Intimations

 

Zadie Smith (2020), Intimations, Penguin Books, pp. 82

We all need the quiet homecoming of the literary kind, especially at a time we were forced to confine ourselves and sever all physical ties to people, places, and things in the year of the pandemic. It was not one long year we could foresee, neatly planned with a release date set. Rather, the news of our own predicament came to us in ebb and flow, like a menacing current of wave, swinging our hope to despair and back. At a time like this, we needed the quiet intimation from a philosopher like Zadie Smith.

In this slim but profound meditation spanning six luxurious essays, Smith fills the questions she asks as a human, prised open from her faith and familiarity with the world, by giving answers only a writer can. The thought traverses the intimate world of peonies, neighborhood, the familiarity of strangers and their silent solidarity in belonging to the same world and world views, slowly moving to the shattering of this world not with a big bang but with a quiet twang in which lives were upended. What does it mean to ask the same old questions of being and belonging in this new world of suspension? What can one hope for? How can we imagine again?

This stunning book of thoughts was my tough companion through some of the most difficult times of my adult life as I lost certainty and learned to live without it. And I dread to think what you would have gone through, dear reader, although I also know you must be the stronger for it. For you and I are survivors.

There were many who did not outlive this pandemic. Let this space, these words, and thoughts be dedicated in their loving memory.

 

 

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!

The Master’s Voice

Alice Munro (2000), The Love of a Good Woman, Vintage, London, pp. 340

‘The Love of a Good Woman’ is an anthology of eight stories by Nobel Laureate Alice Munro. The stories bring out her native country Canada in its full splendor. Set in different time periods, seasons and moods, these stories plumb the Canadian life through the slow, pendulous prose that swings back and forth between memory, love, loss and longing of its characters. The terrain of Munro’s narrative is like the peat bogs that are ubiquitous to her landscape, it is slippery and difficult to navigate, but buries within something precious and clarifying. You journey to the end of the story and wait for the story to reappear in its entirety, illuminating parts that you did not know existed in the first reading. That is part of the delectable satisfaction in entering Munro’s beguiling world.

Truth and Illusion

The book begins with the story ‘the love of a good woman’. The good woman has cocooned herself in a role that she plays to perfection. Just when it seems life is invariant; a small opening comes into sight. There is a road that could lead to new beginnings, but her rite of passage is through a test of truth that could make or break her life. We leave her at the beginning of this crossroad. Similarly, the story ‘Jakarta’ is a man’s journey to understand what he truly lost four decades ago. In the search for clarity, he meets with an old friend’s narrative that could either be the very truth or a tragic delusion of a broken heart. We leave such protagonists in the middle of their journey where new beginnings are just a corner away, shielded by a wall so deliberate and vile that we fear the outcome even as we know the inevitable has to happen.

A characteristic that simmers in this quiet cauldron is the echo in the narrative that ricochets and threatens the fragile worlds of our characters. A daughter visits her father’s clinic after aborting her child only to assist in another for a stranger. A grandmother plays the same silly game she used to entertain her daughter with, only to enter a dangerous territory with her grandchildren. Reverberating through this story is her own adolescent wanderlust, her daughter’s careful separation and the reunion with the next generation. There is always this echo from the past that spirals into something more tangible and intends to wreck the future.

A Woman’s World

Finally, there is the delicious perspective of women, forever becoming more of themselves, no matter what. They push through dreams and hopes, erotic fantasies and dangerous liaisons, adventures and wanderlust, nightmares and confounding labyrinth of their lives and memories, to emerge at new beginnings. It is in the stunning voices of these women that the world opens out and shuts down in unexpected ways in these stories.

This book is an excellent introduction to the master of short stories that Munro is. If difficult pleasures are what you are looking for, you have arrived home as a quiet winter sets in!

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.