The Chasing iamb

In Jaipur I escaped death by a crashing display stand because I was gawking at Manil Suri. He has the same nervous energy of lovely geeks everywhere, watching to see if this time the world will get the punchline to their admittedly silly joke or will the world miss it as usual...

Here is a Manil Suri talk called Taming Infinity.

What happens if a reigning monarch, whose native tongue has one of the richest literatures in the world, decides in her old age to start reading? She has met every great writer of five decades and has so far only discussed the weather with them because, 'one did not read.' So what happens now?

Alan Bennet could have made this a straightforward satire. Certainly there is ripe material when one imagines the Queen of England suddenly going book-mad. The story in fact begins with her trying to chat up the President of France about Jean Genet. "Homosexual and jailbird, was he nevertheless as bad as he's painted? Or, more to the point, was he as good?"  she asks, the panicked President.

Nobody likes the Queen reading because it distracts her from opening parks, mines and sessions of Parliament. Her private secretary deplores his name (Kevin) and his country of origin (New Zealand) but he deplores the distraction of the monarch more and plots against her sole support, unattractive kitchen porter-turned-amanuensis, Norman Seakins. Norman prefers gay writers (hence the Genet!)

Bennet is one of those rare creatures, popular and funny and adored by critics. He could hardly make a wrong move. In this story, The Uncommon Reader, he uses the queen's unique position to gently meditate on the nature of reading and the nature of writing, without ever letting loose his grip on the story. The phenomenal ending also is an optimistic speculation on the nature of the influence of reading on the reader. Uncommon as she may be.

I love this story and could marry it. Let it not be said that I have unreasonable responses to short stories.

I have a long-dead great uncle who left behind a small and interesting library. I read most of it too early to understand anything. I regret it now because it is going to take a super-human effort to read the Russians again since they depressed me when I was 12. A word of advice: If you know any ten year olds who think they want to read War and Peace, distract them with 'Look, birdie!' and hide the bloody book.

Credos and Curios, by James Thurber was one of the few books that intrigued me right from the beginning and draws me back year after year.  I was still in school when I first read it and was blown away by the elegance and style that I could see dimly through eyes more accustomed to juicy murder mysteries. Credos is a post-humous collection of his essays and considerably darker than the rest of his work, though Thurber is frequently disturbing. I put it back in the shelf and promptly forgot him.

A few years later I was doing Macbeth in college and our pleasantly absent-minded teacher (who could not remember the name of the king in Oedipus Rex and told us that Oedipus killed his mother and married his father) read the Macbeth Murder mystery to us. Since we had been drinking the play line by line for two months, not a single woman in that class of 60 failed to see how brilliant that piece was. We sighed with satisfaction when she finished.

Not being a Lit student I had a lot of time to read in college and began hunting for more Thurber. Another member of the English department was something of a Thurber expert and lent me Fables For Our Time. I posted one of those stories here a while ago. Its quite easy to get hooked on Thurber, the way I did. As someone who wrote alongside E B White (of Elements of Style) one would expect that the mechanics of his writing is impeccable and his erudition casual.  Not something you can say about his drawing abilities. Dorothy Parker can't be blamed for comparing his cartoons to half-baked  cookies because they all look like hopeless doodles. (Thurber on the subject: "Some people thought my drawings were done under water; others that they were done by moonlight. But mothers thought that I was a little child or that my drawings were done by my granddaughter. So they sent in their own children's drawings to The New Yorker, and I was told to write these ladies, and I would write them all the same letter: 'Your son can certainly draw as well as I can. The only trouble is he hasn't been through as much.")

The gestalt effect of Thurber's work is not glibly defined. Often it is eerie and disquieting without any perceptible reason. There is a surreal quality to his cartoons that makes you stare for far longer than one would imagine. Thurber is the kind of writer you want to inflict on people because you want to see other people with the same half-smiling half-worried expression. So every now and then I ask people, 'Do you like James Thurber?' and hope for the best. I asked MP who has forgotten more books than I can hope to read. MP's response tickled me as much as it tickled her in each telling. While she was living in Vermont she went to the Thurber house in Columbus, Ohio. She was thrilled to bits to see the stone statues of the famous Thurber dogs in the garden and the statue of the unicorn nearby. She then spoke to the care-taker of the house who revealed herself to be a descendent of Emily Dickenson.

More recently I have been reading My Years with Ross which is a phenomenal work of literary history. Thurber's biography of Harold Ross the founder of the The New Yorker does not get into 'the David Copperfield crap' that Holden despised.  Instead you get stories about hundreds of writers who worked for Ross alongside Thurber, the smell and sound of eccentricity, whimsy and genius. You get the story of the pell-mell growth of the The New Yorker and the literary scene in early 20th century United States. This is the world of  Dorothy Parker,  Ogden Nash,  Truman Capote, SJ Perelman, The Marx Brothers, James Cain and of course Shirley Jackson. (Jackson's story The Lottery is supposed to have resulted in the an avalanche of mail, a good number cancelling their New Yorker subscriptions.)

You get bizarre lists, notes on editorial policy and rejection slips and everybody's preoccupation with grammar , what was permissible to print, (Adultery was ok, homosexuality dubious) and most importantly what was really witty.  Actually, it seems less preoccupation than fascinated obsession with the fiddly sub-processes of writing and publishing. Not a book to read at one stretch but lovely to dip into. And an excellent time-machine.

I have finished reading two books today by two very different sort of writers but both have given me ...if one must use the food-for-thought idiom...they would be dal, I think. I am trying very hard to stay on track and write the novel this year. And suddenly language is leaving me and not even saying ta-ta, bye-bye. But the ladies I read were very good for health.

Nikki Giovanni's collection of essays. I hate to be rude but swalpa editing, swalpa tightening would have made it a far better book. I like rambling personal essays but sometimes she just rambles clean off the page into an alternate dimension.

Giovanni is funny in the way that some women have about them. I am sure you have met them. They have sweet, innocuous, homely faces and can rarely be heard as they whisper rude things. Mothers usually like them. But while your mother is in the kitchen getting the sweet girl a second helping of whateveritis the sweet girl is blandly telling you that she has decided that boys are just not working out and she wants to adopt a baby with her girlfriend from Sierra Leone. Girlfriend! Girlfriend! While you are spluttering your mother has returned and the sweet girl joins her in making cracks about you. The sweet girl leaves after tea and you are still digesting the fact that you were talking revolution or even satirising the post-revolution when the sweet girl is out there with a burning torch.

So the book...if you ignore your inner editor and look out for the great nuggets from the 60s and her witty asides on being an activist and being a writer, the book is great fun. Here is Nikki on the marches and sit-ins of her day.

" I shall always remember the joy on my grandmother's face when she came back from the mass meeting to tell me I could march and how proud she was. She and Grandpapa caught a cab to come see me. I actually figured I was on my way to meet my maker, but one must have a sense of social responsibility. When I enrolled in Fisk University the following fall one of the things I most looked forward to was sitting in. There was a sort of style ti it. Assuming you weren't actually molested, it was cool. You sat on the stool and watched the white people panic. Dick Gregory has the best story. When he stopped at a diner the waitress said, "We don't serve niggers," to which Gregory replied, "I don't eat them." You always hoped someone would say something to you to let you be cool. Mostly you were scared. I was home alone the Sunday the little girls were bombed in Birmingham....Nina Simone said it best: " Mississippi Goddamn!"

If you have not read Helene Hanff I ought to insist that you run out and buy the omnibus or at the very least 84, Charing Cross Road. Perhaps my New Year resolution is to not shove books at people. Perhaps I am too sleepy. In any case I am not going to insist you run out and buy her books now. I shall be sub-tle.

So what is my obscure theory about? I think Helene would have been the prototype internet junkie. I think it is a pity that Helene did not live in the full glory of the Internet. Or did she? She died in1997 so it is a faint possibility, I guess. So here are my incredibly astute deductions.

Helene ordered her first batch of books from Marks & Co at 84 Charing Cross Road in October 1949. The essays by Thomas Hazlitt and Robert Louis Stevenson took nearly a month to reach her. Today she could have access to any number of second-hand book shops from across the world who are online.  Everybody from Select Bookshop on Brigade Road to the bookstores of Hay-on-Wye are online.

When commissioned to write copy for a coffee-table book about NY she charges out and borrows three reference books and dips into all three at once. A definite indicator that she would have loved having 25 windows simultaenously open on her laptop gorging on the arcanae posted by the happy citizens of the world.

When she reads anything including early American history Helene feels a deep desire to share it with other people. Any victim will do. If she was around she could have joined the army of wikipedia editors paring information to the bone like piranha and uploading it.

Most importantly Helene's cheerful, funny, confident letters did not reveal her shyness. They let her make robust, passionate relationships around the world without ever meeting the people involved. Poverty was only one of the reasons she never met Frank Doel before she died. Hating to step out her house was just as strong a reason. What better world for a person like that than the Internet with its silvery cross-border glamour of chatrooms and blogs and online dating sites.

Of course it is entirely possible given the dull procedures of online shopping 84, Charing Cross Road would never have been written. So much for that theory.

Helene really is a writer for obsessive readers. Though her own writing has potent, almost-universal charm, to be in love with her you have to have spent quite a few lunch times in school with your nose in a fat book embarrassed about some social faux pas you made in the first period. Its attractiveness is less about being well-read as opposed to having memories of being socially inept and continuing to be slightly wierd. So here is Helene Hanff a young and independent woman in 30's New York. She is too creative to be a secretary, too bright to do anything dull, too normal to move to Hollywood when her main source of income, the television industry moved from New York to Hollywood and too funny for people to take for granted. Extremely talented yet hopelessly unsuccessful at writing the plays she set out to write. Her most famous book was a direct result of her chronic shyness. Despite her cult following she died fairly poor. Comforting in a strange way.

 Speech by Ramu Ramnathan

I have been yarning on about Paul Zachariah with al_lude  and telling him how I am a hopeless Zachariah groupie. There's a woman in Koshy's who was supposed to have had a little fling with Paul ( as well as AK Ramanujan!) who inspires pale malachite envy in me because what-a-man-what-a-man-what-a-mighty-good-man. It should have been galling then that Al_lude was the one to discover two (count'em!) copies of the voluptous, lust-inspiring Complete Works, the juicy collection of short stories that won the 2005 Sahatya Akademi award. But I am all grown-up now,

Possibly my second biggest favourite among all the Zachariah stories is 'The End of Third-rate Literature', a wicked wicked story that pokes fun at writers and literature . The story is built on two charming premises. One, that a sense of loss, exile, diaspora, longing for home can only result in bad writing or no writing at all. Two, that writers are irritating to live with.  And Zacharia's evil insights are so deeply couched in glorious fiction that it never has the nasty edgy self-consciousness of satire. Instead there is the devil taking a post-prandial drive on a cloud above Palam Airport in Delhi and appearing in a soot-tinged angel costume to the third rate Christian writer Chrissa. There is the beautiful reporter from Hindustan Times who comes to interview the Eezhava writer Eesa  and is startled to discover that Kerala is not in Madras. And there is the sweet heady smell of the toddy laced through the story.

My absolute favourite is 'Teevandi Kolla' (Train Robbery) a  story that made me cry when I first read it in English a decade ago. In Malayalam it is as melancholy and moving as I remember it. Rajan, the poorest of the poor, 'forgotten by both revolution and planners' and his young son decide to hold up a train. Rajan, soft-hearted, gentle and polite is agonized by the idea of having to do something that creates inconvenience for anyone.  But Rajan, his son and wife are hungry. Glumly they wrap a large papaya with newspaper to disguise it as a bomb. The hollow, rabid sounds of naara-loving uber political Kerala is the background to Rajan's musings as he wonders about the rights and wrongs of doing such an act to feed himself and his family.

In 1997 Zachariah's Kannadi kanmolavum (Until you see the mirror) a story inspired by Louis Bunuel's classic film The Milky Way caused wild controversy that Zachariah responded with a "they know not what they do" . The story is about the crisis faced by Jesus a few years before he becomes a prophet. He has just returned from his wanderings to Galilee where his family who had assumed he was dead is overjoyed to see him. He is used to living in places where water is plentiful and daily bathing is taken for granted. In dry, dusty Galilee the acrid notes of sweat have had to become erotic for men and women to continue to fall in love and copulate. 

Jesus is itchy and uncomfortable and considers shaving his beard off. His mother and sister tell him that he is beautiful and that without his beard he would seem much less impressive. Jesus laughs, still all-too human though compassionate and inspiring love in everyone he meets.  He decides to take a short trip to visit Mary, Martha and Lazarus, his friends who are sure to lend him some money.

The first shocking premonitions of immorality comes when he is chatting with the local barber who has just been gifted a mirror, a luxury that only rich Romans own.  Zachariah's wonderful imagination steps in here adding detail to this ochre and gold story. How did the barber get this mirror? He was requested by the Roman commander to shave 'certain parts' of his wife so that he could watch. 'The Romans only think of one thing!' says the barber in scorn. 

But Jesus is untouched by the sexual proclivities of the Romans. The mirror is calling to him. He who has seen his reflection only in the ripples of rivers and ponds now finally has the chance to see himself. But the simple act of taking two steps forward and looking in the mirror casts him into first terror and then despair. He hears the mirror asking him to take a look at himself, the face that is already touched by God and Heaven. He hears the mirror asking him to look at his beard before he shaves it off, to see the face that is going to be immortal. The mirror promises that he will find everything he wants. Jesus flees, not yet ready to accept his destiny. In Mary's house he weeps in her lap unable to explain what he is afraid of.

This is the story that Paul Zachariah calmly accepted death threats, threats of ex-communication and general fire-breathing from self-righteous Malayalees for. The story is perhaps the best example of Zachariah's ability to see humanity and compassion and flaws in everyone from the post-modernist writer, to the thief in the attic to the NRI Malayalee to Jesus.

MP was shocked a couple of years ago to find that Arvind Krishna Mehrotra's The Absent Traveller was out of print. MP being MP, she did not wring her hands and moan over coffee about what the world is coming to. She did not blog about it either. She harangued and cajoled the Orient Longman folks to look in their warehouse and sell her all the remaining copies. The dozen she thus rescued she has given away like so much manna.

The book MP rescued from a dusty ignominous fate is a brilliant collection of verse from the second century AD. And the poems are incredibly potent in the distilled gatha form which is never more than a few lines long. Certainly shorter than the title. Prakrit love poetry from the Gathasaptasati of Satavahana Hala. Gathaspathasputtersputter...I feel a bit like the geography hating child in the Dilip Raote story who wondered whether Eratosthenes' friends called him Sunny or Chunky.

From the 700 love poems written by the Satavahana king, Mehrotra selected the ones which had to do with seperation from one's love. A great deal of the charm is of course from the time-capsuleness of it...what THEY felt like that too? Really! In the second century AD! You mean we are not the first people in human civilization to love and screw and screw other people's loves and to get jobs far away? But after this embarrassing ego-centrism passes the book still has a lot of charm. The verse is in sometimes wry and cynical as we are all wont to be about love and seperation.

Distance destroys love
So does the lack of it:

Gossip destroys love,
and sometimes

It takes nothing
To destroy love

At other times the mood is passionate, wide-eyed, fierce in its belief in love. But the greatest fun is to be had in the sly gathas about illicit rendesvouz.

Ask the nights of rain
    And the Godavari in spate.
How fortunate he is 
  And unwomanly her courage.

***

Tonight, she says
   In utter darkness
I must reach the tryst:
   And practices
Going around the house
   With eyes closed.

***
The cock crows and you 
    wake up with a start:
But you spent the night
    In your own bed, husband.


MP's rescue mission rescued this one for all of us who were barely literate in 1991 when the book was published and definitely not solvent to buy poetry. But who will rescue the sexy Mr Mehrotra's other books? (Sex appeal can be confirmed by checking out any of his dark brooding almost stereotype thinking woman's pinup back cover photos) The man whose translations the other Mr. AK, the great Mr Ramanujan raved about....even his own collections are missing. They are to be found once every decade among a pile of math text books and Gulmohar readers in Daryaganj and Flora Fountain. Why does Mr Mehrotra need fearless evangelists like MP use their canny abilities when he writes like this?

Where Will the Next One Come From