Aftertaste by Namita Devidayal

I’ve been looking forward to Aftertaste for a number of months because of the many favourable reviews I’ve happened upon. Expectation, unfortunately, doesn’t usually bode well for that which is expected, a trait that plays its part diligently in the case of Aftertaste.  

In the prologue, we become acquainted with the Todarmal family, Banias from Punjab, who live in Bombay. They wait around for the inevitable death of their matriarch Mummyji. The book, post-prologue is told in the form of gossipy flashbacks, the kind that contains more tortured explanations than necessary. We learn of Mummyji’s progeny Rajan Papa, Suman, Saroj and Sunny and predictably their spouses and the subsequent generation spat out of their fecund, mercantile loins.  

My imagination too is particularly fecund at the moment and gloriously sticky from this sickening heat. Heat and imagination are never safe bedfellows but explanation enough for the following wholly imagined and fictional interview that yours truly conducted with the author. 

Adi: The machinations of a Marwari mercantile family in Mumbai! So what kind of business are they in? 
ND: Mithai which of course alludes to my title and alliterates nicely with your initial, verbless exclamation. 
Adi: Is the novel principally concerned with the business side of mithai preparation? 
ND: Well, with Marwaris, business and family are so closely intertwined, but Aftertaste is really about the characters – the many members of the Todarmal family, each more rotund, uglier and vainer than the next. 
Adi: I notice that your characters often pass wind and these acts of flatulence are treated with more than merely a passing glance. What was the rationale behind using this very original device? 
ND: You would have probably observed that my characters lack any modicum of depth and I was hoping that the farting would mask some of these shortcomings. 
Adi: It’s very honest of you to admit that. I am curious about why you forced on to the reader some superfluous characters who are completely extraneous to your plot. 
ND: You must be thinking of Rahul, my pink card. Mmm, I’d finished writing about 75% of the book when I realized that the book lacked a certain something – like sumac from a dish of hummus. I took inspiration from a novel by a former colleague, Anjali Joseph. Now, she’d written an entirely pointless piece that hinged on one its main character’s sexuality. So I thought to myself, why not? But obviously, I wasn’t going to put in more than a few pages. My book caters to a variety of sensibilities, I couldn’t possibly sneak in more than a glimpse of pirated porn and eunuch fellatio, by which I mean an act committed by and not upon a eunuch. And it’s in right now. 
Adi: The hummus might explain the flatulence. But, what do you mean by it's in? What's in? Eunuch fellatio? 
ND: No, you dolt, references to repressed sexuality. 
Adi: Oh, have you been away or out of it for a while?  
ND: No, but I have been doing a lot of research, immersing myself in the world of the Marwari family. 
Adi: I see. I am also curious about the language. How much time did it take you to refine some of the more third rate similes, contrived expressions, tautological references and word play? I took a particular fancy to this piece of narrative: 

“Mummyji was everyone’s Mummyji, whatever the relationship. She was not a memsahib or an auntyji, or a bhabhiji. She was a full-blown mummyji. That was the name that she had grown into – a benevolent, flatulent witch, who knitted sweaters for everyone, could bargain like a banshee, and never ceased to remind her daughters-in-law that their husbands had sucked on her sumptuous untoned milk for many years before finding succour in their nipples.” 

ND: Your point being...? 
Adi: I didn’t know banshees could bargain? Also, why was “the city of Bombay being split into two states, Maharashtra and Gujarat” (p.33)? 
ND: This is exactly why you’ll never write a book.  
Adi: Alright, what about this bit? Do you think there’s anything wrong with it? 

“Rahul found tears making their way down the contours of his cheeks, like a slow trickling stream that was bumping along trying to find its way. It just didn’t stop. He licked the bits that reached the corners of his mouth, tasting the salt."

ND: You seem to have a thing for Rahul. Maybe, someone could do with some eunuch fellatio.  
Adi: Okay, one last question. The whole novel plays out like a substandard Hindi soap opera. Was this intended? And is it a good thing? 
ND: Gee, you catch on fast. Listen, there’s no shame in finding inspiration in Ekta Kapoor. Her taste in forehead adornment is appalling but her ideas are well... to answer your second question, you only need to follow sales of my books to recognize what the erudite, deodorant-less masses of our rhombus shaped country need and demand – crude thrills of Hindu undivided family variety with a healthy infusion of sugar and oil.  
Adi: Umm...
ND: And you should get off your high horse and take some tips from me, you might actually attract some readers for this tragic excuse of a blog.  
Adi: Namita, thanks for the tip and of course your time.  

Several years ago, I caught Namita Devidayal on a show I think on NDTV. She’d just released her debut novel, The Music Room, to great acclaim. As I listened to her, I remember thinking to myself, what an intelligent, articulate, sensible and down-to-earth writer. And here she is, disproving what I’d thought of her. Or, perhaps it’s just the curse of the sophomore novel.  

I could end with a bad pun about aftertaste but that might be in bad taste especially in light of my tasteless interview.  I wanna yell out "Where have all the good Indian writers gone?" to the tune of Holding Out for a Hero at the top of my lungs.   

NB: No writers were interviewed or harmed in the creation of this post ;)

The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson

The most amusing thing about The Finkler question is that I started no fewer than 5 books whilst ‘reading’ this supposedly comic novel. The principal theme of Jacobson’s books apparently pertains to the lives of English Jews. This one’s about the relationship between Julian Treslove, an unsuccessful forty something BBC radio producer and Gentile and two Jews; Sam Finkler, a well-liked Jewish writer and philosopher and their Czech teacher, Libor Sevcik. The fulcrum of the novel is an incident early on in the plot where Treslove is mugged by a woman, an act which in Treslove’s head carries anti-Semitic undertones. The remainder of this wretched book plods ponderously through an excruciatingly boring story of what it means to be a Jew.  

The plot has no direction and it doesn’t help either that the three main characters are repugnant, middle-aged geriatrics. The words Jew and Jewishness are repeated so often that it nearly converts you to anti-Semitism by the final chapter. What really seals The Finkler Question’s identity as a preening peacock of misdirected intellectualism is its language. Jacobson is on intimate terms with all manner of syntax that one must use in moderation from run-on sentences to rhetorical questions. The pained use of grammar is still forgivable if it lends itself to a good cause but listen to this: “Beneath their painfully frenetic striving to dress new wave or challengingly out of vogue – nouvelle vague, or ancienne vogue – he saw a grubby slip-strap spinsterliness leading into an interminable old age and then into a cold and unvisited grab.” An excellent example of how you can package crap in spiralling noun phrases and other lexica to give it the semblance of being avant-garde. When Jacobson isn’t confounding us with his tedious narrative, he bores us with his penchant for short sentenced dialogues: 

‘So you’re making racial calculations?’ 
‘I wouldn’t call them racial, no.’ 
‘Religious?’
‘No, definitely not religious.’ 
‘Then, what.’ 

I ought to have known that I was in for £50,000 worth of codswallop when I saw the profane words ‘Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2010’ malingering on the cover 

The Last Speakers by K. David Harrison

“Many as the moments were when he’d have liked to believe that what he and Beth felt for each other was true love, he knew it wasn’t. It was not the emotion, or rather the situation, that he knew in Anvallic as cariah. Though he had quickly grown to like the speech of Ashamoil, which was essentially a skeleton of elegant Halacian grammar generously fleshed with the vocabulary of a dozen other tongues, it was his view that his native language offered more precise tools for defining certain concepts and emotional states, of which love happened to be one. In Beth’s language he could, if he wished, say, “I love you.” In Anvallic this phrase was impossible, for cariah, loving, had no form in the singular person, but could only be expressed in the plural. It was understood to be something that existed as a mutual sentiment or not at all, and it implied a voluntary blending of identities.”

This is an excerpt, not from The Last Speakers, but from a work of speculative fiction that I am currently reading (The Etched City). But, it captures one of dominant themes of The Last Speakers well, that the language we speak compels to perceive and process the world in way that is different from other speakers. This is a subject that greatly interests me. As an instructor of business English, I am particularly curious about how English shapes the thinking of the professionals I train and what impact it has on the work they do. I have been thinking about the connection between language and thought ever since I read a fascinating article last year in The New York Times titled Does Your Language Shape How You Think? 

The excerpt from The Etched City concerns a fictional language but The Last Speakers documents a range of dying tongues, each of which is a rich repository of its speakers’ heritage. Harrison makes a poignant point when he says that most of the cultures of the world haven’t constructed physical records of their existence by way of monuments and manuscripts. The sole record of their culture is their language. He demonstrates how language isn’t merely a vehicle for communicating a thoughts but something that orders our thinking and hence reactions to the world; “At some deeper level, human cognition may be the same no matter what tongue one speaks. But languages package knowledge in radically different ways, facilitating certain means of conceptualizing, naming, and discussing the world.”

A good example of this is the existence of a word ‘iy’ to describe the short side of a hill in the Tuvan spoken in the Tuva region of Siberia (famous for its throat singers). “Languages animate objects by giving them names, making them noticeable when we might not otherwise be aware of them. Tuvan has a word iy (pronounced like the letter e), which indicates the short side of a hill. I had never noticed that hills had a short side. But once I learned the word, I began to study the contours of hills, trying to identify the iy. It turns out that hills are asymmetrical, never perfectly conical, and indeed one of their sides tends to be steeper and shorter than the others. If you are riding a horse, carrying firewood, or herding goats on foot, this is a highly salient concept. You never want to mount a hill from the iy side, as it takes more energy to ascend, and accordingly. This is a perfect example of how language adapts to local environment, by packaging knowledge into ecologically relevant bits. Once you know that there is an iy, you don’t really have to be told to notice it or to avoid it. You just do. The language has taught you useful information in a covert fashion, without explicit instruction.” So, in losing a language, we lose a wholly different way of observing the world.  

Harrison travels to Siberia, Mongolia, Paraguay, India, Australia and Papua New Guinea. Unfortunately, these accounts often leave you depressed. The obscure Chulym language of Siberia is on its last legs. Its elderly speakers are isolated from each other and after decades of coerced Russification, are reluctant to speak their own language. When Harrison gets a few ancient speakers together, there is joy and tears in equal measure. I agree with him when he says that the death of a language is also the death of a culture.  

What kind of music do you listen to?

I never know how to answer this question.  Whilst I could describe my taste in music through genres and artists, I doubt whether it would really communicate what I like.  I could say world music but somehow that phrase connotes bad fusion rather than soulful contemporary and/or traditional music from around the world.  But lately, I've been listening to South African singer, Simphiwe Dana's most recent album 'Kulture Noir' and I think it best summarizes the kind of music I like.  Simphiwe Dana sings in her native Xhosa and her music is simultaneously sophisticated with strong jazz trimmings and yet it's firmly rooted in the traditional call and response songs of the townships of South Africa.  Her music is truly transcendent and that's exactly what I like.

A Restive Wait

I have been eagerly awaiting China Mieville's new book, Embassytown, which is going to hit bookstores in May which means it won't make its way to India till perhaps the second half of the year.   The publisher's offered us a tasty tidbit by way of the first chapter. 

"The children of the embassy all saw the boat land. Their teachers and shiftparents had had them painting it for days. One wall of the room had been given over to their ideas. It’s been centuries since any voidcraft vented fire, as they imagined this one doing, but it’s a tradition to represent them with such trails. When I was young, I painted ships the same way..."  You can read the rest here. 

I want, I want, I want.  Seriously, it sounds really intriguing and it's Mieville's first 'otherworldly' novel (not that his other novels were worldly in any way).  This one's got aliens and intergalactic travel.  Here's the publisher's description: 

Embassytown: a city of contradictions on the outskirts of the universe. Avice is an immerser, a traveller on the immer, the sea of space and time below the everyday, now returned to her birth planet. Here on Arieka, humans are not the only intelligent life, and Avice has a rare bond with the natives, the enigmatic Hosts - who cannot lie. Only a tiny cadre of unique human Ambassadors can speak Language, and connect the two communities. But an unimaginable new arrival has come to Embassytown. And when this Ambassador speaks, everything changes. Catastrophe looms. Avice knows the only hope is for her to speak directly to the alien Hosts. And that is impossible.

Flickr cc image Nail Biting Stuff by Coxy

Two More Jackelian Books by Stephen Hunt

When I finished The Kingdom beyond the Waves, I hungered for the next two books in the series but couldn’t find them anywhere except on Amazon (who don’t deliver to India). I forgot all about Stephen Hunt until someone who happened to read my post, very generously offered to help me get these books from Amazon. Fortunately, I managed to get my hands on both The Rise of the Iron Moon and The Secrets of the Fire Sea through an Indian site – infibeam. Many thanks to Mr. Kalb from Louisville, Kentucky for reminding me about wanting to read these books.  

The books are chronologically ordered and The Rise of the Iron Moon picks up the story trail a few years after the incidents in its predecessor, reusing many of its central characters. I won’t comment on what happens because it’ll be too much of a plot spoiler. Molly Templar, Oliver Brooks, Commodore Black and many others are called on again to battle an eerie, genocidal menace that appears to come from the north but in fact has other worldly origins. What I didn’t like about The Rise of the Iron Moon was the recycling of ideas from Hollywood, particularly studio-spun beliefs about Mars and even the Iron Moon smacked of the Death Star from Star Wars. It was all very, as folks in India say, filmi. Nevertheless, it was fun but it lacked that oomph the first two books definitely had. Also, Hunt’s obsessed with anti-communist allegories and it gets a little tiring after a while.  

The Secrets of the Fire Sea is set away from the Kingdom of Jackals, the pivot for the other three books, on a mysterious polar island called Jago. Jago sits inside the Fire Sea, a constantly shifting body of magma with channels of scalding water which provide access to the island. On Jago, an ancient but dying civilization attempts to revive its fortunes. Its subterranean cities hug the boiling coast because the interior of the island is a frozen wasteland populated by virulent carnivores. Hermetica, the capital, is the last Jagonese city when all others have been abandoned. With a dwindling population, its senate imports mercenaries from nearby Pericur, inhabited by a race of intelligent bear like hominids (ursines) to guard the city’s surface walls against attacks by ursks and ab-locks. The ursines believe Jago to be the holy island of their scriptures from which they were exiled and view the presence of the Jagonese on it, a sacrilege. The Jagonese begrudgingly tolerate the ursines, holding them to be uncivilized heathens. When trade routes move away, Jago becomes increasingly isolated and its rulers ever paranoid about its flighty population. The arrival of Jackelian visitors in the hermit republic signals the end of stagnancy and the beginning of a period of uncertain volatility.  

The Secrets of the Fire Sea had all the ingredients to make it a gem of a book, an incredibly imaginative setting, a mysterious history and the atmosphere of a Stalinist state. But, somewhere the plot loses course and heads down lanes that are spiritual and somewhat idiotic. There were parts that bordered on preachy and others inane – a mathematical formula to become a god-head? Unfortunately, Hunt’s wasted his talent by letting his predilection for things divine and spiritual take over what ought to have been a superb story.  

I read on someone’s blog that Hunt avoids including maps in his books because he feels they limit the imagination and consequently the potential for future books. And Hunt does have an incredible ability to imagine these other worlds; I just hope the plot of his next book does justice to the designs of his intriguing settings.  

The Best Travel Writing 2010

I think the experiences of a traveller are the sum of his own idiosyncrasies, rather than the places he visits. In the introduction to this anthology, William Dalrymple, who I much admire notes that “...if nineteenth-century travel writing was principally about place—about filling in the blanks of the map and describing remote places that few had seen—the best twenty first century travel writing is almost always about people: exploring the extraordinary diversity that still exists in the world beneath the veneer of globalization.” And what better way to explore the idiosyncrasies of people than through the idiosyncrasies of the observer. What I love about good travel writing is how the writer-traveller interprets a place and its people in a uniquely defining way that sets him apart from another with a similar itinerary. Unfortunately, this can also be wearying. Interest isn’t created merely through good writing alone.  

Some of the pieces in The Best Travel Writing 2010 are brilliant and deserving of the title, others less so. In these accounts, I found that distinctiveness in interpretation much more rewarding than exoticness. Jann Huizenga in My Roman Reality Show broods over the puzzle of the appearance and disappearance of strangers on the piazza below her balcony. Her piece has a very simple premise but it works and works well. What I also like was how she played with the language in a contextual but not overdone way; “We lived on the primo piano in opposite buildings, in such proximity that we could have played catch with a ball of mozzarella.” I loved Charles Kulander’s wry observations in Trés Cheap: A Travel Writer Storms the Caribbean where he recounts a conversation between tourists and touting taxi drivers in Jamaica: 

(the tourists) are pursued by taxis, whose drivers shout out the window with a ringing laugh.
“Where you goin’ man?”
“Uh, I don’t know.”
“Hop in, I take you dare.”

Also in Jamaica:
“You want iron shoes?” asked the waiter.
Iron shoes? It was probably a traditional slave breakfast. I wondered what was in it as I glanced down at the breakfast menu. Ackee, a tree vegetable, was the featured specialty. Enjoy it while you are here, read the menu, as the U.S. Food & Drug Administration has placed a ban on ackee in all forms (canned, cooked, or frozen) from entering U.S. ports. Now that sounded like a real seal of endorsement.
“I’ve never heard of iron shoes,” I said. “Do you put ackee in it?”
“You don’t know what iron shoes is?” he replied. “Where you from, Mars?”
“California, actually,” I said. “We never had slavery there.”
He rolled his eyes back in disbelief, then shook his head.
“Iron shoes, man. You pick de ironge from de tree and squeeze it to make de joos.”

Some of the entries are really intriguing like Takumbeng, C’est Quoi? which explores the existence of a powerful mystical society of women in Nigeria and Cameroon who administer punishments by exposing themselves. Others are so personal that I wouldn’t even categorize them under travel writing like Gaye Brown’s Ready or Not where she travels with her two adopted children to Korean to meet their birth mothers. Brian Eckert’s Kaptein Span Die Seile demonstrated how a single interaction between traveller and native can paint a lucid portrait of a troubled nation, in this case, South Africa.  

My favourite out of all of them was Kevin McCaughey's We Wait for Spring, Moldova and Me. McCaughey describes a winter in Chisinau, the capital of Moldava, Europe’s poorest country (or a wishbone of a land as the writer puts it), where he worked in a language school. I think the similitude in our professions probably drew me to this story. McCaughey makes it clear that he isn’t really enjoying teaching English to students who resort to R&R (Russian and Romanian) at every opportunity. Nor does he enjoy living in Chisinau where there are frequent power cuts and socialist era apartment blocks are unheated and hot water is unheard of. The fulcrum of the story is an annual free dinner thrown by the school at a folksy Romanian restaurant – an event that McCaughey has spent the preceding twelve months thinking about. You’d think that this setting wouldn’t make for very good travel writing but it is in fact the very best, profoundly human and poignant.  

“I’m the first to arrive at the school, not from a sense of duty, but because there’s no water in my apartment. First I make coffee. Then I remove my shirt. Then I take my towel and the electric tea kettle into the bathroom, add icy tap water, and pour the mix over my head, splashing my armpits and soaping my hair.”

Sometime last year, I was in a queue, waiting for someone to open the doors to where a play was about to be performed. I put my trademark face on, the one that falls somewhere between testy and snooty, the one that says, “yes I am watching a play alone, but at least I am not a brainless fuckwit.” I look around and hey wadjaknow, I spot kin. Nope, he must just look like that because his friend walks in. They ‘no-yeah’ ‘yeah-yeah’ to each other in semantically inane Bombayspeak to each other. The baldy next to me praises some new Hindi film that he’s written a review for on the site he works for. His petite friend wants to know why he’s not doing travel writing which is apparently what baldy wanted to be when he grew up. Baldy says magazines only hire travel writers who are experienced. I want to interrupt, but the queue starts moving.  

Baldy got it wrong. I don’t know what magazines look for in travel writers but it isn’t experience that makes them good. It’s courage. Courage to write intimately, like Kevin McCaughey, not about a place or even its people but about yourself when you are at your most vulnerable, away from your home.  

The Mutiny by Julian Rathbone

Ridiculous. I thought this was a non-fictional work on the Mutiny. Instead, it turned out to be badly written fiction with dreadful characters and abrupt historical asides. I suppose The Mutiny is written with a certain audience in mind, the grey middling type who alternate between holidaying in Cornwall and rural France. Anyone wanting to read a good book on the Sepoy Mutiny should pick up William Dalrymple’s The Last Mughal – much of which is concerned with the real events that happened in 1857 – absolutely riveting, factual history to the very last word, peopled by incredible individuals.  

Rathbone thinks he’s some sort of old India hand, bland is more like it.