enormity. Part-familiar, part-friend who carries with him the provocation of the intimate “other,” the titular Ice Cream Boy appears in this snow-ridden landscape of enduring melancholia, as the young protagonist navigates life, jobs, friendship, love, and heartbreak (another name for death).

ML Krishnan’s “Salt Slough” is the shortest story and stands out for its formal experimentation. It is the closest to the scholastic curiosity, scientific enquiry meeting its limit, that buoys much of early 20th-century weird fiction. Written as a paper on the fishing protocols of Maickelpatti, a Tamil Nadu village, it tells the enchanting tale of unusual deaths, numinous ecologies, and their mad secrets that punctuate the report with increasingly unreasonable footnotes.

When Blaft headliners Khanna and Devadasan published their compendium on the Ghosts, Monsters, and Demons of India in 2020, it was a promising and whole-hearted foray into the annals of folkloric horror. In the quixotic leap of the Bandigoat, the provocation of the weird and the folkloric intertwine in a way that returns us to the slippery terrain of genre. The life of community, its figural intensities, the bounded structure of legend, sometimes pastoral, sometimes suburban atmospherics, bleed into estrangement, irreality, and unreason. It tells us that antiquarianism and ethnography have been bedfellows, blood-brothers all along. And that any attempt at giving form to strangeness is at once a ridiculous delight and terrifying encounter with a truth held true only in dreams.

Bandigoat: A Collection of Strange and Horrible Tales, edited by Rakesh Khanna, Blaft Publications.