Mr. Kelvin Philip's Web Log: September 2008

Sunday, September 28, 2008

It's Mr.Paul, again !

Brida suffers in comparison to Coelho’s other books, but works well within its own framework.

Brida, Paulo Coelho, HarperCollins, p.266, Rs 295.

Paulo Coelho’s readers can be classified into two groups, ranging from the casual and the curious to the fans and the fanatics. This dichotomy often results in a confrontation between those who defend the Master and the light of his guidance, a nd those who decry his too-easy flights into fantasy.
Venturing habitually beyond the rational, Coelho’s own life of exploration probably qualifies him to record the processes of spiritual journeys. These emerge in the form of simply narrated fictional accounts, lyrical and inventive, but lit by the freshness of a journal.
The search continues
In his latest book, Brida, Coelho’s search continues. Actually, this isn’t his latest; it’s just that it has taken 18 years for the English translation to emerge. And it isn’t really essential Coelho. Lyricism leaps out of his pages when he describes wild Irish landscapes and plunges into a devastating past along with his heroine, but otherwise it’s a pretty straightforward narrative; the stages of Brida’s search seem almost clinical.
The trouble with Brida is that it’s written by Paulo Coelho. Having become a superstar of mystical fiction, his books are heralded by expectation. He is surrounded by so many auras it is difficult to reach his books without them coming in the way. The redoubtable success of his other books have to be tackled first. And Brida suffers in comparison.
The Alchemist and the rest of the markers on the holy trail have to be disregarded, and the present book taken up on its own merit. We can only judge Brida within Brida’s framework; which, ideally, is the only way to read any book for that matter.
Simple framework
The story is simple. Brida is a young Irish girl who sets out in search of knowledge in the depths of magic and the inexplicable. She meets the Magus first, and is subjected immediately to a rather punishing test in the frightening darkness of a forest where she is left all alone to discard her fears and conquer her doubts. Unknown to her, she strikes a chord in the Magus. He is a much older man travelling in the Tradition of the Sun. Banished for a momentary lapse, the crime of attempting to manipulate his disciple’s path, he lives alone. After Brida leaves him, he waits for her.
But Brida turns to the Tradition of the Moon and the witch Wicca for enlightenment. Wicca appears more responsive to her need. On an outing in the mountains out of Dublin, she tells her: “Stay on the bridge between the visible and the invisible. Everything in the Universe has life, and you must always try to stay in contact with that life. It understands your language. And the world will take on a different meaning for you.”
Wicca’s guidance is slow and steady, and Brida finds herself understanding her past incarnations, her present mission and the imminence of her goal. She realises that her Soulmate, the other half of her cloven soul, the being she’s destined to be with, is also close at hand. Recognising him, she reaches another throbbing threshold. Her boyfriend Lorens would probably have become the third corner of a triangle in an ordinary love story; but here relationships are enduring, vast and riddled with many meanings.
Moment of reckoning
The final scene around a fire in a forest clearing becomes a moment of reckoning for all four characters in the book. Things aren’t always what they seem, and conclusions aren’t as expected, but a higher purpose determines the tide of events and relationships; it knows where it’s taking us.
Brida works well within its framework.
Paulo Coelho is a craftsman whose words pin down feelings and experiences, and yet somehow manage to leave them floating in the air. This mix of clarity and evanescence leaves the reader with the feeling of having read a journal of myth, a record of restlessness and reverie. Its simplicity engages him, while its mysticism allows him his own inner journey.
The characters are drawn with clarity; the Magus and Wicca linger. While the breadth of imagination is vast, the symbols and mythology of Christianity are constantly evoked, reigning in the possibilities. Coelho’s Brida is a modern young woman whose feet, like Mary Poppins, aren’t always on the ground.

Bengal Tiger

Part of our fascination with Saratchandra is the desire to see what we could have become had we not become ‘impure’ or ‘modern’.

Three Classics: The New Arrangement, Pointing the Path, Bindu’s Son, Saratchandra Chattopadhyay, translated by Jadu Saha, Shipra Publications, Rs. 450

Business is good for the Saratchandra industry: “Devdas” and “Parineeta”, film adaptations of Saratchandra’s novellas, were — to use trade parlance — “superhits”; Bengali television serials rip of f his stories without acknowledgement; the titles of most of his stories and novellas have been appropriated by Bengali film-makers; Jadu Saha’s translations of three of Saratchandra’s more popular novellas is one more addition to the growing space of the reclamation of the Bengali writer.
The notion of revival implies loss; the revivalism of Saratchandra is associated with that sense of loss, allied with the sense of recovery of the “authentic”. “Authenticity” and the “real” are words that are often used to uphold Saratchandra’s supremacy over his contemporaries. Tagore is “inauthentic”: he was Brahmo, he allowed himself intellectual transactions with the “West”; his aesthetic and his sensibility are “modern”, a word which the Bengali temper associates with the seepage of influence and a perforated sensibility. Tagore is “made”; Saratchandra is still unmade or, at least, yet-to-be-made. For, much has been made of Saratchandra’s “lack” of education by positing it against Tagore’s acquired learning, as if it were a great virtue that shaped his aesthetic, like Milton’s blindness. “I received no education for want of means,” Saratchandra is quoted as saying. The “no education” is only as half-true as Jonson’s description of Shakespeare’s “little Latin and less Greek”. The Tagore-Saratchandra binary has been the subject of many literary addas in Bengal. Saha’s juxtapositions are familiar to the extent of being tired, beginning from the almost naïve “aristocratic Tagore”-“poor Saratchandra” to the slimy “best writer”-“most popular writer”. Ascribing “mass appeal” and a language of the marketplace to a “poor” man like Saratchandra is, of course, ironical.
Immensely popular
Why was he so popular? Apart from the “stories” and the charm of their settings, Saratchandra appropriated the concept of “identification” for his own narrative ends: identification worked inversely in his case. The men and women who read him are not just like the men and women in his fiction; the men and women who read him become the men and women of his fiction. The question of his readership is an interesting one. The subject and, in many cases, the defining condition of his novellas is poverty. The characters of his stories, thus, could not have been his readers. And herein we find the seed of a modernist debate, one that continues to be used against the Indian-writer-in-search-of-an-audience, as if looking for a reader were an immoral gesture — this disjuncture between the subject of a work and its audience is, in many ways, a post-enlightenment one (Was Defoe writing for Crusoe, for only one possible reader?)
Another important reason for the renewed interest in Saratchandra is allied to the “route to root” culture of our times: Saratchandra was, after all, a diasporic writer, a fact that is often glossed over by his critics. (He was not just a Bengali writer; Bhagalpur and Burma were more important in defining his sensibility than the setting where his stories are placed.) The need to compare one’s footprints before and after the moment of departure and the greater urge to turn loss into gain and myth into history are common impulses of the diasporic citizen. That is perhaps why Saratchandra’s women are as much idealised and exaggerated mixtures of myth and history as Ravi Varma’s flesh-and-blood goddesses.
Part of the contemporary fascination with Saratchandra comes from this half-wish on our part to see ourselves as our forefathers, to mark the alternative route we might have taken had we, almost decidedly, not become the “impure” creatures that we are today. The other part comes from a voyeuristic urge to record or gaze upon a different history of becoming, to check whether we could have been “better” than what we are now. There are other reasons for his abiding popularity: his use of the language of the kitchen; his “realism” and “simplicity” (Saratchandra’s self-analysis); and our conditioned reflex to expect a “happy ending” in a story, for, Saratchandra’s stories are, ultimately, fairy-tales for adults.
Recurring themes
There are recurring themes in his work: sacrifice (it is women who sacrifice; if at all men sacrifice, they carry the burden of the discontent) — in Bindu’s Son, a novella about an aunt’s maternal love, sacrifice is elevated to martyrdom; depiction of social evils without commentary (Saratchandra is storyteller without trying to be a social reformer) — The New Arrangement is the story of an abandoned child bride Usha; the conservative moulds his aesthetic, the provocative only occasionally tinges it — in Pointing the Path, a novella in the rich boy-poor girl mould, it is tradition which prevents Guni from accepting the widow Hem.
Saratchandra does not pose too many difficulties to the translator; Jadu Saha’s translation succeeds in communicating the sense of where the story comes from, in recreating the lost-and-found innocence of Saratchandra’s works. In spite of a few grammatical slips (especially those of prepositions), this book adds to the much-needed body of work that makes interaction and exchange between cultures possible through translation.

Heal, Thy-Self !

This novel affirms that being authentically creative with one’s own emotions and thoughts is a healing play, a leela.

The Finger Puppet, Anu Jayanth, HarperCollins, 2008, Rs. 295.

Filthy rich and clean broke!” — that’s the situation of a dysfunctional family sitting on a gold mine of stolen antiques and prime real estate in Tiruchirapalli, and are reduced to eating rancid curd rice with mango pickle to disguise the taste. Thanks to a megalomaniac pater familias, who fancies himself to be a rationalist and a “modern”.
Set in the mid 1960s, with a speechless 12-year-old’s thumb as the protagonist, Anu Jayanth’s debut novel is about many things Indian. Put together in the eclectic fashion of a Navaratri Golu, she holds together the whole show with some startling insights into the nature and function of language.
Restoring faith
The book’s much- more-than-whimsical illuminations have proved wrong my distrust of a whole genre of Indian English writing, sparked long ago by Naipaul’s An Area of Darkness. My reasoning then went thus: Here I am, drenched and gasping in this torrent of ‘India’ — what can a diaspora writer have to tell me about it, from that abstracting distance? This story of a deceptively phlegmatic maami and her three daughters who subvert feminist stereotypes and intelligently resist patriarchy without detesting their yajamaan, has taken the sting out of my defeat. Now, after all these years, I shall accept that for many outside India, as much if not more than for those who are here, India is not a geographical expression but an area of consciousness which can accommodate and sometimes ingeniously reconcile opposites. Its darkest patches have a way of suddenly lighting up.
Tara has been silenced by the experience of domestic violence. Unwilling to burden her beloved co-sufferers with her own struggle to cope with a seething welter of contradictory messages and feelings, she takes to talking with her own thumb. A common enough childhood daydream, you think. We remember whispering to invisible companions, and not just long ago. But when it’s the coping technique of a victim of abuse, unsettling questions can surface: is this child “disturbed”, or “depressed”? Does she have behavioural problems?
Changing conceptions
Our guesses on what constitute sanity and insanity have been changing, as we strive constantly to align received wisdom and apparent commonsense with what is currently seen as politically correct. Discoveries in neuroscience tempt us to speculate on the role of will and consciousness in human systems ruled by self-propelled neural impulses. The sense of losing ground and authenticity in a world of fragmenting identities has driven us to look anew at old ideas about the mind.
Lest you should think Tara’s is a case of what goes by the name of schizophrenia, or the now-discredited diagnosis of “dissociative identity disorder” or multiple personality, hers is a instance which does not fit into that model of mutually exclusive or antagonistic selves. Tara’s is a personality which grapples with but also celebrates and embraces its own “split”, to use a phrase no longer fashionable in psychiatry. It divides itself not to escape from its daemons, but to have a dialogue with them from two standpoints. To remain integrated — and sane — without erasing the line of division, she plays … and how she plays! Her daemons, once confronted, turn into curiously endearing presences…
Serving a purpose
Like the many swamis and devis in the puja room, each of them a loving concatenation of human aspirations, Tara’s daemons are there for a purpose: to guide her to solutions not available through the usual avenues of logical analysis. Tara and her sisters discover that being authentically creative with one’s own emotions, observations, and thoughts is a healing play, a leela. What saves their flights of fantasy from turning into pathological delusions is the sense of fun that flutters around that house, under the indulgent eye of the “shock absorber” mother steeped in Vedas, ayurveda, ahimsa, and Carnatic music. The father who insists that it is just a figment of his silly womenfolk’s imagination slowly sickens, while his wife heals herself of all her deepest griefs with her customised version of occupational therapy. She assures her children that their crazy father loves them all “in his own way”. Positive reinforcement? Or just self-defense? The family breaks away at one point for sheer survival’s sake but returns to care for him till the end. For, he is one of them, a pitiable fragment who has “lost it”.
As Anu Jayanth weaves together the fabric of life in Tiruchi with the khadi values of Gandhigram, the motif of the finger puppet pops in and out. A strange kind of sutradhar, the finger puppet somehow manages to tassel together the many loose ends in this perceptive tale.

A New Medium

Despite the possibilities, most poems lack a sense of completeness.

I Witness: Partial Observations; Kapil Sibal; IndiaInk (Roli Books); Rs 295

Kapil Sibal is entirely justified in referring to these pieces as ‘partial observations’. But neither he, nor Shashi Tharoor on the back cover, nor the even more fulsome front inside-flap copy-writer, is justified in calling them poems.
Some of them are incisive, some insightful, some amusing (claims the inside flap makes for the whole book). However, though they display possibilities, not least a good watcher’s eye, they are almost all lacking in completeness.
New form?
The cell phone is not a medium suitable for literary, or even very literate, composition. The reviewer’s duty, then, is to treat this book not as a collection of poems, but as a new form altogether. There is a sure appeal here for those who like their wisdom in byte-sized pieces, and lack the time to think things out for themselves. This audience does not care much for spelling or grammar, or at all for subtlety.
Sibal has, however, an infectious enthusiasm for scientific advances, and it redeems some of the clumsiness inherent in composing a work when you cannot see all of it — or even all of one line — at any time. A certain facility with rhyme is evident. Perhaps it is too facile; as in “Sunday”, where the rhyme pairs are ‘tea-memory’; ‘recklessly-desperately’; ‘glee-knee’; ‘curiously-nonchalantly’; ‘hungrily-peacefully;’ ‘lazily-nostalgically’. Some pieces — “Tsunami”, “Death” and “Mirage” — which rely on this kind of rhyming, yet at least commence to work, because they are ambitious and succinct. “Mirage” begins
How can we/all equal be?/That is the human/tragedy.
Unfortunately, too often observations which begin thus filter through a politician and lawyer’s mind and end like this:
A constitutional/guarantee?/No panacea/for inequality.
The medium that Sibal composes in favours the use of jargon, which does not look so well on the printed page. Besides, the public thoughts of a public man are not the stuff of which poetry is fashioned.
Ring true
The private verses are those which ring true: “In a Clinch”, “Lovers and the Chowkidar”, “As We Approach the Night”, which ends
Promise to/hold my hand,/for in this battle/I lack the strength/to fight.
In fact, these pieces are actually more readable, overall, when they eschew rhyme. There is a comprehension of the pause, the fragility of the moment, of the beauty of transience, as in “Wrath”, which ends
I never have understood/why so many of us/have to die.
Ones that work
One piece that largely works is the amusing “Meeting in London”; another is “Nano”:
Nano tubes/in nano pores./Nano tech/in nano stores./Nano thoughts/of nano brains….
Really, though, too much of this book is out of place between covers. I open it at random and find (“Whither Press”):
TRPs of channels,/soap operas,/get hits for you./News that matters/serious content,/of limited value.
It would be different if I read it as an SMS, I guess. The same is true of the pieces that follow, on the trust vote in the Lok Sabha, “123” and “POTA”. The next, “Man Behind the Mask”, addressed to Vajpayee, has a certain poignancy.
That Sibal composed these pieces on his cell phone has become a focus of breathless interest for the media: Poetry has entered the 21st Century! Excuse me. Poetry has always been at the cutting edge of culture. But if you are using new technology, why use it for an old-fashioned purpose you do not believe in?
In a few years, our elite schools will be filled with students who have never composed anything on paper. Educationists in Europe and the US are gravely considering allowing SMS contractions to pass in test papers.
A new medium
Sibal has told interviewers that he has no time for poetry, no time to write in longhand on paper, to edit, rewrite and revise. Why, then, are his works collected on printed pages? Surely his path-breaking efforts at composition are deserving of a whole new medium? Perhaps the 24-hour news channels would be best. Or a mobile phone services provider could take them up and send them out as text messages at commercial rates, as they do with cricket news and ring tones.
I offer this as a serious suggestion to the next journeyer on this trail.

Folk-Lore

A painstaking exploration of a society that has an essentially oral cultural history.

Around the Hearth: Khasi Legends; Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih, Penguin Rs. 195.

The Khasi language is an Austro-Asiatic language, which means that it is closely related to those spoken in South East Asia, particularly to Vietnamese and Khmer. But the literary history of the Khasis has been somewhat obscure since the language had no alphabet until the introduction of the Roman in 1842 by a Welsh missionary called Thomas Jones. That is why the orthography (the style of spelling etc.) of the Khasi language is quite similar to Welsh. Even today, when you hear Khasis speaking English, you can trace a faint Welsh accent.
Which is all quite fascinating and proves that the history of the human species is the history of migration. But since the Khasis migrated from South East Asia to North East India without a written script, a large number of their folk tales and legends became obscure. Add to that, 150-odd years of exposure, through missionaries, to Judeo-Christian tradition and the legends of the Khasis, passed down by oral tradition, were beginning to look rather ragged. That is why the publication of Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih’s book, Around the Hearth: Khasi Legends, is so important.
Geographical background
Dr. Nongkynrih has collected the 20 stories in this volume and told them like folk tales should be — with a wide-eyed sense of wonder at Nature, the ways of men and the infinite laws of the universe. Essentially, the stories are woven around the extraordinary geography of the East and West Khasi Hills districts of present day Meghalaya. Behind the names of many of the hills, waterfalls, rivers and animals there is a story.
For instance, Umiew and Umngot are two rivers that begin at Shyllong Peak and flow down to Bangladesh. As legend goes, they were the twin daughters of U Lei Shyllong (the God of Shillong); one twin was impulsive, the other calm. On one particularly clear day, they could see the plains of Bangladesh and the impulsive twin immediately wanted to go down to see the land below. She suggested that they disguise themselves as rivers. At first, the younger, calmer sister started flowing down gently, taking a long, serpentine, graceful route down to the plains. The older sister, according to her more aggressive nature, plunged down the hills and ravines, tearing her way down until she threw herself to the plains with such great force that she splintered into five branches, now the tributaries of the river. It is a folk tale that eloquently describes the riverine geography of the Khasi Hills and Sylhet district of Bangladesh.
Creation
Just as the Old Testament tells us how God created the universe in six days, the Khasis tells us about how U Blei (God) decided to send seven of the 16 clans living in heaven down to earth and create the Khasi people. The Khasi word for seven is ‘Hynniew’, and the Khasis are known as the ‘Hynniew Trep’ or the seven clans, comprising all the present sub-tribes, which are Khynriam, Pnar, Bhoi, War, Maram, Lyngngam and Diko. In other words, Khasi legends are not just folk tales, but important syntax for social anthropology. They explain, quite beautifully, the traditions and social structure of the society.
Around the Hearth is superbly illustrated by Pankaj Thapa and the cover of the book has a reproduction of a haunting painting by Benedict Hynniewta. To Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih, who has explored and painstakingly put together the myths, legends, totems and taboos of a society that has an essentially oral cultural history, we owe a lot. We must say to him in Khasi: Khublai Shibun (thank you very much).

Work that enhances Life

A work that bows to the greats that have gone before, but stands upright in its own space.

In these days of compromised blurb-writing, comparisons with Rushdie and Roy on the back-cover (from Booker nominee Peter Ho Davies) are enough to alert the antennae of all but the most unsceptical of readers. But Evening Is The Whole Day, Preeta Samarasan’s stunning debut novel, is that rare gem: A work that bows to the greats that have gone before, but stands upright in its own space.
In fact, why stop at Rushdie and Roy? The core of Malaysia-born, U.S.-bred and France-settled Samarasan’s story is eerily similar to Ian McEwan’s Atonement, the many-roomed, ghostly mansion where it plays out reminds one of similar rambling adobes in Isabel Allende’s early novels.
The coming-of-age theme, of course, has been examined by any number of authors, ranging from J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye) to David Mitchell (Black Swan Green) to Abha Dawesar (Babyji), as has the child’s eye view, frequently in tandem. But few authors, if any, have had such a child as their centrepiece.
The first time we encounter Aasha, she is “only six, (and her) heart cracked and cried out in protest” at her sister Uma’s departure for further studies in the U.S. Vulnerable and vengeful, aching for love yet prickly, imaginative but sequestered by her own inexperience, Aasha is someone you have empathy for, but cannot sympathise with.
As the narrative plays out like a memory, un-chronological and fragmented, we come to see why this juncture in family life — hard, but hardly unprecedented — should be the moment when things finally fall apart and the centre ceases to hold.
Ideal immigrants
To their neighbours at Kingfisher Lane, in the small Malaysian town of Ipoh, though, Aasha’s family is the ideal immigrant Indian unit: “top lawyer” Raju (Appa), homemaker Vasanthi (Amma), and three children, including the Columbia University-bound Uma. They have their share of sorrows, to be sure — Paati, Raju’s mother, has died suddenly, after years of gradual decline — but then, that’s a part of life, isn’t it?
The bigger tragedy for Aasha, though, is the demise of her elder sister as she knew her. From surrogate mother, teacher of songs and co-conspirator in a hundred childish pranks, Uma, 12 years older, has morphed into a sullen creature who prefers her own company, barely opens her mouth at the dining table and asks her little sister to mind her own business. And now, as she leaves for the U.S., Aasha is convinced that it is because she is driving her away. If this is life, Aasha wants no part of it.
Life, and all its parts, is Samarasan’s ambitious ambit in Evening.. (the title comes from a Tamil film song, which Appa translates as ‘Evening is the whole day for those without their lovers’) and, as the layers peel away and we are forced to confront the horrors that nestle inside appearances, the story takes on larger resonances that include society and state.
As masterfully as Samarasan weaves together the multiple layers of her tale, it is when she focuses on the home unit that she comes into her own. In rich, colloquial, comma-scorning prose, she captures Amma’s innate insecurities and sense of injustice, Appa’s weak-kneed idealism and search for succour, Paati’s self-serving love for Uma and the children’s quest for a semblance of balance. Her observation of the tiny, wilful cruelties perpetrated by family member upon family member is spot-on, the atavistic closing of ranks against Chellum, live-in servant and Paati’s care-giver, terrifyingly familiar.
Bleak world view
In fact, it is this grasp of the workings of the Indian family system — some behavioural traits refuse to die on overseas journeys and alien lands — that allows Samarasan to make her own a theme that McEwan explored so convincingly in Atonement. Her world-view, though, seems even bleaker than McEwan’s: For Aasha, there is no redemption, only relief in a single, brilliant smile from her sister as she walks towards the aircraft.
Samarasan is a talent to watch out for: One hopes in the future she casts off the ghosts (of magic realism as well as of authors who have gone before) to further distinguish her own voice.

Saturday, September 27, 2008

Un-Biased Author

A fitting tribute to a poet who was the centre of the Indo-English poetic scene for half a century.

Nissim Ezekiel Remembered: Edited by Havovi Anklesaria. With assistance from Santan Rodrigues; Sahitya Akademi. p.603, Rs 275.

Both Havovi Anklesaria, the editor of Nissim Ezekiel Remembered, and Santan Rodrigues, who assisted her, were students and long-time associates of Nissim. The book, lovingly compiled, is their tribute to their friend and mentor, a poet who stood at the centre of the Indo-English poetic scene for half a century.
As a commemorative volume, the book is unexceptionable. Even the absence of a biographical sketch is a plus, because it encourages you to build your own biography of Nissim, using the information provided in the memoirs, interviews and chronology. You can see a clear picture of the man emerge, and see his work in the context of his life.
Sister’s view
Take, for example, “Remembering Nissim”, an essay by Nissim’s younger sister, Asha Bhende. When she says, ‘I would like to remember Nissim, as my brother who made our mother laugh’; the line surprises you, like a line of verse from Nissim. When she writes, a little later, ‘I still remember the day our mother died’; you begin to hear, in the background, the best loved of Nissim’s poems, “Night of the Scorpion”.
Mrs Bhende recollects how Nissim, in an effort to revive his mother, kept on fanning her after she was dead, saying, “she has only fainted”; and of how he disappeared from the house after the funeral for a week. Nissim rarely spoke about his mother, but this remark, made in an interview, is revealing: ‘But the real source of my literary sensibility was my mother. I always knew it came straight from her to me. She reacted intuitively to my writing. With the rest of the family it was conscious encouragement; with her it was a primal assurance.’
The other personal reminiscences add to the portrait. Gieve Patel recollects how sensitive Nissim was to human suffering. Santan Rodrigues recalls Nissim’s help in launching Kavi India, and how, when they ventured into book publishing later, he bought 100 copies of their first book to help them pay the printer’s bill. Laeeq Fatehally quotes her daughter, Shama, who spoke for all his students when she wrote “we took it as a given, that Nissim’s time was not his own — it belonged to all of us.”
The disintegration of that fine, sensitive mind, after Alzheimer’s struck, is one of the sad stories of our time. But somehow, even after the other faculties degenerated, sensitivity to poetry remained unimpaired. Santan recounts how they visited Nissim at the nursing home he was confined in, on his birthday, and asked him to read a poem. “He took his book of poems that we gave him and read, as if in the days of yore. And as if to mock us asked, ‘Who is Nissim Ezekiel?’”
Who is Nissim Ezekiel? That’s the question this commemorative volume raises. It throws light on the many facets of his genius: the poet who brought in modernity to Indian poetry in English; the man who influenced and promoted a host of young poets; a sensitive and perceptive critic who, through hundreds of reviews and articles, strove to improve the literary atmosphere in India; an art critic who, never intimidated by a painter’s reputation, spoke his mind; a superb prose writer; founder-editor of Quest and Poetry India; editor of Freedom First and The Indian P.E.N.; a playwright and broadcaster; a teacher who taught at several Universities; and above all, a committed individual whose ambition, expressed when he was only 18, was “to do something for India”, and who never backed out of that commitment till the end.
In world literature
Nissim’s position as the pre-eminent Indo-English poet of our time is well established. But what about his place in World Literature? The question never bothered Nissim. He was only concerned with the quality of his poems. When he was actually asked, ‘What about your place in World Literature?’ in an interview, he answered, with some irritation “Perhaps, I don’t make it on the international scene…Most Indian writers don’t. We’re just not good enough.”
Bruce King thinks that Nissim “is a good but minor poet — in comparison to such giants as Yeats, Eliot, or Auden.” He thinks that what possibly hampered Nissim from being a great poet was his “unwillingness to break the mould and make it new”. He was too sympathetic to others, too much a part of his surroundings, and too concerned with the ethical. And these are precisely the qualities we admire Nissim for! King admits that this attitude “contributed to his leadership of Indian poetry and its relationship to India, and it resulted in a surprising number of poems that are likely to last even as critical tastes change.”
Makarand Paranjape’s article, the longest in the “Academia” section, labours to prove that Ezekiel belonged to the Indian poetic tradition represented by Aurobindo. This surprising thesis is based on two reasons: one, Nissim used traditional metres; two, he shows “a most clearly defined spiritual quest in his poetry”.
Paranjape admits, though, that Nissim’s spiritual quest, in comparison with Aurobindo’s, is “modest.” A spiritual quest in poetry, modest or otherwise, is not an exclusive Indian property. And Nissim valued his Indianness, anyway, though he had no use for Aurobindo’s poetry.
His spiritual quest was no doubt prompted by his own inner need. Perhaps the LSD experiment had some role to play. Nissim said, in his interview: “…with the first LSD experience, I gave up atheism — it just collapsed. Religion and its mysteries became more acceptable.” LSD’s use as an entheogen is not unheard of.
Paranjape’s analysis of Nissim’s poetry is accurate: “Overall, Nissim’s work reflects an almost classical concern with order, balance, good sense and wit. Shying away from emotional or verbal excess, he is nevertheless intensely self-critical, honest and funny.”
But doesn’t this description point to the Movement poets rather than to Aurobindo? They all used regular metre, and were Nissim’s contemporaries: Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis were born the same year as Nissim; Donald Davie was two years older, John Wain a year younger.
I sometimes think that if Robert Conquest had read Ezekiel’s poems, he might well have included poems like “Poet, Lover, Birdwatcher”, “Case Study”, “Poetry Reading” and “Paradise Flycatcher” in New Lines; and they would have been among the better poems in that fine anthology.
Selections
This brings me to my only quarrel with the book. Why are the poems mentioned above not included in this volume, which is “envisaged as a Reader” and “aims to provide a selection of the finest prose and poetry”? “Background Casually”, the only comprehensive autobiographical poem Nissim wrote, and “Naipaul’s India and Mine”, his best known essay, are omitted too. Preferring “the early and not so familiar ones” to the better poems, simply because the better ones are “much anthologised”, is not quite right in a Reader.
But the delights far outweigh the disappointments. The essays in the “Art and Artists” section, uncollected so far, are a revelation. Sharp and incisive in analysis, blunt in expression, lucid and sparkling in style, they show Nissim at his best as a prose writer. The most incisive among them are perhaps the ones on Satish Gujral, Krishen Khanna, Bhupen Khakkar and Laxma Gaud, all published in Z magazine.
Nissim wrote more than 500 book-reviews, most of them in Imprint. The reviews showed his ability to get his teeth into the core of a book, see its virtues and faults and describe them with accuracy. He wrote with such zest that even unfavourable reviews made us hunt up the books, to see if our views coincided with his.
Unfair criticism — or supercilious depiction — of Indian society raised Nissim’s hackles. His criticism was at its most severe then. The anger was due to his passionate involvement with India. He was not quite sure whether he really ‘belonged’, but the desire to ‘connect’ was always there. In an interview in 1977 he said, “I regard myself essentially as an Indian poet writing in English. I have a strong sense of belonging, not only to India, but to this city.”
When specifically asked if his Jewish background did not create a problem, he admitted that it did, but added: “I don’t want to remain negative: I feel I have to connect…”
Poignant message
Connect. That’s Nissim’s message. In 1997, when he was in the grip of Alzheimer’s but had a few lucid days, Nissim wrote an essay, “Poetry in the time of tempests”. I don’t know what impact it made when it was published, but here, in this volume, read against the backdrop of Nissim’s life, it becomes his poignant final message.
Coming out of amnesia, he recollects the past — not the events of his personal life but of the country’s history. The Emergency makes him warn us against “the insidious ways in which those in power try to suppress the inconvenient voices from the margin, the angry voices of the dispossessed and even the quiet voice of poetry.” Then the plea: to look for connections and build them, “so that we may revel in our differences and enjoy our plurality.”

Wish-Full Thinking

Scholarly and entertaining, Prabhakara’s is an eclectic range.

Many read to get “something practical and utilitarian out of the reading as, for instance, is the case when one reads a railway timetable”. A smaller number read, says M.S. Prabhakara in Words and Ideas, “simply for the joy of reading, for the pleasure the reader gets by re-articulating in the unspoken language of the mind and the heart that unique arrangement of words and ideas of the writer.” Prabhakara himself belongs to the minority who not only read extensively but also an amazingly eclectic range of books.
Immersed in books
The short articles on books put together in this collection — which do not belong to the boring category of “reviews” — show a man who has immersed himself in books for a lifetime, devouring everything that comes his way, from detective fiction to lexicons of the most esoteric kind.
Each essay packs in an outline of the book under consideration, gives a quick overview of the writer’s oeuvre and provides tantalising bits of information that will enthuse a reader to go seeking the book. While they are marked by brevity, the essays also place every book in a larger social context. For example, the essay on K.T. Achiah’s two books on food open an interesting debate on the fallacious link often made between Indian diet and vegetarianism, especially with reference to beef eating.
Another remarkable feature is Prabhakara’s sharp eye for details that may go unnoticed by a casual reader. In “An Old Bird Difficult to Catch” on the biography of Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, one of the early communists of India, he picks out a certain Mandyam Prativaadi Bhayankara Tirumalacharya who “flits across” the narrative. Talking about Tirumalacharya, associated with the founding of the Communist Party of India outside the country, he notes that the man had “a uniquely apposite name for a communist revolutionary who after all is constantly engaged in ideological disputations.”
A reader cannot miss Prabhakara’s fascination for words, phrases and the entire histories that lie hidden behind every cluster of letters.
Some of the books Prabhakara refers are either rare or no longer available, which makes this slim volume all the more valuable. The book he writes about in the last essay, for instance, “The Scientific Lady in England”, is about how the gentlewomen of the late 17th and early 18th century were fascinated by telescope and microscope, and through them, drawn to science as a discipline!
Lucidity
Above all, this book is a worthy read for its sheer lucidity. Consider this excerpt from “The Mask Behind the Mask”: “…There is that ‘half a square inch of space within one’s heart’ that is never accessible to anyone, not even to one’s closest companions, not to the lover, not to the husband or the wife. Therein lies security; therein too lies the loneliness of all human beings.”
What Prabhakara says about K.T. Achiah’s style of writing — “scholarship carried lightly and not in the least intimidating, entertainingly written and most comprehensively informative” — could well be said of his own.
If there is a complaint, it is that Prabhakara rarely ever breaks his vow of not “succumbing to the ever present temptation and danger of indulging in anecdotes, that first in the irreversible path to senility that elderly writers should resist”. He breaks it only once to write about the subtle ways in which apartheid works in South African liquor shops, leaving one wishing he had made more such digressions. Let’s hope he writes an entire book of anecdotes next.

Of the people, by the people and for the people

A perspective from ancient Rome.

Imperium; Robert Harris, Arrow Books, The Random House Group Limited, £3.25

Robert Harris, a former Guardian correspondent, is the master of the historical novel, a much neglected literary genre. Over the years, Harris has brought back to life, for his discerning readership, Hitler, Stalin, and the ruins of Pompeii, introducing through a clever literary sleight of hand many an unexpected twist in each tale. Thus, in Fatherland, Hitler lives on and rules into the 1970s; in Archangel, Stalin is survived by his son, kept in hiding in the forest, for an explosive future introduction to public life. The much acclaimed Pompeii is a brilliant telling of the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius and the burial of the great city in ashes due to an apathetic and disbelieving populace.

Imperium, another classic historical novel, tells the tale of the master politician “Marcus Cicero” and his rise from relative obscurity to the position of great political influence he eventually occupied in the Roman Empire. Described through the eyes of his faithful slave M Tullius, “Tiro” who it is claimed invented shorthand, Cicero’s life and career in politics also provides brilliant insights into the mind of the politician.

A political path

Political personalities like Cicero and Caesar, not being of noble birth, fascinate us because of the heights they reached, and because they followed a political path, not merely a military one. The Roman Empire described here was the first to establish a political framework. There was a clear hierarchy: councils comprising the aristocracy and tribunals from the grassroots. There was also a political hierarchy of positions that one could aspire to occupy in succession until one achieved the pinnacle, the supreme “Imperium’ of consulship. The “Imperium” was a prize that did not come easily to the common man or “New Men” as they were referred to. Many a political battle had to be fought by Cicero in order to achieve this supreme goal; and hailing as he did from an ordinary family with neither aristocratic leanings; nor significant wealth; nor indeed military might; the only weapon he possessed was his oratorical skill.

How does one conquer Rome with only one’s voice as his asset? Cicero’s training for political life began in the hands of Greek master tutors and is well described here. Molon who trained him to make the public lectures that he became famous for, taught him to memorise his speech by taking an imaginary journey around the speaker’s house. “Place the first point you want to make in the entrance hall, and picture it lying there, the second in the atrium and so on, walking round the house in the way you would naturally tour it, assigning a section of your speech not just to each room, but to every alcove and statue. Make sure each site is well lit, clearly defined and distinctive. Otherwise you will be groping around like a drunk trying to find his bed after a party”.

Cicero’s rise in politics began due to an unusual stroke of luck. Sthenius of Thermae a well known Sicilian businessman, who had been robbed of all his wealth by the Roman Governor of Sicily, Gaius Verres, sought his legal counsel. The legal roadblock was that Sicily was a province not seen as being a central part of the Roman Empire and crimes carried out there could not therefore be tried in Rome. Discovering that Verres had prosecuted, convicted and punished by imprisonment or execution, in their absence, many eminent Sicilians who opposed his robbing the province and amassing immense wealth, Cicero did the unexpected. He tabled in the Senate a novel but vague piece of legislation “the prosecution of persons in their absence on capital charges should be prohibited in the provinces” thus forcing a debate on the actions of Gaius Verres as governor of Sicily. When that failed, he took his case to the “lower house”, the Tribunes, winning much public acclaim in the process. His alignment with the commoners in the house of Tribunes, many of whom were supporters of Pompey the Great (then an unaccepted political force) albeit acknowledged military leader of Rome, was a calculated but risky move. He subsequently travelled far and wide within Sicily to personally gather evidence against Verres and garnered considerable public support in the process. His oratory in prosecuting the corrupt governor was masterly: “Here is a human monster of unparalleled greed, impudence and wickedness. If I bring this man to judgement, who can find fault with me for doing this? Tell me, in the name of all that is just and holy, what better service can I do my country at the present time!”

First steps

Thus, with the successful conviction of Verres for crimes committed during his reign as Governor of Sicily, Marcus Cicero took his first steps from relative obscurity to the political centrestage. He made many enemies in the process, not mincing words to condemn Verres and all the aristocrats who defended him. For a great part of his career these very aristocrats who constituted the “Imperium” would see him as an enemy; a “New Man” who dared to challenge their authority and successfully. He did make friends among the tribunals and with Pompey the Great but, as he was to later discover, these friendships were fickle and transient. Cicero’s greatest discovery through this process, however, was the power of public opinion; the opportunities that the garnering of public support would confer on a politician; and the vulnerability of even the established politician and aristocrat to public mood. All these discoveries he would employ in great measure in the glorious political career that was to follow.

Cicero’s career as described here gives us an insight into the mind of the politician. It was said that Marcus Cicero never forgot a name, however small or unimportant the person was and that he would work his supporters during interactions “with a word here, a touch of the elbow there, a favoured glance indicating his recognition of the person even among a throng” — qualities that politicians even today are well advised to develop. Masterful oratory, another of Cicero’s strong attributes, was taken seriously by him. He would stay up all night preparing his speeches: “While the world sleeps, the orator paces around by lamplight, wondering what madness brought him to this occupation in the first place…. usually an hour or two after midnight — there comes a point where failing to turn up, feigning illness and hiding home seem to be the only realistic options. And then, somehow, under the pressure of panic, just as humiliation beckons, the parts cohere, and there it is: a speech. A second-rate orator now retires gratefully to bed. A Cicero stays up and commits it to memory.”

Fickleness in expectation and allegiance is another much criticised political attribute, and this, Cicero had in ample measure. When his favourite nephew and assistant “Lucius” confronts him on his defence of Fonteius, another politician who has been charged with crimes similar to Verres, he responds with characteristic political rhetoric “who are you or I to determine his guilt? It is a matter for the court to decide, not us. Or would you be a tyrant and deny him an advocate?” Indeed, even though this incident leads to the eventual withdrawal of Lucius from Cicero’s team, the loss of his valuable friendship and his eventual death, Cicero refuses to change his mind. After all, nothing defines political friendships greater than their “impermanence”. And when Tiro his slave and stenographer chances upon Cicero preparing to defend Fonteius, having realised that he was guilty as charged, he observes “He was not merely trying as a second-rate advocate might have done, to devise some clever tactic to outwit the prosecution. He was trying to find something he could believe in. That was the core of his genius, both as an advocate and as a statesman”.

Belief in causes

Indeed, this ability to “believe” in the cause one espouses, however antithetical to one’s political affiliations or past actions is the essence of political life even today. Politicians instinctively understand this, which is why they spout conflicting opinions with the greatest of conviction.

According to Cicero “What convinces is conviction. You simply must believe the argument you are advancing, otherwise you are lost. No chain of reasoning no matter how logical or elegant or brilliant will win the case if your audience senses that belief is missing”.

Cicero’s career, as detailed in this novel, is a wonderful example of careers in public life, culminating in his acceptance by the very aristocracy that rejected him. The battles and battlefields he chose constitute the stuff of legends and his oratory on these occasions had few parallels for its sheer brilliance. Indeed, the book is an elegant reminder that the mind of the consummate politician worldwide remains in many ways unchanged, through centuries. Although this book is a work of fiction, it draws upon 29 volumes of Cicero’s collected speeches and letters preserved in Loeb’s Classical Library and published by Harvard University Press. His extraordinary ambition, capacity for hard work, ability to see opportunity in adversity, perseverance, social and emotional intelligence, sagacity, oratorical skill and pragmatism, are well brought out here, and remain even today, the favoured attributes of the consummate politician. Most of all, the book reminds us that in the battlefield of public life, “both the pen and tongue are mightier than the sword”.

Peace Be On Him

The Prophet is a book of advice or consolation with a touch of pop philosophy that can lend itself to different interpretations.

The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran; Since it is now out of copyright different editions are available. This review is based on the illustrated Rupa edition, priced Rs. 60.

Shakespeare, who was “not of an age but for all time”, is the best selling poet of all time. Second is Lao-Tzu, the master of Taoist philosophy, infinitely enigmatic in its meanings and therefore attractive at all times. Third is the Leba nese poet Kahlil Gibran who owes his place in the trinity to just one book, The Prophet, a collection of 26 prose poems, delivered as sermons by a fictional wise man in a faraway place and time. Since its publication in 1923, The Prophet has sold nine million copies in America alone and many more in the rest of the world. What is the secret of its perennial fascination and above all, does it qualify to be a classic? That is, can it read again and again and will it appear different at every reading as a new book? The Prophet is a book for all seasons. Its words are recited at weddings and funerals; it is quoted in books and articles on training professions in narrow fields of specialisations; and in commercial ads for products of all kinds.

The Prophet is a character called Almustafa who gives advice on all matters like love, work, on joy and sorrow, and so forth. But there is an ambiguity in his counsels, in the manner of astrologers with their horoscopes with statements that are widely applicable. At times, Almustafa’s vagueness is such that you can’t figure out what he means. Look at them closely and you notice that he is saying something specific; namely, everything is something else. Freedom is slavery; waking is dreaming; belief is doubt; joy is pain; death is life. So, whatever you are doing, you needn’t worry. All this negation can be quite comforting when you are in trouble, which explains why it has been so widely accepted. They appeal not only by their seeming correction of conventional wisdom but more so by their hypnotic power, their negation of the rational process.

Prima facie, the book sounds religious which it is, in the sense that Gibran was familiar with the basic tenets of Buddhism, the Koran but above all with the Bible, in both its Arabic and King James translations. Many of the paradoxes are taken straight from the Sermon on the Mount but they are made simpler for 20th century readers who long for the comforts of religion but not the organised religion of any church, let alone the instructions of any deity on how to get through the slings and arrows of life. Very simply, The Prophet is comforting for people in doubt or in trouble because its central message is, “You are far, far greater than you know and All is well.”

This mix, with its emphasis on suffering, prophecy and the religion of love was the rock on which Gibran built his message. For instance, when people gathered around him and asked him for his final words of wisdom on the existential problems of life, all he says is that love involves suffering and that “your soul is a battlefield upon which your reason and your judgement wage war against your passion and your appetite.” And goes on to add: “Your reason and your passion are your rudder and the sails of your seafaring soul. If either your sails or your rudder be broken, you can but toss and drift, or be held at a standstill in midseas.”

The right balance

Gibran’s philosophy is against two extravagances: “To exclude reason, to admit only reason.” As he puts it, “for reason, ruling alone, is a force confining; and passion, unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction.” Therefore, he says, “let your soul exalt your reason to the height of passion, that it may sing; and let it direct your passion with reason, that your passion may live through its daily resurrection, and like a phoenix rise above its own ashes.” To put it in a nutshell, “you should rest in reason and move in passion.”

If you cut through the rhetoric, Gibran’s leading traits are clear — idealism, vagueness, sentimentality. This would be called “inspirational literature” (a genre that is hugely popular now) but it is also a book of advice or consolation with a touch of pop philosophy that can lend itself to different interpretations.

New meanings

This explains why it has always been in print since publication — every common reader can see different things in it and come back to it in times of trouble. Which is what makes it a classic by the conventional meaning of the word.

But there is more to its success than “chicken soup for the soul”, to borrow the title of a current bestseller of inspirational literature. It is short, less than 100 pages, a selling point not to be missed. And since the text is in sections you can dip into it here and there, as most people do with the Bible or religious tomes, which makes the book even shorter to go through.

The Road-Map

Mahfouz’s classic novel captures the existential choices at the juncture of transition from tradition to modernity.

Cairo Modern, Naguib Mahfouz, translated by William M. Hutchins, The American University in Cairo Press, p.242, $19.95.

Though Egypt has an age-old tradition of oral literary forms, the novel came of age in the modern era with the rise of literacy and the establishment of the printing press. The 19th century saw the rise of the intellectual classes and a period of fre edom from colonial rule. These developments resulted in a literary self confidence along with a nationalist spirit that gave impetus to the renaissance of creative arts with an inherent boldness of not shying from the avant garde and yet giving full importance to tradition. The amalgamation of antiquity and contemporaneity lent a singular dynamism to the literary arts of Egypt.

The people of Egypt stand at the juncture of transition when tradition is being replaced by modernity. Their various existential choices are skilfully woven into the plot of Mahfouz’s 1935 novel Cairo Modern which has been only recently translated from Classical Arabic. Through university students who are about to embark on their future careers, Mahfouz emphasises the varied interests of either following fundamentalist tenets laid by Islam which could present the grand solution to all social and political problems or the principles of August Comte and socialism which have the inherent potential for redeeming mankind. Mahgub Abd al-Da’im, the protagonist, follows the ideology of Nihilism, and is one of four friends who lay out their distinct and contrasting ways of defining their stance on life.

Corruption everywhere

Mahgub is inclined seriously to finally attain his degree, so essential for the upkeep of his family. But on completing his studies, he finds it impossible to get a job in a country where networking is all that matters. A well wisher gives him some practical advice: “Forget your qualifications. Don’t waste money on applying for a job. The question boils down to one thing: Do you have someone who will intercede for you? Are you related to someone in a position of power? Can you become engaged to the daughter of someone in the government? If you say yes, then accept my congratulations in advance. If you say no, then direct your energies elsewhere.”

Faced by abject poverty, Mahgub makes the difficult decision of marrying the mistress of a high official in exchange of a job. Fraudulent existence in a make-believe relationship smacks of the corruption of life in Cairo. Mahfouz, undoubtedly, is morally disturbed by such social conditions, but nothing can be done to save people like Mahgub who daily face the temptation of a wealthy life. Living in the opulent luxury of an apartment with a wife who in fact belongs to another man, he finally realises that “His marriage was a fraud. His life was a fraud. The whole world was a fraud.” The intense relationship that develops between the two overshadows Mahgub’s concern for his family.

His good days in such circumstance are short-lived as his fortune depends on the position of his wife’s lover. Though it is easy to feel sorry for anyone in Mahgub’s situation, one is surprised by his lack of concern for his family. The novel turns out to be a tragic picture of depravity and decadence leading to a deep reflection of a world where education and merit are inconsequential honours. One is left asking these questions in the end: What kind of people are these? Why is it that no meaningful relationships ever develop between these people? Life in modern Cairo becomes symbolic of world-weariness and uncertainty in an empty private world of frustrated energies too fragile to rise to any meaningful intellectual involvement. Nothing could be more mind-numbing.

The novel is a picture of insecure, unhappy people whose mental world rests tremulously on the edge of a neurosis. It is an apotheosis of material well being into an economic craving resulting in the collapse of human values and the gradual corruption of the spiritual hygiene once experienced in get-togethers while in the university.

Faithful portrayal

Though Mahfouz does not succeed in knitting the story of the protagonist with the lives of his three friends from his university days, the novel stands out as a convincing narrative of the archetypal Cairo with all its dreams of a prosperous and just society overwhelmed by contemporary decadence and loss of moral values. His Cairo Trilogy, along with the long delayed publishing of Cairo Modern, indicates his deep seated concern for modern Egypt and the social and political history of his land from “pharaonic Thebes to modern Cairo’s dark alleys” which lingers visibly in the background. Despite its many structural lapses, the novel depicts the conditions of corruption and protest that resulted in the 1952 revolution leading to a fervent spirit of nationalism in Egypt.

Reader discretion is needed

Unconvincing characters and a writing style that tells more than it shows — The Cambridge Curry Club doesn’t seem to get anything right.

The Cambridge Curry Club, Saumya Balsari, Blackamber Books, price not stated.

It’s the first paragraph that makes you blink — and then wish you could be rendered temporarily blind so you can be excused from further torture. I give you the opening of The Cambridge Curry Club:

The sly October wind tore through Cambridge, boldly lifting the prim skirt of the Junior Bursar as her court shoes, indignant at a male colleague’s promotion, clicked briskly through a college archway to meet the waiting porters and bedmakers.

The court shoes, apparently, have a life of their own.

Not being amongst God’s chosen few, you are not blinded but go on to find that there is no further mention of the bursar or her male colleague, or her shoes. This is an unexpected reticence on the author’s part, as she has no compunction in upending a boiling cauldron of enough characters to fill a phone directory on the reader’s unprotected head. Just when you think there can’t possibly be any more, a new man, another stereotype, the “rangy American”, then proceeds to spout the most unreal clap-trap in the history of brown girl-white dude lust dialogue when he meets Durga, the hip quotient in the Club. He moves in a stream of consciousness from “A smalltown boy who singed his soul…. I was Icarus…Arizona Turk’s Head,” leaving you dazed and confused.

The Cambridge Curry Club focuses on a group of disparate women in a charity shop called IndiaNeed. We are to think of it as “another in The Number 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency territory” and a “new direction in postcolonial literature”. There’s no need to insult the reader’s intelligence. You know the kind of women already, you’ve met them before in “The Jane Austen Book Club”, “Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants”, “Steel Magnolias”, take your pick. But in this curry of woes that make up lives, there is no nodding your head in empathy, there is only an uncontrollable urge to push the whole lot off a staggeringly perpendicular cliff. Perhaps because the writing is so unsympathetic, so literal, telling not showing. There is no one whom you sit up and notice. Not Mr. Chatterjee, who writes endless letters of complaint over trivialities and watches buxom neighbours reveal their cleavage; not Diana Wellington-Smythe who is as icy as her trysts; not any one of the women at the heart of darkness, IndiaNeed, ranging from hennaed Heera who meets a lost love and loses a closet homosexual husband, to Swarnakumari who will forever remain Indian in England.

Interchangeable

When Balsari introduces someone, she cannot help but give random, seemingly interchangeable details about them. A chance character, Dr. Sridhar, doesn’t escape from being sucked in either, although we do get a rather nice phrase from his wife who tried to commit suicide, failed and recovered “the calm of thin ice”.

There are other redeeming parts. When the elderly father of an English neighbour sees a rangoli as “what appeared to be a ghostly white Nazi swastika shining on the ground”. A war vet, he takes to his bed and can only point a trembling figure at the window when asked for an explanation. At least this is funny, whereas the final fiasco at IndiaNeed with a dead woman as mannequin doesn’t raise a ghost of a smile; one is obviously infected with Balsari’s style at this point. Or with Swarnakumari, who discovers spirituality to cope with her husband’s retirement, “Guru Ma was the equivalent of headphones”.

IndiaSpeak is right on the button, too. Barry says, “…..what do you think, just because you can fool your mother you can do the same with me?” Or the matchmaker’s “I have “n” number of boys lined up”.

Otherwise, there is an engineered serendipity, a facile marriage of words that cloy and annoy. Of Eileen, a maths teacher, who was dismissed after she crossed 60, Balsari writes “A number had been the final betrayal”. When husband Bob confesses he’s gay to Heera, “It was Adam who banished Eve from the Garden of Eden”. Anita who loved erasers and was soon to get busy “erasing a messy divorce”, Vivek who engineered matchboxes was “hardly going to set her alight”, you get the picture.

The author’s intention is clear: “Arre, c’mon….you enjoy this khichdi pot of life bubbling in here, don’t you?” is a line thrown in at IndiaNeed. They may, but we don’t.

You could draw out a character graph of the book but that would be too much work for too little returns.

Durga’s conclusion at the end of the novel is unashamedly cowardly, for instance. She will stay with her boorish husband (although the likelihood of the rangy American taking a role in her life is not entirely discounted). The fact that she thinks passion does not last and “wasn’t marriage about imperfections?” jars. Hell, no. Marriage is love, sublime sex, a meeting of minds and souls, anything less is not worth getting out of bed for. Durga’s pusillanimity is just that. There is nothing new to learn here.

If you are wondering what category this work falls under, I would suggest a new one: Why Bother. As for the readers? There is a boutique an hour from Cambridge whose name says it best: Past Caring.

Un-Solved Mystery

A book that does not take itself too seriously and gets most things about India right…

The Paradise Trail, Duncan Campbell, Headline Review, p.448, price not stated.

A sticker on the cover proclaimed “If you liked Shantaram you will love this!” I did not much care for Shantaram, but found The Paradise Trail by Duncan Campbell quite enjoyable. Fo r one, the book did not have the mixture of incredulous awe and condescending attitude that most western writers affect while setting their works in India. For another, Campbell seems a bit confused as to whether he should cubby-hole his book in any one particular genre. The narrative keeps on changing from being a study of human relationships to a murder mystery to a tribute to the era of flower children. In the hands of any other writer, this may sound like a perfect recipe for disaster, but somehow Campbell’s ability to meander from one character to another and one style to another becomes the book’s singular strength. Although this is his first novel, Campbell has written other non fiction books and that may explain his disdain for plot points.

Plenty of action

A lot of things happen in the book. It starts with a bunch of Western tourists in Calcutta on a shoe string budget in the early 1970s when India and Pakistan are at war. They stay in one of those seedy, rundown guesthouses situated in narrow lanes that mushroom off Chowringee and spend most of their time in activities like rolling a joint, getting their ears cleaned, composing songs and jingles about Hepatitis and sleeping with each other. They are soon joined by other, more focused, Westerners staying in the opulent Oberoi Grand to cover the war. Their paths cross followed by some more drinking, doping and love making. Overseeing this orgy of indulgence is the Indian landlord of the guest house who is an alumni of the London School of Economics but who spends his time playing cricket with his guests or spying on their possessions when they are not in their rooms. Two of the visitors are bumped off and everyone including the Police believes the murders are the handiwork of a serial killer but no one seems to be unduly perturbed. Even the victims appear to leave the world with beatific smiles on their face. The war of liberation of Bangladesh ends with the Indian victory but that does not seem to matter much in the scheme of things.

There are many books that place their protagonists in a journey that spans many decades but it’s difficult to think of any other that does it with such commendable ease. In a matter of a couple of chapters and a few pages we learn that the several characters have successfully negotiated more than 30 years of their lives. The Hippy has turned into the ultimate success story thanks to his juvenile lyrics, the woman passionately desired by at least three men in her youth is now in a committed relationship with another woman, the snob in a safari suit is an old bitter loser and the Indian landlord has migrated again. As far as the serial killer is concerned, the mystery is left for the reader to unravel. Suffice to say the denouement is quite Bollywood.

Nothing contrived

The Paradise Trail is not for students of serious literature nor would the book enjoy a pride of place in a mystery lover’s shelf. However, the refreshing thing about the book is that it does not take itself very seriously. There is nothing forced or contrived about the characters or the situations. They seamlessly float from one event to another and the reader goes along, a tad amused at the wealth of well researched anecdotes from the era that tumbles out. Like how the polite American audience applauded Ravi Shankar and his musicians when they were tuning their instruments for an inordinately long time because the harsh lights set up at the concert in New York to raise funds for the Bangladeshi refugees had affected them. They mistook the preparation to be a new raga that the master had devised. Another thing that the book has going for it are the pithy dialogues that sparkle with wit and humour. The writer gets most things right about India and that is rare for someone from the West.

The Paradise Trail is the sort of a companion you look forward to in a long flight.

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