Lunatic in My Head by Anjum Hasan

Midway through Lunatic in My Head, one of Hasan’s three protagonists, Firdaus Ansari, a forlorn, middle-aged, English lecturer, questions her surreal relationship with her improbable boyfriend, Ibomcha, a Manipuri dropout and Maths whiz who does odd jobs.

“A letter she mumbled into the bed cover. I should just write a letter telling him that nothing, not the smallest thing could possibly unite us. You, your homeland, your tribe, your love for your mother, your dozens of cousins, your schemes, your beliefs – I share nothing of this. I can’t get onto a bus every second month and go home. There are no people I call my people. I don’t speak a private language. How would you, always enfolded by this mist of connections, carrying it with wherever you go, how would you understand this loneliness.”

In this passage, as in the rest of the book, identity, uncertainty and loneliness are the prevailing themes that shape and reshape the lives of Firdaus, 8 year old Sophie Das and Aman Moondy, an IAS aspirant. The three characters live separate and yet interconnected lives in Shillong – a small hill town in the north-east of India. The town dominates the book and Hasan is able to skilfully communicate its beauty.

“Firdaus found that she longed for Shillong even as she lived there, even though she had lived there all her life”.  

And its faults.

“Shillong did that to people... preserved them in its Shillong flavoured timelessness – the same rumours, the same jokes, the same gossip, the same petty jealousies. The scale of the town corresponded to the scale of people’s imaginations.”

Besides her troubled and somewhat clandestine relationship, Firdaus is dawdling with commencing her thesis, ostensibly on Jane Austen. At work, she goes through the motions of lecturing, silently questioning but never altering the subject matter she delivers such as Hemmingway’s The Old Man and the Sea which she can’t understand but must explain to her students. A similar scene plays out much later when she discusses Shakespeare’s As You Like It with her nonchalant and disinterested pupils, using ancient hand me down teacher’s notes. Although this scene struck me as odd, I neither had the perceptiveness or skill to catch the intelligence of the writing; Chandrahas Choudhury points this out on his blog:

“Hasan gives us a sense of how Firdaus’s students are hearing her lecture, and how puzzling it must seem to them. And by showing how Firdaus, while feeling frustration at the sluggishness of her students, is herself not willing to walk with Shakespeare without the crutch of her notes, Hasan has the courage and the confidence to present us with a fairly damning indictment of her protagonist. The most meaningful words in Hasan’s passage are not those that make some sense of what Jacques is saying, but precisely the most superfluous ones: phrases like “In addition, that is withal” and “within brackets anatomised”, which show that Firdaus is actually on the same side of the fence as her students. It is a genuinely novelistic passage, teeming with crisscrossing meanings: as a result of the author’s artful layering, the words point out towards Shakespeare and back towards Firdaus at the same time, and we understand not just the place of the fool in Shakespearean comedy but the feelings of inadequacy felt by Firdaus.”

I found Sophie’s character particularly startling. Hasan subtly renders the insecurities of a pre-pubescent in an immensely complex but believable manner. Sophie’s father is pig-headed and unemployed; her mother is pregnant, hopefully with a boy. Sophie is disenchanted with her family who are so dissimilar to the boys and girls with English names in the books she reads. This leads her to long for a number of counter-factuals including the belief that she is adopted and the desire to be Khasi like Elsa, the Das’ landlady. The tension between Khasi and Dkhar – tribal and non-tribal – is reminiscent of the conflict portrayed in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss and underscores the issue of identity so well articulated when Firdaus thinks to herself “There are no people I call my people.”

Aman, Hasan’s third protagonist, has failed the IAS exam and is studying for a second attempt. He fears not living up to the expectations of his parents, particularly his father, a doctor, who seems to have given up on him. And yet, he idles away much of his time, cultivating his passion for Pink Floyd and hanging out with his friends. In a brilliant scene where Aman has summoned the courage to ask a girl (he’s been perving at for over a year at the library) out for coffee, we see Hasan’s dexterity in layering by finely observing the incongruity between Concordella who talks about finding faith in God again in a sermon on the Book of Job and Aman who desperately tries to connect with her over Pink Floyd.

I suppose Firdaus is the character closest to Hasan’s real self and consequently the best writing in the book is reserved for those chapters that deal with her life. I read this paragraph, which describes the routine that is inadvertently established between Firdaus and her fastidious grandfather, several times before recognising the marvellous writing, the simplicity of perceptive observation and the wonderful layering.

"Firdaus handed Nana his eggs. How had this complex system been established, she wondered. How was it that Nana ate her eggs but fried them in his own ghee, drank milk she paid for sweetened it with his own sugar. What in Nana’s head had led him to establish these conventions? When had it all started? She couldn’t remember. Her grandfather was remorseless. He got his Christian business associate to buy their meat from halal shops if they were inviting him for a Christmas lunch. He did not believe that men had landed on the moon – for reasons that Firdaus could never fathom, this to him antithetical to Islam. He never looked women in the eye. He kept his room scrupulously clean and always wore his clothes ironed. Firdaus realised that he had built up the whole edifice on his existence on the basis of a few beliefs so that now the idea that the eggs should be hers but not the ghee appeared to be as self-evident as everything else about his life."

The only weak part of the book is the gimmicky way in which Hasan tries to bring the three characters together during an earthquake – each saying something insignificant to the other. But, even here, Hasan redeems the scene by the parting the three just as quickly.  

In a way each of the characters constitutes a piece of Hasan, even Aman who has studied philosophy at university, which was incidentally Hasan's major as well.  Hasan has written about what she knows best and she has done this well. I think the unhurried pace of Lunatic in My Head won’t please everyone. But, the reward of completing this book is to witness the birth of a very talented Indian writer.  

You can read Chandrahas Choudhury's post on Anjum Hasan titled Anjum Hasan and the Indian Shakespeare here. 

You can also read his review of Lunatic in My Head in the Mint Lounge here. 

And finally here's an interesting article (also in the Mint Lounge) on writing from the North-East. 

Goddess of the Market - Ayn Rand & The American Right by Jennifer Burns

The Fountainhead entered my life for the very first time when I was fourteen. At the time, I lived in a scrap of a country on the shoulder of South America. If my memory serves me correctly, the American Center had announced an essay-writing contest on Ayn Rand’s principles and my mother eagerly egged me on. “There might be a certificate, maybe even a prize” she told me, “and after all Ayn Rand was a great writer.” Strange then, that she hadn’t seemed to have read any of Rand’s books. I made an attempt. But, it was boring and insanely thick and I had better things to do like catching eels in the storm water drains.  

It wasn’t until a couple of years ago that I attempted Rand again. In fact, attempted is an inappropriate word because I read all four of her fictional works in a short span of time. My reason for rapprochement with Rand was odd. And I couldn’t have articulated it accurately were it not for a chapter titled Encounters with Someone you Love in that charming book How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read by Pierre Bayard.

It is a commonplace to say that our sentimental life is deeply marked by books, from childhood onward. First of all fictional characters exert a great deal of influence over our choices in love by representing inaccessible ideals to which we try to make others conform, usually without success. But more subtly, too, the books we love offer a sketch of a whole universe that we secretly inhabit, and in which we desire the other person to assume a role.

So, I read Rand diligently because someone I cared for deeply adored Rand. Unfortunately, the second sentence in this excerpt couldn’t have been truer about our relationship. Beyond that laconic indictment of adolescence, boring, I could proffer so much more by way of criticism. The prose was wooden and shamelessly wordy; the plot, gimmicky and tiresome. And Rand’s principles? Well, I didn’t give it too much thought at the time. Love seemed to hastily cauterise any criticism.  

It wasn’t until I read Goddess of the Market, did all my anger at Ayn Rand come rushing back to me. I neither have the time nor the patience to explain why Rand vexes me, so let me just quickly type out my thoughts on Jennifer Burns’ Goddess of the Market.  

The book is absorbing and sequenced well. Burns’ principal objective is to describe the strange relationship between this erstwhile Russian immigrant named Alisa Rosenbaum, her ideology and the American right. But, she does this chronologically and in doing so recounts Rand’s biography in a well researched and extremely detailed manner. Burns is quite impartial in handling Rand’s life and her ideology but the evidence still stacks up against the writer. Her circle of disciples (a word that she ironically abhorred) was akin to a cult in that they were “almost lifeless, devoid of enthusiasm or spark, and almost completely dependent on Ayn for intellectual sustenance. Striving to become good Objectivists, Rand’s followers tried to conform to her every dictate, even those that were little more than personal preferences. Rand harbored a dislike of facial hair, and accordingly her followers were all clean shaven... Objectivism was a religion to some people, it was a notably dogmatic and confining one. Led to Rand by a quest for answers and a need for certainty, her followers could find themselves locked into the system she had created.” I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Alan Greenspan was one of her closest lackeys; certainly explains the state of the American economy with its assiduous application of Rand’s hackneyed ideas.  

 It’s also interesting to note her hypocrisy, “libertine in her celebration of sex outside marriage, she described homosexuality as a disgusting aberration” since it was on the wrong side of the rational-irrational dichotomy that she saw existence as. She fell out with Nathan Branden, her intellectual heir, (a man who had changed his surname to incorporate Rand’s) with whom she’d had a long and stifling affair about which she had insisted on keeping both their spouses abreast. She expected them to tolerate the arrangement and coerced them into sanctioning it. When she learnt of Branden’s own affair with a young, vivacious thing (Rand was an old woman by then), she wrote to him ““If you have an ounce of morality left in you, an ounce of psychological health— you’ll be impotent for the next twenty years! And if you achieve any potency, you’ll know it’s a sign of still worse moral degradation!” A bit rich if you ask me! 
 
And listen to this, “Clean air is not the issue nor the goal of the ecologists’ crusade. . . . it is technology and progress that the nature-lovers are out to destroy.” She also claimed that European colonists had a right to seize their land because native tribes did not recognize individual rights. She extended this reasoning to the Israel-Palestine conflict, arguing that Palestinians had no rights and that it was moral to support Israel, the sole outpost of civilisation in a region ruled by barbarism.

How does this woman still sell close to a million books a year worldwide? I suppose it’s because the majority of her readers are individuals who have little or no exposure to philosophy and when confronted with her all encompassing vision presented through the medium of a novel, they are hooked. All of Rand’s books begin with a little sycophantic prologue by one of her most cherished flunkies, Leonard Peikoff who emerged as Rand’s staunchest defender and would ask people rhetorically if anyone “could possibly believe that the author of Atlas Shrugged had done anything fundamentally wrong.” As balanced as ‘Goddess of the Market’ is, I can’t help but feel vindicated that Rand’s books are nothing but second-rate propaganda devices for her megalomania.  

Amrita Sher-Gil: A Family Album

I had the pleasure of attending a lecture on one of India’s greatest painters, Amrita Sher-Gil, our very own Frida Kahlo. What’s more, the lecture was presented at the NCPA by the artist’s niece, Navina Sundaram, a television journalist who lives in Germany. The format of the evening comprised a 37 minute film titled Amrita Sher-Gil - A Family Alblum (they repeated the duration several times, so I remembered, reiteration really does work wonders), a presentation by Navina of Amrita’s work and a Q&A.  

I knew bits and pieces about Amrita before attending the lecture but most of it pertained to the sensational bits of her life such as her sexuality and her death. The lecture, however, painted an extremely vivid picture of Amrita’s childhood, her development as an artist and a free-spirited individual and her work.  

Amrita Sher-Gil was born in 1913 in Budapest. She was the unlikely daughter a Sikh landowner and a Hungarian opera singer. She spent much of her early childhood in Hungary before moving to India where her family lived in Shimla. In her late adolescence, she moved to Paris where she enrolled in the École des Beux-Arts to train as a painter. The paintings she produced here reflect the prevailing style taught at the École. Of the paintings she made in Paris, I particularly like this one titled simply ‘Professional Model’ (1933). The droop of the shoulders, the sagging breasts, the tired heads, the embittered face all suggest a spent life so powerfully. Although this painting moves me greatly, there is nothing particularly original about it. It could have been made by any of the multitudes of early 20th century artists whose works hang in galleries and museums across Europe. But it was a painting that she did a year before that won her a gold medal and got her elected as an Associate of the Grand Salon in Paris. The painting titled ‘Young Girls’ (1932) features her sister, Indira (the presenter’s mother) with a friend. Later, Amrita is swayed by Paul Gauguin’s Tahitian women whose influence can be seen in this ‘Self Portrait (1935).  

But, it’s only when Amrita moves back to India, that we see her developing her own unique style. This style is initially influenced by her travels to South India and a stopover at Ajanta. The frescoes she sees in the caves at Ajanta have a significant impact on both the forms and colours in her compositions. ‘Bride’s Toilet’ (1937) seems to be among her more celebrated works and there is a definite Indianness to the painting beyond merely the subjects being native. I assume the trend at this time would have been to underplay native art in favour of movements in Europe because Amrita expresses her astonishment at this; “It always surprises me to hear that those who can recognise the good in Western art are unable to do so as regards to Eastern art. To me it seems incredible. But perhaps this is due to my double atavism.”  
  
In Kerala, Amrita is moved by the beauty and simplicity of the people. She is also inspired by the murals at the Matanchery Palace in Cochin. Kerala inspires her to paint works such as ‘Brahmacharis’ and ‘South Indian Villagers Going to Market’. With the former, Amrita is surprised at the subtle yet patent variations in skin colour she is able to achieve. The latter is my favourite. The stylised, long, dark skinned men contrast against the bright horizontal lines of their pink and green lungis; the shadowy hue of the woman’s face against the fluorescent green of the fish in the basket on her head.  
Amrita was a prolific letter writer and during the presentation that followed the film, Navina quoted directly from Amrita’s letters, adding negligible commentary of her own. These quotes read in sync with the visual give us insight into the artist’s mind at the time she would have painted the work being shown. Beyond this, Amrita proves herself to be an adroit writer with the ability to render emotions to paper lucidly, her words marked concurrently by wit, yearning and sensuality. The synchronised effect of audio and visual - her words and her work - was remarkable and moving.  

However, Amrita’s style is still evolving, changing and reinventing itself. Out of the blue, she gets married to her Hungarian cousin Victor Egan. One can only guess that this is a move to put in place an accommodating consort because she continues to have many affairs with both men and women. The couple move to rural Uttar Pradesh where the Sher-Gils have their sugar mills, the source of their wealth. Victor who has trained in medicine becomes the factory doctor. Amrita’s work becomes influenced by the fauna and the village life of the region as well as Indian miniatures especially the Mughal school. Here, she would paint ‘Red Clay Elephant’ which she would declare as her most cherished painting. I asked Navina which was her favourite of the lot. She replied that ‘Red Clay Elephant’ was her favourite as well. When I asked her why, she mumbled something bland about a transitional phase between earlier influences and the Mughal school. I felt a little disappointed that someone who claims to be so passionate about Amrita’s work could only summon up a few clichéd words of art jargon to demonstrate that passion.  

Ms. Sundaram was articulate, with her careful speech marked by diphthongs and inflections acquired from a slightly dated Received Pronunciation, with only the occasional slip on ‘thirty’ (nineteen thuthy seven). But, she seemed a little cold; maybe the side-effect of all those years amongst Germans or perhaps her guardedness was the result of inappropriate questioning in sessions like these. One man alluded to how much money she would make if she sold the Amrita Sher-Gil paintings she owns. The only one to have been in the market in the recent past was apparently sold for more than Rs.60 million. To her politely vague reply, he quickly retorted something to the effect of “you should give it a thought.” Another one whose many questions were thinly veiled devices to draw attention to herself, suggested that Navina read a novel on art forgeries because it was gripping and informative. Occasionally, she was more jovial, joking about how the fact that she and her brother ‘had no issue’ as having no children is commonly termed India, posed a significant challenge to the Sher-Gil-Sundaram legacy.  

Becoming bored of her life in the boondocks, Amrita moves to Lahore where Victor sets up a medical practice. Here, she suddenly and lamentably dies. I had read somewhere that this was the result of a botched abortion. But, Navina, in response to someone’s question on the subject, said that it was probably dysentery. Although, we can’t imagine any well-off person dying of dysentery today, it was apparently quite plausible since penicillin wasn’t introduced to India until the mid-forties. The death was also perhaps hastened by Victor’s inexperience with tropical diseases. He tried to cure her on his own and by the time he sought help, it was too late. The year was 1941 and Amrita was 28 years old. This unfinished scene of the view from her studio was her last painting.  

Amrita Sher-Gil lived a short life, but what a life it was. She truly embodied the hedonistic expression ‘sensualist of the eyes’ that she was so fond of. She was beautiful, talented, intelligent and irreverent. Merely looking at her photos, which are almost like paintings, is sufficient to leave an impression. Her face shows a detached timelessness. The arch of her eyebrows suggests strength and their droop suggests frailty. Her eyes have such intensity and emotion, they don’t captivate as much as they hypnotise. As I walked out of the NCPA, I was troubled by the thought that one would be hard pressed to find an Amrita Sher-Gil in today’s India. I suppose Amrita, impertinent as always predicted it when she wrote “Europe belongs to Picasso, Matisse and Braque and many others. India belongs only to me.”  

I am looking forward to reading Amrita’s letters in the two volume anthology that her nephew and contemporary artist, Vivan Sundaram, has recently released.  

Amrita Sher-Gil (1910 – 1941)

Disclaimer: I have no expertise in art whatsoever. The thoughts expressed in this post are based on my emotional reactions to Navina Sundaram’s film ‘A Family Album’ and Amrita Sher-Gil’s work.  

Miéville in Mumbai

China Miéville's in town with several other writers who I have never heard of as part of the British Council's LitSutra program.  By happy coincidence, I happen to be reading Miéville's Perdido Street Station and unhappily, I won't get to meet him.  The wankers (aka the organisers) have kept the event on the 2nd of March - a Tuesday - at 6.30PM at Landmark?! Perfect for rotund Lokhandwala housewives and Juhu pocket-money bludgers but not for a poor little salariman.  I must admit that Perdido Street Station isn't riveting thus far but it certainly isn't your run of the mill fantasy novel.  Miéville apparently called Tolkein "the wen on the arse of fantasy literature."  And this ain't no folksy Hobbit epic.  The book starts off with some weird inter-species sex. And just look at him!  When you put that kind of writing together with multiple piercings, can a bloke be anything other than interesting?  

Kala Ghoda Arts Festival 2010

The Kala Ghoda Arts Festival was extremely disappointing this year. I was waitlisted yet again for the literature workshops... will I ever get to attend one in this lifetime? They had the best literary events at odd times on weekdays. I was eager to attend the events with Anjum Hasan and Chandrahas Choudhury, but they were at 5 and 6 in the evening during the week. I suppose the organisers don't consider people who work for a living to be their core audience. I finally went on the Thursday before Shivratri. There was so much traffic at Haji Ali that I only got to Fort around 7.15. The literature event would have already begun at 7 and I decided to cut my losses and make my way to the National Gallery of Modern Arts for the premiere of a play from a new theatre group. At the venue, an enormously long line of (mostly) college students snaked its way around the gallery that runs around the building. As I pondered about whether my evening would have been better spent reading Goddess of the Market - Ayn Rand & the American Right, a young man in the queue (apprenticed to Hafez Contractor by the looks of his big folder that said Hafez Contractor; lord save us from any more Graeco-Punjabi architecture), remarked to his friend that Summer Boys (the much anticipated object of our queuing) was an experimental piece. That shored up my flagging optimism about the evening. Then, the man standing in front of me (a stereotype of alternative sexuality straight out of a Madhur Bhandarkar film) articulated to his pyjama-clad friend (okay not pjs but those track pants you normally wear at home) in a squeaky voice that didn't match his partially bald head or moustache that he'd been to most of the other plays that week and he was very excited about this one. A connoisseur, I thought to myself. The evening might be worthwhile after all.

Alas, it was not to be. The play was utterly mediocre, a Parsi farce full of cliched jokes and bawdy one-liners. But, everyone else seemed to be enjoying themselves. To add to my woe of watching this tripe, seated adjacent to me was a family with 3 young children. What kind of a mother brings her kids to a play full of seedy puns? The kind of mother who doesn't teach her kids to respect other people's personal space! This irritating little boy kept elbowing into me and sitting so close and making me feel muggy and uncomfortable that I just had to abandon the play during the interval.

I then strolled down to Rampart Row hoping to better my evening. It felt like that street outside Dadar station and I absolutely dislike crowds especially the ones in India, brimming with the kind of people who will push into the side of a building and act like it was your fault. I couldn't even make my way to the amphitheatre. I think populated is a far better word than pedestrianised to describe Rampart Row. I decided not to hang around and quickly made my sortie. On the way back home, I was stuck in head-splitting traffic. Sadly, it turned out to be a typical Bombay day.

At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig – Travels Through Paraguay by John Gimlette

“Paraguay is not merely isolated, it is almost impenetrable. Small wonder that it has become a refuge to Nazis, cannibals, strange sixteenth-century Anabaptists, White Russians and fantastic creatures that ought long ago to have been extinct.” On this cryptic note, Gimlette begins his wonderful exposé of this little known land-locked South American country. Having visited the country in his late teens during the Falklands War, Gimlette returns to this strange, mongrel nation to explore its past and present. Paraguay, unlike its other colonial cousins on the continent, speaks Guarani, an Amerindian tongue, and gives it official status alongside Spanish. In fact, it is the only place in the Americas where a partly non-indigenous population of mestizos speaks an indigenous language. This is but one among a number of qualities that makes Paraguay and Paraguayans unique.  

Gimlette mixes travel and history skilfully. There’s just the right amount of both in each chapter to keep you engrossed. I reckon that people who would prefer watching a dog urinate to reading a book on history would be swayed by the history of Paraguay. It starts with some wonderful cannibals who live in and around the Paraguay River and then moves on to the Spanish conquistadores who are in search of El Dorado. Since they couldn’t find any gold, the Spanish made do with procreating with the Guarani women and they were so successful that in just a couple of generations, there were hardly any pure blood natives left. Post-colonial Paraguay is a story of crazy dictators, each slightly loonier and deadlier than the last. Stroessener, the very last one, remained in power until 1989 when he was overthrown in a coup. Dr. Francia, the very first, started the tradition of eccentricity and excessive cruelty. El Supremo Dictador banned all forms of fun, commerce, educational institutions, barred Europeans from marrying each other and returned to the treasury any portion of his salary which he didn’t expend. He was succeeded by the Lopez dynasty whose father and son dynamic duo were known for their obesity, bad oral hygiene and despotism. Francisco Solano Lopez, the second and final scion of the dynasty, acquired an Irish whore named Madame Lynch from Paris and two fancied themselves as emperor and empress in the mode of Napoleon and Josephine. Lopez led the country into the disastrous War of the Triple Alliance which despite its terrible costs proved the mad bravery of Paraguayans. Add to this milieu, Australian socialists, Nazis, a Nicaraguan dictator and all sorts of other pariahs, you have a swash-buckling real-life non-stop adventure.  

Gimlette’s wry observations make At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig particularly enjoyable. Here’s just one example;

Our lives had been thrown together by mutual contacts in Asunción and a particular source of irritation was that I was British. As we drove along, he probed at this.
“It is true you drink your beer warm, like piss? What you got a queen for?”
It was like discovering that The Catcher in the Rye wasn’t just a nightmare, that Holden Caulfield had emerged from tortured adolescence and was now a tortured agronomist in central Paraguay. Just in case he can blush, I’ll call him Garth (although his real name was Brian). In Garth’s world, there were only two redeeming features: plants and insects.
“This is the fuckin’ ant capital of the world. More species than anywhere else.”
He particularly admired the insects that devoured mankind.

Paraguay has been described at various times as paradise or hell. Gimlette’s writing brings this hellish paradise to life in a vivid and wonderful way.  

2 States – The Story of My Marriage by Chetan Bhagat

I haven’t read any of chubby Chetan’s other books but I have read enough disapproving articles about his populism; or is it his popularity that literary types disapprove of? I simply adore the books section of the Mint Lounge and there was a very adroitly written article on Bhagat’s latest masterpiece. That and the revelation by a colleague of having read the book (a man who I pompously assumed had never read a book voluntarily in his entire life) compelled me to read 2 States. I won’t go into the details of the story but it’s pretty straightforward. The story, which I believe is inspired by Bhagat’s own marriage, is about a Punjabi boy who meets a TamBram girl at IIM, Ahmedabad. The two hit it off and when not studying intensely, they are off doing things that young TamBram girls ought not to and young Punjabi boys are expected to do such as drinking beer, eating chicken and having sex (in that order). Then, they decide to get married so they have to convince their parents; this takes up a plurality of the book. 

Bhagat’s writing lacks intelligence but ironically, it’s written intelligently (i.e. to bring in the moolah). It’s a light read (I started after brekkie and was done before lunch), no big words, familiar stereotypes, Bollywoodish drama, characters that Indians can connect with, a North Indian protagonist, the South Indian other, a tight plot and a happy ending. Does this sound familiar? It’s little wonder that my colleague and countless others like him are lapping up Bhagat’s books. Although, he tries to balance out the portrayal of north vs. south, some of his comments about South Indians and Madras rankled me and I am not even from Madras (nor do I like the city). Bhagat dishes up stereotypes and generalisations by the bucket loads. He’s witty in that cutesy ‘you know what I am talking about’ manner. When you put all this together with an MRP of Rs.95, you’ve got a winning combination.  

On a single page, separated by just a few lines of dialogue, Bhagat (who sees himself as some sort of crusader for the English language in India) confuses alphabets with letters and acronyms with abbreviations. It’s the kind of error that Chandrahas Choudhury would never make and it’s exactly the kind of error that an average Indian English speaker would make. I suppose that’s why Bhagat will always outsell Choudhury not because he writes better but because he writes intelligently with his finger on the pulse of the average Indian writer. Lakshmi Chaudhury from the Mint writes that Bhagat “panders to the worst kind of middle-class materialism” because his novels are apparently aspirational and don’t feature maids, farmers or coolies as protagonists. No shit Sherlock! In a country obsessed with the accumulation of wealth, the fact that he panders to middle-class materialism is precisely why he sells so well. Seema Chowdhry who also writes for the Mint is the author of the article that piqued my curiosity. She summarises my sentiments aptly in her concluding paragraph “Sometimes, making fun of communities can make for great humour, but when a story is just an overdose of stereotypes, it tires the reader. Would I read 2 States again? No. Would I buy the next Chetan Bhagat book? Sure, just to find out who he is out to seduce next.” I reckon if anyone can get non-readers to read, he or she ought to be applauded. But, not too loudly, lest it encourage replicas of Mr. Bhagat; one’s quite enough.  

A Dead Hand by Paul Theroux

I have picked the wrong book for my maiden tryst into Theroux. I have been carrying the notion based on ragged readings from here and there of Theroux being a noteworthy and distinguished writer. Perhaps, the downside of being so prolific (44 books and this is his 29th fictional work) is that you run out of ideas ensuing in the title – A Dead Hand – which is just about the only thing that works in the book. The reviews I have read so far about this book have been overwhelmingly derogatory. About 50 pages in, I thought that this might have something to do with how Theroux portrays India, Indians and Calcutta. He paints a consistently ugly picture of the city and his focus is overwhelmingly on the decay. I don’t really give a damn if writers don’t mention the new glass offices, malls and overpasses. Yes, India is ugly; get over it. But, Theroux doesn’t. Instead, he plaits his entire book from those familiar strands about India, poverty, rot, child labour etc. As I read on, the story passed gently into the realm of the ridiculous and hackneyed, I realised that the criticism levelled against A Dead Hand is spot on.

Theroux’s protagonist is Jeffrey Delmont, an American who writes travel pieces for magazines. He finds himself in Calcutta at a loss for ideas and unable to write, ergo the dead hand. He receives a mysterious letter from a seemingly wealthy American expatriate, Mrs. Merrill Unger. Known for her low-profile philanthropic work, she asks him to investigate the appearance of the dead body of a boy in the hotel room of a close Indian friend (or lover) of her son, Charlie. Delmont becomes besotted with Mrs. Unger (call me ‘ma’, she tells him) and investigates the enigma of the dead boy to satisfy his curiosity and ingratiate himself with her. The remainder of the book is really about Delmont plodding around Calcutta, conducting his amateur investigations; the highlight being the acquisition of one of the chopped off hands of the dead boy, ergo the dead hand. Later, Mrs. Unger, who dresses in glamorous saris and likes sacrificing goats at the Kalighat temple, gives Delmont lots of soothing Tantric massages in a vault under her house cum orphanage. Bathos seems to be the single unifying force in the story and it reaches a crescendo on a train journey to Guwahati, when a greatly distressed Mrs. Unger reveals to Delmont that she is in fact black (as in African American). But, the most disconcerting part by far was Theroux pulling a M. Night Shyamalam by writing himself into an entire chapter as Mr. Paul Theroux, celebrated writer. Beyond extolling his skills through self-deprecating comments and back-handed compliments, what was he thinking? Or did he decide on its necessity given that readers might identify the mawkish and insipid Jeffrey Delmont with him?

I wonder whether Theroux has ever really interacted with anyone from India because the Indians he portrays in the book are not characters, but caricatures; the virginal Parvati, the effeminate Rajat and the bombastic Mr. Mukherjee. Above all, Theroux demonstrates a profound lack of understanding about India. It resembles the work of the gauche wife of an American diplomat whose only connections with the country she lives in are her driver and maid. A Dead Hand makes Chetan Bhagat look like a literary genius. You can do without reading this book, especially if you are from India.

The Opposite of Fate by Amy Tan

I read The Joy Luck Club a very long time ago. I can’t remember whether I enjoyed it. I can vaguely remember watching the movie in the States. I hadn’t read anything else by Amy Tan until a couple of years ago when I had a thoroughly satisfying experience with Saving Fish from Drowning. But, I had forgotten that besides being a really good storyteller, Amy Tan is an exceptional writer. Her writing is straightforward, affable, funny and involving. The Opposite of Fate is a collection of essays and speeches that Tan’s written over a lifetime. There’s even one that she wrote as an eight year old in a local library competition where she compares her access to the library to the opening of multiple windows in her head; a portent of a prodigious future. The essays are on topics ranging from her family, her own life, China, the English language and her writing career. Most, if not all the essays, are about or allude to Tan’s Shanghainese mother, who has arguably had an enormous impact on her.  

I picture Amy Tan to be a sensible, generous and perceptive individual and it’s not because of her benevolent visage (moon face as she describes it) peering out of the many photos in the book. As she describes her interactions with the world around her and her own past, she reveals profound insights on life and love. She is candid about her own life disclosing events that must have been intensely traumatic such as the murder of a close friend and her confrontations with her mother. But, her endearing sense of humour ensures that the essays never become too heavy. The one glitch in the book is that many of the pieces are repetitive because they were written independently. Although, Tan does apologise for this in the foreword, the contents of essays towards the middle of the book are a bit tiresome given that you would have trod the same memories sometimes on multiple occasions. 

I particularly liked Tan’s descriptions of the process of writing. At one stage, she says something to the effect of good writing having its source in a writer coming to terms with the most unpleasant parts of his or her life. Somehow, that struck a chord with me. I also liked the advice she gave the graduating class of Simmons College, unpretentious and useful: 

1. Avoid clichés. 
2. Avoid generalisations. 
3. Find your own voice.
4. Show compassion. Here she says “many beginning writers think sarcasm is a clever way to show intelligence, but more mature writers know that mean spiritedness is wearying and limited in its one dimensional point of view.” (I am so guilty of this) 
5. Ask the important questions. 

Standing before these freshly minted graduates, she concludes by saying “I wish you all interesting lives.” I hope Amy Tan won’t mind if I partake of this blessing.