...of slippers and overcoats

   While reading Abu Kasm's Slippers, I keep thinking about another wardrobe malfunction in literature; Gogol's The Overcoat. Why are these tattered, old, over-loved, beyond well used items causing so much grief? The owners of the items are perfectly happy with them until their peers shame them. This leads to disaster in both circumstances. Poor Abu sinks deeper and deeper into trouble because of those old shoes. What can he do? He is losing control of his life. Surely there must be some supernatural force at hand. Or maybe not. Look closely at the story. All of the grief Abu suffers stems back to his own choices. This is quite similar to the man in The Overcoat in which a simple clerk is shamed into ordering a new overcoat because his old one is so worn it cannot be mended. The poor clerk was doing alright until his coat design got the best of him. He starved himself for one year to afford it then decided to show it off. He was robbed of the coat and in walking home caught a cold and later died. So here we are riding the sea of stories and we find ourselves swirling around as if we are all going down the drain. Northrop Frye notes this in chapter four of The Secular Scripture that theme of decent are common in romance. Although Abu is not physically traveling downward to hell, his life is unraveling faster than the stitching on his shoes.
 
   What good are these two stories that are not true? These stories give us examples of what can happen when we do not think ahead and make choices that will bring us happiness and well being in the long run. Yes, they are exaggerated. I don't know why some people seem to have such an issue with a fictional story's overblown pictures. Do they not use the same method in science classes? "Look class, this is a photo of the eye of the common house fly multiplied many times so we can appreciate the detail." They also make models of things so large we have trouble grasping their immensity and properties. While traveling to New York, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to tour a museum which had a beautiful display of the planets which were all scaled to a minute fraction of their size so happy tourists, such as myself, could appreciate their diversity. Perhaps it would help to explain fiction in this manner to some of the people who share Mr Sengupta's view (from Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories). Maybe they would finally begin to understand.