Saturday 28 December 2013

Meeting Miss Konni Chiwa: A Short Story - Mita Jain

Date of Reading: 21/11/2013
Author: Mita Jain
Format: E-book
From: The author in exchange of an honest review

           I hate short stories for the obvious reason that it is short. But time was of short nature, needed something for a quick finish and this was the shortest inside my collection. Well, Mita is not expected to be boring and the 'before-to-read' instructions compels one to go on. All in all it felt like Browning's dramatic monologue in prose version; it is in the form of an interview, and the reader is the journalist who conducts the meeting, but quite contrary to the expectations, narrator is the interviewee who smartly describes you too. Hands off to Mita for this wonderful creation, as always you find fun in the most ordinary circumstances.

            This is a part of "Last Love Series" where the reader is a journalist searching for extraordinary love stories among ordinary people for the next valentine's day edition and Aman Singh is the focus of this issue.
          He is a teacher of foreign languages and trains foreign nationals who visit India on the pretext of studying language. Aman belongs to a curious multinational family with an Indian father and British mother, brother married to an American and sister to a Spanish. And in India Aman meets his other half, the Japanese lady, Miss Konni Chiwa. As to his bad fortune, she is under another Indian teacher, Uday, so each day he is forced to make some pretext for meeting her without arousing suspicions. Her nasal English is not to his taste, therefore the communication element is seldom.

          One month passes like this with the Japanese girl who is clueless about his affections and Aman decides to go a step further. She comes out of the class with Uday who watches their communication with amusement and as the girl says farewell, he explains that Konni Chiwa is a form of addressing someone, not a name. Her real name, now Aman realises is Sakura Nakajima and she is leaving India that very day as her one month visit is over. Frantically Aman rushes to the airport but fails to communicate his intention. Exhausted, he uses Hindi which surprisingly the girl deciphers and Aman's multicultural family receives a Japanese member