Interview in The Hindu Metroplus with Baradwaj Rangan

There’s something entirely appropriate about the lassi that Meena Kandasamy orders one April afternoon. It isn’t just that a merciless sun is beating down upon us, sneaking up even in the shade we’ve settled into. It’s also the rage bubbling beneath the surface of her small frame, threatening to erupt any instant. She needs that lassi like the Fukushima facility needs coolant. She also needs her poetry. “You don’t know how it heals you, but it heals you,” she says. “It helps you channelise your anger.”

Looking at this young woman, all of 26, exuding a gypsy-beauty in jeans and a light top matching her purplish earrings and a cotton stole thrown casually around her shoulders, you wouldn’t know she needs healing. But she insists it’s not about personal healing. “I think society needs healing. Something like the caste system is society wounding itself. Every time you accept your superiority it’s because you don’t want to be wounded in some way, and you have at least this one thing to be proud about. But to feel proud, you go and hurt somebody else. This is the cycle.”

She enumerates the other ways in which society wounds itself — with domestic violence, with child sexual abuse, with the hatred around us. “These are all things that need healing.” At her most excited, her sentences wrap around an ascending series of notes that makes it appear that she’s the one asking the questions.

Sometime after school, Meena began volunteering with the Dalit Media Network. She says it wasn’t just empathy that made her interested in Dalit causes. “It’s also about being very shrewd and looking at the fault lines. You go to the OBC leaders, and they are very proud of the fact that they are OBCs. They hate Brahmins, and yet they are not accepting of Dalits.”

It was someone similar, a Nobel-winning non-accepter of Dalits, who spurred Meena’s foray into journalism. “When I read Naipaul, he came across as really slum-o-phobic. He says crazy things about the caste system. How did this guy get the Nobel Prize? That’s how I wrote my first article, ‘Casteist. Communalist. Racist. And Now, A Nobel Laureate’.”

A different writer who made news around the same time elicits an altogether different reaction. Talking about Arundhati Roy, Meena positively coos with admiration, seeming for the first time the girl-woman her age would seem to indicate. “All of a sudden, it was a post-Arundhati Roy world. After her Booker happened, it became a cool thing for girls to want to write.” She says she can still reel off sentences from The God of Small Things, and she does. “Biology designed the dance. Terror timed it.” That’s a good sentence, I say. She agrees.

Meena is currently writing her first novel — The Gypsy Goddess, inspired by her ancestral deity Kurathi Amman — but her early attempts at the form were abandoned hastily. “A novel is not something you can write at 17. You can write excellent first chapters, but beyond that do you really want to stay with those people?”

Ultra-sensitive

Poetry, she says, is more convenient. “It’s not unwieldy and large.” Meena started writing her own poetry at 17. Her first poem was about a sex worker. “I don’t know why I wrote this kind of poem. I think it’s a lot of reading feminist literature and things like that.” I ask her if she remembers what triggered this sudden outburst of poetry. She laughs and says, “I think things just started because I’m ultra-sensitive.” She sobers up. “I don’t know. I think I’m a deeply disturbed, deeply angry person.”

Her favourite poem is Mulligatawny Dreams, in which she dreams of an English language that “shall tire a white man’s tongue” and where “small children practice with smooth round pebbles in their mouth to the spell the right zha.”

With so many poems published, with so much fame at such a young age, I wonder if she’s finally happy, if her writing has finally healed her wounds and alleviated her anger. She thinks for a moment and says, “I’m not sure what happy means. When I feel happy, I feel empty. It’s a crazy situation. Misery is a very solid emotion. You can hold on to it and cry. But happiness, you can let go of it. You don’t know where it went. Misery, you can save it and keep it and…” I suggest, “Make poems out of it?” She laughs, “Yeah. It’s very nice to be melancholic and miserable.”

I conclude that she’s a Romantic at heart, a Byronic heroine even, completely at odds with the activist persona that prompts people like me to meet her. She should be writing about lost lovers amidst swooning sunsets. She laughs again.

“I never imagined this kind of success,” she says. “It’s really success. There’s no other way to put it.” I ask if she’s really honest about herself, the way artists are supposed to be in the pursuit of great art. For the first time during the interview, she plays cute. “Am I allowed to lie?” she asks. And then she says, “Of course I’m honest.”

My review of Naguib Mahfouz’s ARABIAN NIGHTS AND DAYS in Monday’s EdEx

Read the official online version here.

ARABIAN NIGHTS AND DAYS
By Naguib Mahfouz,
Translated into English by Denys Johnson-Davies
Doubleday, 1995, pp.229, $22.95

In this stunning retelling of the classic Thousand and One Nights, Naguib Mahfouz succeeds in recasting the novel in an exotic, Arabic form. Set in an unnamed, ancient Islamic city of the medieval times, this book resonates with the politics of the contemporary world. As in the original, these stories are narrated by Shahrzad who fears being put to death by sultan Shahriyar who has sent several hundreds of young virgins to the gallows.

Inhabited by genies who plot mischief and plod their victims to commit murder, the series of inter-connected short-stories revel in magic realism. The cycle of bloodshed begins when Saanan the merchant is tricked by two trouble-making genies, Qumqam and Singam, to kill the corrupt governor of the city. He is put to death and his family is reduced to penury. More misfortunes follow, and the book is filled with mysterious murders which the police cannot solve. The trials of those people accused of these crimes provide the public with material for gossip and unlimited entertainment, but when it comes to light that the innocent have been sentenced to death, it leads to simmering discontent. The subjects are no longer satisfied with the ruler.

In order to solve this problem, the sultan, his minister and the clown put on various garbs and roam the streets at night gathering real information that seldom reaches royal ears. This leads to several riveting episodes which form the basis for about half-a-dozen short-stories.

In the story of Anees-al-Galees, a cunning genie take on the form of an enchantress, mesmerizes the most powerful men of that land (including the sultan) and ultimately humiliates all of them by robbing them of their clothes and making them walk back to their own homes in stark nakedness.

The characterization is contemporary: the women are more strong-willed than the men; a madman acts as the voice of conscience; the bloodthirsty sultan regrets his style of functioning, sets on the path of reform and grows increasingly despondent; religious fundamentalists keep conspiring against the regime.

The alternate endings presented in Arabian Nights and Days vary between the hilarious and the tragic, so we find Shahrazad’s sister Dunyazad eloping with Nur Al-Din, a perfume-seller; sailor Sindbad spouting Sufi wisdom; and Magic-lamp-and-flying-carpet Aladdin, famous for his happily-ever-after story, brutally executed on trumped-up charges.

Mahfouz writes like no other about the world of the living, the dead and the living-dead. First published in 1982 in Arabic, this novel is simultaneously shaped as a call to conscience and as a submissiveness to fate. It easily opens up to many layers of interpretation. It is a novel that’s wise without trying to be clever; and filled with prose where the dialogues are poetic, the descriptions haunting.

//

Review of Yashpal’s Divya in today’s New Indian Express

First published in The New Indian Express. Official weblink is here.

When it was first published in 1945, Yashpal’s novel Divya created a furore because of its unconventional portrayal of women and their quest for independence. Although it is tame enough for our times, the book remains enigmatic as ever since it sets out by envisioning the prostitute as a liberated woman. Set in a time-period when the clash between Buddhism and Brahminism was at its peak, the novel probes the roots of slavery and the plight of women, thus providing insight into the personal and political nature of bondage.

Born in a Brahmin family, the enchanting Divya is the great-granddaughter of the Chief Justice of the Republic of Madra. She falls in love with Prithusen, the son of a former slave, who is also the best swordsman in the kingdom. As in works of fiction (and unlike in almost all of real life), pregnancy follows a single night of love-making, and Divya hides the signs of a new life growing inside her as she awaits the return of Prithusen. He emerges successful in the war, and in warding off the Brahmins who seek to annex the Sagal territory, but spurns Divya on the advice of his father who is keen to get him married to Seero, granddaughter of the President of the Republic, since that would ensure him a better place in the echelons of power.

Her pregnancy, which should have possibly been an occasion for celebration becomes the cause for censure, and Divya leaves the kingdom. Unable to come to terms with that shame, her great-grandfather dies. Sold to a slave trader, she becomes a wet-nurse, and later, flees in order to join the monastic order, but they refuse to allow her since she does not have a father, husband, son or master who can grant her permission. Saved by the generous courtesan Devi Ratnapraba, she’s rescued from slavery of one kind, and inducted into slavery of another.

In her new avatar as the dancer Anshumala, her fame is unparalleled. However, she also realises that merely by becoming the mistress of her own body, a woman cannot become the mistress of her destiny. She returns to Sagal on the invitation of her former guru Devi Mallika, but is once again ostracised by caste society. Rudhradhir, the Brahmin who has now taken over the kingdom asks her to be his wife, arguing that a high-born girl can never be the state’s chief courtesan. Divya turns down his offer. Prithusen, now a Bhikku offers to take her into the monastic order, but she refuses to enter it too, and the novel ends in a conventional manner.

This trajectory of a woman’s life is used to explore the social maladies prevalent in India at that time. As a revolutionary freedom fighter, Yashpal subtly and shrewdly argues for the necessity for transcending caste divisions and empowering women. Even though it is envisaged for personal purposes, this urgent yearning for an egalitarian society by one sensual, spirited woman enables Divya to assume a realness which is neither maudlin or superficial. Such a nuanced construction renders the novel eminently readable.

Book Review: Sam’s Story by Elmo Jayawardene

(First published in The New Indian Express, 02 August 2009.)

Sam is poor, Sinhalese, and a servant in the Master’s River House. His only best friend is the owners’ dog Brutus. Sam is someone who can never figure out what a problem is, someone who doesn’t know why people cry. He has never learnt anything, not even how to write his name. He is a village idiot who doesn’t know what breasts are, but then, surprisingly, he knows about the Tamil militants.

Employing the first person narrative throughout the text, Sam’s Story succeeds in its attempt to imitate the raw, sparse prose style of Hemingway — the stark simplicity blends with the irreverence and dumbness of the protagonist, and the sudden shifts of action make for an aesthetic reading experience. But the story-telling embeds a clear-cut political agenda and is nowhere as remarkable as the superficially successful prose-style.

Sam’s Story, first published in 2001, painstakingly avoids even a single oblique reference to Tamil suffering on the island. Perhaps, it is left for us to infer that just as the stupid Sam is incapable of looking at reality, even to the minimum extent of noticing that Tamils are being discriminated against, people too refuse to accept that linguistic and racial chauvinism have wrought a climate of hatred on the island.

Most of the novel is a successful study in hate: the narrator prefixes everything about the Tamil language, people or culture with the word “stupid” and goes little beyond depicting Tamil people as those “who threw bombs and killed our soldiers and tried to divide our country”.

After more than 100 pages of a monotonous rant, we are privy to the picture on the other side, of how the Sri Lankan military is also a convoluted place to be. Perhaps, this is one way of striking a balance and attempting neutrality, although the damage is already done; no amount of salvaging can help the text.

The depiction of the brutalities of army life begin when Sam talks of his brother Jaya who’s killed-in-action, and his brother Madiya who deserts the armed forces. From this point forward, the book changes vastly in tone and treatment. Madiya, in his brief stopover at his home (after his desertion, and before going into hiding) explains the poverty draft and the meaninglessness of the war.

Against this backdrop, Jayawardene explores how poor people, bereft of all opportunities, send their children to war; and how they make do without food and medicine whereas a rich man’s dog gets immediate access to the best doctors and a stream of visitors inquiring about its health. He writes of this divided world where the political ‘punishment’ for a Sinhalase man campaigning for the Other Party involves being transferred to teach at a faraway Tamil school.

Sam’s lives his life in a climate of mutual hatred, and he instinctively distrusts the Tamil servants at River House. While Sam tolerates the housekeeper Janet, he resents the cook Leandro, who, with his talk of Eelam, divides the world into easy binaries — the people who are willing to kill (The Army) and the people who were willing to die (The Tigers).

Sam’s suspicion of Tamils extends to everybody: he thinks Velu, a servant in a nearby bungalow is a spy; and he doesn’t appreciate that Master’s son has found himself a Tamil girlfriend. The fatal climax, replete with a truck-bomb driving into a national bank, throws them all apart, and widens the rift to such an extent that any coming together seems fraught with impossibility.

Flowers of Violence: Review of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Thing Around Your Neck

With her latest book The Thing Around Your Neck, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who won the Orange Prize for Fiction for her novel Half of a Yellow Sun, proves that she is much more powerful on the rigorous terrain of the short-story. Hailed by Chinua Achebe as a “writer endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers,” Adichie leaves an indelible mark through her first foray into short fiction. Seven of the dozen unlinked, stand-alone short stories in this collection are set in a turbulent Nigeria whose crime and corruption she describes with detachment.

Set in the University of Nigeria campus at Nsukka, “Cell One”, is a young girl’s tender retelling of the story of her handsome brother Nnamabia’s arrest and subsequent release. Without screaming for attention, it also offers an insight into college cult warfare, police excesses and custodial deaths. In “A Private Experience”, Chika, an Igbo Christian medical student is herded into safety by a poor Hauza Muslim woman even as a violent regional-religious riot is on. Three hours later, both these women — who discover friendship and faith — return to a city full of charred bodies and unsure of the fate of their loved ones.

The mindless violence that haunts Nigeria is a theme that Adichie often revisits. A young asylum seeker in “American Embassy” refuses to hawk the story of her son being shot dead by government agents in order to keep her dignity intact. The most engaging story in this collection, “Tomorrow is Too Far”, is set in the amoral world of children where sibling rivalry leads to the young Nonso’s death.

In “Ghosts”, the despondent survivors of the January 1970 war, torn

between alienation and allegiance, share their memories even as they carry with them the weight of what could have been: Biafra, the nascent nation that

no longer exists. This short-story preceded the publication of her celebrated novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, which dealt with genocide and starvation in Biafra even as it explored how the Nigerian nation never allowed its peoples to break away but brutally forced them to stay together in submission.

Unlike the ideological rigidity that characterises states, Adichie portrays the family as a fluctuating unit that is free to fracture. Certain shared facets of her stories don’t evade notice — for instance, all (but one) of the protagonists are young Nigerian women. And, all the men, invariably, inexcusably, cheat. Therefore, when some of the stories delve into the multiple crises of married life in an alien land, there is nothing intriguing or puzzling about what the men will do. Women, on the other hand, hold the answers. They take the decisions that really count.

“Imitation” is the story of a middle-aged Nigerian wife who finds her voice when she has lost her space. When Nkem discovers that her husband has installed his young mistress at their Lagos home, she decides to leave the comfort of America in order to secure her marriage. Nkem’s rage, though legitimate, is more a reaction that springs from her own experience as mistress to married men than from harbouring tragic illusions.

“The Arrangers of Marriage” echoes Indian Diaspora writing as it brings out the series of shams that constitute any arranged marriage. Here, Adichie makes inroads in understanding an immigrant’s efforts to merge with the mainstream at the cost of his identity: Ofodile Emeka Udenna names himself Dave Bell, conveniently opts for a visa marriage with an American, and orders his African wife to forget Igbo language and food.

Adichie probes into same-sex love in two stories, “The Shivering” and “On Monday of Last Week”; but the doomed endings are disappointing, and sound almost as if the protagonists were punished for daring to love differently.

By dwelling on lesbian desire and the female body, “On Monday of Last Week” stands a great chance to be a influential story, but our hopes are dashed when we learn that artist Tracy was merely ‘flirting’ when she kept asking Kamara to pose in the nude. “The Shivering”, a story set in the Princeton University, follows the lives of Chinedu and Ukamaka who miss the obvious future by carrying the burden of past loves.

Once out of Nigeria, and in America, people enter into relationships that would never have been possible back home: an upper middle-class girl befriends an impoverished gay driver, a domestic help turns into a rich wife’s confidant and best friend, a waitress finds a college-going boyfriend, and a university-educated woman becomes a babysitter. The Thing Around Your Neck experiments with the second-person narrative to depict how the American dream is rendered meaningless for Anukka when she realises that most of the population in USA adopts either a curious, or a condescending attitude towards her.

Switching between dualities with ease, Adichie repeatedly returns to her preoccupation with cultural encounters. The mischievous and tightly-crafted “Jumping Monkey Hill” explores prejudices, subtle racism and attempts to define the Other that occur over a two-week long writing workshop. A British Africanist has the self-righteous superiority to tell a group of young African writers what constitutes “an African story.” Significantly, this story-within-a-story mentions no workshop participant by name, preferring to refer to them by their nationalities such as Ugandan, Kenyan, Tanzanian and Senegalese and so on.

She takes off from where she left in her debut novel Purple Hibiscus by using these short stories to explore how Christianity and colonisation succeed in demonising native traditions. In “The Headstrong Historian”, we come across Nigerians who have been conditioned by Christian education to disregard their own culture. Nwamgba’s soul is crushed when her son becomes a priest and treats her contemptuously as a pagan, but she is avenged when her grand-daughter Grace renames herself with Afamefuna (“My Name Will Not Be Lost”) and writes about the lost and undocumented history of the African peoples.

It is evident that Adichie subscribes to the show-don’t-tell school of story-telling, but sometimes she goes a little overboard with the symbolism. But for this slightly irritating flaw, there is no fantastic chutneyfication of language, no bombastic driving-the-reader-to-a-dictionary. Armed with broad strokes and a straightforward style, Adichie subverts on other levels.

Her critique spans continents, her stories flit across timeframes but throughout the book, she maintains the restraint of an oracle, never wasting a single word, never sitting in judgment.

It’s turned out to be something of an Adichie festival because the publisher has taken advantage of the opportunity to make available reprints of two earlier works, Purple Hibiscus and the award-winning  Half of a Yellow Sun. Both are ideal candidates for re-reading and enjoying again the world that she has created with her carefully crafted words.

(Published in the New Sunday Express, i.witness, 12 July 2009)

Eat, Drink, Man, Woman

Reproduced from Tehelka.com

MEENA KANDASWAMY has an electric effect on rooms when she reads her poetry. The erotic content quite apart, the juxtaposition of her highly femme persona and the tartness of her observations always charges the atmosphere.

The late Kamala Das wrote the foreword to Touch, the collection of poetry Kandaswamy published at age 23. ‘Love and its politics inform my poetry. Caste atrocities happen most frequently because of intercaste love affairs.” A happy denizen of the Internet, 25-year-old Kandaswamy’s first short story The Suicide’s Inbox was the perverse unfolding of a correspondence between two women.

The daughter of a Tamil professor and a Maths professor at IIT, Meena has been always aware that even PhDs are not invincible armour. She chose to pursue a degree privately. “I knew I would not rest quietly if I had to suffer the usual caste slurs in college. Such a waste of time.”

Kandaswamy pins her dalit identity on the act of rebelling against any kind of oppression. She describes what it is like to live in a state with powerful dalit movements going back to the legendary Nandanar, who died claiming his right to worship Shiva: “Discrimination is sophisticated. Once a day — I’m not exaggerating — once a day someone will ask me whether I am vegetarian to figure out whether I am Brahmin.”

She avidly follows the media’s handling of dalit public figures. ‘People say dalits smell but when dalits stand for elections people say that suchand- such dalit’s perfume was expensive.” She has funny stories about the liberals left as well. “People exoticise our ‘sexual freedom’ as if dalits live in a nudist colony. I once met the editor of a left-leaning national newspaper. He told someone to verify if I was a dalit since I spoke English well.”

Kandaswamy says she wrestles daily with the biases of language in her writing, her PhD thesis and her rapacious translation of Tamil literature. She teaches English in a college. She blogs about local politics but is writing a novel set far from Tamil Nadu. Is this the life she dreamt of? “I dream of too many lives,” she replies.

NISHA SUSAN

From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 6, Issue 24, Dated Jun 20, 2009

Review of THE WATCHMAKER by NANAK SINGH

(First published in The New Sunday Express, June 6 2009)

The Watchmaker
Nanak Singh (Translated from the Punjabi original by Navdeep Suri)
Publisher: Penguin
Pages: 192
Price: Rs. 250

First published in 1942, Nanak Singh’s Punjabi novel Pavitra Paapi (Saintly Sinner) subsequently won a Sahitya Akademi Award, and was also made into a Hindi film. Translated into English by the author’s grandson Navdeep Suri, The Watchmaker is a timeless classic of doomed and unconsummated love. Rendered in another tongue with enormous sensitivity, this novel retains the earthy metaphors of the Punjabi original.

Set in the cities of Amritsar and Rawalpindi in the 1930s, it traces the story of an ill-fated young man Kedar Nath. When he desperately joins work as a watchmaker under the parsimonious Attar Singh, little does he realize that another family has lost its only breadwinner. Panna Lal, grievously in debt, goes to work one day and learns that he has been sacked from his position as the shop’s accountant and Kedar, armed with the knowledge of repairing watches has been hired as the new replacement. Panna Lal walks away casting the last accusatory glance at Kedar.

When Panna Lal’s children come looking for him, Kedar is plagued by guilt. Afraid of saying the unpalatable truth, he invents the comfortable lie that Attar Singh has sent their father to Bombay on business. He visits their home, and on their advice, takes lodging nearby. Soon, he is exposed to the dire straits of their family: the increasing debts, the young mother Maya looking after four children, the marriage arrangements of the eldest daughter Veena that have been suspended for want of money and so on. Kedar starts shouldering all the responsibilities of running their family and repaying the various debts. In order to account for Panna Lal’s absence and to keep up a lie of such a magnitude, Kedar (writes and) reads a weekly letter (purportedly from Panna Lal) to the family and manages to satisfy them about his whereabouts.

It is not just a story of a young man playing good samaritan by weaving a litany of lies. Quite naturally, Kedar falls in love with the beautiful Veena, and is torn between pursuing his romantic interests and answering his gnawing conscience (which in true Indian fashion reminds him that he is like a brother to her, and that it is a sin to break such trust). The pleasure of watching Veena gives him the necessary emotional sustenance to bear the crushing poverty which he has called upon himself. With nothing but bitter black tea to sustain him, Kedar wrecks his health working hard to settle Panna Lal’s debts. He then convinces Maya to make all arrangements for Veena’s marriage to another man.

Veena sends for Kedar the night before her wedding and confronts him, however, it is too late for the lovers to change their entangled fate. Doomed in love, the young lovers seek their deaths in diverse ways.

Navdeep Suri’s translation preserves a poetic narrative style of an earlier era, a style that doesn’t show and tell, but only hints and implies. The unpretentious novel subtly questions societal norms and deals with the eternally hazy divisions that separate love and duty and sacrifice. In the end, it is also a story of a watchmaker whose Time has gone all wrong. This embattled love-story, replete with a tragic ending, has an universal appeal.

In Conversation With Rana Dasgupta

(First published in i.witness, The New Sunday Express on 26 April 2009. And I, as usual, was too caught up with too many things.. so I could not put it up.)

With an iron-fist-in-velvet-glove approach, Rana Dasgupta’s Solo is about people who had to live through painful and pointless political projects, says Meena Kandasamy. This place is chaotic,” Rana Dasgupta complains even before we settle down to talk about his latest novel, Solo. At Chennai’s Landmark bookstore, where his publishers have spared him for half an hour, little children run around us, and some staff are sweeping the bookstore. His observation is sharp, but cloaked in that soft voice, it could be mistaken for a compliment.

This iron-fist-in-velvet-glove approach pervades his writing. That is why, even though preservation of culture is an overarching theme in Solo, its dangers are accorded greater importance. “There is a difference between the attempts of an individual to find out what links their lives, and the attempts of a state or political party to impose a cultural homogeneity on people,” he says. “The protagonist in my book is in fact suffering at the hands of people in this category, and he’s forced into losing his culture in the name of a big political project.”

Speaking of “corrective history”, Dasgupta says the times we are living in make sense only through history. “I wanted to write a book in which the present is linked to a long past through the life of one character, the 100-year-old Ulrich.”

In that sense, Solo is essentially an alternative history of what is called the Anglo-American century. “The 20th century is shown as the American century, but I wanted to tell the story of people for whom the 20th century was quite meaningless, haphazard and full of pointless political projects that caused them quite a lot of pain.” Is that why the protagonist Ulrich takes shelter in daydreams, the only redeeming feature of his life? “No, to me Ulrich is like a novelist. On one level, Solo is an examination of how elements of life become mutated into fiction.”

I wonder why Solo was not set in India, given that Dasgupta has told a universal story. “Are you worried that a honest novel about India would face too much criticism?” I ask He pins down the emergence of such criticism to a “particular kind of psychological sensitivity in India that ridiculously claims that there is no poverty or violence in the country.”

That leads to the inevitable question, whether he will write a novel set in India. Dasgupta says he is keen to do so, but it will be non-fiction since the reality of this country is complete in itself. “The reality is so stark and intense that just reporting on it, as it is, is enough.”

He points out that he wrote about Bulgaria in Solo because he was bored with big countries that were full of arrogance and self-importance.

Likewise, he wrote about a doomed man’s life because he was bored by the success stories that surrounded him.

Now I understand why he writes about people outside the social system, such as the gypsies. He says he finds them fascinating since they refuse to allow an “identity” to be given to them from outside.

“I am like that,” he admits, “I refuse to be categorised.”

Book Review: Family Values by Abha Dawesar

(Both this review, and the following interview with the author were first published in i.witness, The New Sunday Express last Sunday)

SOME HOME TRUTHS ABOUT RELATIONSHIPS

With a plucky, precocious little boy as its protagonist, Family Values delivers some home truths about the illnesses that pervade Indian society. Narrated from the point of view of a child living a queasy, claustrophobic existence in an one-room house where his doctor parents practice, it simultaneously exposes the feuds that run within an urban family, and fraudulence that runs through the country’s administrative machinery.

Even as the little boy strives hard to strike friends at school and struggles for space in his home, he finds himself lost in the large-scale drama that enters his lacklustre life. His parents plan to expand their practice by buying a new clinic, so they drag him along on their visits to bank managers, lawyers, policemen, architects and astrologers.

Soon, the boy (who has so far entertained others only by names-dropping clinical conditions and talking about female monthlies) starts coming up with some shrewd observations. Meanwhile, there’s plenty going on in their extended family: his paternal uncles Psoriasis, Paget, Sugar Mills, Six Fingers, Poop and aunts Self-Sacrificing Sister and Pariah set out to find a bridegroom for his cousin briefly setting aside their squabbles for a share in grandfather’s property.

The novelist has painted a doomed story of sons who turn against their own fathers and grandsons who go astray choosing guilty pleasures — Sugar Mills’ son Flunkie Junkie is on the road to ruin with his drug addiction, Six Fingers’ son is a local hoodlum. Interspersed with this narrative are disturbing stories of missing children and multiple organ-theft at the Milkwoman’s nearby slum, the kidnap of an industrialist’s kid at the boy’s school and several instances of the police brutalising the poor.

In the risky intersections where the individual-and-the-particular meets the universal, we learn of a model-bartender being shot to death in a shady pub owned by an arms-dealer who has links to the ruling family who use their influence with the police to get the children-eating cannibals of a Delhi suburb get away scot free.

The boy’s family can’t condone these clu­msy happenings not only because it is all over the papers, but also because this arms dealer in question is the illegitimate father of the boy’s female cousin who is getting married. It is a mean and miserable world alright, but Abha Dawesar shows us that it is a small world too.

Unlike the characters who bear weird nicknames, the capital city, its streets and its suburbs are left unnamed and the author succeeds in her refusal to be specific. However, the novel’s monotonous and sparse prose style is capable of eclipsing the meticulous effort that has gone into producing it. One has to acknowledge that the slack-and-straightforward storyline, and the many stylistic innovations, successfully serve to maintain a small boy’s point-of-view.

This novel may take a great deal of time to read but to the novelist’s credit, forgetting its insolent (or in other cases, innocent) character-cast will take even longer.

In a society where it’s taboo to talk ill of family and an act of transgression to question its role as an institution of economic and emotional exploitation, Dawesar has displayed enormous gumption in spilling the beans about this constantly glorified system. Her clear and compelling voice will provoke any reader to have a fresh look at the so-called “family values” that are zealously upheld, but never lived up to.

INTERVIEW WITH ABHA DAWESAR

Why are men, women and children in your novel identified only by their quirks, deformities or excesses? For a novel where everything has been penned down in microscopic detail, why this decision to name no names, but only stick to epithets?

The first few pages came out that way and it made intrinsic sense to me. The boy is exposed to the adult entourage of his parents but he doesn’t necessarily know a lot about the individuals who are familiar to him. At least not in the sense that adults know about one another; instead he has an impression of them based on a fact or a characteristic he’s heard of. Once I decided to name the characters this way, it would have been jarring to have the city or its streets named either. The other day one of my cousins told me that his son refers to me as Macy’s bua because the last time they were in NY we had been to the department store and that’s stuck with him. It’s the way one looks at the world at that age. The microscopic details goes with the book, I don’t think that the book could hang together without them.

The story is seen from the point of view of a small boy. It is written in the present tense (which is too tiring at times). It shies away from using quotation marks, or dates. Much of the story actually revolves around the use of the family toilet, and personal histories are often little more than medical conditions. Why did you choose to deliberately overthrow aesthetic considerations?

There is a rigorous anti-aesthetic that informs every page of the book. It is the only kind of style that makes sense for the book. In all my work, style and content have been very closely wrapped together because I don’t separate form and content. The humour in the book too is very measured. It would have been possible and even easy to write this same story with a splash of colour that made it all entertaining and palatable and let the reader and the writer glibly sidestep any inconvenient questions that arose about the nature of our complicity in this system. That’s not the kind of book I wanted to write. The exigencies of writing in the present tense were a challenge as were the lack of quotation marks. Since neither was intended to be confusing I had to work through several drafts of the book. I learned a lot more about writing from this book than from all my other novels put together though many readers who were attracted to the more classic style of That Summer in Paris might find Family Values distilled and stark in comparison. But the book, not just in its content but also through the way it is written demands pause.

Babyji, about a desi Lolita, was so different in tone and theme compared to‚ Family Values. Why did you choose such a conventional storyline for your fourth book?

I disagree. The other day one of my editors in Delhi said Family Values was more subversive than any of my other books and I think he is right. It is an unflattering portrait of ourselves and asks about what is broken in our world. On another note, I think Family Values is as visceral as Babyji was sensual; I am talking here about disease and health in which are metaphors for the illness and health of our society but which are treated close to the ground and pinned to the flesh.

Sometimes the family is portrayed as a bunch of scheming siblings, at other times, it is the only saving grace and support system. As a woman, and as a writer, what is your opinion on the institution of family?

I think we are in the habit of glorifying the institution all too easily and as a writer my job is to burrow underneath the convenient notions of family values we like to pay lip service to. Family can be claustrophobic and it can stifle the personal desires of its individuals. It can also step up to support an individual in times of distress. There is a constant tension between these roles and we see the boy’s parents, the doctors negotiating these tensions. There is also another consequence of family ties that is deeply buried in the book the love of one’s own has consequences for a nation and its health. It is the root of partiality and nepotism and therefore injustice; the boy’s mother tells him this. Both the other boys in the family, Flunkie Junkie and Cousin are protected by their parents when they do wrong things.

The large-scale effect of this sort of partiality is to promote injustice and contribute to the larger scale problems we see in the book.

The fictionalised accounts of the Nithari killings, the model-bartender being shot to death, the arms deal scandal: events that have rocked the national capital dictate the fate of the boy’s family. Why did you take the decision to play with history and therefore flatten out the timeline of these events to fit just a few years in the boy’s life?

To an extent these events have become types of events, events we probably have seen before the ones this particular book is echoing and some of which we might see again in some form. The corruption scandals, I think no one needs convincing, are repetitive though they may repeat on larger or smaller scales, in state capitals or the national one. The time scale is fictionalised because the book is a work of fiction and as a novelist I am not interested in writing a journalistic account of the events but rather hearkening to what is in our common national consciousness. All that said, the nature of the horror and the injustice in the book are real. That, much to our shame, is not fictional.

Signs of friction and fissures: A review of “Cutting for Stone”

 

Cutting for Stone
By Abraham Verghese
Publisher: Random House
Pages: 541
Price: Rs 595.

Marion Stone, son of Sister Mary Joseph, an Indian nurse-nun and Thomas Stone, a British surgeon tells the story of his life for the sake of his conjoined twin brother Shiva. Born in Missing Hospital in Addis Ababa where his parents worked, Marion and his twin come into this world as abandoned children: their mother died in childbirth, their father vanished without a trace. Brought up by two of the hospital’s doctors Hema and Ghosh (who eventually marry), the twins share a special bond with each other.

But growing up involves growing apart, and soon their relationship experiences the first signs of friction and fissures. A love triangle involving their childhood sweetheart Genet, and Shiva’s betrayal of Marion changes their lives forever. Genet is punished by having her clitoris cut off and her mother Rosina commits suicide soon after. Marion’s foster-mother Hema holds him responsible for the tragic course of events, and he refuses to even defend himself.

In the midst of family melodrama, Verghese has portrayed how the social context of Ethiopia on the brink of a revolution affects the life of every character. Whether it is Marion’s harrowing experience with a man from the army, or Ghosh’s imprisonment, the skill of story-telling shines through. Genet’s proximity with Eritrean liberation fighters gets her involved in the hijack of an Ethiopian Airlines plane. As her close friend, Marion finds himself in the middle of a muddle not of his own making, and is left with no other option but to flee Ethiopia. Normalcy continues to elude this novel; Marion, as the intern in an understaffed Bronx hospital, gets to meet Thomas Stone, his biological father. He demands details of the letter that Sister Mary Joseph wrote to him on her dying day, but his father is as unaware of its existence as he is. Disappointed, he seeks out Genet (who has also sought refuge in America) and fulfils his promise of “losing his virginity” to her. In return he is infected by the deadly hepatitis virus. On the verge of death, his life depends on the generosity of two people whom he reviles the most: his twin-brother and his father. An astonishing climax is played out at the end of this epic saga. In terms of themes, Cutting for Stone shares a great deal with John Irving’s novels: a main character searching out an absent parent, severing and amputation of body parts, deadly accidents, prostitutes with STDs, and sexual relationships between young men and older women.

Though they lend a peculiar charm and impart wisdom, the many lengthy digressions hinder the narrative flow. One can also harbour valid objections to the representation of almost all African women as easily “available”. In this novel, such generalisation perpetuates an oppressive stereotype. Despite these limitations, this novel about suffering and healing, love and redemption succeeds in leaving an indelible impression.

Interview with Dr.Abraham Verghese

First published in The New Indian Express, i.witness. Read the official, online version here. 

Why did you choose Ethiopia and not any of the regular places that mark diaspora fiction?

I chose Ethiopia for the simple reason that I was born there and spent my childhood there, so I was following the old adage of “write what you know.” I knew the geography well, and it is a land I always thought was easily stereotyped and therefore as a writer if you succeeded in showing the true diversity and richness of life there, you could surprise a reader.

Reading your novel, I was reminded of John Irving. Is he an inspiration?

He and his kind of storytelling certainly inspires me, as does Gunter Grass, Marquez, or reaching back further Dickens, Tolstoy and others. I am partial to the epic and multi generational story — a life or several lives playing out on a large canvas. It is what I look for in a novel, not just entering a world, but entering a world and a story whose sweep covers a much longer time than a regular life allows. As a reader, such writers give you the luxury of spending just a few days in the real world, while covering decades in the fictional world.

I was surprised in several places: a nun mothering twins; a feisty Indian woman doctor, a brahmin at that, grabbing a French pilot by the balls and so much more. Why does constructed reality have to be so tongue-in-cheek?

Well, I am not sure about tongue-in-cheek reality. You might accuse me of the same thing if I made up a story of a Kenyan man marrying an American woman and having a child who is brought up in Indonesia and America and aspires to go to Harvard and to become President . . . and does! In other words, I think real life is much more dramatic than most novelists conjure up. And frankly, if novels were all pyrotechnics and surprise, or as you say ‘tongue-in-cheek’, the reader would or should drop the book in a flash. What one aims for is more than verisimilitude: we really want truth to emerge, whether it be (as in Marquez) from A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings, or from Kafka’s Gregor Samsa waking up to find he is a cockroach. Fiction is the great lie that tells the truth about how the world lives.

I find too many Indian writers using the convenient metaphor of twins in their novels. But no other pair of twins have been so catastrophic to each other, or this self-sacrificing either. Your comments on Shiva, Marion, ShivaMarion.

I am not familiar with all those examples. I think twins are tempting for the reasons you state, but also because their dual existence is really more a physical construct than a mental one, and their destinies are always intertwined. My twins happened organically, and I can’t quite remember the moment of their conception in my mind.

Why did you juxtapose a story about the human body, with a story about ethnicity?

Not sure, I understand. Isn’t ethnicity a function of the skin and attributes and gene pool of the human body? Again, these were far from conscious decisions. I will admit to my sense (and it is one that Marion in the book also feels) that all explanations, all that human beings achieve or perpetrate, have their origins in the body, and it is that combination of genes and geography, nature and nurture that makes each of us unique and quite unpredictable.

Work appears to be a sedative within the novel: if there is something all the doctors in this novel share, it is this dedication to duty. Do you see medicine/medical practice as essentially that sincere and single-minded?

No, I don’t think so. I think the aim of the novel was to show just how medicine and the magic word ‘work’ can both heal and cripple, how it is a trap and yet a balm and, as Yeats would say, the challenge is to find that balance between the‚ perfection of the life or of the work and in the book there are characters who exemplify both ends of that spectrum.

One often hears famed accounts of indigenous medicine that could set almost everything right: but, in the Ethiopia that you have portrayed, people are clamouring to be treated by allopathy. Why did people start disbelieving their traditional remedies?

Oh I don’t think they disbelieve. They use traditional medicines for the great majority of ailments. When the ailments are trivial and self-limited, it works well. It is only when that fails that they seek a more potent form of magic that allopathy offers.

This book also appealed to me because within the rather clinical concerns of medicine, or surgery, you deal with political issues that centre on the woman’s body. What made you choose this road?

I love medicine and the study of medicine. I do see it as a passionate and romantic pursuit. Sometimes the most elemental struggles are often first encountered by physicians. They are medical problems at one level, but they are really political and social problems at another level. It would be tough to write a novel about medicine that does not engage with these issues, unless the novelist turns an eye to the nature of suffering.

What remains after the reading is the ease with which love, hurt and betrayal, transform into life, disease or death. Here, medicine transcends all, where love does not. How have your many years as a physician contributed to this?

I think my years as a human being are really the experience I draw on; that is what I bring to the story. Being a doctor does allow one to see the disastrous consequences of loving or of not loving; it does allow one to see the carnage that can result from careless action, and sometimes the bad things that happen for no reason at all. So medicine only qualifies you to testify that ultimately only love endures. The art is long and the art is endlessly instructive. But life is short, the moment fleeting.

Book Review: The Immigrant

The Immigrant
By Manju Kapur
Publisher: Random House India
Price: Rs 395
Pages: 336

SEX sells. Sexual dysfunction, as a plot device, tries hard and in the process makes use of an anaesthetic, a timer and couple-therapy. Apart from this single, sinful exception, Manju Kapur’s The Immigrant fails to offer any fresh insight through its tortured portrayal of an NRI marriage.

Nina Batra, an English lecturer at Miranda House, Delhi, immigrates to Canada after her arranged marriage to Ananda, a dentist in Halifax. But for a disappointing Professor-Student, May-December dalliance that is concealed from her mother, Nina represents the quintessential middle-class spinster in every possible aspect. The novel begins on her thirtieth birthday and with a grim realisation of her diminishing prospects. As banal as her surroundings, she joins her widowed mother in passively waiting for a marriage proposal. Daughter of a dead diplomat, and single-handedly supporting herself and her mother, it is to Kapur’s credit that Nina is made to maintain an air of dignity: this ensures that the penny-pinching isn’t reduced to a peepshow.

Set in the Emergency era, the novel is a laboured attempt to recreate India of the 1970s: forced sterilisations, money laundering, sloganeering, curfew and arrests. Or, in other words, an India that everyone wants to abandon. This is the India — where criticism can prove to be costly — about which Nina writes to Ananda. Halfway through the book and several letters later, Ananda flies in to India to finalise his marriage. It is from this point onwards that the novel loses focus and begins meandering. What adds to the tension of a different sort is the manner in which tense oscillates between paragraphs, sometimes, even mid-sentence.

A delayed consummation sets the stage for the disintegration of their marriage. Nina struggles as her husband moves from denial to acknowledgement and action. The discontented protagonist dabbles with feminism and co-counselling, but her arguments reach the heights of academic pretension. She finds Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex too western, and she takes pains to point out that woman is not a universal category. As a relatively new immigrant, she is also weighed down by the necessity to blend in by eating meat and wearing western clothes. Pushed into the servility of staying at home and denied a life outside of marriage, she has to console herself that planning the weekly menu together secures the future in a way in which sex never can. Meanwhile, to cover-up/cure his inadequacy Ananda secretly undertakes sex-therapy.

After successfully ‘proving’ himself with a surrogate, Ananda becomes the insensitive, straying husband, and after a string of one-night stands, takes on a young, white mistress. As Ananda-Amanda (Andy-Mandy, if you will), kick up a storm, Nina too gives into her spirit of adventure, signing up for a library science course, and getting herself an admirer. Though both spouses enter into extramarital affairs, it is unfair and unfortunate that it is the woman who ends up ‘punished’ (read raped by her rakish lover). Though the delayed climax, replete with the discovery of a blonde hair on the bed, is highly predictable, there is an element of anxiety in the narrative that makes it easy for the reader to feel for the protagonists.

The Indian middle class family is a safe, familiar territory and Manju tells this cliché-ridden story with tenderness and empathy never reducing any character to a caricature. Themed on distance and its effect on identity, The Immigrant is an interesting read if one wants to know the long way today’s global Indian has come. Despite its weaknesses, this book of fiction is bound to work precisely because it telegraphs the message that in the process of self-reinvention, Anywhere can be home

First published in the Sunday mag of The New Indian Express. You can read the online version here.

Book, booker, booked

“The future was a casino, everyone was gambling, and everyone expected to win.” Salman Rushdie (Fury)

Every time an Indian has won the Booker, it has triggered off a boom in the publication of Indian English fiction. This book boom, this opportunity-knocking-repeatedly-on-many-doors, this “democratization” (if it could be called that) of the publishing industry has ensured that the idea of “everyone has a book in him/her” has been stretched to its logical extreme: everyone has a book out now. Everyone? Well, not exactly, but almost. Because, there is no denying the fact that a book’s selection is driven by the author’s profile. (Consider your novel-in-progress booked if you belong to one or more of the following categories: IIM/IIT graduate, NRI with an MFA, or young and sexy female blogger). Nobody can berate publishers for keeping one eye on the market, and the other on the manuscript. Neither can we blame the writers whose works reflect the hungry haste of our Internet generation, whose novels resemble patchy compilations of blog-posts, and who inspire in an average reader, the urge to pen such a novel herself. 

Welcome to the World of Live and Let Live. Now that we are finished meeting the survivors, let’s know its victims. What’s happened to them? Ms. Dedication drops dead. Ms.Quality becomes a dejected kite-maker (and it has been observed that a lot of her kites follow a certain fast-paced, gripping formula). Ms. Writing Calibre, widowed, with her varicose veins and heart condition, tries to fly these kites on humid afternoons. 

The rest of us are, as always, misled by the marketing. 

The tragedy doesn’t end with Chetan Bhagat’s appalling and irksome novels becoming record-breaking best-sellers. The Indian Imagination is laid to rest as other wannabe authors decide to mass produce campus novels. In most cases, these are the literary equivalents of a frame-by-frame remake of the author’s autobiography. May be, when they are tired of replicating the university fiction model, new writers would migrate to call-center novels. Or, they might try their luck with chick lit (and in the process, remember to reinforce several references to monsoon and mangoes). 

Since the story doesn’t sizzle, what about style? 

Shouldn’t innovative use of language be an equally important consideration? Or has it become inconsequential? Friends tell me that the GRE test paper for English Literature contains random passages whose author has to be correctly identified. Where content cannot be clearly demarcated, students rely on style to zero in on the author. Could this be possible with India writing in English? Isn’t it an oft-repeated complain that with the exception of Rushdie and Roy, the new generation of Indian writers, even those who manage to bring in regional nuances, read like each other? 

One has to also probe as to why Indian English novels prefer to stick to safe territory? This is not a question of authenticity/credibility: most of these novels are authentic in the tiny (rarely well-researched) worlds which they inhabit. Of course, these novels are accessible only to a small, heterogeneous minority that has no clue about the grassroots reality in India. But, why this hesitancy to try something daring at least in the make-believe universe? In this deeply distrustful, fragmented society where every individual act is capable of subversion and has its own shock-value, why do we have trouble in locating the live-wire in our literature? When Arundhati Roy captured the poetry of Ammu’s brownness against Velutha’s blackness, we learnt about love’s limitless potential to challenge the Love Laws. We shuddered for the lovers, we wept at the various manifestations of violence. But such realistic portrayals are few too less to provide comfort. The complacency is evident from the absence of anxiety to engage with any cause/issue of oppressed people in contemporary Indian English fiction. Remarkable exceptions to this elitist formula from among the new crop of writers are Altaf Tyrewala (No God in Sight) and more recently, Aravind Adiga (White Tiger).

As Indian English fiction shamefacedly enters the big league of pop culture, what we presently seem to lack is the literary equivalent of a talent hunt like Super Singer. Otherwise, hype-wise we are already there. In this backdrop, it is understandable why new novelists are more concerned about readership than content. Naturally, their body of writing ends up more factual than literary. Nepotism and his dignified cousin Networking, have created a scene where anything goes, and everything gets into print. Glitzy book-launches and massive promos cover up these fault lines. Authors turn celebrities and critics conveniently metamorphose into cheerleaders. The bandwagon rolls on. 

Nobody can contest the claim that new Indian fiction in English is clever and confident, but when can we lay hands on a literature that will touch and transform lives? In their much-publicized love affair with the English language, the new generation of Indian writers seem to have gained intimacy, but have unforgivably lost ground. 

This article originally appeared in The New Sunday Express. Read the online version here.