‘Gooday Nagar’: A city’s lifetime of experiences in slice-of-life and speculative short stories
· Scroll
Maithreyi Karnoor’s ten-story collection, imaginatively titled Gooday Nagar, set in a city by the same name and featuring its big-hearted, good-natured citizens, is a picture of every Indian nagars through its goodays and badays.
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In a spin on the Indian prime minister Narendra Modi’s overdue delivery of the promised acche din of wealth and prosperity, the naagriks of Gooday Nagar too await a bountiful future while they play their part as dutiful, patriotic citizens.
Though very much set in contemporary times, during the COVID-19 pandemic years, there is still a nostalgic goodness in the Gooday Nagar citizens and their small-town, old-time ways, which remind the reader of RK Narayan’s Malgudi – although the good people of Malgudi never had to worry about living in a world where everything was cake.
Reality and unreality
Karnoor’s stories range from slice-of-life to post-apocalyptic comedies, encompassing a full range of experiences that a city goes through in its lifetime. Witnessing a deadly pandemic and outbreaks of several wars in the last five years proves just how restless history can be, and even though in our world, only cake is cake, everything else is so shocking that we seem to have made a direct entry in a post post-apocalyptic timeline.
To those who live near Gooday Nagar – in its...