I am listening to...

I have been listening to the potent voice of Aruna Sairam in Padam – Le Chant de Tanjore, as she laments past loves and the passing of great ages through a dying Carnatic art form – the Tanjore style Padam. Padams are rhythmic lyrical poems that were popular in the 15th and 16th centuries. They are sung in a manner that places them somewhere between a song and a chant. They’re mostly in classical Telegu and Tamil which explains why I can’t understand a word. But there is so much yearning and emotion in Sairam’s voice that lexical sense becomes secondary to emotional meaning. My favourite is Paiyyada Paimida Ceri Pavvalinci. I can just close my eyes and imagine the words of this song bouncing of the friezes inside the big temple in Tanjore. It’s challenging but rewarding music.  

If It is Sweet by Mridula Koshy

Koshy’s writing is a hurricane, words swirling with such intensity around the reader who she situates within the calm of the eye. There is a sense that beyond the sentence that you are on, there is a whole world, unread and unseen that the narrator has woven in the time that you took to blink. This world is screaming out to you and it’s full of allusions to inequity and class struggle and you stop to tell yourself that it’s typical, after all the author’s some kind of trade unionist ergo the Marxist undercurrent. But, the truth is that the stories in If It is Sweet are anything but typical. They are not about ideologies but about individuals in such a potent and poignant way.

I am not a great fan of short stories. There were a couple in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth that I really enjoyed. I think it was the story more than the style that I appreciated. But, Koshy’s language, rambling yet terse; warm and yet distant, lends an eerie sharpness to her characters and stories who by themselves are distinctive. My favourite story was the very first one. ‘The Good Mother’ about a woman who lives in Manchester and returns in India annually in what she considers a pilgrimage with the memories of her two young sons who’ve died in a car accident. I found the narration of the mother scattering her children’s ashes in Agra particularly moving: 

“Dry-eyed, she unwraps her bundle. This time it is easy. The knots are not really knots, just cloth twisting and crisscrossing, and deep inside the length of cloth there is a knot that slides free, revealing warm brass which gleams in the shade of the balcony. She tips the lota to the lattice that faces the street and market below. The lip of the jar catches the edge of the narrow opening in the concrete but cannot intrude beyond. Shaking out the contents is an awkward business. The brass and concrete where they meet and scrape make a rasping sound, and there is no breeze to carry the ashes that, soft and oily, disperse only slowly. Much of it mounds into the opening, and when the jar is empty she sets it down, kneels to the floor and, bringing her mouth close, blows. Little bits swirl back and stick to her lids and lips, but the rest float out, and before she can grasp the moment they are gone. She cannot remember the words her mother has taught her to say.”

The proposition that in the end the mother consumes what she produced is far more powerful than the phrase “Little bits swirl back and stick to her lids and lips’, albeit pithy, reveals. This is Koshy at her very best, pensive, understated and yet forcefully compelling. The other stories I really liked were ‘When a Child was a Child' and 'Companion'. Rana Dasgupta couldn’t have described If It is Sweet more aptly when he wrote that it was ‘brooding otherworldly prose’. There is something (I am afraid I have to use this word) beautiful about Koshy’s writing. I have a gnawing urge to reread some of the stories; I think I will have to temporarily break my solemn vow of not buying fiction in the near future.

The Time Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

I read somewhere that Niffenegger’s debut novel belonged to a little known genre called literary science fiction. I am no authority on literature and should ideally refrain from deeming something literary or whatever is its opposite. But, I do think that a literary work distinguishes itself from the clutter through the originality of its language. Whilst The Time Traveller’s Wife has a remarkably original plot, the language is clichéd and the result is the adorable but incredibly senseless love child of Nicholas Sparks and Doris Lessing.  

The premise of The Time Traveller’s Wife is that its protagonist, Henry DeTamble, a handsome librarian, is chronologically challenged. He suffers from a genetic disposition that causes him involuntarily time travel in his birthday suit to different points of his life, mostly in the past but sometimes into the future. On one of these sojourns, Henry appears before a 6 year old girl, Clare, who is and will be his wife in his present and her future. The story revolves around Henry and Clare’s relationship. The basic plot is strung in a chronological sequence with rewinds and fast forwards whenever Henry time travels with the narration alternating between Henry and Clare. To avoid confusion, Niffenegger helpfully adds the time, date and character’s age before commencing a sub-chapter.  

I must admit that I was initially hooked. There’s something very charming and romantic in a very old-school sense about Henry and Clare's love for each other. However, the novelty of the time travel business soon wore off and I found myself concentrating increasingly on the inadequacy of the language. Take for instance the fact that the writer ostensibly takes the trouble of defining two perspectives and yet Henry and Clare sound exactly the same. The dialogue is often forced; the love-talk contrived. The post-death letter Henry writes to Clare (because he knows when he’s heading upstairs) is a good example. “Clare, I want to tell you, again, I love you. Our love has been the thread through the labyrinth, the net under the high-wire walker, the only real thing in this strange life of mine that I could ever trust. Tonight I feel that my love for you has more density in this world than I do, myself: as though it could linger on after me and surround you, keep you, hold you.” Touching and mushy like mashed potatoes with gravy out of a carton. Predictably, I found myself in a 100 page sprint to the end. If I had to sum up The Time Traveller’s Wife in a single word, it would be ‘cute’. I leave it to you to consider the implications of such a word in the context of literary science fiction.  

A Guide to the Birds of East Africa by Nicholas Drayson

In the boxy world we live in, Bengalis write about Bengalis, TamBrams about TamBrams and Immigrants about Immigrants; you get the idea. Then, along comes a book that swims against the current. A Guide to the Birds of East Africa is a novel that’s as intriguing as its title. And yes, it is in fact a novel and not a collection of colour illustrations and descriptions of the avian kind. English born writer and naturalist Nicholas Drayson sets the stage for his pithy novel in Nairobi. The unlikely protagonist, Malik, is a short, fat, balding, sixty something year old who happens to be a retired Kenyan businessman of Gujarati extraction.

Every Tuesday morning, Malik sets off with a bunch of known strangers on a bird walk conducted by the East African Ornithological Society. The facilitator of this weekly walk is Rose Mbikwa the Scottish-born widow of a Kenyan politician. Along with his enthrallment with birds of the feathered variety, Malik harbours furtive feelings for Mrs. Mbikwa and fantasises about taking her to a relic of the old colonial social life, the Great Hunt Ball. On one such Tuesday morning, Malik happens to meet his childhood nemesis, Harry Khan. Khan who is described as white haired and charming, drives around town in a rented red Mercedes convertible, irks Malik without delay when in response to Mrs. Mbikwa’s comment about some Baglafect weavers (birds) being beautiful, he retorts “Almost as beautiful as you, Rose Baby.”

Things come to a head when it is discovered at the Gentleman’s club, which Malik & Khan frequent, that both sexagenarians intend to take the winsome Mrs. Mbikwa to the aforementioned ball. The gallant members of the Asadi club (a colonial style club for brown sahibs) set out a contest where the one who spots the most number of bird species within a week, reporting back to the club each evening, would win the right to ask the dame under dispute to the ball. As the contest unfolds, we learn more about Malik, his family, his thoughts and his clandestine column where he exposes political shenanigans through some feathered metaphors. After a number of little incidents including a mugging, a carjacking, an encounter with Somali bandits and being arrested by the Kenyan armed forces for snooping, the contest comes to a conclusion, but not before the Malik garners tremendous respect from the reader with his quiet dignity and quaint humility.

The narrator recounts the story as one among the birds so to speak. There is genuine warmth in the way places are described and people are portrayed. There is a sense of being among friends. When writers set their novels in foreign lands, they often make the mistake of writing with the eyes of an outsider. Drayson, on the other hand, makes the reader feel one with the city and its inhabitants, feathered or otherwise. You see the myriad birds that are spotted as vividly as the characters in the novel. You amble along posh streets and skirt the perimeters of shantytowns; your head trapped in the after-effects of a thousand bonfires of old leaves and garbage. Meanwhile, the protagonist grows on you in a sort of unhurried, East-African way. The measured revelation of Malik’s character is akin to lovingly unwrapping a present whilst savouring each new layer. A Guide to the Birds of East Africa is a simple but charming book.

Reading, Discerningly

I have so little time to engage myself in the things I love. The drudgery of work and the mindlessness of my commute take away so many precious hours, minutes and seconds from learning Spanish, practicing my up downs & down ups on the guitar and of course reading. It’s strange how time or the lack thereof has changed my approach to picking books. If you asked me whether I would give just about any old book a whirl, my answer would be an unequivocal no. But, just a year ago, my response would have been very different. I was willing to try out anything masquerading even remotely as a book including several of the brain rotting variety (Kid Edward’s The Memory Keeper’s Daughter and Indu Sundaresan’s Splendor of Silence win hands down).

Now, each minute that I spend reading is so precious that I would much rather read a book that I would probably enjoy than one that I would despise or be diffident to. This, despite the fact, that I have stopped buying books. Librarywala is my saviour. It’s a case of Dominos meets your neighbourhood library. And thankfully, it’s very effective in ensuring that my passion for the written word doesn’t reduce me to penury. But, even though the books come free (well in a manner of speaking), I have started doing a bit of a background verification before I order a book, thereby optimising both my time and subscription.

Before I ordered my book for this weekend (If It is Sweet by Mridula Koshy), I squirreled around the web in an attempt to discover more about Koshy. This is her first published work so there’s not much precedence to go by. However, I did chance upon her blog. Koshy’s a bit of rambler but there’s a darling of a post with the seemingly trite title ‘She wants to get back’. Koshy talks about the banality of suburban routine in Oregon and how things changed when she moved to Delhi. Any paraphrasing of Koshy’s words will do much injustice to the comeliness of this paragraph. So here it is:

“Something shifted for me once in Delhi. I walked in the jungle park bordering my colony—a place, lovely and crowded, like so many in Delhi. A small search here yielded solitude. Solitude, by the way, isn’t at all the same thing as loneliness. In fact solitude is the best cure for loneliness. Walking here I found myself and again became my own best companion—the left right rhythm of walking merging my left right selves, so they spoke to each other. And this time I gave chase to the words floating into and out of me. I wanted to know where they came from and where they were headed. I was not content to think, how extraordinary, as an image emerged then vanished. I wanted to turn it over in my hands, examine it from all angles to see what made it work, and I wanted to replicate it on the page, where it would yield its meaning at my will. But what is extraordinary, when it is suspended between left and right, me and I, becomes less so on possession. I wonder sometimes if that is the way it will always be.”

Such insightful thoughts and so well articulated. Koshy has inadvertently set expectations. I hope If It is Sweet lives up to them.

Rooftops of Tehran by Mahbod Seraji

Seraji’s first novel is a semi-autobiographical tale cobbled together from memories of growing up in Tehran in the time of the Shah. The story revolves around Pasha, a gifted teenager with a love of books. Pasha spends a lot of time with his best mate, the cheeky and irreverent Ahmed, on the rooftops of their houses, talking about girls, reading books and sleeping. Ahmed is besotted with Faheemeh who lives nearby. During their attempts to get closer to Faheemeh, the two friends meet a young man nicknamed Doctor who’s engaged to Zari, Pasha’s alluring neighbour. Pasha is drawn to Doctor, a Marxist and an intellectual who freely criticises the regime, a precarious act then as it is now. But, Pasha is also attracted to Zari and feels a profound sense of duplicity towards her fiancé, a man he admires. When Doctor goes away over the summer to the countryside to undertake ‘university work’, Pasha, Ahmed, Faheemeh & Zari become close friends. As summer draws to a close, word arrives that Doctor has been arrested by the Savak, the Shah’s secret police for subversive activities. He is executed soon after. His death plunges Pasha, Ahmed and Zari into a dangerous cycle of dissent that will have severe repercussions on them all.  

Subversion in Iran seems to be a perpetual affair, regardless of the regime. I imagine that there must be hundreds of Pashas and Ahmeds in today’s Tehran fantasising about their neighbour’s daughters and dreaming up novel ways of expressing their opposition to the state. From that perspective, Rooftops of Tehran is very convincing. It skillfully captures a snapshot of adolescence with its casual impertinence and its heady impatience. In novels that are set in times of oppression, there is a sense that the political climate displaces characters to a position of inconsequentiality. Seraji, however, blends the small and personal events in the lives of characters with the larger landscape adeptly.  

Where Rooftops of Tehran fails is in its style of writing. At first, I put it down to that ubiquitous stilted approach that so many writers are hooked to. But as I read on, I realised that it was more to do with the unnaturalness of the narration arising perhaps from a lack of a thorough hold on the language. Lines such as “...the space between his beating heart and mine feels taut, as if they’ve been tied together with a string” seem incongruent. There are many more metaphors and adjectival phrases throughout the book which seem to have been inserted without much thought as to its semantic impact on its surrounding narration and dialogue. To Seraji’s credit, in the reader’s note towards the end of the book, he admits that his mastery of English is incomplete. Having come to America as a 19 year old, he says that he “ate Big Mac, Small Fries, Small Coke for six weeks because that’s all I knew how to order.” I think humility in a writer is a laudable trait. I do confess that the writing style became progressively better in later chapters, but it still needs a lot more refinement.  

Seraji has evidently written Rooftops of Tehran with an American audience in mind. To this effect, he adds cultural explanations by way of annotations, prefixing these sentences with the phrase ‘We, Persians.’ I found these a little annoying. But can we really critique him for writing the novel as an immigrant about his experiences growing up in the home country for readers of his adopted land? Would the book’s realism be heightened if he addressed an Iranian audience? I have been thinking a lot about the target audience of a novel. A couple of articles on Chandrahas’ blog (it’s true, I dissed his book, but I enjoy reading his blog!) refer to the tendency for Indian authors to write for western audiences and how this perhaps detracts from the veracity of the experiences described in these books. I suppose these are thoughts that Seraji should consider for his second novel on which he is currently working.  

Jahajin by Peggy Mohan

Jahajin is an account of a linguist who’s recording a dying language, Bhojpuri, on the island of Trinidad. A plurality of her book comprises interviews with elderly women who came to Trinidad from Bhojpuri speaking areas in British India to work as indentured labourers on sugar plantations. Interspersed with these interviews are stories of her own family who are also descendants of jahajin (people who came on the ship – as in jahaz) as well as time spent in Trinidad with friends. Mohan is interested in how the women jahajis helped preserve and perhaps propagate Bhojpuri in the estates among those who would have otherwise spoken Khari Bholi (Hindi from Western UP – our current standard dialect) or would have altogether abandoned their mother tongues for English and Creole. An interesting device that the author uses to tie together the various themes in the book is the Bhojpuri folk tale of Saranga and Sada Briju. The book concludes with Mohan’s visit to her ancestral village in India with a particularly moving incident where she meets an old man of the same caste as her ancestors.

The description of the journey of jahajis to Trinidad reminded me a lot of Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies; except of course that Jahajin is not fiction. Mohan’s style of writing is simple and unadorned. It lends itself well to the subject matter, heightening its authenticity. Instead of a dry, academic recitation, Mohan’s narration is peopled by rich, living characters. However, the plain speak is perhaps best suited to someone who is familiar with the West Indies. I have been to Trinidad; in fact, I lived for a couple of years next door in Guyana, which like its neighbour has a large population descended from indentured labourers from India. I wonder if someone who didn’t have the benefit of context would be able to as easily picture the verdant greenery and the lilting speech. The dialogue between Mohan and her family and friends, at first glance seems bereft of any rules of grammar. In fact, at one point, Mohan expresses the fact that she has good English – this after a chapter full of dropped articles, wrong tenses and errors pertaining to subject verb agreement in between inverted commas. Only to someone familiar with the Caribbean, would these mistakes seem innocuous; just one of the facets of the wonderfully affable, sing-song patois of the islands.

I also had a hard time believing that an Air India stewardess would have asked Mohan about her caste. I accept that Air India cabin crew can be guilty of a wide range of offences, but this one seems a little incredulous. The author describes events that happened conceivably in the eighties and perhaps early nineties. She doesn’t mention the time frame, but I presume the eighties based on her descriptions of Delhi. The book was first published in 2007. Beyond the recorded interviews with jahajis, I wonder how she was able to recall all the personal conversations she details in the book. Maybe she wrote them down. Or perhaps she wrote the book back then only to be published much later. I do feel that the 268 odd pages do injustice to the wealth of immigrant stories that must exist amongst the elderly in Trinidad. Despite her claims of having interviewed a multitude of people, Mohan includes the stories of only those connected to her family. I assume she wanted the book to come across as a very personal endeavour – something I think Jahajin achieves.

Ptolemy's Gate by Jonathan Stroud

I had the flu when I finished reading the last episode of the Bartimaeus Trilogy. Despite the restlessness brought on by the fever, I managed to read Ptolemy’s Gate in a single afternoon. The book is far longer than the two preceding ones in the series, depicting the conclusion of the conflict and events described in the earlier books. I always read the final book in any series with a bit of reluctance and despondency. Despondency that this world that you were so eager to revisit is coming to an end. At least, that’s how I felt when I read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

The surprising element of ‘Ptolemy’s Gate’ is how it concludes. It’s a very grown-up ending. Even J.K Rowling gave her creation a stereotypical happy ending. However, the plot gets caught up in the action of the events leading up to the climax and consequently Ptolemy’s Gate lacks the humour that was so refreshing about The Golem’s Eye. Still, I read it unflinchingly from start to finish despite a throbbing head and a miserable throat; so it’s decent at the very least.  

The Liar by Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry is an enormously funny man whether it’s him being comical on Jeeves & Wooster or on Parkinsons. So, it naturally follows that his books are in that genre of ‘drop off your chair laughing’. His humour is simultaneously sophisticated and downright filthy. Rarely have I across an author who can render the profane so eloquently in a high register. However, his ability to push the limits of good taste tends to work both in his favour and against. It makes his plots, shall we say, unique. But, the therapeutic paedophilia and bestiality in The Hippopotamus was a little too much even for me. Hence, I justifiably picked up The Liar with some trepidation.  

The Liar concerns itself with a young man named Adrian Healey who has a penchant for dispensing untruths (ergo the title). The story doesn’t follow a chronological sequence, but instead hops back and forth between different phases of Adrian’s life. This can be quite jarring, particularly when repeatedly, out of nowhere appears a strange sub-plot where characters are referred to by their garments with scenes taking place in Austria. This is of course a sudden departure from the English public school and the Cambridge college where most of the action takes place. Adrian is an erudite if unconventional chap. His deviancy manifests itself in his tireless pursuit of some boy-on-boy action with his fellow public school inmates as well as an underground school magazine to which he contributes a subversive article. For the latter bit of insurrection (the former seems to have been tolerated, perhaps even encouraged), Adrian gets expelled. He then works the streets of London as a rent boy who reads Antigone in French when not fellating clients (we later find out that this episode in his life is made up).  

In bits and pieces, Adrian’s life at Cambridge is also revealed. Our irreverant protagonist gives up the noble love of the Greeks and finds himself a girl. He also hatches a plan to forge a novel with the unlikely name of ‘Flowerbuck’ and pass it off as a hitherto unknown Dickensian piece. The chapter where a portion of ‘Flowerbuck’ is recited was perhaps the most confusing part of ‘the Liar’; the sudden insertion of 19th century English with incomprehensible dialogue with no possible context-setting or introduction left me wondering if it was a misprint. It seems to me as if Fry was trying very hard to force that element of unpredictability into his writing. I agree that predictability in a novel is bad. By that logic, unpredictability ought to be good. But I doubt if the purpose is served if unpredictability breeds utter confusion. Things come to a head in the last hundred pages when Adrian is drawn into a conspiracy of international espionage involving his English professor and a Hungarian chess player. This new angle comes to an end as quickly and perplexingly as it commenced and the book concludes soon after. 

Of the three books I have read so far by Stephen Fry, The Liar by far has the most well written dialogue but with the most mediocre story. The biggest flaw in The Liar is that the plot seems to have been an afterthought with the actual dialogue taking precedence. I concur that the latter is exceptionally witty and well written, but it’s no excuse for the lack of a robust story. By this, I don’t mean that that story in itself needs to undergo a radical change; rather the manner in which it’s been put together requires refining. Disappointed as I was by The Liar, I can’t help smiling when I think of its classic one-liners such as this gem uttered in appreciation of a wine, “I wonder how they got the cat to sit on the bottle.” 

Stranger to History by Aatish Taseer

I have a certain partiality for travelogues and books on history and politics. But, books on exploring Muslims’ perceptions of themselves and the world, I find dreadfully tedious.  

But what interested me about ‘Stranger to History’ wasn’t its subject matter as its author. I spent a couple of years at the residential institution where Taseer was schooled, a year below his. In fact, we were in the same dorm. So when Taseer describes the school in a short chapter towards the middle of the book, I rummaged in my memory to identify some of the people and scenes he describes. I remember the dorm parent, a small-minded Anglo-Indian with her perpetually jaundiced husband. I remember her apartment with the pastoral scenes and biblical verses. I remember the shrine to Princess Diana to which in a bout of amateur toadying, I contributed a tacky ceramic plate I bought in London. If sucking up came very unnaturally to me, it was modus operandi for the suave Taseer who when not flattering school staff, would spend hours gossiping on the corridor phone with his celebrity journalist mother. Unbeknownst to Taseer, my roommates and I would pass many boring evenings imitating his strained exclamations and mind-numbing paraphrasing of high society tales his mother must have eagerly recounted to him. I did have a little trouble remembering the school counsellor who seems to have been the original instigator of a journey of self-discovery which seems to have culminated in this book. Suddenly, my brain retrieved the only memory I have of her. It was at a special school assembly following the death of student who suffocated while attempting to intoxicate himself on liquid thinner. This ‘hippie counsellor’ as Taseer puts it, gave us some unsolicited advice on the process of bereavement.  

I also interestingly have a memory of Taseer’s mother. I was walking out of the side entrance of the school; I can’t remember where I was going because I wouldn’t normally use that entrance. Waddling out of the Carlton Hotel, towards the school, was a small, squat woman with a very severe, almost masculine face. I recognised Tavleen Singh from her column in India Today. As we passed each other, she looked up at me and then quickly looked away, her face frozen in dispassion. I don’t know why I recall this incident when I seem to have lost so many more significant events.  

Having digressed sufficiently into my addled adolescence; let me get back to Taseer’s debut offering, ‘Stranger to History – A Son’s Journey Through Islamic Lands’. Part travelogue, part memoir with a smattering of socio-political commentary, the book fleshes out Taseer’s journey through Turkey, Syria, Iran and Pakistan. There are essentially two journeys that the author makes. One is the physical one where he meets Muslims of various shades and nationalities. The second is, well I won’t call it spiritual, but an inner quest to pin down his Muslim identify or the lack thereof. Connecting the two journeys is Taseer’s desire for rapprochement with his estranged Pakistani father.  

As I try to objectively review the book, I am trying my best to avoid my memories clouding my judgement. I remember Aatish as a one-dimensional and somewhat supercilious character. But, the more I read his book, the more I became convinced that he hasn’t changed much. The truth is that in non-fiction of this variety, the author and the prose are inseparable. Each contributes to the other. There aren’t any real epiphanies in Taseer’s scribblings. His observations on the liberal paradox of Turkish society, Baathist suffocation in Syria and the extent of dissent in Iran have all been reported by a plethora of books on the Middle East. Beyond the lack of originality, what troubles me is Taseer’s tone. His writing masquerades veiled condescension with a sort of forced humility. It seems to me that he presumes his readers know nothing beyond their backyards. It’s one thing to inform, but time and again Taseer patronises us as he describes the history of the religion and the places he visits. It’s also a bit rich when he decries his father’s hypocrisy (Salman Taseer stridently defends Islam despite his purported offences against it) since he himself repeatedly tells people he encounters that he is a Muslim, when he patently isn’t. He asks why his father sees the need to call himself a Muslim and devotes quite a bit of space to analysing this. But our gauche auteur fails to examine why he felt the need to adopt the Islamic label.  

The only touching bits in the book are Taseer’s encounters with his father who treats his son’s attempts at acknowledgment with a sort of warm apathy. My childhood too was marked by the absence of my father and I must confess that it must have taken immense courage to open up an extremely personal story and private feelings to the world. However, ‘Stranger to History’ disappoints by falling short of its potential. Unfortunately, Taseer has lost an opportunity to render an extremely interesting idea in a more substantial manner.