Aditya Sudarshan

Short Story: The Fork in the Road

2012-01-21T22:11:00.000-08:00

This was published in Himal's January 2012 issue- but with some mistaken proof-reading- so it's better read here.

After the unremitting crush of the station, it was a relief to be out on the street. Here too, the crowd was about us, the wretched commuters in their dishevelled clothes, the hawkers hawking tirelessly, the beggars lying decrepit, the autos wending their way through the lot, but at least we had the use of our limbs. I turned to ask Tara if she felt like walking on.

She was staring hard at a point in the distance. I could see only the usual, sullied road, fringed with shacks, filled with poverty. Then I saw that she wasn't really looking at anything. She was staring into space. A moment's consternation seemed to seize her, it parted her lips, but she said nothing.

'The park', I said, 'is down the road. It's maybe another kilometre from here.'

'We can walk', said Tara, 'Let's just walk.'

It was good weather for walking. It had rained hard the previous night, but the slush and the puddles had dried through the morning. The monsoon mugginess still lay on the air, but with an intervening layer of fragile cold. We walked between the traffic and the hawkers, our shoes crunching the road's loose rubble.

Tara walked briskly. I was surprised. As far ago as I could remember, she was the kind of girl, that if she wasn't running, then she strolled. Now she walked straight with narrowed eyes that looked not left nor right.

'Slow down', I said, 'You'll tire yourself out.'

'I'm alright.'

'You'll tire me out.'

She paused with a sigh.

'Why do you want to dawdle? To take in the atmosphere? When we're moving at least it doesn't smell so much.'

I knew what she meant. Everywhere, the air was fetid, every square kilometer suffused with the odour of thirty thousand unlooked-after bodies and everything they got up to. This was Tara's second visit to the city, and she was beginning to loathe it. I didn't blame her. However-

'You may as well get used to it', I said, 'Especially if you're going to be visiting often.'

She shot me a look. I ignored it, but perhaps she was right; perhaps, though I didn't intend it, a certain something had crept into my tone. I changed the subject then; I tried to interest her in the skyline beyond the slums. A range of ugly high-rises looked over that tattered sea.

'Bombay has scale', I said, 'It's a phenomenon, even if it's a tragedy.'

'It's shitty.'

My heart knocked suddenly, unexpectedly. Hastily I muffled the mood, but it was disorienting all the same. Her diamond eyes, her pithy speech. Sharper now than I ever could remember. Did one never grow indifferent?

Only when we were well inside the park, did Tara relax her pace. The traffic noises had faded now; the snarl under the flyover which had taken us, even on foot, a full ten minutes to negotiate, was out of sight. Teak and peepul flourished on either side of the shaded road. Other trees too, that I couldn't name, and in amongst them tall grasses, shrubs in flower, all the lushness of the forest floor.

'A national park', I announced with approval, 'A whole forest ten minutes from the station! I can't understand why more people don't visit here.'

'Small mercies,' said Tara, 'You hungry?'

'Already?'

We were carrying water, juice and sandwiches bought from a coffee shop in Andheri. The plan was to eat after we were good and tired exploring the park. But now I realized she was right.

'Well?'

'I guess we can buy more later', I said. Then I laughed. 'We must be getting old.'

A signboard up ahead pointed the way to a lion and tiger safari trail, a Jain temple, a 'Viewing Point' from where, it was said, the whole city was laid out, and a set of ancient Buddhist caves. I felt no particular curiosity for any of them. Closer at hand was the sound of splashing water; an intuition of space. We followed a grassy lane that broke from the main road, and took us through a patch of wilderness. Soon the wind picked up, and then it was on its way to us, all the way down the forested slopes and across the breadth of the lake.

I could see us then; Tara and I; close and familiar; stumbling to rest by the water-side; the wind in our hair. At intervals further down the bank, on rocky outcrops and ragged grass, other couples sat two by two. The small-town boys with their over-slick hair, the girls in their gaudy jeans, but it was I who was wrong to notice. They shunned scrutiny in their quiet knots, creatures of Nature at home in her lap, drinking deep of each other.

Meanwhile, we looked at the trees, and the sky, and the shimmering colours in the flat of the lake. We sat side by side, munching our sandwiches in a silence that seemed important. After a while, she said:

'So you feel it too?'

'Feel what?'

'Old. Do you feel old too? Because I do.'

'Oh that', I said, 'I was only joking about that. Come on- we're twenty six.'

She looked at me with a kind of disappointment.

'Don't you feel any- any nostalgia now... for the past? For how things used to be?'

'Well, I mean...' And then suddenly, looking away from those earnest eyes, I decided to be candid. 'Well... ok. I guess, I do sometimes think back- to college... first year college, second year...Yeah, it was different...'

It had come to me just the previous night, woken inside me as I struggled to sleep. Just a stray memory of a long time ago. A muggy night in a telephone booth, on a run-down street wet with rain. Tara a thousand miles away, talking excitedly of a friend I'd never seen, and a book I'd never heard of. But nourishing me, as I clutched the receiver, gladdening my essence with just the music of her voice, as the rain does the earth. And then, as I lay there remembering, a whole era had seemed to open out, like a chapter in a history book; days spent in gratitude, nights soaked in enchantment, when pleasure and pain were constant and indistinguishable, but that each was a blessing I never doubted, because I knew, the way you know things- deep in your bones- that my star was shining, the world would be mine, the girl would be mine. And never once the possibility entertained that-

I touched the grass. It was rough and bristling. The breeze passed with a pungent sigh. Something shuddered through me.

Tara's face, gold in the sunlight, was soft with remembrance.

'Remember Penang', she was saying.

'Penang?' I was surprised.

'I don't know how we managed to meet there! Remember? A foreign country and no cell-phones!'

'Yeah', I said, 'Yeah, that was something.'

'And nowadays people call and call and re-confirm until you're right there looking at each other.'

'Yeah, most rendezvous' seem to begin like that now. Both parties in the same place talking to each other on the phone.'

I laughed, and she laughed too. But she laughed a lot harder than I thought the thought merited. That confused me. The onset of the cell-phone revolution was not the stuff of my nostalgia. I had thought she wanted to really talk; now I waited impatiently to resume the proper tone. The soonest I could, I interjected-

'See, I think we just felt a lot more invincible then. We felt things would turn out right for us no matter what. But now, we know we're not special any longer. We know that anything can happen to anybody, there are no guaranteed rewards.'

Tara was listening, but I couldn't read her expression. There was a frown and then there was nothing. She looked out over the lake.

'For example', I hesitated, 'With love, for example.'

But now her laugh was quite manufactured. Smarting suddenly, I turned my tone safely dry and cynical.

'I mean, you certainly screwed me over.'

'Haha', she laughed, 'Haha, yeah that was it.'

Her gaze stayed on the hilly forest, that overlooked the banks beyond. I thought of the snuggling couples, so perfectly harmonious (or so I imagined) and the two of us, whom any passer-by would take for the same. But the difference wasn't just that we weren't in love. That I had known for five years. That was alright by me. The occasional pang was not unwelcome- it was proof of the past. There was something else...

'Seriously, though', I tried again, 'Dreams really take a beating, don't they?'- but before I could finish the thought she interrupted with finality.

'God!', Tara exclaimed. Her eyes were alive with outrage. 'God, just look at that!'

I stared a moment at the grass and the water, until suddenly I spied the offending plastic bag. It was held down by a rock, half-immersed in the lake, fluttering futilely. It looked as though it was drowning. And alongside the bag, offensively cheerful, lay the rest of the litter; multi-coloured wrappers, a soft drink can and a packet of chips.

'Garbage even here...' Her voice grew faint with disgust. 'Inside a fucking national park!'

'It is awful', I agreed.

'It's fucking ridiculous! Doesn't anybody care?'

I jerked my head towards the pockets of lovers.

'Not them anyway.'

'God!', Tara got up swiftly, 'This sort of thing is so... let's go!'

'Go where?'

'I don't know, anywhere.'

'You want to see the tiger museum?', I suggested.

'Anything, anything.'

The tiger museum was a little gallery near the starting lines of the tiger safari. It was a good idea to visit there. It meant a short walk through a strong breeze, and then the quiet gloom of a mostly empty interior; palliatives for her temper and antidotes for my nerves. We wandered past cheerfully illustrated, well-written displays. We both loved animals- and that love is prelapsarian. The half-hour we spent in the museum seemed snatched straight from each of our childhoods.

'Did you know', I read aloud, 'that tiger stripes are like fingerprints? Every piece unique.'

'Did you know', she retorted with pleasure, 'tigers can leap thirty feet at a time?'

'Well check this out- from the mouth of the tiger- if humans fought fair, they'd be the endangered ones.'

'Aww', she came over, 'he looks so cute!'

'He looks like a Lolcat.'

'You're right!'

'And when did those become such a craze? I don't remember them in our hey-day.'

'Our hey-day?'

Later, while the bus was loading passengers for the safari, we bought cups of hot, sugary tea from a kerb-side stall, and took them to a parapet under a tree. Someone asked if we were getting on too, but Tara shook her head. I was glad. We sat and sipped the tea and watched the crowd leave, and when the ache of the engine had died on the air, I looked at her.

'It's great seeing you again', I said, 'It really is.'

'You should have been more in touch', she answered calmly.

'I know', I said, 'I know, I should have. I really don't know why I wasn't... But... I'm really glad you found time for today. And you know, I was thinking, it's so great we've been able to be friends for so long... through all the different phases. I mean- that's a rare thing.'

I watched her smile- that private smile, half-blush, half-smug, as though she'd just had a compliment. I knew it well. And I was happy then. Happy the way I had expected to be, seeing Tara again after so many months, happy the way people should be, when Love has been buried, and its ghost exorcised, and their mutual caring, enriched by their history, can have its untrammeled say.

'Tara', I told her, 'I've been depressed. I don't know how to explain it, but I think you'll understand. I think it's what you said, about feeling old.'

'You said that.'

'Yeah, I said that, but you noticed it- and I tried to play it down. But it's true. I was feeling it just the other night...as though enthusiasm itself has become a thing of the past. And now only endurance remains. Endurance until the crack of doom! And the soundtrack of life has suddenly changed from Beautiful Day to- I don't know- Fade to Black.'

She laughed. We both did.

'You know me', I went on gratefully, 'I always try to put a brave face on things. But this city- it does get you down. And India- India!'

'I know.'

'India is an ordeal... I mean, it's alright if you're happy in your ivory tower- and you talk about India Shining or whatever- and maybe it's ok if you just dive into the thick of things and don't give a damn, but if not...if you look around you, if you pause to think... It makes you doubt if anything you're doing has any point whatsoever. I mean, maybe a tiny section of the very elite are interested- or pretending to be, I think they're mostly just pretending to be- but other than that, who cares? Everybody's either stepping on somebody else, or trying to avoid being stepped on. Everything's so degraded and hand to mouth. The newspapers-'

'I don't read them', Tara said firmly.

'Yeah... I mean, the crime, the corruption...'

'I don't read them.' She was shaking her head.

'And the chaos', I said, 'The country is a cacophony. And instead of finding out how to stop the noise, and change it into music, everybody's basically looking for ear-plugs. Anyway... you know what I mean... It all...'

'It all adds up', she said, 'to something quite depressing.'

Her voice was clear and unflinching.

'Exactly', I said.

I laughed then, bitterly again- but I wasn't feeling bitter. No, I was feeling calm, almost heroic, like a soldier sizing up a battle-field, the war-zone that might destroy him but can no longer overcome him, because he has already made his peace with it. I was feeling protected.

Around us, the light was changing. The leaves were going from green to gold, glimmering gently as they turned in the breeze. A premonition of dusk had entered the late afternoon and struck it through with beauty. Or perhaps not, perhaps the beauty was in my way of seeing. Any environment is beautiful when once it is background; and with Tara beside me the wider world seemed to fall into place- turn dreamy and unintrusive. I tasted the warm tea. I felt like putting my arm around her.

'How was New York?', I asked her suddenly, 'You never really told me.'

'Oh New York', she said, 'Yeah, New York was great. We partied a straight 72 hours.'

'Wow! So it's everything it's cracked up to be?'

'I guess. Maybe. I couldn't live there though.'

'No?'

'I couldn't live in America at all.'

I nodded. We had talked about this before. America, the land of work and achievement and climbing ladders to golden prizes, and freedom and sex and great portions of greasy food; America that knew only one way, which was forward, and one speed, as fast as possible; whose attractions and exhortations had shaped our generation in so many fundamental ways; was yet a foreign country. Tara had felt that just months into her course- felt it so strongly she had called me up one night to tell me.

So here she was now- back home, to face the music.

'Well', I said, 'I'm proud of you.'

She beamed at me, stretched her back, gazed around her with appraising eyes.

'Do you want some more tea?', I asked.

'No.' A sudden discontentment creased Tara's brow. 'Let's go.'

'Where to?', I was surprised, 'It's quite nice sitting here.'

'Well, we can't stay forever. Anyway I need to find a loo.'

On the road again, she talked about her work. It was difficult, she told me, it was frustrating. I thought that was inevitable. I could imagine Tara, with her urbane tastes, her earnest ideals, her great expectations, floundering in the around-the clock- politics and feudal culture of a Delhi set-up.

'They spend all day talking', she said, 'and drinking tea- and when I want to leave at six, they look at me like I'm a shirker! Even though I've actually been getting things done. But just because I don't stay till midnight with the boss- oh, and they're all so scared of the boss. It's pathetic.'

'But what's he like?', I asked her, 'The boss.'

'Oh he's nice, he's fine... But I have to work with the others, right.'

'Yeah, but he doesn't discourage these pointless late hours?

'No... he's very laissez-faire that way.'

'I guess he enjoys the power then.'

'Maybe... I don't know... at least he cares about the work. Most of the others don't, you know. Once we were talking over lunch and one of them was like, haan, so the hospitals are over-crowded and unclean and unequipped, but then it's a big city with so many people, so what can you do? And everyone was nodding, and I was thinking, there are big cities all over the world! We are supposed to be thinking of ways to improve things! We're supposed to be this important 'think-tank'!'

Her voice, so warm and ebullient when she was happy, was peaking with indignation. I looked at her, striding past the still gulmohars, hot with anger, bathed in shade. And then, as I looked, it seemed to me that all of Nature was rushing to her side; the breeze fanning her crumpled brow; the leaves in the trees rustling their sympathy. The evergreen forest was receiving her rage, but her young heart still filled with disappointment, and my own heart went out to her, as it always would.

'Tara', I said, and my speech, as I heard it, was soft and wise, 'I think- what we have to do - is just accept our reality. We have our skills, our beliefs, and they're different from the majority's. They just are. You, for example, you believe in cities, you believe in building things that have scale, you believe in the possibilities of the individual, and maybe most of your office doesn't think that way, maybe their heart is somewhere in the country- the town or the village, I mean. Maybe they leave things to destiny... If we're the first fully urban generation, with all our liberal education, then maybe we have to be the fall-guys. We have to pit our wits against the way things are, and not expect any great rewards for ourselves- but just look for solutions. And we can do that, right? We can even have fun doing that... I think you just have to keep going... Because what you're doing is really great, it's really fundamental.'

As I talked, she walked beside me, not saying a word, with her head lowered and her eyes narrowed. It was the way she had walked from the station to the park. It was a new note in her persona, that I hadn't known in the days when I adored her. But perhaps this briskness, this hardness, was only on the surface; the strong exterior of a grown-up woman.

A little later, as I waited outside the park's toilets, I thought again of Tara and I. In the morning, going to see her, stalled in traffic with time to think, I had been apprehensive. It had been so long; we had fallen out of touch. What invisible strands had snapped between us; I didn't know. We couldn't be friends in the ordinary fashion; that had been clear for years. Two elements, unstable in proximity, must either unite or separate. We had to separate. But although we walked on parallel lines, never meeting, I was reminded now that our road was the same. We saw the world the same way; we hurt at the same things. We shared a community, be it of disappointment and broken dreams and the weight of a nation's failure, but a community no less.

I gladdened with that idea, and the still beauty of the forest seemed to swell and deepen too. It was pregnant with hope, as Tara came out to join me, her mouth pursed in grim disdain.

'Not good, hunh?', I smiled.

'Don't ask', she said.

'Well- maybe the animals use it too.'

'That's disgusting', she winced. 'Anyway', she went on smoothly, 'So this job has been a real pain. But it's ok, I'm quitting soon. I'm looking forward to that. I'd like to spend some time doing nothing at all.'

She was walking on ahead of me; I caught up to her.

'You're... quitting?'

'Ya, after I get married. I'll be moving here with Akash, so I'll have to quit anyway.'

She was still walking; in what direction I didn't know. It seemed to me the wind had ceased and the scufflings in the forest gone silent. I stared at her, but she neither caught my eye nor avoided it.

'Tara', I said, 'Tara, hold on.'

'What's the matter?'

'I didn't realize, you were getting married.'

'Oh I made up my mind a while back. It was just a question of when. I've been seeing him for two years now. You know that.'

Her speech seemed to fly by me, as brisk and removed as the rest of her. She turned to walk on, and in a stupor, I walked with her.

Soon I was aware of a great weight on my bones. I could hear my breathing, slow and strained. A bench by the road tugged at my vision, and I broke stride towards it. It was damp and gritty; covered in yellow leaves. I sat as best I could. I could feel Tara's gaze following my movements with incredulity. A part of me was incredulous too.

'What's the matter?', she said again. She was drawing closer. Her voice held an unfeigned astonishment.

'What's the matter?'

I shook my head.

'You're surprised? Why are you so surprised?'

I didn't know what to say.

'We talked about this two years ago!', said Tara, 'I told you even then I was going to marry him. Our parents are involved already.'

I tried to grin, but a sadness inside was choking me, all the harder because where had it come from?

'I thought', I said, 'that you were going to...'

'What?'

'Take a call on it.'

Tara threw her head back with sudden animation. Her lips parted in mirth.

'That was then! A long time ago! I made up my mind after that! But I don't understand why you're so surprised. I've been seeing him constantly. I've come to Bombay to see him now, haven't I?'

'I thought', I repeated, and I was talking to myself now; stunned into open introspection; trying to trace, through my speech, the roots of my reaction, 'you said, this wasn't it. I thought you were going to... wait... till you fell in love again.'

For a moment, she was angry. I braced myself for the easy and unanswerable lie. But something prevented that. Perhaps it was the honesty of my emotion, my unabashed bewilderment, my vulnerability, that made her candid.

She started to talk. She said she used to think that way when she was younger, but she wasn't twenty one any longer. She said she had learned to be sensible, to be wise, to take things as they came, and not always as she chose. She said, what was love, but making your peace. She spoke freely, not from the heart, but a nimbler, more persuasive, more dangerous place.

Years ago, when we had talked of Life and Love and what it all meant, we had talked like seekers after a common truth, who do not balk at argument. That wasn't her tone any more.

'I don't know about you', Tara said, 'but I know what my dreams are. And they're not wild or bizarre or unconventional. Maybe they aren't romantic. Maybe they aren't going to save the world- or the country- or anybody. I don't care. They're mine. A house to live, a space of my own, a companion I care for who cares for me, friends whom I know I can trust, just enough money that I don't have to worry about money. And that's it. That's all I want from life.'

'But that's all I want too!', I wanted to tell her, 'That's all I want too!'- I wanted to scream- but then how could I explain the distance between us? How could I justify why I sat, drowned in loneliness, while she stood not inches away, neither lover nor comrade, drawing further and further apart with every passionate sentence she spoke? I could be pompous and futile, or I could stay silent.

'You understand?', she was asking me, 'Do you understand?'

'I think so', I said.

We were quiet then. A great weariness seized me. I looked at the ancient trees, stirring gently all about the late afternoon. Maybe the signs had been there, and I had failed to read them. Maybe our road had been the same. But I had forgotten the fork in it.

'Aren't you going to get up?', Tara laughed, 'You're not actually old yet.'

'I feel old', I said.

'Let's go', she said. 'It's too late to see the sights here- let's go back.'

'You didn't enjoy coming here.' I looked at her.

'Oh I did', she said quickly, 'It's really beautiful- but I'm tired. And we have that awful commute still to come.'

No, she hadn't enjoyed it. Not the forest, not the lake, not the flowers in the trees. She had gotten brisk. She remembered the garbage and the dirt and the looming spectre of the broken city. A cold wind swooped down on us; it was bracing to me, but I saw Tara give a little, fearful shiver as it passed. Then suddenly it was easy to get to my feet, to almost put my arm around her. I didn't, but the thought of it played in my mind, healing me, tormenting me, as we walked back to the waiting streets.

The Necessity of Fiction

2011-09-26T14:22:00.000-07:00

This was published in the September 2011 Hindu Literary Review.

"Any healthy man can go without food for two days--but not without poetry." So said the French poet Charles Baudelaire, and I think he meant it quite literally. For the centre of everybody's life, rich or poor, oppressed or oppressing, working or idle, is a dream, a world created inside the mind, an imagined perception of the way things are. Surely, then, to forego the nourishment of this omnipresent imaginative faculty, is to fall sick. And surely, art is the cure.

But if the sickness should abound, and yet be wrongly diagnosed, then there will be no cure, only a likely aggravation. Such would seem the case with Indian writing in English, whose condition can only worsen, if it continues to be misunderstood. So far, this lack of understanding has begetted many damaging ideas- the idea that our literary establishment can safely piggy-back on the West's; that the tide of home-grown 'frothy' fiction should be celebrated, because it sells. And most recently, the idea that non-fiction can take over from fiction, and tell us the stories that will make us well again.

A Mistake in the Making

For a while now, this view has been gaining currency. Nilanjana Roy informs us: “In 2010, when Basharat Peer’s memoir of Kashmir, Curfewed Night, was published, one of its most enthusiastic champions was William Dalrymple... A few months later, Dalrymple spoke of his excitement at what seemed to be a new trend — the slow shift towards non-fiction replacing our somewhat obsessive focus on Booker-winning novels and other fiction.” Also in 2010, Alok Rai, reviewing Annie Zaidi's book of non-fiction, Known Turf, wrote that: “Despite the hype surrounding the novels-with-large-advances, the best writing today is happening in non-fiction. Of course, fiction presents certain unique problems... but the gravity, let alone tragedy, of human existence apparently lies beyond its clownish scope.” This year, in an interview published in April, Chiki Sarkar, the then chief editor at Random House India, said: “I am largely unimpressed by current Indian literary fiction, but I think we're going to see extraordinary non-fiction from the younger generation. Basharat Peer, Samanth Subramaniam, a young writer called Aman Sethi who we publish this year, Sonia Faleiro - these will be the real stars of the coming years.” And while praising Aman Sethi's A Free Man this July, Nilanjana Roy added: “For years, a writer friend spoke wistfully of the Great Barsati Novel: a mythical beast that would do for Delhi, presumably, what Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s or Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City had both done for New York. But the road to the Great Barsati Novel has been paved with failed attempts, and perhaps Delhi will find its chroniclers in non-fiction rather than in fiction.”

Now, what is interesting about these quotes, is that they do not merely commend the state of our non-fiction; they also feel the need to compare it with the state of our fiction. This is understandable, just because comparisons are tempting. But it is not very helpful, because the categories here are essentially incommensurable. There is no sense in gladly decrying bad fiction, as though, with the arrival of good non-fiction, it has ceased to be a worry. Moreover, to expect that the blessing of high-quality non-fiction can redeem us, in any way, from the burden of low-quality fiction, is to misunderstand the nature of the two forms- and to risk harming both.

The Nature of the Forms

The names are almost self-explanatory. Fiction is make-believe; it entails a positive commitment to imagining. Non-fiction is anything but make-believe; it requires, in the face of the facts, a scholarly restraint on imagining. These territories are entirely different, and the boundaries, though they may be porous, are also impassable. Thus, a piece of reportage that is full of lies, does not become a piece of fiction (except in poetic condemnation), because to imagine a few facts is not to commit to the imagination. Nor does a factual account told with imaginative verve become fiction- because the facts will keep that verve in check. Conversely, once the imagination is fully deployed, so that it takes, quite literally, a life of its own, then it does not matter if the contours of what follows are traced from reality- one is still making-believe. And by making-believe, one is submitting to the test of 'story'. Meanwhile, on the other side of the divide, 'story' is beside the point; what matters are the fruits of inquiry.

These are the general distinctions, which are also easier to recognize than to articulate. But once they are understood, what does it mean to say, like Hartosh Singh Bal, that “the one genre that can overcome the limitations of Indian Writing in English is well reported non-fiction that is specific to a time and place”? It can only mean that Indian writing in English has no need for make-believe. And what does that mean? That as writers and readers in the English language, we must stick to interrogation? With our environments held fast under our microscopes, and its contents the subjects of our scrutiny? But this is not how anybody really lives. A city, for example, may be chronicled ever so brilliantly in non-fiction- and to great benefit- but it is only in fiction that it can recede to an abstract setting, that dream-like blur through which we all actually pass, not scrutinizing, merely living. It is only in a story that we can really feel its spirit.

The Root of the Matter

In the nature of things, then, non-fiction, no matter how superior on its own terms, cannot serve the ends of fiction. But why is this view taking hold at all? Why are we loath to accept the necessity of fiction? The answer, I think, is that by requiring a real commitment to one's own imagination, it is fiction that strikes the raw nerves in our psyche. The guilt and self-loathing and sense of uprootedness that afflicts the Anglicized, Westernized Indian imagination, can still be kept at bay in non-fiction. With its separation of object and observer, non-fiction allows us a certain distance from our selves. Not so fiction; that demands absolute introspection, a gouging out of the self, the courage to take one's own emotions so seriously as to transmute them into an offering. And it is these emotions that are specially painful to the touch. Even the timid 'clownishness' that Alok Rai spoke of, which has so degraded our fictional output, is only a kind of anaesthetic.

However, if the aim is to get better, there is no escaping the places that hurt- and there is a high price for trying to. Just as Indian English fiction can only worsen from neglect, so Indian English non-fiction can only buckle, if handed the burden of trying to do two jobs at once. That way lies half-heartedness; flimsy treatments both of subject and self, which might masquerade as high literature, but will take us far in neither direction. Let us not, therefore, get too comfortable in condemning our fiction. We cannot do without it.

Bangalore Reading of Show Me A Hero, on April 15th

2011-04-09T00:04:00.000-07:00

Am doing an event in Bangalore on Friday, April 15th, with Toto Funds the Arts, for my new novel Show Me A Hero. I'll be in conversation with Dr. Arul Mani, the well-known writer and critic. Do come if you can- details are below, and the invitation is at the TFA website.

Venue: Crossword Bookstore, ACR Towers, Ground Floor, 32 Residency Road, Bangalore - 1

Date and time: Friday, 15 April 2011 at 6.30 pm

Show Me A Hero

2011-02-22T00:55:00.000-08:00

My new novel, a coming of age/crime fiction story set in Delhi, has been published by Rupa and Co. It's available on stands and online too.

More info about the book is on the right-hand panel of this blog and on the Facebook Page, which is here.

2011-02-22T00:11:00.000-08:00

Book Review: 'The Red Devil: To Hell With Cancer- And Back', by Katherine Russell Rich (Tranquebar Press, 2010)

(A shorter version of this was published in February's Hindu Literary Review)

Subtly Showy

The Red Devil is a woman's story of her struggles with cancer. This makes it hard to review. To criticize the memoirs of a cancer patient might very well sound both insensitive and ignorant. But assuming (as one must) that one is entitled to assess it, it must be said, that although the book is captivating from start to finish, it is also somewhat shallow.

Caught Amidships

Katherine Rich was 32, a high-flying magazine editor in downtown Manhattan, living a fast-paced life full of work and travel, and married to a romantic, tempestuous Argentinian. Then in the space of weeks her marriage broke up and she discovered she had breast cancer. But athough it might seem a wretched incongruity that such a full life should suffer such a swift fall, Rich's own view is that it only made sense. 'I smoked two packs of Newport Lights a day', 'I drank, a lot', 'I ate like shit', 'I worked out... hardly ever', and thanks to a 'high-drive, adrenylated job', 'mostly, I inhaled stress'. As for her marriage, keeping the love alive had become an obsession, which, writes Rich, 'is the same thought repeated over and over till it blocks off reason, till it leaches sanity. And cancer is a single cell that reproduces uncontrollably till... it starves the tissue around it and ultimately destroys its host.'

It is intelligent, articulate ideas like these that make for the attractiveness of Rich's writing. They sparkle throughout her narrative- the way that cancer engenders loneliness ('if your body is divided within, how can you not feel divided from the world?'); the peculiar horror of losing your hair ('we've all had sore throats, we've all been tired, we've all thrown up before... but in the natural universe hair doesn't... fall out with a sudden, horrifying thud of force); how difficult it is to accept a chronic illness as part of your life ('after illness, as after sin, the temptation is strong: to flee the bed.').

She also presents a grim picture of the American medical establishment. The history of her treatment abounds with dodgy diagnoses, overlooked symptoms, adversarial tussles with dispassionate doctors, who are too afraid of being sued to properly care. It is easily inferred from this book that market forces and health-care are a dangerous mix. Also, that while New York may be a wonderful place to be young and healthy, it is not so pleasant to be sick there, and dependent for support on a paid therapist. For Indian readers, this book should also lead us to appreciate better the personal touch of our own culture, the familial networks that we sometimes take for granted.

But these inferences are not made by Rich. Her roving eye flits from subject to subject. In the space of pages we find interesting things being said about recovery, relationships, doctors and friends. However- and this is where the book suffers- none of these leads is properly followed through. Instead of staying with her insights long enough for them to bear fruit, she more frequently lets them descend into glibness.

Pop Psychology

For example: the first time Rich suggests that her depression over her broken marriage was a factor in her cancer, it is an interesting thought. But later, when we find her merely insisting she got 'breakup cancer', she sounds more than a little superficial. Similarly, when she analyses her dreams- a wild cat represents the illness, because it is wild and her name starts with 'Kat'. Similarly, when we find her trying a whole litany of pseudoscientific cures- from psychic healers to Egyptian ankhs to 'purple drops sold by a mysterious cowboy in Casper, Wyoming.'

This is not to mock Rich- anyone with cancer might be so desperate- and indeed she chastises herself for the fact. Just as she chastises the 'talk-show honesty' of her generation ('self-revelations about sex or degradation...but never venality or arrogance or the other, more banal sins that actually made us look bad'). But it is one thing to be perfectly aware of a shortcoming, and another to overcome it. The truth is that 'The Red Devil' does feature a kind of talk-show honesty, where splendid insights are dragged down from their rightful pedestal and mixed up in the shallows, and where the aim is not so much to share one's courage, as to have it confirmed. In the nicest and discreetest way, it is a showy book, one outstanding proof of which is that it reads like a novel. The dialogue is all within quotation marks, conversations are described in implausibly cinematic terms, and the love stories are weaved in like sub-plots. This 'fictional' treatment helps the book read easily, but it also hides the absence of real, helpful content, that a more mundane and less stagy style would not have been able to. To sum up, I think 'The Red Devil' will have you genuinely liking and rooting for the author, but I doubt it will have you thanking her.

2011-02-21T23:49:00.000-08:00

Book Review: Jimmy The Terrorist, by Omair Ahmad (Penguin Books India, 2010)

The Wrong Story

(This was published in February's Biblio under a different title).

At a hundred and seventy seven pages, Jimmy the Terrorist is a slim novel, and yet a massively uneven one. It features subtly fashioned characters alongside rank caricatures, great skill and also great carelessness, wonderful prose and plain meretriciousness. Examined closely, these contradictions suggest a core flaw- a kind of original sin- that plagues Ahmad's book- which is a mismatch between the material the author actually cares about, and possesses a genuine feeling for, and the politically 'significant' material that he has determined to take on.

An excellent prologue sets the scene for the story. Jamaal Ansari, also known as Jimmy, a young Muslim in the non-descript town of Moazzamabad, in U.P., has stabbed a police inspector and been killed in retaliation. Journalists from Delhi and Bombay descend on the town, “like kites upon a fresh kill.” The implication is that they will learn nothing save the superficial and dramatic facts. But our narrator, a weary, half-cynical, anyonymous native of Moazzamabad is about to tell us the real story- the truth that underpins 'Jimmy the terrorist.'

This story is then divided into two halves, which can quite accurately be labelled the father's half and the son's half. And it is necessary, we are told, to begin with Jimmy's father, because “whatever Jimmy was, whatever Jamaal became, in the end he was their son, Rafiq's and Shaista's, and their story. And because their story played out in Rasoolpur, he was also the story of this mohalla. And of Shabbir Manzil... the hub around which the mohalla revolved.'

Similarly, in his note at the end of the book, Ahmad explains:

“There is a line in Frank Herbert's sci-fi classic Dune that has stayed with me- 'Still, but one must ask: What is the son but an extension of the father?' So for me the book also became at least as much, if not more, about Jimmy's father.”

Now, at first glance, there does not seem anything improper about asserting such connections. But they come with an implied promise on the part of the author. We are entitled to expect that, over the course of the story, the connections will be more than just asserted. They will actually be established, and in some psychologically convincing way. As we shall see, in Jimmy the Terrorist, they are very far from established. This is especially a pity, because before that point where the tracks fail to connect, and the book comes off the rails, is some very fine story-telling.

In confident, controlled prose, Ahmad brings to life Moazzamabad, a largely Hindu town in which the Muslim community resides in apparently easy harmony, though “lightly, with more culture and pride than hard faith.” Shabbir Manzil is the house where they come into their own, where “the notables of Rasoolpur mohalla... speak of poetry and cricket, perhaps make a learned comment, but casually, on some bit of politics...”

Our protagonist in this milieu is Rafiq Ansari, an English-educated, passably well-to-do young man whose sole ambition is to climb the social ladder to the gatherings at Shabbir Manzil. This is far more important to him than getting a job. And to begin with, his sense of priorities seems vindicated too, because when he does get in with the 'smart set', he receives in benefaction not just a job at a University, but also a wife to set up home with- the home that will give birth to Jamaal.

Rafiq, his wife Shaista, the doyens of Shabbir Manzil- these are ordinary, unsensational people, but in Ahmad's hands they are never dull. In fact, they are riveting- and all the more so because they are completely free of stereotype. One might not have thought that a small-town, middle class, mildly religious (at best) Muslim community, could make for such rich novelistic material. But it does, because Ahmad has a grasp on its own particular enchantments and oppressions. We can admire the wit and poetry at Shabbir Manzil, and the warm familial bonds of the community, but we can also see how the social hierarchy that beckons Rafiq upwards, reinforces his sense of inadequacy; and how the well-meaning domination of a protective brother sows the seeds of rebellion in Shaista. So later, when Rafiq is floundering to assert himself, and Shaista is a domestic tyrant, who rarely lets him so much as talk to their child, and neither can communicate with the other, we feel we have learned something. In a mohalla where “nobody ever spoke openly about anything; all the accusations were by insinuation; every blow was a stab in the back”, these are just the things that would happen.

So far, so good. Unfortunately, this is as good as it gets. Because from here on, Ahmad's attempt to force his perfectly interesting, but mellow, characters in the direction of violence and terror, is crude, uninsightful and altogether misconceived. That Rafiq, propelled by a series of coincidences, should turn to religion and adopt the manner of a mullah, is acceptable in itself. But it still feels a contrivance, made necessary by the need to join the dots to reach the novel's pre-determined conclusion- the transformation of Rafiq's son into Jimmy the Terrorist. In any event, it does not suffice. The dots never join. Ahmad never comes close to finding in his characters the pitch of psychological intensity, the deep-rooted sense of hurt, from which acts of terror must stem. In fact, he seems to realize this himself, and so he tries to bluff away the shortfall- as, for example, in the passage near the beginning of the second half of the book, when an unemployed and ostracized Rafiq is being given some advice.

“... 'There's a simple trick that will help you get a job at an Islamic school.'

Rafiq didn't like the word 'trick' but he listened.

'Just be angry', Harris said, 'Rant and rave. Talk about the grand tragedies, about oppression, zulm, riots and murder. Grow your beard a little longer and miss no opportunity to raise your voice against the suffering of Muslims. It's what the mullahs do all the time.

Rafiq nodded reluctantly.”

This is humorous, but the humour is all out of place. Such deliberate, self-aware role-playing is simply not the stuff that fanatics are made of. What Ahmad does, in passages like this, is betray his own distance from Ground Zero (so to speak). He was right at home when delineating the subtleties of social and family life in Rasoolpur, but to shift gears to the terrorist drama- the drama that the prologue had promised us- seems beyond him.

The entire second half of the novel is therefore reduced to a succession of blind alleys and compromises that undermine the story as a whole. We are told in great detail of the teasing that young Jimmy suffered in the missionary school he went to, on account of his relative poverty and his father's religiosity; also, that he fell into delinquent company. But these trials are far from extraordinary. The idea that mean-spirited, but perfectly common games of childhood one-upmanship- the kind that Ahmad himself, with his undeniable privileges, might well have undergone- are a breeding ground for terrorism, does not hold water. It suggests instead a kind of self-serving romanticism that exaggerates everyday ordeals, and underestimates actual hardship.

The upshot of all this- and this is no exaggeration- is that nothing that happens in the first three quarters of Jimmy the Terrorist has any particular bearing on its conclusion. His father's embracing of Islam, his mother's dotage, his school-mates' distrust- none of these were needed for Jimmy to take up a knife. Because when Ahmad introduces communal tensions to Moazzamabad, he ratchets up the scale of hostilities to such a degree that anyone might retaliate- and in fact many do, not merely Jimmy. The Hindu right-wing, fomented by politicians both local and national, is a “maddened hundred-armed creature carrying axes, iron rods, tridents and kerosene cans”; they torture a Muslim boy, burn to death the Maulana Qayoom; mount a fearsome campaign of intimidation against the Muslim community; and are about to commit a rape when Jimmy lashes out with his knife, crying out that he is 'Jimmy the terrorist.'

Which rings untrue, because he is plainly nothing of the sort. All he is, is momentarily violent in the face of immense provocation. Now, the point is not that this provocation, so garishly described, is untrue or implausible. The point is that it gives us no insight into any of the characters involved. As a colourful newspaper report of a series of nasty incidents, it is perfect. As a piece of fiction, it is strictly second-rate. We are provided only the superficial and dramatic- and no more enlightened than the 'kites' that came in from the cities.

Ultimately, then, Ahmad has not told us the story of a terrorist. Nor has he even told us the story of Jimmy- just many disparate details about the boy's family and school-days. The real story that he might have told- the story that he seemed most interested in telling, and which, at the end of the book, the reader is likely to be most interested in knowing about- is a gentler, less politically 'relevant', but much more enlightening tale of the subtle play of power in a middle-class Muslim mohalla. But to do that story justice, we would need a different book.

________________________________________________________________________________

2010-07-07T21:40:00.000-07:00

Why Indian Publishing Needs to Get Less Fun

(This essay was published in July's Hindu Literary Review)

In the world of Indian English publishing, kitsch has begun to dominate the mainstream. Penguin India publishes 'Metro Reads', books that they call 'fun, feisty, fast'; Random House India produces the 'Kama Kahani' series of Indianized Mills and Boons; Hachette India openly states that it cares most about commercial thrillers; and with its latest, highly-marketed release, 'Johnny Gone Down', Harper Collins India seems to be headed in the same direction. These are all books that openly disclaim any particular literary merit. They are projected instead as 'fun' reads- with the implication that only a killjoy could possibly protest them.

A Preliminary Question

But before we get to that question- are these books fun for us?- there is an important preliminary question: why are they being offered to us? The easy answer is that the market is clamouring for them, just look at Chetan Bhagat. But this is too easy. It's been seven years since Bhagat's first book. Why would it take so long to follow his example? Moreover, the mainstay of Bhagat's readership has never been readers per se. It has been non-readers, those who are new to books, even new to the English language. This is certainly a massive group, and after Bhagat's success it has certainly been tapped- but by the smaller publishers, such as India Log and Shrishti Publications- not by the A-list. For them, Bhagat has simply been a fact of life- too dominant to ignore, too declasse to embrace. Which is one reason why their own 'fun' releases take great pains to explain that they're well-written too, that they 'bridge the divide' (a fashionable phrase) between the literary and the commercial.

In any case, with Bhagat's readership out of the picture, we can see more clearly that the push towards this new breed of writing is not being fuelled by market forces- those simply aren't strong enough. Our habitual readers of English fiction are not a small group, but they are not nearly so organized as to be pro-active in shaping publishers' decisions. Readers remain reactive and the freedom to decide what books get to them, remains primarily with the publishers. Unlike in more developed environments, 'publishers here need to be entrepreneurial', wrote Chiki Sarkar, Random House's Chief Editor, in an article in Seminar last year, 'A large number of our best-sellers have probably been commissioned ... Rarely do we discuss submitted work. Half of my list consists of subjects that I think would make a good book... And I would guess that’s the same for most other publishers here. [emphases added].' Her article, by the way, was called, 'Why Indian Publishing is so much fun'.

The impetus for new books, then, comes neither from the readers, nor from the writers- their submissions, remember, are rarely discussed. So how did the Kama Kahani series begin? Sarkar explains: 'We’re full of girls in the editorial department who had grown up on historical romances and hadn’t read any desi ones. So we figured we should launch our own.'

This answers our initial question. If, today, our shelves of Indian English fiction are crammed full of 'light reading', it is because our editors felt like it. That such centralization of literary power should hold sway in a world that includes readers and writers, seems unacceptable on the face of it- but let us hold our condemnation a moment. After all, more new Indian authors are being published today than ever before, in more genres than ever before. We have crime fiction, thrillers, young adult fiction, fantasy, chick-lit, erotica. These are books, says the Penguin Metro Reads Facebook page, 'that don’t weigh you down with complicated, boring stories, don’t ask for much time, don’t have to be lugged around.' They are what Hachette's M.D. Thomas Abraham calls 'crossover' books- not literature, but good enough to 'bridge the divide' between literary and commercial fiction.

No Such Thing

But what if there was no such divide? What if there was only good fiction and not so good fiction? What if being engrossing was a virtue, even in 'literary' fiction, and being shallow a vice, even in 'commercial'? Because the truth is, that the abstract standards of literary quality are constant. Campus novels and murder mysteries may be second-rate trash or the most moving experiences, but they aren't condemned by their labels to be a half-hearted compromise. So setting out to 'cross over', is simply setting out to lose your way. To try to 'bridge the divide' is to get on a bridge to nowhere. The galling element here, is not that you are arriving at mediocrity- there's no shame in that- but that you were aiming at it.

Getting Serious

If we remember further that Indian English fiction is a very fledgling body of work, greatly in need of direction and nurturing, then the escape to 'fun' seems even more of a cop-out. It suggests a basic lack of belief that quality books can be written by Indian authors- or an inability to recognize them. In the absence of a foreign endorsement, it is as though an unwritten rule prevails, that there may not be any serious writing, there may only be amusement. But such a self-loathing attitude helps nobody. It doesn't help the new genres. These can't be wished into existence by an editor looking for kicks; they must emerge naturally from those who care about them- like pulp fiction did, in the early American magazines. And it doesn't help the new writers, because there is a sad, but common, phenomenon, of authors being published and simultaneously disrespected. In the recent past, for example, there have appeared a number of essays lamenting the inferior state of Indian English writing. But the curious fact, which would be funny if it were not annoying, is that the same people who have contributed to that state have nodded along sagely, and sighed.

The point of this present essay is not, I hope, similarly futile. It is simply to argue that we ought to demand high standards from everyone associated with our literature: not merely our writers, but also our critics and editors. Then maybe Indian publishing can get serious.

A Linguistic Awakening: Interview with Katherine Russell Rich

2010-05-08T22:41:00.000-07:00

(Excerpts from this interview were published in The Hindu Magazine today)

American writer Katherine Russell Rich's 'Dreaming in Hindi' is an engaging, informative account of a year spent in Udaipur, learning Hindi from scratch.
In this email interview, she discusses the process and what it did for her.

1.You mention in your book that you weren't quite sure why you chose to learn Hindi in particular. But do you think your achievement, of re-imagining your world through a second language, would have been as personally rewarding if the language had been some other?

Yeah, I kind of stumbled into Hindi—I didn’t know precisely why. I wasn’t one of those Westerners who was after all-things-Indian to get jolts of spiritual enlightenment. I just liked the way the language felt in my mouth, I liked the glimpses it gave me of someplace so different from what I knew. It’s funny to say this about something as cerebral as learning a language, but I liked the sensual experience of Hindi.

I sometimes think when we allow ourselves to stumble into something, we leave ourselves open to larger forces guiding us in the right direction... Hindi and India were an absolutely essential part of the mix, it turned out. But no way would I have anywhere near the same rewarding experience had I gone, say, to Cuernavaca to learn Spanish. Hindi and daily Indian life are so infused with the wisdom of the Vedas, that wisdom seeps in whether you’re looking for it or not. And whether you intend for it to or not, it’s transforming. In casual conversation, for instance, somebody said to me, “Life is a rope snake,” and I haven’t felt fear with quite the same intensity since. And as a proper, distanced Anglo-American, I was at first horrified by, then totally melted by the boisterous closeness of an Indian family. I ended up loving that and yearning for more.

2.As someone who balks at the idea of learning another language in adulthood, I was very struck by your analysis of how traumatic a process this is, and how it requires unsettling your whole way of thinking. Do you think you could have done it if your own life had not been at a cross-roads at the time?

Being at a cross roads gave me the time to get away, but I’m not sure it’s what enabled me in the process. It might sound weird, but I think what came in most useful was the fact that I’ve had cancer for two thirds of my adult life. When you live with cancer, you have to figure out ways to live with constant uncertainty, and same thing goes for when you learn a language: Did that man just say what I thought he said? No way. Wait, wait: I think he did. In both instances, you either learn to be fluid or you go nuts. In my case, I’d already gotten a jump on learning to be fluid when I started learning Hindi.

3.It's often said that we in India must all learn a common language if we're going to get over our linguistic rivalries. But since this can be such a painful process, would you say a 'live and let live' philosophy is a better approach?

A live-and-let-live-philosophy is a better approach in theory, but I’m not sure it is in practice. For a country to truly function, doesn’t it need to have some kind of collective national voice? On the other hand, just as you can’t invent a symbol, you can’t thrust a language on people. A language is so much a part of the unconscious, it has to be gently incorporated or it’ll never seep into the deeper levels.

As India continues to change so rapidly, I have a feeling the situation with languages might too, maybe because there’ll be more incentive to have a common language. It won’t be a matter of ramming it down people’s throats. It’ll be a necessity for doing business.

4.Reading your book, it's obvious you love English. In a paradoxical way, do you think that helped you with your Hindi- knowing that it would always be at arm's length, so to speak?

I do love English but I think that’s largely because, like a lot of writers, I love language. And loving language, no question, helped me with Hindi. Unfortunately, I think that knowing English would always be my primary language slowed me down with Hindi. If you’re a Hindi-only speaker and go to America, you can’t cheat and fall back on Hindi when you get sick of fumbling through in another language. But if you’re American and go to India, you can always corral someone into speaking English with you, to the detriment of your Hindi.

5 .Has your time in India learning Hindi changed your use of English?

In the beginning, that was happening all the time. You know how people in India often say “Hum” in a sentence where English speakers would say “I”? I was constantly doing the reverse—“We’ll be there at 7, then”--and people would say, puzzled, “We? Who else is coming?”

I was in such an Indian frame of mind, it took me about a year to know how to begin the book. One small example: I’d gotten used to the Indian sense of hierarchy and so I kept balking at writing about my teachers in any way that might sound disrespectful. This is the dead opposite approach you want to take with an American audience, who’ve been seeped in notions of “everyone’s equal” their whole lives.
I finally snapped out of it when one day, I was telling a writer friend a very rude but very funny story about one of the teachers and she said, “Of course you’re going to put that in the book?” Without thinking, I answered, “Oh no, that would be disrespectful,” and she cried, “What. Are. You. Talking. About?” After that, I was back in America.

Book Review- Maria's Room, by Shreekumar Varma

2010-05-08T22:32:00.000-07:00

(First published in April's Hindu Literary Review)

Not many novels are able to combine good writing with good story-telling. Maria's Room comes close- which makes the shortfall easier to sight. This atmospheric, highly literary novel is also an example of a mis-crafted narrative, which, while containing all the elements of a powerful story, doesn't effectively arrange them.

A Potent Setting

But the elements are there. Shreekumar Varma sets his book in rain-lashed Goa, an inspired choice of setting for a protagonist on a breakdown. Far from the revelry of sun and sand, this is a Goa of overflowing streets, vivid foliage, lonely, courteous hotels. It is the perfect place to brood, and that is our narrator's intention. Following his arrival in Goa, he takes us through his sojourns to the town, his encounters with locals and fellow guests, and his abiding introspections. He is Raja Prasad, a novelist searching for material for his next book, while wrestling with the failure of his last- and more than that, with the scars of personal tragedy. Soon he shifts into 'Maria's Guesthouse', and drifts into an affair with a young girl, even as he learns the story of another love, from another time. But the events of the past are impinging on the present, and the novel that Raja is writing begins gradually to lay bare his own predicament.

The Unreliable Narrator

However, as readers, our grasp of the demons that assail Raja- either what they are, or where they come from, or what is strange about them- remains only vague until late in the book. Realistically, this is not a problem- an afflicted narrator need not be particularly informative. But the question, from an artistic perspective, is whether he is then fit to narrate. Imagine, for example, a party at which a man is drunk out of his wits and involved in a series of fascinating scrapes. He is certainly the subject of a great story- but he is no position to recount it. We would much rather listen to a more sober onlooker, someone capable of marshaling the facts.

Something similar is the central defect of Maria's Room- a defect of story-telling. Raja tells us too little, until it is too late. Even the murkiest mystery arises from facts, and our interest in his situation could only really be piqued if we knew something solid about it. But his narrative, though rich in thought and observation, is short on facts. We are led to a conclusion without ever being primed for it. And when we finally understand, not just the secret of Raja's pathology, but the bare details of it, we wish we'd been told before.

Skill and Sympathy

Even saddled with this defect, though, the book remains very readable. Partly this is testament to Varma's skill with words. He brings to life the primal energy of Goa in the monsoons, so that even when the story flags, the atmosphere holds. His descriptions, as a rule, are precise and vivid: the rain 'writhes' against a window, a breeze 'dances' across a swimming pool, lights glow 'damply.' His language has flair: a cell phone is shaken 'like a faulty thermometer'; interrupting a compulsive talker is likened to 'boarding a train in motion.' But more than writing well, Varma cares about his protagonist- and that feeling communicates. Raja may be an enigma to us, but he is appealing in his vulnerability, and his open acceptance of it, as, for example, in his relationship with his father. Not many thirty one year old men could accept their parent's constant concern, and yet come across courageous. And not every writer could write them like that. Which is why, despite its errors of craftsmanship, Maria's Room is well worth visiting.

Book Review: Me Cheeta, by James Lever

2010-03-27T04:24:00.000-07:00

(This was published in February's Hindu Literary Review)

A one line description of Me Cheeta- the 'autobiography' of the chimp in the Tarzan movies- would suggest it is more or less a gimmick. Surely a book that proceeds from such an unreal premise cannot be taken seriously. In fact, it can. There is (as far as we know) no such thing as a monkey capable of language and literature, but then nor is there any such thing as an orc or an elf, or Jane Eyre, or Hercule Poirot, or Sartaj Singh, or Rocket Singh. They are all equally made-up, and one of the pleasant things about a book that is unabashedly fictional is that it reminds us what the essence of fiction is. Artifice. Whether you take for your protagonist a grim, tough-bitten man of the world or a goofy chimpanzee in Hollywood, the question is never: Is it real? The question is only: Does it tell the truth?

On the other hand, there is a reason why most fiction deals in the recognizable, which is the need to keep in touch. The more 'far-out' a character becomes, the less likely it is to serve any useful purpose. It is one thing to imagine a chimpanzee writing, it is another to imagine it writing three hundred pages of interesting memoir- without metamorphosing, at some point, into an ordinary human being. In which case we would be entitled to ask why it wasn't simply one to begin with. So when James Lever decides to get into the head of Cheeta, a chimpanzee abducted from the jungles of Liberia and launched into show-business, he is taking on a task that is legitimate, but difficult. On the whole, he does an excellent job of it. He does it by sticking, more or less, to the core ground of true emotion that Cheeta is perfectly placed to know- a captive animal's feelings for humanity.

This is, however, the less prominent theme of the book. The prominent theme, as advertised on the back jacket and in the bulk of the blurbs, is that of a Hollywood spoof, a parody of a celebrity memoir a bitchy, satirical send-up of the Golden Age of the Dream Factory. And it is true that no one who picks up this book hoping for the salacious atmosphere of gossip is likely to be disappointed. From the introduction, where Cheeta resolves to tell his tale 'without bitterness, name-calling or score settling', 'no matter how oafish the behaviour of certain people, such as Esther Williams, Errol Flynn, 'Red' Skelton, 'Duke' Wayne...', to his continually back-handed praise of his 'colleagues' ('Chaplin is an extraordinarily special human being... but... not even Charlie's stoutest defenders would claim that he was perfect or even likeable or indeed defensible on any level at all'), the entertainment is undeniable.

However, it does not fit. To put high-grade insults in an animal's mouth is funny, but strictly fanciful; the animal in such cases is the prop, not the author. A little less fanciful, but still a stretch, is Lever's portrayal of Cheeta as a delusional and increasingly bitter actor. His cluelessness about how Hollywood really works, coupled with his sense of being at the centre of it, is intended, perhaps, to echo the situation of many of the industry's human stars. But this can only succeed as a brief joke: no really insightful analysis of an artist's struggle in Hollywood can emerge from Cheeta. He is, after all, only a chimp.

All in all, these elements of the book are best treated as stand-alone parodies, snatches of information and comic relief, and if they were all there was to Me Cheeta, it wouldn't have deserved to make the Booker long-list. But there is more. The beating heart of the novel is Cheeta's relationship with humanity, and in particular with Johnny Weissmuller, MGM's Tarzan. “Happy, beautiful, young, untroubled”, Johnny is the centre of Cheeta's world, the human being who epitomizes the best of human beings, the only species that, for all the killing and hurt they cause, truly love and need animals. When Cheeta says this, we hear no satire. His gratitude to humans, and his fascination with their world, is both sincere and believable. Anyone who has cared for a pet will comprehend it. And Lever knows the profundity of this relationship, which is easy to ignore, but worthy of a novel. He sums it up in the lovely end, where Cheeta recalls the memory of a baby, lost in the jungle. “Its trusting gaze was the most vulnerable thing we'd ever seen, but there's power in that... The thing starts to cry... It smiles... I pick it up. It needs me, I think. I'll be its friend..."

Book Review: Neti, Neti, by Anjum Hasan (IndiaInk, 2009)

2010-01-10T01:23:00.000-08:00

(This was written for Biblio)

Towards the close of Neti, Neti, its young protagonist Sophie Das wonders aloud when her story will end. A little later she has a moment of realization: it won't even be on the last page. She is right about this, and perhaps unwittingly she reveals in the process the truth of her tale. Not merely that it remains unresolved, but that she does not know how to resolve it. So she cries for help- as she has been, more or less clearly, more or less consciously, all through the book.

Here, in a nutshell, is the best and worst of Neti, Neti. It takes on a problem that it cannot tackle, and on this stark measure it is a failure. But the problem isn't easy, and the attempt is honest, so there is not much shame in the defeat.

What is the problem? It isn't anything very new or startling; it is the problem of a young person getting to grips with adulthood. More than anything, Neti, Neti is a coming of age book. Indeed, one of its chief virtues is that amidst a literary culture so paranoid of 'self-indulgence', it features a protagonist who makes no apologies for worrying about herself. Not unlike the author, Sophie is a young woman from Shillong, who moves to Bangalore in search of freedom, and vistas wider than the home. The city gives her independence alright, and Sophie knows how to value it. In her apartment, “she could cook what she liked, smoke to her heart's content, put every object exactly where she wanted it to be and know it would not move unless she moved it.”

But it gives her other things beside; all the hot and bother of a chaotic Indian metro. Traffic jams, accidents, casual rudenesses, ugly malls, dirty streets, vast economic and social disparity existing cheek by jowl. Like any sensitive young person, Sophie feels the oppression of her environment and fears it will overwhelm her. She thinks with a pang of her beautiful home-town and the life she left behind. Hasan knows what hurts. The thousand little pin-pricks, Sophie's everyday humiliations, are all as they should be.

They are not, however, exactly as they should be. From fairly early on, we see the signs that Sophie is not trying hard enough. There is something unduly exaggerated about her horrors, the city seems to parade its evils especially for her. Hasan's insinuation is that other people look away, but the truth appears to be that Sophie looks too raptly. There is a glitch in her perception that repels our sympathy, and it is most apparent in her attitude to wealth. We have all felt the aesthetic failings of a lavish mall, but we have not all been literally paralyzed by the sight. It is reasonable to flinch at Page 3 culture and the glossy lifestyle magazines; it is not reasonable to devour them, just so one may vent. “She ground her teeth reading about wine appreciation evenings in swanky hotels.” This is funny, until you realize it is serious. “Nausea, mixed with awe”, is Sophie's avowed reaction to “wealth, in all its forms.” She does not pause to consider whether this isn't a bit excessive.

For us, however, it is worth pausing here, because it affords a clue to Sophie's character. What might be the probable cause of her heightened intolerance towards 'things'? Perhaps, the book suggests, it is the contrast they strike with her sheltered childhood in Shillong, and its slow-moving, small-town values? This is certainly part of the explanation, but it does not seem the whole or even the greatest part. After all, we are told that Sophie left Shillong precisely because she felt that there, “there was nothing to see.” Moreover, it is not necessary to be brought up in a small-town to feel, in your youth, the crush of the city. Every childhood has its own shelters, and the transition to adulthood is always a shock. And yet, staring at an array of packaged items on a supermarket shelf, walking by lighted shop-fronts, whether in a mall or not, most people, now and then, will feel a rush of something akin to admiration. An abundance of 'things' need not only be proof of human greed. It is also proof of human achievement. So for a truer explanation of Sophie's trouble we must look to her character, not her circumstances. And there is one glaring fact that can strike a twenty five year old like an arrow through the heart as she looks around at all the glut of productivity- and sees nothing made by her.

If one is self-critical enough to grasp this, the way ahead becomes easier to see. It lies in cultivating one's own abilities. Unfortunately for Sophie and for her story she is rarely self-critical, and she is frequently selfish. As a result, her friends and acquaintances, in whose sympathies she might have taken recourse, remain two-dimensional figures. She seems to want them around chiefly in order to feel superior to them- with their prosaic dreams of money and comfort. Her interest in their interior life is half-hearted at best. So even when her friend Ringo kills his girlfriend Rukshana, her thoughts are neither with him, nor with her, but with herself. “All Sophie could think of was the part she had played.” There were a few quarrels between the three, but to the reader it seems no part at all.

But perhaps the most apparent instance of Sophie's self-centred-ness, is her relationship with her boyfriend, Swami- “the first boy who understood the essentially shitty nature of her job and held her hand when they crossed roads.” Given that this isn't much to build on, it is unsurprising when later she grows dissatisfied with his easy-going personality. But the idea that, in letting the relationship drift, she might now be simply using Swami does not cross her mind. Instead, Sophie blames her boyfriend for failing to weaken in his “rock hard love”, because of which, she complains to herself, “nothing need ever change.” All in all, she is rather passive. She expects things to please her; she does not think of being pleasing herself.

That she remains an engaging protagonist, is the reason that Neti, Neti remains a good book. Hasan is not alive to her character's faults, but her achievement is that she makes the reader want to be. We are interested in criticizing Sophie because we are interested in her. And that is because she is honest. She is unhappy, but she does not pretend otherwise- as many people do. Moreover, she wants to feel better and she is willing to look for help. To deserve sympathy and attention, no more than this is required. So when Sophie decides to return to Shillong, we still follow her with interest. There is the possibility that the mountain town is her true home, 'that certain places on earth must bring forth happiness, as a plant peculiar to the soil, that cannot thrive elsewhere.' There is also the possibility of love; a man whose image she carries in her heart.

Now, Sophie's capacity to imagine these possibilities, and to act upon them, is proof of a creative impulse- the kind of capacity that could really turn her life around. But an impulse is only a spark; if it is to burn steadily it must be nourished. And it cannot be nourished unless at first it is shielded. This she does not do. She is greedy to be rewarded, and so her enthusiasm remains feeble and easily dashed. No sooner is she at her parents' home than we find her staring out of the window at a changing town, “at cold, boxy, pink and concrete houses built by people who didn't care about Beauty.' This is vintage Sophie. In the days that follow she is witness to domestic strife and local politics, and the end of an affair. There is no cold rejection; the man cares deeply. There is no familial tragedy either; her parents, despite hiccups, are sticking together. But it wasn't as she had imagined it, and so Sophie decides that “she was alone from now on. She was her own context.” Armed with this insight, she returns to Bangalore, to another job that she does not like.

Her new attitude, though, is “to grow mesmerised by the boredom.” “Nothing frightened her anymore- not walking into a shop in a plush mall, trying on clothes and then buying nothing. Not waking up in the middle of the night and being unable to go back to sleep. Not seeing a man crushed to death on the street.” The old ambition of happiness is gone, and like an invalid, Sophie has taken to being grateful for small mercies- the odd free ride, the occasional kind word. 'I don't want to feel the knife edge of anything ever pressing into me again', she thinks, as the book ends. They are hardly fighting words.

Of course, we are expected to sympathize with Sophie's disaffection, and even perhaps to applaud it. 'Neti, Neti', the title of the book means 'Not this, Not this.' Bangalore is ugly, Shillong is petty, so what is one to do? But the whole premise of this philosophy is flawed. It only wants to receive; it does not think to give. As readers, we never feel that Hasan sees this, and that is why, ultimately, Neti, Neti is a failed story. But we also never feel she is happy with the failure, and that is why it is a good story.

___________________________________________________________________________________

'The New Anthem: The Subcontinent In Its Own Words', edited by Ahmede Hussain (Tranquebar Press, 2009)

2009-11-09T05:16:00.000-08:00

(First published in the Outlook dated Nov. 16th)

What is South Asian fiction? How does it fare in the English language? And why do we need to know? These are important, interesting questions, which a book aiming to anthologize 'the subcontinent in its own words' really ought to have engaged with. A one page introduction merely asserting that “a strand of post-colonial literature” has now become an “independent genre” with a distinctive voice, is too brief and too vague to suffice. So when 'The New Anthem' moves hastily on to its twenty two short fiction pieces, we are fore-warned.

Some of the stories have South Asian settings and some South Asian protagonists. Only a handful reflect South Asian perspectives. Altaf Tyrewala's hand-wringing Mumbai abortionist, Monideepa Sahu's mother-and-son outing; Khademul Islam's Chittagong 'cyclone'; here are examples of subcontinental writers telling their stories in a language that came from a colonial power, and remains foreign to large swathes of their countrymen- and all without affectation or apology.

This is a major cultural achievement, but it is only meaningful in a specific cultural context. It would be wonderful to prove that the achievement is widespread- but you would have to focus. Where 'The New Anthem' lets itself down is in its uncritical collation of sensibilities- South Asian, diasporic, even simply Western. What suffers in the process is not the individual quality, but the collective thrust. That English fiction abounds in South Asian names, we already knew. And South Asian voices? We still don't know.

The Road to Recovery

2009-10-31T21:45:00.000-07:00

On the 27th of August, 1999, on a still, clear morning in County Sligo in West Ireland, Lord Mountbatten was out at sea, boating with his family, when a bomb planted by the IRA exploded and he was dead. Three others died in the blast, including Nicholas, Mountbatten's grandson and Timothy Knatchbull's twin brother. “Our hearts beat in loose synchronicity over seven hundred million times, until he was killed, aged fourteen.” It was the deepest relationship of Timothy's young life: 'to be so completely on the wavelength of another human being... was a gift. I was to realise this only once I had lost it.' 'From A Clear Blue Sky' is the story of how, over the course of the next twenty four years, Knatchbull overcame that loss.

Now of course, grief itself is commonplace. As Knatchbull points out, “we all have a car crash in our lives.' So it is perfectly fair to ask, at the outset: Does his own story rise above the ruck? Is it really deserving of a book? The answer is Yes, and not because of the political turmoil at the back of it, or who Mountbatten was; these details are interesting, but ultimately only incidental. It is obvious that Knatchbull isn't trying to cash in on a famous tragedy. Nor is he merely airing his sorrows. He is not 'using' his writing to get over his brother's death. He has already got over it; he is writing to tell us how. In doing so, he offers an account, always sincere, often moving, of a mourning so courageous and a healing so complete, as few people manage.

A Human Process

Of the many important insights Knatchbull has to offer, one that is crucial is the difference between grief and mourning. In the aftermath of Nicholas' death, he returned quickly to physical strength and an outward ebullience. But “becoming strong again did not mean physical strength alone, it also meant emotional strength. Had I spent more time actively mourning, then I would have healed more quickly and suffered less. Instead, I just let grief float over me on an occasional and passive basis.” There is a suggestion, also, that the stiff upper lip, and the sense of humour- revered British institutions both- can hinder one's facing the facts. So at thirty one, despite a seemingly happy professional and personal life, Knatchbull diagnoses himself afresh. He has mood swings, bouts of misery, the 'sound of the bomb' still plays in his ear. He decides then to take “an almost impossibly difficult but necessary step... to return to Ireland and finally address what had been holding me back for so long.' To engage, as he puts it, 'in a human process.'

From here on we follow him through an exhaustive series of encounters with the world of his childhood and the day of the bombing. He speaks with the staff at Classiebawn Castle, the family's old August retreat, “a place where normal life was suspended and dreams were played out”; with locals in Village Sligo; with his rescuers; doctors and hospital staff; with the security forces assigned to Mountbatten. Through these meetings and interviews, Knatchbull is able to reconstruct the environment at the village and grasp for the first time the complex politics behind his grandfather's assassination. He is able, also, to confront the image of his murdered brother.

Farewell and Forgiveness

During this account, what is particularly striking is the contemporaneousness of Knatchbull's personal healing and his forgiveness of Thomas McMahon, the bomber. It seems clear that his mission to 'say goodbye' to Nick would not have succeeded, had he not made his peace with the murderer. To achieve this takes hard and careful work. While he wants to learn about it, Knatchbull is careful to avoid probing too deep into the conspiracy that led to the bombing; he is not interested in rooting out every last culprit or pointing fingers at local sympathizers (of whom there were plenty). What he aims at is only a sufficient understanding of events to accept, “that if I had been born into a republican stronghold, lived my life as dictated by conditions in Northern Ireland, and been educated through the events of the 1960s and 1970s, my life might well have turned out the way Thomas McMahon's did.” The point here is not that it would have- it doesn't seem likely- nor that McMahon's crime was at all justifiable. The point is that the crime was human. And a book that culminates with a truth like that has told a story worth telling.

2009-10-03T20:36:00.000-07:00

A Critical Failure: Standards of Judgment in Indian English Fiction

(This is an essay I wrote on the state of contemporary literary criticism of Indian English fiction. A slightly altered version was published in today's Hindu Literary Review.)

At first glance, literary criticism seems a purely reactive enterprise; an appraisal of creative output that both logically and chronologically arrives after the fact. But it is much more than that. Just as the gardener's pruning shapes the growth of the plant, criticism gives direction to creativity. A critical culture envelops writers, whispering suggestions of subject and style- and the majority of writers depend on the suggestions. Otherwise they might not know what to say. The same critical culture guides readers too, and helps them comprehend the books they are given. Otherwise they might not know what to think. So if Indian English fiction today seems a disjointed cacophony of voices, with no discernible shared themes or values to lend some shape to its burgeoning mass, the ultimate fault is of our critical imaginations. They have not clarified the standards, by which writers may know their material, and readers may know their books. What standards we have got, are superficial and misleading, and the products of insecurity.

Awards

Judged by the number of international literary awards it has won, and the pace at which it has won them, Indian English fiction must be among the world's finest. The list of winners is impressive- Rushdie, Roy, Lahiri, Desai, Adiga. And it seems only natural that we should accept these victories as aids to our judgment. Surely it is safe to say that a book by an Indian author, so successful on the world stage, is an exemplar of Indian writing in English? But truthfully, not at all, because fiction writing is not a sport. An Indian cricket team winning the World Cup is almost certainly a greater achievement than the same team winning domestically, since at the international level the rules are the same and the competition is likely much tougher. But in fiction, there are no rules, and the 'competition' is incommensurable. All there is, at the back of every book, is a certain sensibility, the writer's mind, expressed for better or worse. And the act of reading is a meeting of minds. So when a book by an Indian writer wins a foreign prize, it makes more sense to be suspicious than thrilled. It may well be that the book is not really Indian writing, not really an Indian mind on paper, but a more or less foreign one. Perhaps that is why it won. At any rate, the inquiry must be made, and to shirk the inquiry, to focus on the fact of the prize, and to declare on its basis a triumph for Indian writing in English, is to leave the critical job undone. It is to continue to accept other people's opinions, without looking for one's own.

Reportage

Kiran Nagarkar once observed: “Research is not fiction. Very often it is passed off as fiction, especially in this country.” These are insightful words. Non-fiction continually outperforms fiction in our English language market, perhaps because its utility is clear on the face of it, while the case for fiction is less easily grasped. It needs to be made, clearly and effectively, but it hasn't been, and so a strange and pervasive theory has come to hold sway, that the best fiction is really just non-fiction with a storyline. According to this theory, the internal crises of characters, the play of their thoughts, the analysis of their emotions, do not suffice: 'hard facts' are needed, politics, history and sociology must be dropped as paperweights to prevent the frail fictional edifice from fluttering away. Many literary heavyweights adhere to this theory, and with seeming impunity. But the greater the emphasis on reportage the greater the disconnect between the writer and his characters, and the less the human insight. Then why the great emphasis? Perhaps, as Amitava Kumar has written, “the painstaking attempt at verisimilitude... betrays the anxiety about authenticity.” A writer “concerned about losing touch with the society he took as his subject...[might] invest in an aesthetic of observation and reportage... to build banks against the rising tide of that worry.”

Fashion

Nowadays, it is usual to read and hear that middle class India is growing ever more self-confident and ever more globally powerful. All too often, however, the hallmarks of this way of thinking are an uncritical celebration of money, personal aggrandizement and faux liberalism. Businessmen and industrialists are the heroes of the movement, but artists are welcome to join- provided they toe the line. And therefore a new breed of Indian English fiction has come to be published and lauded, not because it is good, but because it is the fashion. A book that is 'light' and 'breezy', doesn't have much to say but says it glibly, pats its chosen establishment on the back, and takes aim at nothing but good taste, will fit the bill. The operating tyranny here is that one mustn't be a spoilsport- you cannot seriously criticize a 'fun' book. A great deal of 'chick-lit', for example, is thus allowed to fly under the radar. But this is literary criticism at its most superficial; it is almost literally judging a book by its cover, as though the only important story on offer is the writer's 'success story.' Naturally, it provides no means of judgement, only adds to the prevailing peer pressure.

Interior Honesty: The True Standard

The extent of foreign acclaim, non-fictional content, and trendiness- what do these spurious standards of criticism have in common? They are each proof of a cultural insecurity. We resort to other people's verdicts, hide behind detail, and pile onto bandwagons, because we are shy of accepting that we have minds of our own. The literature of other Indian languages suffers from no such crises of identity; but as to Indian writing in English, Naipaul has rightly diagnosed, “India has no means of judging.... India's poverty and colonial past, the riddle of the two civilizations, continue to stand in the way of identity and strength and intellectual growth.”

And yet we cannot accept the air of finality about that assertion, because after all, it is the writer's very job- and pride and joy- to solve such riddles. The fact is, that the lives of English-speaking Indians, their specific social situations, their emotional crises and predicaments, are as real as anybody's, and as fertile a ground for literature, as anybody's. The test of the worth of Indian English fiction must, therefore, be the same as the test of any fiction. It is the test of interior honesty, which is achieved only by accepting your material and making something of it- and with candour, not a nervous laugh or a running apology. What is more, we do have writers who have attempted this task, and some of them have even tasted great domestic success. Unfortunately, their success has perhaps been mis-analyzed. I would suggest, for example, that the popularity of Chetan Bhagat's books is not because they are written so 'simply' or imagined so crudely; it is because, in spite of their many glaring artistic and other shortcomings, they honestly have something to say. There are others, also, who have things to say, and the only fair way of judging them is on the merits of what they have said and how well they have said it. That way lies literary criticism, and a little further on, maybe, a new national literature.

Book Review: The Quickening Maze, by Adam Foulds, Jonathan Cape (2009)

2009-10-03T20:33:00.000-07:00

(A modified version of this was published in today's Hindu Literary Review)

The Quickening Maze, shortlisted for this year's Booker Prize, is a graceful, vivid, beautifully written book, about fascinating characters in an otherworldly setting, whose achievement is nevertheless limited by a serious absence of narrative unity.

Drawing upon the lives of real people, in real situations, the book is ostensibly the story of the 19th Century English poet John Clare, and his incarceration in Dr Matthew Allen's High Beach Asylum, in Epping Forest in Essex. The 'nature' poet, whose mad hallucinations centre around his first, dead love, Mary, and his own identity- sometimes he is the poet Lord Byron, sometimes the boxer Jack Randall- is denied the company of his muse, the forest, and his wives, the real Patty and the imagined Mary. We follow his descent into madness. But although The Quickening Maze is so described, and although it starts and ends with John Clare, it is not particularly about him. A host of characters make up the tableau at High Beach Asylum. There is Dr. Allen, a seemingly wise and self-possessed medical man who launches into an ill-fated enterprise to sell wood-carving machines and prove to his skeptical family that he is an entrepreneurial genius. There is a young, as yet un-lauded Alfred Tennyson, living in the vicinity while his brother takes treatment, nursing grouses against literary critics, and investing in Allen's doomed project in a bid to get rich quick. There is Hannah, Allen's daughter, smitten by Tennyson, and trying touchingly to reel her man in. There are others too, the gypsies in the forest, the patients in the asylum, an aristocrat's love-lorn son, a business magnate, Dr. Allen's brutish colleague.

Now, to varying degrees, these various storylines are each engaging. The book abounds in apposite descriptions of people's emotions. The unwavering stubbornness of a lunatic receiving treatment; 'she could hear that he [the doctor] was exasperated, as with an awkward child, whereas it was his understanding that was childish'; Allen's fatal attraction to 'risk'; 'there was a pent force in having things at stake that seemed to charge one's limbs with energy and made eventual triumph more intense than could be imagined'; Hannah's curious relief at knowing finally that she can't have Tennyson;, because now 'the failure was outside of her body. It was already there, in the green and sunlit day', are high quality pieces of thought, with writing to match. The setting too, is precisely evoked; Epping Forest, dark and lovely and teeming with interior life, stays with the reader as an abiding presence. Where the novel loses steam, though, is in the big picture. Its various parts never really coalesce, either thematically or structurally. Aside from their co-existence in place and time, John Clare has little to do with Tennyson, or Hannah, or Allen's wood-carving scheme. And though it is possible for the enthusiastic reader to hunt out commonalities of meaning, running through the different stories- Imagination's battle with Reality, for example, or simply the 'quickening maze' that each character navigates- one feels that the novel should have done more of this work.

Partly, perhaps, this lack of unity stems from the inherent difficulties of transmuting non-fictional material into a single work of fiction. John Clare's story is both true and interesting. So is Matthew Allen's. Foulds is thus naturally keen to include both in his book, but the question remains, do they reveal any greater truth, when examined side by side? The other culprit, maybe, is the narrative style that Foulds adopts- one that is becoming increasingly fashionable in contemporary literature. The book unfolds scene by scene, flitting from place to place as a camera would. This allows for vivid images and a sense of compacted meaning, but it is, quintessentially, the style of a movie. It is a transplant, therefore, from a different mode of imagining. Not only does it somewhat distance the author from his characters, to have a metaphorical camera installed in between, but it might also waylay him into pursuing parallel, unconnected storylines, where the more traditional literary narrative, that cuts the whole book from one cloth, would have imposed a desirable unity. So it is in the thick of individual scenes that Foulds' brilliance shines through; not in the transitions, nor in the whole. That still leaves enough brilliance, however, to make this book well worth your while.

An Interview with Neel Mukherjee, Author of Past Continuous

2009-09-30T03:52:00.000-07:00

I did an email interview with Neel Mukherjee, who won the 2008 Vodafone Crossword Book Award for fiction for his first novel, Past Continuous. Excerpts from this were published in September's Hindu Literary Review.

1. Past Continuous is your first novel and it's obviously deeply felt. Did you worry at any stage about how your candour would be received? For example, did you worry that the scathing treatment Calcutta gets in this book, might offend some of your readers? And now that the book's been out a while, how would you assess the reaction of readers in this respect?

I do not have any memory of worrying about the reception its candour would get but the thought did cross my mind, on several occasions, that Calcuttans and Bengalis might murmur against the book. I was relieved when my anxieties turned out to be unfounded. I do not know why I have been spared the fate (so far, I hasten to add; it might be unleashed with my next book, who knows?) that lies in wait for writers who are critical about Bengalis and Calcutta. I'd like to think it's because I do not write as an 'outsider': I know the place and the period in my blood and my bones. I have lived as a Bengali and a Calcuttan for 22 years of my life, so no one could accuse me of not 'being' a Bengali/Calcuttan, of writing about things I do not know/understand. It may also have something to do with the fact that the book's attitude towards Oxford and London are as scathing and disaffected so it balances out the disenchantment with Calcutta.

2. There have been plenty of books dealing with emigration from India to the West. But the protagonist is rarely as little nostalgic about what he is leaving and as single-mindedly bent on escaping, as Ritwik in Past Continuous. Were you aware, while you wrote this book, that you were treading a different emotional terrain from other 'migrant' novels? Is that something you deliberately set out to do?

Yes, it was a very deliberate move on my part. I was trying to look at exile as choice, as volitional and sought-out. The common or garden variety of nostalgia, which is nothing more than a spurious, confected sentimentality, has ruined the 'migrant' novel. If you must have nostalgia, or longing glances backwards at what you've left behind, there must be new ways of doing it. Aleksandar Hemon, the Bosnian-American writer, for example, looks back on his life in Sarajevo all the time, but he reinvents nostalgia for his purposes to the extent that we need to find another word for the feeling that charges his fiction. Nostalgia can be extremely powerful in the right hands: think of the intense longing in the films Andrei Tarkovsky made after he left the USSR. They wring your soul. Alas, no such thing marks Indian 'migrant' literature yet.

3. You chose a gay protagonist for the novel, and yet the fact of his homosexuality didn't seem to me central to any of his predicaments. He might have been heterosexual and had just the same crises- only the details would differ. Do you agree with this reading? Or do you think the novel has something specific to say about Ritwik's sexuality?

It's really wonderful and affirming to hear this. I cannot tell you how much I agree with this reading. Ritwik's homosexuality is a sideshow. The novel is not a 'gay novel' in the sense The Swimming-Pool Library or The Spell are. I'm dismayed to hear it described as a 'coming-out' novel or, worse, a 'coming-of-age' novel. It could then, with equal justification, be called a novel about fruit-picking, or a novel about a posh London hotel. I was once told by a reader, who was disappointed, I think, that the book was not 'about' homosexuality, that I 'didn't do anything with Ritwik's homosexuality, just placed it in the novel without dealing with it'. What's there to deal with? His sexuality is what it is, a given, and I was not interested in mounting an enquiry into it at all. It's a novel 'about' other things.

4. When I finished reading Past Continuous that old line of verse came to me : East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet. Is there a sense in which you share that sentiment?

Yes, I do, in short. I'm much more attracted to the miscegenation of cultures than to harmony. The vision of, say, Naipaul, of such complicated enmeshments and their intractable nature, excoriating though it is, speaks an undeniable truth that is lacking from the flimsier works written by lesser writers to 'celebrate' multiculturalism or happy fusion of East and West. I'm much more interested in the long-term historical legacies of such (mostly baneful) encounters between worlds than sixteenth-century Turkish and Venetian art that borrowed from each other and married East and West in such harmonious beauty because the worlds came together through trade and commerce and all that rubbish.

5. I understand that before Picador India got it, the book was considered by many agents and publishers in the U.K. Were there any recurring comments or suggestions that you received from them?

Agents don't usually send suggestions in this country if they turn you down. The agent who took me on made one very sensitive suggestion and I accepted it instantly because it went 'ping' in my head. I have one very bad experience with a UK publisher, who gave it out to be understood that she wanted to publish my book and made me do a lot of changes, all outside a contract, only to reject it in the end. What was worse was that it was obvious from the outset that she simply hadn't 'got' the book: she wanted me to turn the novel into a fluffy, romantic, weepy Exotica Fest. She wanted the 'smells and colours of India', which she felt were missing, a love-story in Ritwik's narrative, a love-story in the Miss Gilby narrative, something that would 'wrench the heart' ... I'm really, really lucky I wasn't published by her. I think of that experience as something akin to surviving a rail crash.

6. You did a course in creative writing at the University of East Anglia. How useful was that experience in shaping you as a writer? Would you recommend a creative writing course to amateur writers?

It was one of the worst years of my life. The UEA Creative Writing MA was in irreversible decline by the time I joined the course: too many students (because it's an easy money-spinner for the university); very mediocre teachers in my year; their craven kowtowing to the illusion that writers can be made out of people who are not readers; the inanity inherent in the 'workshopping model' ... I could go on and on. The anti-intellectualism that so defines the English was nowhere more starkly on show than in that dreadful MA course. Which makes you think: if a writing class is pegged to the lowest common denominator, where are we headed? What it does give you, and I think this is quite useful, is a kind of toughness, a resilience to both the dominant norm in writing produced by the Creative Writing Industry and to useless, content-free, unintelligent criticism. It can build a good filtering system in you, so that you can instantly detect rubbish in comments you get on your work and, equally, the perceptive stuff. It also teaches you to push against the zeitgeisty kind of writing that has taken over publishing and that is invaluable. So, in short, all you learn from a Creative Writing course is to go against it, a kind of walking the via negativa. On a more personal level, I should quit complaining about my time at UEA because it was there that I met the most exciting writer working in the UK today: Ali Smith. Alas, she didn't teach my group.

As for recommending creative writing courses to amateur writers, yes, I suppose I would, very reluctantly, simply because it's getting impossible to have your manuscript seen by agents if you do not have the rubber-stamp of a good writing school.

7. Who are your favourite authors- and what do you like about them?

The list is endless. I'll pick just a few. Gustave Flaubert, because he took realism to its stretching point. Samuel Beckett, because he picked up the pieces after that and created new possibilities for fiction by taking prose back to zero. Mikhail Bulgakov, for that one novel, The Master and Margarita, which shows you what a wild, untramelled imagination is capable of. Penelope Fitzgerald, for her left-field imagination, her left-field prose, her astonishing way with details. R.K. Narayan, because the whole world is there in his gentle, witty, immensely affectionate novels; irony had not become a default position for moral impoverishment yet. Richard Yates, for the glitchless surface of his psychological realism, under which runs a bleak vision of humanity. James Salter, for some of the most extraordinary prose in the Anglo-American world.

Book Review: My Name is Will, by Jess Winfield (Hachette Book Group, 2008)

2009-09-30T03:50:00.000-07:00

(First published in September's Hindu Literary Review)

There is one redeeming truth that glimmers at the back of this book: every good artist owes more to life than to letters. The absence of academic laurels can therefore be no impediment to a suitably sensitive youth, looking to be (the next) Shakespeare, provided always that he lives deeply. But just what constitutes living deeply? Jess Winfield's My Name is Will has no good answers. It calls itself a novel of Sex, Drugs and Shakespeare, and that is a fairly exact description. Unfortunately, the implication through the course of the book seems to be that the first two commodities, partaken of in generous quantities, will more or less yield the third. This somewhat thin understanding of creative genius shows also in the novel's stylistic make-up, so much so that it is better treated as a high-spirited academic tract, than a work of fiction.

Employing what has become a fairly common story-telling device, My Name is Will proceeds along two parallel narratives. In 1980s California, we follow young Willie Shakespeare Greenberg as he struggles with his Master's thesis on his illustrious namesake. Willie wants to show that the persecution of Catholics in late sixteenth century England was the fire in which Shakespeare's talents were forged. But what he really wants is to sleep with plenty of girls and get high on plenty of mushrooms. His troubles begin when his father, who is wise to his son's predilections, cuts his flow of cash, thus forcing Willie to embark on a dangerous expedition to Berkeley to sell a giant psychedelic mushroom to a drug dealer. Dangerous because Nancy Reagan's war on drugs is underway, and there are informers and enforcers on the prowl. There are also, of course, various high-minded young men and women, vociferously saying Yes to Drugs. So where does Willie figure in the fight? Ostensibly on the side of the latter group, but not really- all that he really wants is to sell his 'stuff' and make a quick buck. The principle of the thing is not so important to him. And somewhat similar is his attitude to Shakespeare. We know that Willie is obsessed by the Bard; he has what looks like the entire Collected Works memorized; but the strongest impression he gives is of a young man in thrall to a name, Shakespeare, and an idea, The Great Artist, but neither particularly capable, nor particularly interested, in comprehending either. Now, in all this, he is a perfectly convincing character; he represents a very real type of affable, feckless young man. But Jess Winfield wants us to believe that he is a modern Shakespeare in the making, and that is a stretch.

Unless you buy his idea of the original. The second, alternating story of the book is of the young William Shakespeare in Stratford on Avon in 1582, flitting from maiden to maiden, and not doing much writing. His own 'war on drugs' is the Queen's war on Catholicism, and his own dangerous expedition is to deliver a relic from the Church to his old schoolmaster, now in hiding from Protestant pursuers. He, too, does not ultimately care for this fight; religious faith, one way or the other, doesn't much interest him. So what does interest him? People, presumably, their lives, their loves, their emotions, their crises? We would expect him to spend long hours scanning his thoughts for what gems he could make of them. But Winfield will have none of that. In a few pages of jejune fictional fancy he attributes Shakespeare's uniquely powerful insight to a particularly strong encounter with narcotics. Meanwhile, back in 1986, a similar 'mind-blowing' overdose gives Willie Greenberg the scoop on his hero and ensures the safe passage of his thesis. Thus the two Shakespeares, old and new, are each set on their way. In Winfield's imagination, it really is that simple.

Save, then, for the one true idea that artists draw from life and not books, My Name is Will is superficial in the extreme. And yet this is not because it is jaded or too tired to try. On the contrary, it is nothing if not enthusiastic. The writing is full of puns and word-play; the author is clearly besotted with his subject. But his enthusiasm is misdirected. The energy Winfield expends on his fictional characters and situations might have been better harnessed had he written an out and out academic treatise. This is no joke; even as it is, My Name is Will frequently reads like a highly imaginative research paper. When telling the story of the modern day Willie, Winfield pauses every now and then to take a potshot at 'New Literary Criticism'- an academic doctrine which holds, apparently, that the personal experiences of an author are irrelevant to appraising his writings. And every chapter about the 'original' William Shakespeare is prefaced by a brief factual note about his life and times- these are interesting, and serve as relevant points of departure for the story to come. The whole of My Name is Will could therefore be treated as an ebullient attack on New Literary Criticism, buttressed with examples, and on that footing it might well succeed. But not as a novel.

Age and The Fiction Writer

2009-09-30T03:48:00.000-07:00

(First published in the August Hindu Literary Review)

Literature, Naipaul once remarked, is not really for the young. In the course of his career the man has made many controversial and hotly debated remarks, but this has not been one of them. On the contrary, it is a thesis widely treated as true, that a writer of fiction is green in his youth and gets better with time. Individual proponents of the theory might easily be named, but a thought experiment will better establish its general acceptance. Imagine a critic, reviewing a book, and writing of its author- 'X is a woman, and so we may forgive her lack of insight'; he would lose his job. He would lose it just the same if X, in that sentence, was a North Indian or a Muslim or dark-skinned. But if, instead, our critic forgave X, because 'X is a young man', not only would he keep his job, he might also gain a reputation for wisdom, gentleness and compassion. Is this fair? Must a young writer, to whom 'talent' and 'potential' are so freely accorded, be denied insight- the one attainment that defines the artist- until there is some grey in his hair? I suggest that the answer is No, and the theory is a mistake, and a big one to boot.

The case in its favour is simple and, from the looks of it, strong. First and most fundamental, it seems obvious that if one wishes to say something of 'life', one must have lived a little. Lacking experience, one lacks knowledge. Second, writing is a craft and the more one does it the better one gets at it. There are techniques to be learned, and that takes time. Finally, writing is not the pastime of a few months or years. It is the vocation of a lifetime. Given the scale of the task, surely it is logical to assume a period of apprenticeship that extends (at least) through one's twenties, and then a period of consolidation and refinement ever after? To date, the youngest Nobel Laureate in Literature is Kipling, and he was 42, no spring chicken. So is Naipaul right?

Before we turn to the analytical reasons why not, let us consider the cases of three great authors, each of whom started young. Charles Dickens was 24 when The Pickwick Papers was published. It was his first novel, a hilarious, rollicking jaunt of a novel, which G.K. Chesterton has called “the great example of everything that made Dickens great.” Rudyard Kipling was 23 when Plain Tales from the Hills appeared; sharp, witty accounts of English lives in India; “he terrifies us with his truth”, wrote Oscar Wilde. And of all Kipling's work, it was this book that Naipaul picked out for a dose of (rare) praise. Before F. Scott Fitzgerald was 30 he had published three of his four finished novels, including The Great Gatsby, his romantic masterpiece.

Were these men aberrations? Were they, by some quirk of nature, granted middle-aged maturity at a prematurely early age? No, because these books are so youthful. There is nothing in the least middle-aged about them. Dickens never wrote another novel like Pickwick Papers, with it's unfettered, formless vitality; at the end of his days he was writing the highly structured Edwin Drood. The tender gravitas of the elder Kipling of If and the Just So Stories is a far cry from the frankly gossipy Plain Tales from the Hills. Even Fitzgerald, for whom the ways of youth were a way of life, lost to a great extent the lyrical penchant for 'fine writing' that made his early work so beautiful. In its stead he developed the pithiness and wit that marks his unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, and more clearly his last several short stories.

The point is not that these writers grew worse with time. Or better. The point is, they grew different with time. Their abilities changed with time. They remained great in middle-age and beyond- for one set of reasons- but they started great in their youth- for another set of reasons. And this is the clue to our mystery.

Yes, writing is a lifetime's vocation. Which is why a forty five year old writer is no more 'superior' to a twenty five year old, than forty five years of life are 'superior' to twenty five. The common mistake is to assume that at the later age you have all that you did at the earlier- plus twenty years experience. The truth is people forget. At twenty it seems scarcely conceivable that we were once six years old- a child is a stranger- and similarly, at forty the young person is a stranger. His or her way of thinking and feeling is irretrievably lost- it shows in the clash of the generations, and it shows in the writing. 'Experience' is not a commodity that keeps increasing quantitatively; it only keeps changing qualitatively; and so, incredible though it may seem, the twenty five year old writer possesses as many passionately felt thoughts, and as many means of expressing them, as he or she ever will. Looked at another way, it is worth noting that there comes an age beyond which one word fits all: the word is 'adult', and if you are not one by twenty five, you probably won't be one by seventy five.

All this is important for a single, outstanding reason: that the preponderance of Naipaul's sentiment can, and no doubt has, waylaid many a career. It is very easy, and very deadly, for young writers to put off their work on the theory that they are too young, and can't possibly have anything 'really great' to say just yet. Their every instinct may be crying out against the theory, but such is the power of suggestion and the brittleness of psychology, and the fragility of confidence, that we don't always trust our instincts. Discouragement is cheap and easy, but what is always wanted- now more than ever for Indian writing in English- is enthusiasm. So it needs to be said, that age is a number, and literature for the young.

The Dangerous Demarcation of Literary and Commercial Fiction

2009-09-30T03:44:00.000-07:00

(This was published under the title 'Dangerous Demarcations' in July's Hindu Literary Review)

A product must have a description, and nowhere is this requirement more acute than in the business of fiction. Mention a new book and 'What's it about?', is the first and inevitable question. It is a perfectly serious, perfectly reasonable question. Everybody asks it, and it deserves to be answered. The artist's protest that his art is ineffable is not a good answer. In steps the tough-bitten marketeer. He has made a career out of bombarding the public with masses of information they never wanted to know. Now they do want to know, and he finds he hasn't a clue. But unlike the writer he is never short of words. He dips into his bag of cliches, categories and comparisons and what should come to hand, at the very top, but those old faithfuls: literary fiction, commercial fiction.

Perhaps you will say this is being unfair. After all, just instinctively, one feels there is something to the distinction. James Joyce is not Jeffrey Archer. Chetan Bhagat is no Chekhov. True enough, and important too; differences in depth and stylistic ability ought to be recognized. That is how the great writers are separated from the good, and the good from the mediocre. And if this is what publishers were trying to do, when they called one of their books literary and another commercial, it would be a welcome dose of honesty. If they were really saying, these books are works of art (but we don't really care if you buy them), and these books are not much good (but we think there's money in them), it would be half the job done for the critics.

But of course- they hasten to assure us- that is the one thing they are not saying. The marketing labels contain no judgments. They are meant only to be descriptive. In what sense, we shall consider. But already we have a glimpse of how dangerous they are. In belying our intuition that 'literary' connotes well crafted and 'commercial', a quick buck, they covertly mislead us.

Overtly they do nothing for us. Overtly, they are meaningless. Look and you'll see, that in practice, it is the mood of the story that determines the moniker. Imagine a novel that begins with the murder of a wife and ends with the revelation that her husband was the killer, and jealousy the motive- like every Agatha Christie, it is bound to be labelled 'commercial.' Why? Because the mood of the book is suspense; because the story unfolds by twilight. But change the order of events, push the murder to the end, and bring the husband to the centre, and draw out by the full light of noon his simmering emotion, and you have- Othello. A 'literary' classic. Both stories may be just as effectively written, and contain just as true psychology, but the demarcation will not be deterred.

And it's emptiness should now be evident. A thunderstorm is more thrilling than a sunset, which is more nostalgic. Certainly, they evoke different moods, and if we were to describe them, we would use different concepts. But not these concepts. Does it mean anything to associate 'commercial', with one phenomenon and 'literary' with the other? Is there not as much art in the storm as in the sunset? Are they not equally popular? The truth is that the same artist has fashioned them both and, very likely, the same audience will admire them both- unless waylaid by the labels.

So much for the general malaise (because the labels are everywhere). Closer home, they have an added danger, a peculiarly Indian corruption that discriminates between books, not merely according to their mood, but also their subject. Conventional wisdom has it that English fiction in India was chiefly 'literary' until about a decade ago, and is now satisfyingly 'commercial'. I suggest that this is a myth. What has really been changing is the profile of the author, and the subjects that interest him or her. The last generation of our writers were almost entirely a part of our disapora, published and feted by the Western literary establishment, and examining India, quite self-consciously, from the outside. Now, there exists a younger generation, with a different standpoint. More firmly rooted within the country, it is not natural for them to write 'about' it; except indirectly, and subtly. Their subject is not India, nor even especially the 'people of India': it is simply people.

It does not sound a frivolous subject. It does not suggest a less important fiction. But those who believe that some lives are less real than others, and that private introspection is the privilege of the West, are bound to raise their eyebrows. An unseemly rush ensues, to label without looking stories of love, 'chick-lit'; stories of crime, 'pulp'; the coming of age novel, a 'campus novel', and the whole output 'commercial'- that the old guard, safely and exclusively literary, may retain pride of place.

That this attitude is condescending, is obvious. But it is worse, because it sows the seeds of a self-fulfilling prophecy. To believe that new fiction must necessarily be trivial is to all but ensure that it will be: that bad books are encouraged and good ones overlooked. Most dangerous of all, if young Indian writers are always being assured that their fiction, no matter how painstakingly crafted and how emotionally alive, can never be 'literary', they may really start to believe it. Instinctively- remember, these categories have an instinctive meaning- they may feel themselves second-rate. Not 'real writers', like the ones abroad. Tell someone enough times that he or she is only an amateur and soon you might be right.

There's a lot in a name. We may pretend they mean nothing and resolve to ignore them, but all the same, they reflect and create mentalities. 'Literary' and 'commercial' are sloppy labels that mislead readers, and slander writers. We would all do better without them.