Unruly bodies | Review of ‘Leech & Other Stories’ by Ranjan Adiga

Ranjan Adiga's writing explores the fusion of intellectual, emotional, and sensory experiences, including a candid exploration of asexuality.

What is this strange animal called “creative writing”? As someone who doesn’t care much about the lines of control between the “creative” and the “critical”, I’m most deeply seduced by the literary sensibility that fuses the intellectual, the emotional, and the sensory without any hierarchy between them. This is how Ranjan Adiga writes — with his entire being. 

His stories, whether set in Nepal or the U.S., are not only sensory in their technique but evoke the aspirations and anxieties of human beings in their sweaty fullness. What makes Adiga particularly fascinating is that he has also offered a visceral confession of an acute personal disembodiment, in a honest and vulnerable essay: ‘How I Struggled in An Arranged Marriage As An Asexual Man’.

Any writer worth their pen knows that one doesn’t need a vibrant sex life to write about sex. Experience matters to the writer but not in a crude quantitative way — its relationship with imagination is utterly unpredictable. Adiga’s debut book, Leech & Other Stories, is driven by unruly bodily and emotional experiences that vitally include the sexual. There is nothing unusual about the fact that this comes from a writer who has openly come out as asexual. What I find striking is Adiga’s ability to evoke both — one fiction, the other memoir, one erotically charged, the other erotically empty — with equal wholeness. Body, mind, desire and detachment come as deeply together in the evocation of the sexual as the asexual in these 10 stories. That is one real writer.

“We laughed a lot together. Our lives seemed fun, except for this one issue.” Adiga doesn’t mince words in his essay. “Having sex with my wife made me cringe.” The South Asian prudishness about sex had shielded him so far, but his arranged marriage brought it all crashing down. He is keenly sensitive to his deprived partner Jessica’s bodily needs, and when she tells him that a guy at the gym has asked her out, he insists that she should consider it. “I miss having a man’s hand on my body,” Jessica tells him, as they “both started crying, remember when she would wrap her around me, aroused and breathless, making me shrink further into my shell”.

This is deeply bodily writing about disembodiment. It is the same sensoriness that shapes the core of his fiction, be it the leech that sits inside a character’s nostrils and attracts racist barbs, the vindictive employer forcing his young staff to clean up after him in the toilet, or the pangs of jealousy inside a possessive husband as his wife talks about a past lover. 

“Ah,” says the racist Kathmandu doctor examining the leech inside the nostril of the poor Madheshi, Ram. “Leeches cling on to the body heat of people with peculiar smells.” In America, the deeply hierarchical Indian employer of the Nepali student moonlighting in his restaurant proudly declares that he forgot to flush the toilet and sends him inside. “The crude sounds reverberate through the walls, and the smell rises, stealthily at first, encircling me like a ring.” 

But Adiga reserves his richest narrative voice for a subterranean world of sex. Sameer is at once deeply upset by the fact that his wife Puja had a passionate lover before marriage and also sharply turned on by it. “‘We had sex in a swimming pool,’ she says. Sameer feels effervescent bubbles in his thighs like he’s never felt before.” But the most seductively threatening story in the collection is ‘A Haircut and Massage’. The expert masseur Iqbal raises tingles on the body of his hesitant patron Krishna, for which the latter, a family man, develops a haunting obsession that makes him fidget through the night next to his wife.