In Search of Love

Madhuri Vijay (2019), The Far Field, Fourth Estate, New Delhi, pp. 432

Madhuri Vijay is a debutante with a compelling story. Her novel ‘The Far Field’ won the JCB prize for literature in 2019. I got hold of the book with the beautiful cover art and wonderful story telling about identity and memory in contemporary India. This story of the mother-daughter developed first as short fiction in 2010 and was subsequently developed as a novel. Vijay’s voice is tender and distinct, and is an asset throughout the narrative.

‘The Far Field’ is the story of a young woman in India who drifts away in life until a powerful memory from childhood triggered by her mother’s death, leads her on a mission to understand her past. Her journey takes her to militant Kashmir in search of a familiar face only to get entangled in an irredeemable quest. The narrator-protagonist is unreliable and vulnerable, evoking alarm and sympathy in equal measure. The anti-hero telling a story of anti-climax is essentially the essence of the tale, although there are layers and depths to explore.

Echoes and Mirages

One device that Vijay uses masterfully is the ‘echo’. There is a constant reverberation between childhood and adulthood, Bangalore and Kashmir, mother and daughter, that gives us the feeling of shifting time, space and gaze. This is a great narrative device to show comparison, contrast and the manner in which arcs end and cycles come to pass. In many ways, the daughter avenges her mother’s death but the brooding, meandering valley and the story warns us of what is to come.

At another level, this is a story about the impossibility of redeeming the past and the relying on memory. What is gone is gone forever and to wade into incomplete stories is to rip apart its integrity. Memories can be mirages that lead nowhere but to further illusions. Perusing such illusions cannot but end in doom.

This is good fiction coming out of India asking the larger questions of political identities through the personal quest of love and loss. The description of bustling towns and the quiet valleys of Kashmir are evocative. The human and natural characters from the valley are portrayed with flair and compassion. The portrait of Kashmir through the silent mountain, the gurgling ravines, the vigilant cows and goats, the incessant weaving and the busy everydayness of life is on point. The light and shade, the people and the forces parallel each other in a dreadful deadlock.

As we celebrate women’s history month, a fresh voice asking us difficult but important questions is here with us.

A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Tawang

Nabaneeta Dev Sen (Trans. Arunava Sinha) (2018), On a Truck Alone to McMahon, Oxford University Press, New Delhi

A great way to begin this year is to embark on this journey with the inimitable Nabaneeta Dev-Sen to the edge of imagination! Prof Dev-Sen, who recently passed away, was a prolific author of eighty books (written in Bengali), poet, public intellectual and a much-loved teacher. It was only in 2018, that her widely-read travelogue originally published in 1984 in Bengali was translated into English. I must acknowledge the terrific editorial work done by Dr. Mini Krishnan of Oxford University Press (India), under whose discerning eye and able guidance, some of the amazing writers in regional languages in India have been made accessible in English. So, I grabbed a copy and happily jumped into the dizzying ride of pure impulse and spontaneity with one of the funniest adventurers I have ever had the pleasure to read!

Edgy Ride

Armed with a double masters and a doctorate, a young Nabaneeta is invited to a literary conference in Assam in the North Eastern part of India. The absent-minded professor is at her goofiest best from the word go! She boards the wrong flight just in time to make it to the right one. She goes off on a wildlife safari as monsoon rages and fellow academics dig into warm comforts. She sets off to Tawang, literally the edge of India, alone and without a travel plan, hitch hiking her way up the mountains. We fear on her behalf, only to be outwitted by her gift of the gab that pulls her out of every sticky wicket.

On her way to Tawang, the narrator meets seedy truck drivers who give her a ride up the hills and puritanical bureaucrats who share their cottages over-night for rest. She makes friends with nuns in a Buddhist monastery and understands how pragmatism rules the decision to join religious order in the high mountains.  She learns to live with shepherd families, sipping yak tea, unperturbed by the gaping language barrier that makes conversation impossible. The first Buddhist gompa (temple) she reverently visits ends up being a fan house dedicated to India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, in the middle of nowhere.

Spirited and Spiritual

Tawang is a place of pilgrimage thoughtfully planned by visitors from all over the world. In this book, the subversion of accidental journey to a spiritual centre is a perfect foil devised by the author to reveal something more profound as the book unfolds. Soon enough, Tawang becomes a pathway to transient comradeship and compassion between people who are as different as they can possibly be. Through this journey, the narrator and the unwilling fellow-travelers jump hoops, break walls and bend mountains to open their homes and hearts to a stranger.

As the journey closes and the last glimpse of the gompa fades out, we realize that all along, it was a spiritual journey in the truest sense of the term. Tawang stands for love, loss and longing and this impulsive solitary adventure was a way to pick pieces of life and start all over again. And that is why this book is the perfect way to begin a year, start all over again, pick up pieces, grieve for what is lost and embrace what is to come.

I wish you the warmth and comfort of books the year around! We made it to a new decade, fellow travelers!

An Anthology for Winter

The Best of Quest (2011), Edited by Laeeq Fatehally, Achal Prabhala & Arshia Sattar, Tranquebar, Chennai, pp. 660

There are many ways to end a year and cozying up with an anthology is the best of them! The sweeter the nostalgia for times gone, if the said anthology is from the alcove of lost time. The Best of Quest is one such tome that compiles English writing from and about India during the period 1955-1976.

It was the height of the Cold War and an international enterprise called ‘The Congress for Cultural Freedom’ was set up to spread liberal ideas of freedom through literary endeavors. Covertly funded by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), this endeavor took various forms through the launching of classical ‘little’ magazines such as Encounter in the UK and Quest in India. So much for the thrilling background story of who-dunnit!

In India, fresh from British colonial rule, Quest must have represented the niche space of liberal cultural ethos expressed in the colonist’s language (For archives: http://www.freedomfirst.in/quest/quest-archives.aspx). The diversity of the literature spanning essays, fiction and poetry were deliciously served by those who went on to build new India such as Kamala Das, Nissim Ezekiel (poet and its first editor), Adil Jussawalla, Dilip Chitre, Ashis Nandy, A.K. Ramanujan and so many more. The subject of the discourse was also delightfully diverse from the portrait of historical figures to those of historical institutions, from the pleasures of commercial cinema to the gravitas of ancient paintings, from breezy travelogues to political arguments for gender rights. The housing of the pedantic with the pedestrian, polemic with the anti-puritanical signals the firm ascendance of modern, liberal view of the world that a part of India hoped to achieve.

Evocative Journey

From the vantage point of contemporaneity, reading these perspectives evoke a multitude of emotions. The first is nostalgia at the loss of the punctuated leisure that these pieces present. I believe this quality has been lost along the way through the onslaught of neoliberal consumerism. Today, we do not read with such relish. To my generation, it is a loss of inheritance.

The second is envy at the ease of writing, the style of the language and the strength of the argument, no matter the subject. Such candor requires confidence in the self and its place in the scheme of things. With the way we are today with ourselves and our social media, something of such integrated self is lost. We can share kink, but not erotica; viewpoint, but not argument in under 30 seconds.

Finally, there is pathos, the moving portrait of what once was and what dreams have become. I believe this is the biggest loss. The ability to not only say most of what you think, but to be politically incorrect, to be funny and unabashedly self-deprecatingly so, to use irony to drive home a million home truths- the loss of such powers hurt a bit more in this age of extremism.

I think it is for the feeling of what Quest represents than what it contains that you must revisit the Best of Quest. Besides, the volume comes with an exquisite cover art and vintage Quest post cards. Certainly, a collector’s delight and a great way to wind up the year!

The Second Homecoming

Arundhati Roy (2017). The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Penguin, pp. 445

When Arundhati Roy debuted with The God of Small Things, we were introduced to the expanse of spaces between people in her world, that both shaped and blurred them. Love, hate and everything between flowed among the characters like subterranean rivers, silent and deep. Exactly two decades after her first novel, she has arrived with The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. This is a story that is a world apart from that intimate exploration of the tiny village-world of Aymanam of her first novel. The world that this story takes places is all of India that is relegated. It is the spirit that pervades border and the heartland with equal alacrity, which does not fit with the temperament of the big narrative that makes India today.

The protagonist is characteristically, a trans-person, who is also a single parent. She occupies the ultimate borderland-between the alive and the dead- and lives in a cemetery in old Delhi. Strangers, who are mostly renegades, pass through and affectionately people her world. They come from the forests of central India to the valley of Kashmir, belong to all genders, creed and credo. They fight a narrative that steals their truth, hides their identity and muffles their voices. Yet, they are all thieves of another kind- secret keepers of conscience and inheritors of a disowned pedigree. In the corner, away from the rest of the world, they find friendship and fellow feeling, laughter and love.

Between the first and the second novel, there is a two decade long pause- in which Roy traveled many worlds within India. Her books of non-fiction, Listening to Grasshoppers, Broken Republic and The Algebra of Infinite Justice, critique and question the Indian state from the point of view of the adivasis, the displaced people at the wrong end of development and communities at the borderlands, especially Kashmir. Through this work of fiction, Roy explores the intensity of what it means to be marginal and the terror and insanity of violence that pervades lives at the margin. On her impulse to write fiction again, she recently remarked in an interview to The Hindu, “There was this huge sense of urgency when I was writing the political essays, each time you wanted to blow a space open, on any issue. But fiction takes its time and is layered. The insanity of what is going on in a place like Kashmir: how do you describe the terror in the air there? It is not just a human rights report about how many people have been killed and where. How do you describe the psychosis of what is going on? Except through fiction.” It is these layers of truth and the insanity of violence that is at the heart of this stunning second novel. 

The ‘Prose’ and Cons of Being a Poet

Maps for a Mortal Moon (Aleph) &

 I Dreamt a Horse Fell from the Sky (Hachette) 

Adil Jussawalla

No one can write about one book of the Indian poet Adil Jussawalla.  One must present a bunch of his collected works, both fiction and non-fiction like a bouquet of flowers. Only as assortment of melodies, this music makes sense. The reader must experience the world of Jussawalla as a wholesome experience of entertainment and alienation from comfort zones. You are in the presence of a nomad who is addicted to deracination, an architect who shapes poetry, a critic who births new languages and a wit who unwittingly is making and unmaking norms.

The two books that collect his fiction and non-fiction work in two very different ways equally well- as a one-stop preview for the uninitiated to get a taste of Jussawalla’s intense, dramatic and poignant world that begins and ends in South Mumbai (but traverses many worlds in between) and as a reflective piece for those who have followed him through his productive decades. Jussawalla’s essays on people, artists and writers, art works and literature, places and travelling document with tenderness and unfailing wit, what is erasure in this world that is adept in losing important things. Indeed, the able editor of Maps for a Mortal Moon, Jerry Pinto (author of a fine novel Em & the Big Hoom), remarks drily that the Adil Jussawalla has spent the best part of his life battling amnesia that results from things, people and landmarks disappearing. His essays are a collection of things fast receding, treasures that we should have held close to ourselves. What us poignant is that he displayed a unique penchant to collect some of these things from the verge of disappearance. Anecdotes have it that in his paper-lined flat in Cuffe Parade, Mumbai, some of the finest poets writing in English (Jeet Thayil, Eunice de Souza) would have their scribbled poetry collected, kept and published in anthologies later. In this sense, Adil was literally a keeper of literary conscience.

The most enduring contributions of Jussawalla however, were in the capacity of editor, teacher and a publisher. He had tenure at the national newspaper Indian Express where poets like Arvind Mehrotra were given two full broadsheets for book reviews and later in Debonair. As a teacher of literature at St Xavier’s College, Mumbai, he held poetry reading called Dangerous Animals every Tuesday. As a founding member of poets co-operative Clearing House, he was setting up a modest but important clearing house for poetry manuscripts of the 1970s. Regrettably, in India today, we have only small publishers interested in discovering poets as big publishing houses are led by supra-literary concerns while selecting manuscripts.

From the vast expanse of his world to his intense scrutiny of the here and now is unsettling. Reading his poetry (The Right Kind of Dog & Trying to Say Goodbye) brings discomfort- he places the most disparate things close to one another, distorting expectations and creating strange experiences. His poems begin at the fissures of this disjunctive unsettling, it has many registers each resembling the many worlds of the poet and his many variations of a self over the years. For the deeply compassionate and engaging conversation with Adil Jussawalla, these edited works provide a good introduction.

The Mountain Girl

The Black Hill, Mamang Dai, Aleph, pp.295

Every hour was a preparation and prayer to bid farewell to the grounds and leaves. Tidy the place and pack things to be elsewhere. Both Father Crick, the Missionary from France imbued with the original passion of his vocation and Gimur, the Abor woman longing to explore the mountains share this thirst for an adventure.   ‘A fire draws people together’, say the elders of the tribe and it was a curious fire that lay in the pit of their spirit that kept stoking them to wander away in search of new meanings.

This novel is a fictionalized account of Father Nicholas Crick the nineteenth century missionary from the Missions Étrangères de Paris to Tibet to spread the word of God. But Tibet, like a Holy Grail, remains unattainable to him. Throwing himself to the fate, the padre has to depend on the kindness of strangers and tribesmen for safe passage to the forbidden land that Tibet was. He makes his way through the treacherous mountains of North Eastern India, being the messenger and the medicine man, healing bodies and souls. His strange alter ego is Gimur the wild woman, breaker of all taboos, mother and daughter, who is prodded into an all or nothing passion to save the people she loves.

Set in the backdrop of Colonial India where the British were guarded in their approach of the tribesmen of north eastern India, the coming of Father Crick is an omen. He becomes the unwitting part of a dramatic war between the British and the ferociously territorial people, as they fight for their land, gods and livelihood. And the two people who are peace makers, nomads and believers of peace are thrown into the pit of deceit from which there is no safe passage.

Intensely researched and evocatively written, Mamang Dai’s novel is a superb and thrilling account of an adventure. As it narrates the compelling story of politics, faith and struggle for land, the story sheds light on the history of the Abor and Mishmee peoples in Colonial India. By tracing the history, the story also gives a possible direction for the future political course that the claim for land and belonging would take.

Mamang Dai is a writer with great sympathy for her characters and understanding of the complex historical context she seeks to explore. Her prose flows like the rivers that shape the contours of her story. I found the writer as a gift from a dear friend from Assam and cherish the discovery. Dai is one of the promising writers to look out for in Indian writing in English.

Bond With The Best

The quintessential Bond stories are to be read in long train journeys that most Indian families take annually when the schools close for summer. Summer in India is not just monotonously long days with heat waves; it is one of the most beautiful times of the year, with cassias and flames of the forest bursting in a riot of bright colours, with the ice-candy man matching his gastronomic treats to the vibrant summer hues, kite flying during the days as much as mango stealing, star gazing at nights where meteors shoot past delivering wishes like postmen who bring love from old friends and pen pals and even the much cherished mango showers with its thunder and deep rumbling. It is a festive time of sorts and new friendships are to be made with books and authors. 

 

When I was growing up, the staple of my summer holidays was an issue each of Tinkle and Amar Chitra Katha during these famed train journeys (that I would finish very quickly to the deep consternation of my father) and the occasional Champak. Tinkle and Amar Chitra Katha are Indian comics while Champak is a literary magazine in English and Hindi for young readers.  I did come across the beautiful mountain stories of Ruskin Bond, that Anglophone writer from the Himalayas who wrote poignantly, the angst of adolescent life amidst an indifferent adult world and a deeply empathetic natural world. The Chirs and Pines, the railways, the cottages with cherry trees, the languid town of the hill people- all of this  was an alien exotic land for the sea breeze loving beach going ‘plains’ girl that I was.

 The best of Bond came when he was just seventeen, fresh out of a public school and on his way out of India into the world. He carried the Himalayan town with him and while abroad at his aunt’s in Channel Islands for a year, working and going to the movies every day. He went back to his memories of friendship and his earliest literary encounters in India to quell his loneliness elsewhere. In the year he spent as a civil servant at the Island and thereafter in London, he always roamed quietly like the leopard of Kasauli, restless and fretting inside, while darting about from one island of solitude to another. He wrote The Room on the Roof, that was kindly encouraged by his editor and it went on to win the prestigious John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize for the best first book by a writer under thirty.

Ruskin Bond lived the rest of his sixty years until this day, writing to pay his bills, just like the other writer who the same editor introduced to the world- V.S. Naipaul. He has over 500 works to his credit, an oeuvre that includes poetry, short stories, novellas and essays all filled with his delightful vantage point and his impish humour. His latest book Love Among the Bookshelves speaks fondly about his early literary influences with excerpts from his favourite authors. It is a glimpse into the adventures of a bookish boy who skipped sports in school to read and wrote stories only to be flogged. The banality of the adults around him only spurred him on to more adventures with Wodehouse and Bates, a stock of British fiction, comics and classics that he goes back to this day.  A rare account of his London days and Channel island days add a wonderful background to the works and foreground to a stunning career of over forty books for children alone.

The illustrated verse volume Hip Hop Nature Boy and Other Poems is a joy to read.  It has poems on animals, birds and trees, on love, loss and longing, on peace and collective aspirations of humanity. Of course, ghosts haunt a few pages and truants play in the bright morning sun. It seems as if Bond would dream with such tenacity that the world would change with the sheer force of his words. In his poem ‘IF Mice Could Roar’, he says

‘If a tortoise could run

And losses be won,

And bullies be buttered on toast;

If a song brought a shower

And a gun grew a flower,

This world would be nicer than most!’

Such a flight with poetry to reclaim happiness and beauty, childhood and innocence, silence and solitude and summers with love and books is within our reach now.

Difficult Pleasures

Difficult Pleasures, Anjum Hasan, Penguin Viking, 2012.

‘Difficult Pleasures’ is a masterful collection of thirteen short stories from the accomplished Indian writer Anjum Hasan. These are stories about the secret pleasures that the heart yearns for- the longing to escape and belong and the desire to be free. In the end, what the odd protagonists who potter about these landscapes encounter is pain and loss, as they struggle with the difficulty of keeping their pleasures intact.  Once out in the open, all secret desires are moulded by the rough hands of life; it is a freewheeling ride that is at once ambitious, full of surprises and  often disastrous. Hasan weaves her stories tenderly with her fragile ‘heroes’, who may not withstand the assault of reality on their vulnerable dreams. What binds these characters together is that they are lonely and tethered to their ordinary lives till an extraordinary adventure takes over and they are stranded in an alien land, they comprehend only after confrontation. What follow is terrific excitement and an unpredictable dénouement, that makes this book ‘unputdownable’. 

Three stories in the collection are about the life and dreams of young children. Hasan skilfully sketches the fears and prayers in a child’s heart. In ‘Wild Things’ Prasad Yelagodu is caught in a nightmare called K.P. Kattimani High School, where he is perpetually unsure of what is right and what is wrong. He is a misfit from the beginning, wont to break rules and get caught. His lessons are meaningless to him; his mind is full of other exciting ideas. On an impulse he runs away from his village, stealing his mother’s savings to the glamour of the city. His wild dream lasts a night and as he returns home he is full of his adventure, happily oblivious to the tantrums of his future. The second story ‘Hanging on like death’ is about Neel, of how he made it to the school play and what he yearns for more than anything on that perfect day on which he performs. ‘Birds’ is the story of little Samir as he is transplanted to a new home and life, which he is powerless to escape from. All the three stories are full of pathos, of children caught in a strong adult world that they decide to overcome with the power and pure force of a child’s instincts. 

There are five stories with women as protagonists. A young woman negotiates her status and her future in an alien city in ‘For Love or Water’. A daughter returns home heartbroken and realises that her life may turn out exactly like her mother’s in ‘Good Housekeeping’. A young wife leaves her husband on an impulse and embarks on a thrilling journey only to be ensnared in other kinds of dangers in ‘Eye in the Sky’. A schizophrenic double life and the terror it holds is disarmingly portrayed in ‘The History of Touch’. Easily the best story of the collection, ‘The Big picture’ is about a lonely middle aged woman on the throes of a new threshold in life. 

The stories in this collection reveal a universe that confronts the inevitable pain that holds out for the unusually liberated. Hasan is a writer who is not afraid to follow her ‘unlikely heroes’ who are faltering at every step in their lives. The languid pace of narration that lucidly brings out the conflicts and confused rebellions of her imperfect characters reveals the author at her best. That she portrays her characters empathetically and their daring in a haunting, almost lyrical way deserves praise and attention. Hasan’s competent portrayal of pathos and despair with a dash of wry humour, firmly establishes her as ‘one of the most suggestive and subtle Indian writers of her generation’ as the writer Amit Chaudhuri described her. These stories will indeed speak to a generation in new and exciting ways.