When I picked up this book, I only had a vague idea of the theme it would explore. The title couldn’t be clearer in telling that it is about people from the provinces. But what exactly about them? I had read Sumana Roy’s work before and knew that she is not the one to reduce a subject to its bare bones of cliched arguments. Reading her essay on Amit Chaudhuri, for example, had given me immense relief as I had found a fellow rasik of work in which nothing conventionally substantial happened. A rasik who wrote non-academic prose on literature that is perceived to be ‘boring’. Later while reading, somewhere in this book I encountered the sentence —

When “nothing happens,” invention happens. That children and provincials know.

Though this sentence was not the reason I picked up the book, I encountered it later while reading, it certainly validated my decision. Why someone picks up a book to read is a question best answered by the universe but where I picked this particular book from is as non-provincial as any place could be — Kitabkhana near CST in Mumbai. The irony would strike me much later. And it is only later that I would recollect that in the most urban of places, islands of provincial experience exist. As I was walking towards the bookshop, I heard awadhi spoken with a bhojpuri lilt, which is the dialect of the place I come from. Even after so many years of urban migration and mingling, it sounds misplaced in the background of Victorian buildings. It evokes a sense of accidental recognition. It is like an Eclairs chocolate prematurely bursting open in your mouth and surprising you with the onrush of flavour which you know is not going to outlast the sticky gooey mass that covered it.

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I entered the shop with the intent of buying nothing and came out with a bunch of books, only one of which I have been able to finish reading. But that’s a story for some other time.

Form

While reading Provincials, I found it difficult to define its form. Is it a series of essays? If yes, then why are there no titles? Are the names of the sections (Postcards, Place, Pedigree, Poetic, Pran) supposed to be the titles? It was in the last pages that the author herself describes its form precisely posed in the form of a question, the answer to which is a resounding yes —

As I’ve groped and gathered, collected and scavenged through cultures and continents looking for provincials, those with whom I shared something invisible, I have wondered about the form of this emotional and intellectual history—what genre is it? Is it a provincial book—in a shape that I associate with the provincial imagination and intuition, of accidents, autodidacticism, and astonishment?

Shared emotional and intellectual history indeed. She goes on to write in the same chapter—

This is more like constructing an unimagined history and a map different from the geographical.

This is the classic case of a writer putting to words what I had been thinking all along but was unable to articulate. Only, this sentence comes in the last chapter of the book. Right through the book the question ‘what is this book’ kept buzzing in my mind. This buzz remained a background white noise like that of a tungsten bulb. That it never became my primary preoccupation is credit to the author throwing-in insights about provincial life that sounded so familiar. They evoked a strong sense of recognition. I was surprised that experiences described so precisely can be so relatable to someone completely resigned from the time and place of the author.

It was during this time that I watched the documentary on Vinod Kumar Shukla called ‘chaar phool hain aur duniya hai’. In that film Shukla says ‘aap jitne sthaaniya hote hain, utne hi vaishvik hote hain’ (the more local you are, the more global you become). This book is a breathing proof of how true this statement is. The relatable provincial encounters invoked memory trails of my own provincial experiences.

Memory Trails

His interests were numerous, and his resources could, of course, never keep up with his desire for discovery—in discovering the world, he would be able to discover himself, so was the urge. It’s a familiar itch, to borrow his metaphor, for many of us.

‘He’ in the quote above is John Clare, a fellow provincial residing in a distant time and geography.

Where does this feeling that there is something out there to discover come from? I think it has to do with the feeling of some kind of lack. I was acutely aware of the fact that by virtue of being in a small town, there were limited things I was exposed to. This feeling intensified whenever I visited Mumbai to my Nani’s place once every 2-3 years. People from big cities seemed to be carrying an air of someone who knew things. Not academically, but something close to and not exactly ‘street smartness’. This sense of lack needed to be dealt with.

Big cities reached us only through friends, news stories, books, and movies. I would extrapolate the scraps gathered from these sources to create my own version of life in these cities. The desire for discovery was a desire to discover my own version of life in these cities.

My version of these cities was so resigned from reality that I feel slightly embarrassed thinking about it today. I thought every young person in Mumbai must be into heavy metal because I accidentally befriended a few Mumbaikar metal-heads; everyone in Delhi must have an elementary knowledge of Urdu shayari because that’s what the movies showed; writers like Vikram Seth, Salman Rushdie, and Amitava Ghosh must be household names in big cities because it was only the unexposed provincial that does not recognise these literary superstars; Gurgaon must be like Dubai because it had tall shiny buildings and a shiny metro line that circumnavigated them. It took just a bit of exposure to get disabused of these notions. These weren’t stereotypical notions by any means. With the information I had as a provincial, I was very generous with my assumptions. It was more a result of the familiar itch Sumana Roy writes about in the quote above.

I read them as illustrations of what my English teacher had said, quoting the filmmaker Satyajit Ray: you say “da” when you use it just as an article and “di” when you want to emphasize.

For the first eight years of my education I went to a school that had ‘convent’ in its name, but had no nuns or fathers going around. It was run by a Catholic family. There was an unsaid hierarchy of how we would address our teachers. The grand-sounding ‘madam’ was reserved only for the ‘principal madam’, then came ‘ma’am’ which was reserved for senior teachers, and finally ‘miss’ for everyone else.

The above quote reminded me of our principal madam. I remember her as someone who had all the answers. A walking-talking encyclopedia. But what made her stand out was the way she gave those answers to us. She would tell us a little story or anecdote about most of the questions. She oozed confidence.

The only time I remember her faltering was with the question of how to pronounce ‘the’. The answer she gave was a bit different from what Sumana Roy got from her teacher. She said it is pronounced ‘da’ when the next word starts with a consonant and ‘di’ when it starts with a vowel. So, it is ‘da cat’ but ‘di elephant’. I have since then followed this rule without ever doubting if it’s correct. But our principal madam was not so sure. The image of her tentative face is crystal clear in my mind even today. Like a stupidly competitive child, I felt a sense of victory back then. To ask our principal madam a question that made her doubt herself was no mean feat. Sumana Roy’s sentence brought it all back to me.

Our houses had two mirrors: one for everyone, the other a tiny shaving mirror for our fathers and uncles that hung from a nail beyond our reach.

Ours too had two. The shaving mirror, instead of being hung at the wall, was kept as a floater. It wafted the smell of shaving cream. My father would sit on the floor to shave. He would make the mirror stand with the support of the mug, full of water he used to clean his shaving brush. I was summoned every time the water needed changing. Despite having access to the mirror, I never used it. Probably because I saw it as a part of Papa’s shaving paraphernalia.

The regular mirror was loosely hung on the wall but my mother would often take it out. It also had a stand to keep combs that would never fit. Either the combs in our house were bigger than usual or the mirror was smaller. I felt mildly irritated every time I had to keep the comb somewhere. The mirrors had plastic frames and sometimes the fitting came loose which added further to my irritation. Sumana’s sentence reminded me of what might have been my initiation into indifference to mirrors.

There are others too like playing tic-tac-toe on the lunch plate, the instinct to sit on the floor, trying to read anything one could get access to, drinking charnamrit in temples and so on. Reading this book reassured me that the texture of provincial life elsewhere was so similar to that of mine. But this is not the only reason I loved the book.

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Novelistic Sentences

Regular readers of this newsletter would know that it is delectable sentences that keep me hooked to a book and eventually play a major role in framing my opinion about it. I sometimes call them novelistic sentences. Sumana Roy is also a poet and it shows in the way her sentences evoke images. She herself gives a perfect metaphor to define her style of writing, contrasting it with that of Arun Kolatkar —

Kolatkar’s eye is a fast-moving camera, mine an earthworm that wriggles and digs, turning earth into globules.

It is this earthworm-like wriggling and digging that produces a sentence like this —

Siliguri. So many syllables, so many i’s in its name, like walking a vowel staircase, and yet so little, so small.

I would assume that it takes obsessive wriggling and digging to notice that very few four-syllabled words take as little time as ‘Siliguri’ to pronounce. It takes a poet’s vision to come up with the image of a word being a vowel staircase. These images give so much character and space to the otherwise unimportant or insignificant words and objects. Take this example —

What a sight it was once—the legs of drying trousers kicking the wind in the direction of the sky.

She gives character to drying laundry by specifying the direction in which the trousers are kicking — the sky.

The book is full of sentences that make you revisit them again and again. It took me some time to finish this book. It either prompted me to re-read certain sections for the sheer joy they give or made me think about my own provincial experiences. Is this not what good literature should do — create beautiful obstacles in your way to finishing the book? My relationship with ‘Provincials’ is a lot more intimate than a lot of the other nonfiction books I have read.

There is also a somewhat perverse reason to feel affinity towards this book. Sumana Roy has quoted the exact paragraph from VS Naipaul’s novel A House for Mr.Biswas that I did in one of my essays on this newsletter. Here is the link to my essay and if you happen to buy this book, which you must, you’ll find the quote on page number 258. I will end this essay with a quote from ‘Provincials’ that precisely points to a provincial characteristic I just displayed —

We dislike stereotyping, but we seek a lineage in strangers.

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When I was first asked to watch the movie Ford vs Ferrari, I remember being reluctant. I knew nothing about car racing. The movie didn’t spark any interest in me for the sport. I still don’t care about it. The sport I mean. The movie, though, I have watched many times since then. According to me, the best moments in this movie, as is true for any good piece of art, do not need the context of its subject matter to become unforgettable. The truths they tell slip out of them and become more generally applicable.

Among many such moments, the one that stuck with me the most comes right in the beginning. The character Caroll Shelby, who is an elite athlete, gives a background monologue that goes something like this —

There’s a point at 7000 RPM where everything fades. The machine becomes weightless. It disappears. All that’s left, a body moving through space, and time. At 7000 RPM, that’s where you meet it. That’s where it waits for you. You feel it coming. It creeps up on you, close in your ear, and it asks you a question. The only question that matters. Three small words. “Who are you?”.

The only question that matters has the simplest answer — in the grand scheme of things, you are nothing. But we spend our days blissfully unaware of the grand scheme of things, so we are never satisfied with this answer. Every question we ask ourselves is a variation of this question, everything we do is an attempt to answer it. There are ready-made moulds made available to us — father, mother, CEO, VP, captain, manager and so on. We, often unknowingly, manufacture an answer to this question by trying to fit ourselves into one of these moulds. For most of us, this is enough and we move on. But there are people who get to this question again and again.

I have never been an elite athlete, or an athlete, or someone who would move his body unless seduced with copious amounts of sugar and butter. So, I can only guess that the peak of their performance must be an experience impossible to share with anyone else. Harsha Bhogale once said about Virat Kohli that he seems lost in his own perfection when he is on song. This perfection must take them to a state of solitude so complete that everything else has to fade away, leaving them in the company of no one else but themselves. When they’re on their own, they probably ask the only question that matters. Caroll Shelby, who was the first American to win the Le Mans, sure did, according to the movie. Also, his disappointment at not being able to race again shows that these champion type people crave that experience, that perfect solitude.

How do they respond when they’re confronted with this question? Is it a humbling experience for them, rendering the question rhetorical — ‘who the hell are you’? Or is it something else? Who is asking this question? Who is ‘it’ in the quote above?

This is where the context of the movie slips away and my egoistic self takes over. What about me-me-me? Or more precisely, what about commoners like me? Do we ever ask ourselves who we are? Unfortunately, we can only make conjectures using whatever limited experience we have of everything else fading away.

We too, sometimes, get this moment of clarity and are confronted with this question. Champions probably conjure it at will, we can merely stumble upon it accidentally. But we do stumble upon it. Champions experience it first hand, we live these moments vicariously by seeing them flirt with the boundary of craft to creep into the territory of art. What do commoners like us see when asked ‘who are you’, and how do we respond? I stumbled upon a few poems that address this moment when we encounter ourselves, loaded with the answer to this question - ‘who are you?’.

Self-Portrait

I resemble everyone
but myself, and sometimes see
in shop-windows,
	despite the well-known laws
	of optics,
the portrait of a stranger,
date unknown,
often signed in a corner
by my father. 

— AK Ramanujan 

The speaker of this poem sees his reflection in the shop-windows, calls it a self-portrait, and claims that he sees a stranger. The only resemblance of this portrait with him is, presumably, physical. That’s what he probably means by ‘signed by my father’.

Despite physical resemblance, why does he see a stranger in his portrait? Our conception of who we are, is challenged the moment we observe ourselves from a distance. What we see, can only be a part of what we are. In this poem, this part is the physical appearance of the speaker. It comes out of the speaker’s body and deposits itself on the glass of the shop-windows, freeing itself from the grip of the speaker’s lived experiences, exposing itself to the world that can invent any past or future for it. When this possibility opens up, how could the speaker see anyone but a stranger in his own reflection?

Susan Sontag writes about photographs that —

It is a view of the world which denies interconnectedness, continuity, but which confers on each moment the character of a mystery.

Is this ‘character of a mystery’ applicable to a person’s reflection in the mirror? If you see a stranger in the reflection then it sure is. But there is one fundamental difference between a photograph and one’s reflection in the mirror. Ephemerality. Photographs last forever (theoretically), immortalising the moment they capture. Reflections are ephemeral. They last only as long as you are staring at the mirror. A fleeting glance at it might show you a stranger, but spend more time in front of it and you might encounter a person resembling someone you know. Like what the speaker of the next poem sees.

Approaching Fifty 

Sometimes,
In unwiped bathroom mirrors,
He sees all three faces
Looking at him: 

His own,
The grey-haired man’s
Whose life policy has matured,
And the mocking youth’s
Who paid the first premium. 

— AK Mehrotra

Reflections in unwiped mirrors are devoid of details. They reveal merely the crux of a face instead of the whole thing. The speaker of this poem extrapolates this crux across the timeline of his life, invoking his youth and the imminent old age.

Both these poems address the confrontation with self using the same device — looking in the mirror. If one is able to see a stranger, or one’s past and future selves in the mirror, then surely one must be carrying this other person along throughout the day. After all, what one sees in the mirror is a mere reflection of what one carries. Charles Simic calls this person ‘The Inner Man’ in one of his poems.

The Inner Man 

It isn’t the body 
That’s a stranger.
It’s someone else. 

We poke the same
Ugly mug
At the world. 
When I scratch,
He scratches too. 

There are women
Who claim to have held him.
A dog follows me about.
It might be his. 

If I'm quiet, he’s quieter.
So I forget him.
Yet, as I bend down
To tie my shoelaces,
He’s standing up.

We cast a single shadow.
Whose shadow?
I’d like to say:
“He was in the beginning
And he’ll be in the end,”
But one can’t be sure. 

At night
As I sit
Shuffling the cards of our silence,
I say to him:

“Though you utter
Every one of my words,
You are a stranger.
It’s time you spoke.”

— Charles Simic 

Simic’s speaker addresses head-on what the other two poems gently point to — this ‘someone else’ we carry with ourselves.

It is impossible to read through a Simic poem and not stop to wonder how he thought of this image or that. Consider ‘We poke the same/Ugly mug/At the world’. Every morning I have a mug in my hand before I sit down to write, and not once has this thought crossed my mind that I am poking this mug at the world. Then there is also ‘Shuffling the cards of our silence’. Before the speaker distributes the cards of silence to this ‘inner man’, he wants him to speak.

In this poem, the interaction with this other self is more detailed. The mirror in the previous poems merely reveals its existence, while in this the speaker lives with this stranger and practically performs all the activities of the day with him. The speaker carries this stranger, this inner man, inside him.

This idea of carrying multiple people inside ourselves and trying to talk to them or address them, might sound like spiritual mumbo-jumbo but it is not. As long as it does not promise any nirvana, it is not. It is merely a frame through which we can pretend to understand ourselves, pretend to find answers to questions like — ‘who are you?’. The question we started this essay with, which, apparently, is the only question that matters. I wonder if elite athletes too have this sense of a stranger lurking inside them when they’re asked the only question that matters. Is this stranger the illusive ‘it’ that asks this question? When they are shuffling the cards of silence, presumably at the peak of their performance when they’re absolutely alone, do they ask this stranger to speak? Like many other mysteries of life, this too will remain unanswered.

Like this, there were many memorable moments in the movie that made the context of the sport irrelevant.

PS: It’s a crime to not quote the poet MirzaGhalib in an essay that veers into abstract concepts. I neither fully understand nor endorse the concept of post script, but here I am making an exception just to quote a Ghalib couplet that’s too directly connected to the theme to be ignored. You can make of it whatever you want —

Or, you can hear it recited in the voice of Jagjit Singh —

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Speech begets speech, image begets memories of other images. Speech begets speech because of the contexts words and images evoke in our minds. For example, words written in the context of the original speech might remind one of the old contexts the same words invoke in the begotten speech. Pardon me for being so roundabout about a simple concept, I just wanted to get away with using the word ‘begotten’.

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What I mean to say is that if we are paying attention to something, it’s not unusual to be reminded of something else. In no other form is this more true than poetry. Because poetry at its best, jumps out of the page and gets stuck in your memory, either in the form of words or images. This is what makes reading good poetry books, cover to cover, in a single sitting such an arduous task. There is no narrative strand to lead you to the next sentence. You have to, and you should, linger around a poem and, like a bubble-gum, discard it only when it’s chewed dry of its flavour. But there are poems that keep giving. Brueghel’s Two Monkeys by Wisława Szymborska is one such poem.

When I first came across this poem, I had to google the title. I knew what ‘two monkeys’ meant but ‘Brueghel’ had too alien a sound for my palette. He turned out to be a painter. He is known for depicting through his paintings, the human condition. Before I could go back to the monkey poem, I came across another famous Brueghel painting called ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus’. It looks like this —

This image begot (I used it again!) the memory of another poem. I remembered two things about that poem — it had an unpronounceable title, and it started with saying that the Old Masters were never wrong about suffering. This was enough to find the poem on the internet. On re-reading it, my love for the poem was reconfirmed. Here it is —

This is considered one of the best poems of W. H. Auden. It talks about the banality of evil. The speaker of the poem gives a few elegant examples of how the mundane keeps on happening — ship sailing undisturbed, and ploughman walking unperturbed — while a grave tragedy is unfolding for someone. In this case, Icarus, while trying to reach the sun, has tragically fallen from the sky.

If you live in India, seeing suffering in the background of banal activities is not a novel experience. A less elegant but equally sad example would be the sight of accidents on Indian roads. There would hardly be any of us who hasn’t witnessed an accident scene, and almost all of us must have gone past it, unperturbed, at least once. In the context of today’s world, this is hardly an insight. Then why is this poem so celebrated?

Poems are great not because of what they profess or even reveal. They are great because of how they do it, the unlikely connections they make while doing it. It’s possible that this poem first saw in the painting what others might not have noticed before. I’m not sure of this but it’s possible. Or, because back in Auden’s time (he was born in 1907), readers loved the images in this poem. Or, maybe back in his day and age, the banality of evil was indeed a novel idea. I love this poem because of the phrase ‘innocent behind’.

...and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree

What atrocities or tortures does the ‘behind’ of a horse commit, the absence of which leads the speaker to call it innocent? Or is innocence just a physical attribute of the horse’s behind as it often is of a cute baby’s face? These questions sound flippant, and they probably are, but that doesn’t make them unworthy of mention. There is something unresolved in this image that irks the reader in a good way. It compels the reader to keep thinking about the poem. It is these unresolved images that also make a poem, especially ones which philosophise, entertaining. A poem, by virtue of its size and structure, makes you hyper-attentive to its details and it is often these details that propel the poem out of the page and make it reside in your head.

Before we proceed to the monkey poem, allow me to be meta for a second. The old masters were indeed never wrong about suffering. Here I am saying — yeah yeah there’s suffering and all, but tell me more about the innocent behind of a horse. Isn’t it pathetic?

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Now to the monkey poem and the painting it is based on.

The title tells us that at some point, this painting will come up in the poem but we couldn’t be sure of how and when. The poem starts with the description of the painting. This is what the speaker sees in her dreams about ‘final exams’. Before one could wonder what exam she is referring to, the next two lines show clearly that it’s merely a device she is using to make a point about ‘History of Mankind’. Soon, there is going to be a comment on this lofty, all-encompassing subject. Often, spelling out of such subjects leads to cliched images and boring poems. But in the hands of a master poet, it is precisely these heavyweights that come to some kind of life. In this case, the speaker puts herself in a position of not knowing much about the ‘history of mankind’ as she ‘stammer and hedge’. By now it is clear that at least one of the monkeys would come to her help. The one that’s dreaming away, does —

but when it’s clear I don’t know what to say
he prompts me with a gentle
clinking of his chain

It seems that this prompt is the point of the poem — the entire history of mankind condensed to the image of chains. Everything else in the poem is there to facilitate the arrival at this insight, this image. The poem works better if one sees again the two monkeys in the painting.

This poem too leads to some questions that aren’t directly related to the central theme. Why is it that the one ‘dreaming away’ is clinking the chain and not the other one? — the one that ‘stares and listens with disdain’. Is aloofness a necessary condition to become aware of one’s chains? Is this monkey aware of its chain? Let’s say it is, then is it wilfully ignoring the chains and reserving its disdain for the stammering speaker? Have we not met such monkeys in human form before? I certainly keep meeting them, and sometimes even embody them, not out of choice but habit. What a tragic figure this monkey would be if it didn’t know about its chain, in the first place. Yet, there are human monkeys going around that don’t, including yours truly at times.

But were we not talking about the history of mankind? Isn’t that the grand subject the poem is supposed to be addressing? The seemingly unnecessary detail about the monkeys (‘mocking disdain’ and ‘dreaming away’) is the light in which we see the history of mankind. It is the ‘two monkeys’ route the poet has taken to tell us something we already know. And it is precisely this digression that leads to questions one would otherwise not ask in a lecture on the history of mankind. It is this poem’s ‘innocent behind’.

I mentioned lingering around a poem before moving on to the next one. The image of the chain also reminded me of another Urdu couplet by the young poet Abbas Qamar. I had heard him read this couplet in a video on youtube which I will be leaving you with. There could not be a better way of ending an essay. The couplet I am referring to is this —

तन्हाई से चौंके जो कभी, ख़ुद को पुकारा 
और ख़ामोशी से घबराये तो ज़ंजीर हिला दी। 

Which loosely translates to - 

When loneliness startled me, I called for myself 
When silence disconcerted me, I shook my chains

Now the link, hope you enjoy it as much as I did - Jis But Pe Fida ho Gaye Jaan Jis Pe Luta Di | Abbas Qamar Shayari | Jashn-e-Rekhta.

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शाम भी थी धुआँ धुआँ हुस्न भी था उदास उदास
दिल को कई कहानियाँ याद सी आके रह गयीं

Evening hazy and beauty forlorn —
stories aplenty just tickled
my heart’s memory

It was not until I recited this couplet on insistence of a friend, who is a self-acclaimed fan of sher-o-shayari, that I came to know that it was used in the movie Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara. I had watched that movie but only in bits and pieces, and this bit of Firaq’s poetry must have easily passed unnoticed. But I can’t be entirely blamed for not being able to notice this gem of a couplet probably because of the context in which it was portrayed. Three friends vacationing in Europe and trying to find their true self was as clichéd a plot for a self-discovery movie as possible. Probably the glamour of its exotic locations and beautiful faces superseded the impact of this couplet. But (as I would come to know later) only for me. That friend of mine said ‘ZNMD!’ even before I could finish reciting the sher. I was dumbfounded. I thought that it’s his obsession with Hrithik Roshan that made him watch ZNMD with the dedication and madness it takes to retain the dialogues of a movie. But I was again proved wrong when I recited this in front of another friend who recognised this couplet immediately. Farhan Akhtar, he said. He even was under the false impression that it was written by Javed Akhtar and ‘Raghupati Sahay Firaq’ was a made-up name Farhan’s character uses in the movie to sound cool. But it was their turn to be dumbfounded when I told them that it was written by one of the most celebrated and my personal favourite Urdu poets. They had never heard of Firaq Gorakhpuri.

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I remember the first time I encountered Firaq’s poetry. A ghazal of his was a part of our Hindi syllabus in school and it was impossible for me to understand its couplets because the language in which it was written, was completely alien to me —

नौरस गुँचे पंखड़ियों की नाज़ुक गिर्हें खोले हैं
या फिर उड़ने को रंग-ओ-बू गुलशन में पर तोले हैं

तारे आँखें झपकावे हैं ज़र्रा ज़र्रा सोवे है
तुम भी सुनो ओ यारों शब में सन्नाटे कुछ बोले हैं

हम हों या क़िस्मत हो हमारी दोनों को एक ही काम मिला
कुछ क़िस्मत हमपे रोवे है कुछ हम क़िस्मत पे रो ले हैं

As a 15-year old kid, growing up in Allahabad in a Hindu family, and studying in Kendriya Vidyalaya had imbibed in me a mild disdain for anything unrhetorical, especially poetry. I was used to Ramdhari Singh Dinkar’s blazing calls for sacrifice in kalam aaj unki jai bol or Maithilisharan Gupt’s moral sermons in Bharat Bharti. Poetry, for me, was another way (a beautiful one though!) of moralising. So, naturally I held poets in high moral regard in the most conventional (North Indian Brahmanical) sense possible. Despite this notion being in absolute contrast with what I think of poets now, it made me like Firaq and left me with wanting to explore more of his poetry. It was this notion of poets being moral authority of a society that made me fall in love with the only couplet I understood in that ghazal:

जो मुझे बदनाम कर रहे हैं काश वे इतना सोच सकें
मेरा पर्दा खोले हैं या अपना पर्दा खोले हैं

This couplet had a simple moral lesson for me — you’re exposing yourself by speaking foul about me. What a line! On top of it I was told by my teacher that Mahatma Gandhi called Firaq a ‘spoiled genius’. Firaq had worked as under-secretary for Congress but later left politics for good, and resumed his academic endeavours. He taught Wordsworth in Allahabad university. Every aspect of his career, so to speak, appealed to me because of the seemingly unconventional paths Firaq had followed in his life. For me, a conscious decision to not write in English despite being a professor of this exotic and elite language (it was my perception back then about English) was in itself fascinating. This was another misconception which brought me closer to Firaq’s character. I say ‘character’ not ‘poetry’, because I became familiar with his work much later in my life when I started learning Urdu words. But Firaq’s ‘character’ remained with me and made me question the sanctity of a poet’s morality. Is it necessary for poets to be moral? Firaq was how I was introduced to the cliché of poets being somber, drunk degenerates whom the society looks down upon because nobody understands them. Because it takes a soft heart to understand the ‘feelings’ their poetry conveys. Much later in my life I would come across this sher of Mirza Ghalib that conveys this idea with absolute precision —

हुस्न-ए-फ़रोगे-शम्मा-ए-सुख़न दूर है ‘असद’
पहले दिल-ए-गुदाख़्ता पैदा करे कोई

The beauty of eloquence is still far ‘asad’
Why don’t you discover your delicate heart first?

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Firaq’s poetry has every element of cliché possible in Urdu poetry but not in a negative way. Yes, he talked about the usual stuff — raat, tanhai, andhera, udaasi etc. and thank God for that because the way he used these elements made him remarkable —

अब तो उनकी याद भी नहीं आती
कितनी तनहा हो गयीं तनहाइयाँ

or

इसी खंडर में कुछ दिए हैं टूटे हुए
इन्हीं से काम चलाओ बड़ी उदास है रात

or

कुछ कफ़स की तीलियों से छन रहा है नूर सा
कुछ फ़ज़ा कुछ हसरत-ए-परवाज़ की बातें करो

Firaq created spaces in his poetry to fit my experiences into them. I’ll explain how. We must have encountered this answer on asking how someone’s doing — ab kya batau! Of course, this is not a concrete answer but we do get to know that the person is not happy. It’s a way of expressing sadness and it encompasses the entire spectrum of sadness. A person getting poor marks and a person with a shitty job can use the same phrase to express his/her sadness. These are the kinds of expressions Firaq used in his ghazals to evoke an emotion and left it up to me to fill it with my experiences. These open-ended/ambiguous expressions were the reason I was hooked to Firaq’s poetry. They made him a poet I could ‘relate’ to despite my sufferings being nothing more than inconsequential issues of a teenager. I can still point to most of his ghazals and say — Damn! This was written for me! Very few poets in my limited knowledge are capable of invoking that intimacy (there are others of course).

Take the ZNMD couplet for example. By saying ‘kahaniyan yaad si aake reh gayi’, he has created the space for you to reminisce your own stories. He doesn’t tell you his story but he does make you feel a sense of longing by using ‘yaad si aake reh gayi’ instead of just ‘yaad aa gayin’. He elevates everyone’s individual experience of grief to a common platform where it doesn’t matter why you’re grieving. What matters is only the fact that you are grieving. I say elevate because how could one not revere the language he uses to express it.

Here are a couple of examples where he creates space for the readers and my futile attempt at trying to explain how these couplets worked for me:

कुछ इशारे थे जिन्हें दुनिया समझ बैठे थे हम
उस निगाह-ए-आशना को क्या समझ बैठे थे हम

By using ‘kya samajh baithe the hum’ he only tells you that he misinterpreted the familiar glance (निगाह-ए-आशना) but under what circumstances, whose glance etc. he does not mention. This is where he has created the space for you. You suddenly got reminded of your misinterpretation of someone’s glance, misinterpretation of someone’s love.

कहाँ का वस्ल तन्हाई ने शायद भेस बदला है
तेरे दम भर के आ जाने को हम भी क्या समझते हैं

The first line sets the tone of this couplet. And the rhetorical way in which he says ‘kya samajhte hain’ again creates the space for you to answer this question.

Now, as I always get to hear from friends that if poems are so open to interpretation (or ‘spacious’ if I may), then where is the art in it? This is what a friend asked me when I was boring him to death by going on and on about Firaq -

Even a normal photograph can be interpreted in some or the other way, then why read poems and why work so hard to write poems in the first place? I mean, I can write a line without following any of your stupid rules of poetry and say that it is open to interpretation. What is so special about poets like Firaq then?

Language. Firaq’s use of language, his style is such that it neither over-states nor under-states. It states enough to show you the road but not so much as to hold your hand and walk with you till you reach your destination. He doesn’t ask you to listen to his story but he does give you enough idea of how sorrow works. For the emotionless he might be just another shayar crying over the cliched themes of loneliness and sorrow, but for the ones intoxicated by him he is indeed the ‘hijr ki raat ka sitara’ (shining star of separation’s night). It might not be bright enough to light up your path but it’s enough to give the consolation of there being light somewhere far far away. It is easy to guess that his was a life filled with pain and loss but to discuss the nature of it here would be irrelevant. One could only be grateful and celebrate what he has given us. Even today, through his poetry he becomes my closest confidant. Every time I go back to Firaq I discover something new in his poetry and that is what makes me go back to him in the first place —

कहो तो अर्ज़ करें मान लो तो क्या कहना
तुम्हारे पास हम आए हैं एक ज़रूरत से।

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I have always been drawn to the essay form. Part of the reason is that I had zeroed-in on its definition. I found it appropriately specific to be not conflated with something else; and at the same time, generic enough to allow for digressions, and in some cases, transgressions. The word essay is derived from the Latin word exigere which means ‘to weigh’. I found a more definite definition of the form in Brian Dillon’s book called Essayism -

...the essay is first of all a type of measurement or judgement, not so much a test of itself, of its own powers, or its author’s powers, as a weighing of something outside of itself

In the same chapter he goes on to say -

The essay is diverse and several - it teems. But of course it also tries - and gives up.

I thought I could do it - try to weigh something using the tools of language and then, I love this term, give up. Toying, teeming, trying without the intention of arriving at any definite or, God forbid, authoritative conclusion is what we (Amod and I) do at Mehfil with subjects ranging from literature, music, cities, and tremendous trifles (you’ll see later what this means) like going out for a walk, or drinking tea, or imagining oneself as someone else and writing their diary entries. Essay, by definition, can encompass all of this. A few days ago I came across the term ‘personal essay’ and it ruffled this happy equilibrium. Essays we know, but what’s this ‘personal’ business about?

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To seek answer to this question, I bought a fat book called The Art of the Personal Essay. I’m wary of books with titles that start with The Art of. They usually have too much fluff per unit of information. But this one promised to be different as it comprised entirely of examples. Except for the introduction that runs, maybe, for twenty pages. I’ve been able to read only one-fourth of the book and it has done two remarkable things for me already -

1. Given me insights not just on the definition of personal essay, not that it matters beyond dousing the curiosity of a genre-nut like me, but on writing as a whole

2. Introduced me to the essays of G. K. Chesterton, particularly from the collection, Tremendous Trifles (this is the later I referred to earlier)

First, let’s get the irrational genre-obsession out of the window

There is little difference between the essay that’s personal and the essay as I understood it. In fact, what’s true for personal essays sounds true for every piece of writing done to evoke pleasure. Or to use a slightly less suggestive term - to be engaging. This is what Phillip Lopate, the editor of this collection, has to say -

The hallmark of the personal essay is its intimacy. The writer seems to be speaking directly into your ears, confiding everything from gossip to wisdom. Through sharing thoughts, memories, desires, complaints, and whimsies, the personal essayist sets up a relationship with the reader, a dialogue - a friendship, if you will, based on identification, understanding, testiness, and companionship.

This can clearly be the hallmark of a novel’s narrator, a poem’s speaker, and even a non-personal essayist.

Now, to G. K. Chesterton

The colour of your aspirations keeps changing. As you grow older, your dreams start becoming more aware of your limitations. This doesn’t mean that they become reasonable. Dreaming to become a cricketer as good a batter as Tendulkar, a fielder as Rhodes, a pacer as Akram, and a spinner as Warne is as unreasonable as dreaming to become a writer who produces masterpieces every week.

It is impossible to become the cricketer mentioned above, as there are no precedents. It is outright fantasy. But there are examples of writers writing masterpieces every week. This occupies your imagination until you realise that just because it is humanly possible, it doesn’t mean you could do it. This is when dreams morph into daydreams. Instead of trying to become, say a great writer, you start imagining yourself as one. But here too, there is a filtering process. There are a few writers you can’t imagine yourself as, even in your daydreams. This has nothing to do with your fickle modesty, and everything to do with the nature of imagination. Even in imagination, a few things are far-fetched. This too, I think, comes with age. As you grow older your filtering criteria keeps getting more and more stringent.

Then comes a day when you come across a writer with a voice so familiar, that all your inhibitions disappear and you want to reside permanently in his head. Or rent him a permanent room in your head. You daydream of being the G.K. Chesterton who wrote this small collection of essays called Tremendous Trifles. The Art of the Personal Essay has two pieces of his. Both from the same collection. This is how he begins the essay titled A Piece of Chalk -

I remember one splendid morning, all blue and silver, in the summer holidays, when I reluctantly tore myself away from the task of doing nothing in particular, and put on a hat of some sort and picked up a walking-stick, and put six very bright-coloured chalks in my pockets.

Who wouldn’t want to be this guy? He likes doing nothing in particular, and has to tear himself away to do what? - doodle on a brown paper with colourful chalks (we get to know this a couple of sentences down the line). This seemingly unimportant activity is what brings him out, and later makes him walk some distance. There is also a sense of off-handedness about him. He lets a few things be. All blue and silver is enough to tell that the morning is splendid; and some kind of hat surely shows that he doesn’t really care what kind. This off-handedness becomes a bit more acute later when he writes -

Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.

We all give up things, anticipating the effort. Some people give up more easily than others. What I like about the statement above is that right after finding it too long, he justifies his not doing it by quoting an external reason - the age of epics is past. As if, if it still were the age of epics, he would actually take the pains of writing those poems.

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Going back to what Brian Dillon had to say about the essay - ‘but of course it tries - and gives up’. Chesterton’s essays do exactly this. Through them, he tries to make sense of what he calls trifles from his day to day life, and gives up. Not literally, of course. He doesn’t abandon his essays midway. What I mean is that his essays carry an air of giving up. The anecdotes he quotes do not lead to some serious philosophical inquiry, and he deals with his conclusions in the same off-handed manner as he does his hat.

In real life, it’s a privileged state to be in, given how absurdities are piling up on the world day after day. That’s where imagination comes in, I guess. With its reasonable limits, of course. But imagination, especially the one that involves oneself, is fickle. I am sure I will find another essayist in The Art of the Personal Essay that I would want to imagine myself as. Till then, let me put on my jacket, grab a hat, and go out into the streets of London to encounter trifles, and wonder about their tremendousness (yes, it is a word). In my imagination, of course.

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It was one of those weekend days on which one ends up having an unimpressive expensive meal. In order to quell the disappointment, one decides to go to a second-hand bookshop at the other end of the city, hoping to get pleasantly surprised by a title one had vaguely heard of. Only this time, the decision to go to the bookshop was my wife’s, not mine. Because my pile of unread books was, is, getting taller and I didn’t want to add more to it. I entered the shop with a resolve to not buy anything but she pointed out to me the section where old issues of Granta magazine were lying around. I couldn’t resist. I picked up a couple of them and got through the Granta 130 India issue in a single day. This one was published in 2015.

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For those who do not know, Granta magazines are designed like books. They are more a collection of new writing than a magazine. So, I decided to write a short note about it as a book. Almost every issue of Granta is available on Amazon.

The India issue of Granta featured some of the writers I adore to the point of lunacy; and it was satisfying to see slightly different, probably earlier, versions of their stories and poems. For example, there was an excerpt from the novella Ghachar Ghochar written by Vivek Shanbagh. Then there was a story by Amit Chaudhuri called English Summer which was probably taken from his novel, Odysseus Abroad. There was also an Upamanyu Chatterjee story, Othello Sucks, which, when read first in his short story collection a few years back, I found quite inaccessible and boring; but this time it made perfect sense and I found it quite funny. There were also a couple of Vinod Kumar Shukla poems translated by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. Here is an excellent essay on this poet written by his translator - Grass lives Next to Grass: On the poetry of Vinod Kumar Shukla.

There were also writers I had read other works of - Samanth Subramanian, Anjali Joseph, Anjum Hasan, Tishani Doshi, Neel Mukherjee - and found them as appealing.

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There was one surprise though. I encountered a short story by Arun Kolatkar. I never knew that he wrote short stories too. Like his poems, this story is funny and observant. His vision does not lose its sharpness in prose, as can be seen in this section where he is describing a Pathan -

I looked at him carefully. He was a giant of a man, tall even for a Pathan; a big burly brute of a frontiersman, a red-beard, with black mascaraed eyes and a scar on his face. The crisp fan-tailed turban that crested him further increased the impression of height. And I, who was certainly no taller then than I am now, was like a midget before him.1

There were writers I encountered for the first time and would certainly love to read more of - Deepti Kapoor, whose novel Age of Vice came out in 2023; and Amitava Kumar, whose occasional essays I was familiar with but would love to read the journal trilogy he has been publishing for the last couple of years, The Green Book being the latest one.

If you can get a hand on this issue, you can surely get through the day in ways better than most. You might as well not notice the day pass by. Wouldn’t that be delightful?

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I first heard about Milan Kundera from a friend back in my college days. I was a part of the literary club and this probably made him think that I was an avid reader, which I was not. Well, not in the traditional sense. I held some strong opinions about literature. I preferred poetry over everything else, especially novels. The suspense of what happens next in a narrative never appealed to me. I was more interested (still am, sans the dogma) the meditative and reflective quality of poetry, even in novels. Getting lost in a piece of text still remains the peak literary experience for me. Back then I believed that only poetry could achieve it. I might have been blabbering something on these lines when this friend asked, rather stated as a truism, that I must be a big fan of Milan Kundera. Not just had I not heard this name before, I stupidly assumed that this was an Indian name. How could I have not heard of an Indian writer writing in English - he could not have recommended a Hindi book - when I had an affliction to go gaga about how good they were (I meant mostly poets)? I googled and found that Kundera wasn’t Indian. He was some exotic European writer who wrote novels. I ignored him and moved on.

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A few years later, while looking for humorous books, I stumbled upon ‘The Book of Laughter and Forgetting’. I made the mistake of buying the audiobook. If you are not familiar with Kundera’s work, listening to his novels can be a bit disorienting. There is no obvious narrative thread running through the chapters and it becomes difficult to keep a track of it in audio. Reading them is a completely different experience. I recently finished reading his book ‘Immortality’ and fell in love with this writer.

Why did I pick up this novel? We can get into the philosophical question of why does anyone pick up any novel, or even why does anyone do anything. But we won’t go there. I think there are specific, often illogical, reasons why we do what we do. I picked this novel because of the blurb, that said -

It will make you cleverer, maybe even a better lover. Not many novels can do that. - Nicholas Lezard, GQ MAGAZINE.

You bet Mr.Lezard. None of the novels I had read had made me any of the two. So, it was worth the shot.

Intimacy

The work that appeals to me generally has a sense of intimacy about it. One has to feel that the narrator is always present as a guide and letting you experience the world he is presenting to you. This novel invokes this intimacy brilliantly.

One of the hacky ways to do this would be by addressing the reader directly, invoking a ‘you’. Something similar to breaking the fourth wall in movies. If not done well, it becomes jarring after a point. Instead of being an interesting storyteller, the narrator becomes that pesky friend who keeps telling the same joke again and again.

Kundera’s direct address to the reader in this novel never sounds out of place. It seems necessary. Just when the reader starts feeling out of sorts, he brings her back to the novel by invoking the intimate ‘you’, the one that isn’t weatherbeaten with excessive use.

When I say intimacy, I am only partly talking about this invocation of ‘you’. Mr. Kundera himself is a character in the novel, making sporadic appearances - reading a piece of news or meeting his professor friend. He makes us experience, first-hand, how he relates his experiences with what happens to the characters. There is a transparent wall between the real and the fictional. As a result of this, one gets to know the characters all too well. One is reading a story, or multiple stories, and the novel never lets one forget about its essential elements. Things are happening actively either inside the head of the characters or outside it. The intimacy is achieved not by some literary pyrotechnics - newfangled form or meta gesture - but through the very basics of storytelling - getting the reader interested in the lives of the characters. One pines to know what is going to happen to the characters, and Kundera manages to douse this curiosity through digressions, meditations, and reflections. Of course he tells us what happens, but not with the urgency of a whodunit.

Episodes

This novel is written in episodes. Such a redundant thing to say. The novel also defines what an episode is, somewhere in the last fifty odd pages. Kundera quotes Aristotle’s definition who calls it the worst possible type of event from the point of view of poetry -

It is not an unavoidable consequence of preceding action, not the cause of what is to follow; it is outside the causal chain of events which is the story.

Kundera defies this assertion of episodes being of no use by telling multiple compelling stories in this novel only through episodes. He also addresses the flaw in this argument directly -

...no episode is a priori condemned forever, for every event, no matter how trivial, conceals within itself the possibility of sooner or later becoming the cause of other events and thus changing into a story or an adventure.

In this novel we experience first hand the process of these episodes becoming significant, not just in terms of what happens to the characters, but also in terms of the ideas they lead to - the chain of thoughts they kick-start. It so happens that a minor episode, over the course of a few hundred words, morphs into a piece of wisdom without sounding like forced philosophising.

Fatigue

The piece of wisdom that appealed to me the most and stayed with me is the idea of fatigue. Kundera is describing the poet Goethe, who is a character in this book. Goethe, reluctant to let others write his biography or portrait, has given permission to someone to write it. This is when the idea of fatigue is invoked -

This second part of life, when a person cannot tear his eyes away from death, is followed by still another period. The shortest and most mysterious, about which little is known and little is said. Strength is ebbing, and a person is seized by disarming fatigue. Fatigue: a silent bridge leading from the shore of life to the shore of death.

What he is saying about the life of a person can also be extended to the life of anything - relationships, things, cities etc. I believe that fatigue, or lack of it, is one of the most significant drivers of what people do and what they don’t. It is so for me at least. Yet, there isn’t much about it that I come across in literature. It is a sweeping statement and while I am typing this, a sher of Jaun Eliya comes to mind which I will leave as it is -

Ae shakhs teri justju se

Bezaar nahi hun thak gaya hun

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Novelistic sentences

It is a novel after all. The pieces of wisdom hit home only if this book is read as one. If not for novelistic sentences, that propel an action or bring a scene alive, the book would reek of bland philosophical sermons.

Consider this long sentence where he is describing the physical attributes of a person completely unimportant in the story. The acuteness of observation is quite palpable -

The man at the next table slouched in his chair, his glance fixed on the street and his mouth wide open. It was a yawn without beginning or end, a yawn as endless as a Wagner melody: at times his mouth began to close but never entirely; it just kept opening wide again and again, while his eyes, fixed on the street, kept opening and closing counter to the rhythm of his mouth.

Like all great novels, this one too points with remarkable precision to an attribute of a character that makes further description redundant. Like in this sentence -

No matter where she went, her self fluttered behind her like a flag.

He does this with places too -

Long rows of marble busts of famous Italians, standing on pedestals, lined the avenues of trees. Their faces, frozen in terminal grimaces, were exposed like resumes of their lives.

This book is also full of flights of fancy, where a simple metaphor brings an image alive and one is left wondering if it came spontaneously to the writer. I am not sure about Kundera but in general it’s almost never spontaneous. Here is such an image -

He is jolted out of his thoughts by his daughter’s laughter: in a TV commercial, a naked baby, hardly a year old, gets up from its pot, dragging behind it a strip of white toilet-paper like a gorgeous bride.

Sentences like these trick the reader into thinking that what’s happening on the page is not a mere farce. Novels are made up of episodes that might or might not be overtly significant. These episodes come alive with sentences like these. There are few better ways to make a reader deeply involved in a narrative that is not linear.

I am certain that I am going to read more of Kundera’s work. There is also a sense of missed opportunity, that is so often a result of one’s stupidity. If I had read Kundera a few years ago, I might have become a different person today. Not necessarily better, but different. This is the only consolation one has for missing out on something, as time is a limited resource and one is indeed a slave to one’s dogmas, literary or otherwise, until one comes across a promise difficult to ignore. Like I did with the blurb on this book. Whether the promise is fulfilled or not, is not for me to decide.

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This post was scheduled for Saturday but it’s a brand new year and I thought of treating you with a brand new essay. It’s a little presumptuous of me to say this, but that’s what keeps us going. Enjoy!

One hears a lot about how human beings are at the centre or heart of fiction. I don’t agree with this because there are great works of fiction that defy this assertion but there are also the ones that give strength to it. Shiva Naipaul’s The Chip-Chip Gatherers is one of them. At the heart of it, is its characters. It would be too grand to say that the book reveals eternal truths about human beings in general. I am sure it does but to talk about it would be doing injustice to the idiosyncrasies of the characters, as they deserve to be spoken about without the burden of carrying some general truth. All the characters are well-rounded and one or two of their characteristics are stretched to the extreme - Egbert Ramsaran’s arseholery, his son Wilbert Ramsaran’s single-mindedness about the business, Rani’s despondency, Sushila’s waywardness, Mr. Bholai’s obsequiousness, Mrs. Bholai’s bitterness, Basdai’s artfulness, Sita’s demureness, and so on. It is the playing out of these characteristics that drives the plot, if at all there is a single plot running through the book.

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Of course, the characters change over time but the core of who they are remains the same. Circumstances make them behave uncharacteristically but there is an air of inevitability to this change. For example, when Mrs. Bholai softens up to a person she used to abhor or when Sushila finally realises that she had been stuck, it doesn’t come as a surprise. Because by then, the writer had made these characters so intimately familiar that it’s difficult not to see what they themselves could not. Take this for example when he is describing a trait of Mrs. Bholai -

She spoke truthfully at both times, for truth was not absolute with her. It arose from the circumstances and needs of the particular hour and thus, as the hours changed, could accommodate quite flagrant inconsistencies. The chain of self-contradictory truths lay looped in her mind.

Once you know this about Mrs. Bholai, her actions become less puzzling. And, of course, there is the adjective ‘flagrant’ used for inconsistencies and the alliteration ‘lay looped’ that stay with you. Look at how he describes another character, Egbart Ramsaran’s brother interestingly named ‘Chinese’ -

It was amazing how he had ever managed to do anything so positive as desert his wife. That one act of rebellion has apparently used up his limited supply of energy and it was inertia alone which kept him faithful to his mistress.

‘Inertia alone which kept him faithful’ is an interesting thought and if this were a more serious newsletter, could have made for a good theme for elaboration and probably an extrapolation to today’s political climate. Needless to say, there are many such sentences that describe the traits of different characters in unforgettable sentences.

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Yes, sentences. All the character-building and plot-twisting falls flat if the sentences are not pleasurable to read. Especially in a novel that is not a mystery thriller and the reader more-or-less knows what is going to happen. Or can make a fairly accurate guess. This book is written in exquisite prose and here are some examples of what the novel is made up of.

There are two features of his prose that were noticeable - his use of repetition, and adverbs. Both these features would be scoffed at in the style guides and both these features are used liberally by Shiva Naipual to create either a rhythmic effect or to make an image clearer. Consider this sentence where he is describing the state of mind of a character named Sita -

She was not going to be deflected by the dubious gratification of a dubious relationship.

How easily he slips into our consciousness the common ground on which the relationship and the gratification she is supposed to get from it, stand. Consider this sentence where he describes Egbart Ramsaran, who in the first half of the novel can be called its protagonist -

His lips were pinched and thin and his voice escaped through them like steam through the apertures of a whistling kettle. The analogy held in more ways than one. His voice was high and piping and querulous and the longer he talked (it made little difference whether the conversation excited him or not), the more high and piping and querulous did it became. He walked with a jaunty, hopping stride.

Does it not paint a clear picture of the man himself? And would it not be boring if the image was not hammered into our heads like a nail on the wall by repeating the words ‘high’, ‘piping’, ‘querulous’? The strength of Egbart’s personality warrants this repetition.

For the use of adverbs, consider this -

Brushing importantly past Wilbert, she hustled Sushila into the sitting-room.

I don’t remember reading ‘importantly’ used as an adverb for ‘brushing past someone’. There is also this one where he describes Egbart Ramsaran’s, a man incapable of soft emotions, newfound affection for his soon-to-be mistress Sushila -

It was a new and delicious sensation to him to be so assiduously mothered.

Remove ‘assiduously’ and the sentence falls flat. The book is full of such brilliant uses of adverbs. One word that encompasses the whole picture.

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The book is also full of the usual good stuff. There are vivid images and metaphors one can keep wondering about in free time and even extrapolate them to other situations. Like this one -

The baby screamed louder than before, squirming like a fish in Wilbert’s grasp.

If you have ever seen someone struggling to hold a baby hell-bent on escaping their grasp, you would know how accurate the fish metaphor is.

There are few things one can say about a great book except - go read it. There is no other graceful way to conclude a piece like this. The conclusions that sound graceful are mere pretences. There is always so much more one wants to write but it comes at the cost of coherence. In this novel, the author often ends his sections or chapters with a shift in focus from the character to the surrounding. I will leave you with one such example and urge you to read this book. Here is Sita trying to bring a rendezvous with Julian Bholai to an incomplete conclusion -

Sita did not answer, staring at the restless interchange of light and shadow on the ground.

Imagine yourself petering out of this essay by staring at whatever you find yourself surrounded by.

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Amit Chaudhuri is, without any caveat, my favourite writer. Whenever I am struggling with putting something to language and am on the verge of giving up, convinced that language cannot handle the situation, I go back to Chaudhuri’s work to find evidence to the contrary. He can turn the most mundane detail into something lively. It might as well be something in the passing but it’s often enough to know that you are in the presence of a writer who is acutely aware of everything around him. 

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Calcutta is a book he has written about the city he loves. It reads more like a collection of essays with the city as the common theme running through all of them. The essays are not about the city per se but about what constitutes the Calcutta Chaudhuri experiences - people, places, politics, food, family, friends, history, literature, music and so on. There is no clear demarcation in the organizing principle of the essays when it comes to these themes, but they are invoked at will to serve the holiest of writing’s purposes - evoking pleasure. 

This pleasure is often the pleasure of recognition. Chaudhuri’s writing works for me as a mirror that reflects aspects of myself and the world around I was aware of but had never seen taking a concrete form. I don’t mean it the way Saadat Hasan Manto meant it - forcing the society to look into the mirror to see how ugly it is and probably shock it into action. It’s more like catching a fleeting glimpse of your own image or the street’s while walking past a mirror shop. 

Take this sentence for example taken from the description of a couple he saw in the flight to India - 

She nudged her partner and invited his response frequently; he replied with the colloquial immediacy of a man who has an opinion on everything.

What is ‘colloquial immediacy’? An immediacy that results in nothing tangible? A useless non-serious immediacy? Why show the immediacy then? But this is what we all do - assume the role of the guide when someone is visiting our space; and as if to prove that we belong, respond immediately to questions asked about it. Regardless of whether we are supposed to know the answers or not. This happens to me quite a lot when I am visiting my hometown with my partner. I feel a strange anxiety when I don’t have answers to simple questions like - how far away are we from home or whether this road leads to the new Yamuna bridge? That Chaudhuri has captured this in a fleeting description of a couple is remarkable. 

Consider this sentence in which he talks about the new phenomenon of the Indian Premier League (the book was published in 2013), and the newfangled concept of cheerleaders in cricket - 

The cheerleaders were met with grave reproach by both cricket purists and common-or-garden puritans, and then - as is the case with so much in Indian public life - lazily accepted and secretly looked forward to.

How many things do we lazily accept and secretly look forward to? What is said about cheerleaders is true for almost everything that is considered indulgent or contemptuous by the Indian public morality. Also, notice how he effortlessly squeezes into a single sentence the fact that there are puritans of the garden variety and then there are the common ones.   

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Most of the time I found myself nodding in agreement with Chaudhuri’s opinions, but the nods were most vigorous when he opined about food. Take this for example - 

‘Kormaisation’ is what this process, integral to Indian cuisine, might well be termed: a suffocation of individual ingredients in the interests of the sauce poured over it, the result of a dozen impossibly unlikely condiments brought to a simmer and then turned into this all-purpose national deluge. 

For a long time I have been trying to come up with a term that captures the ridiculous ubiquity of the yellow-orange gravy that is supposed to be Indian food. I can finally conclude my search as I’ve found the term ‘all-purpose national deluge’. 

In this book I found sentences that reveal, in condensed form, the perspective of the writer on concepts that normally require more elaboration. Take this sentence about marriage for example. It is about marriage but also not about it - 

I knew marriages, in a strange bid for immortality, could be perilously terminated in this way; but employment? 

Could you be more precise in the description of marriage? The word strange reveals what Chaudhuri thinks about it. And yet, the point he wants to convey is the unusual termination of employment. 

Take this one about craftsmanship - 

By craftsmanship I mean a quality of tactility, of ‘madness’. It comes from the instinct to shape and touch things, to impart an intimacy to materials. 

Isn’t every act of creation nothing but the act of ‘imparting intimacy’ to whatever is being created; by the very virtue of having worked on it closely, having spent time obsessing about it? 

These are concepts that can be explored independently but they feature in this book in specific contexts. Contexts related to Calcutta. The book is titled Calcutta after all.

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In case you’re wondering if it is about Calcutta at all, let me assure you that there are enough quintessential Bengali cultural elements, some would call cliches, explored in the book. The usual suspects - Tagore, Park Street, CPM-TMC, bhadralok, Satyajit Ray, Durga Pujo, Ingabanga, colonial hangover, French windows and so on - are very much present in the book. One might even say that the book is made up of exploration of these elements.

This book was published in 2013 and I am sure a lot has changed since then. In one of his essays he describes how a friend of his, Samirda, after coming to know that Chaudhuri was flying to Europe wanted to know if he was flying to Europe of his (Samirda’s) imagination. Chaudhuri writes it as - 

Now he wanted to know, rapt, whether it was that Europe I was flying to.

Notice the use of the word ‘rapt’. It was the first time I encountered this word without its companion ‘attention’. Why would you disturb the rhythm of a sentence if a single word is enough to convey the point? 

By the time this gets published, I would have visited Kolkata for a friend’s wedding but unlike Samirda, I am aware that it would not be the Calcutta of Chaudhuri’s book. Ten years is a long time even for a resilient city like Kolkata to avoid morphing into something unfamiliar. But I am sure at least one statement made in this book about the city would still be true and strangely it came not from Chaudhuri - 

‘I like this city’, the novelist Akhil Sharma shrugged and admitted to me on his second trip to it. ‘You feel that something happened here’. 

This is how I felt when I was last there, this is how I will most likely feel this time. 

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Now to my poems that were published. I am pasting the screenshots from their PDF. You can also read them here - Four Poems/ Rahul Singh/ Issue 15. Would love to know your thoughts about them. Also, please subscribe if you haven’t already -

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It was James Wood’s essay (Saul Bellow’s comic style) and the fact that I saw this book staring straight at me in perfect condition in a second hand bookstore, that led me to Saul Bellow. I had also heard Bellow mentioned by Manav Kaul in a podcast. His taste in literature I quite like. I am usually wary of fat books because I can’t finish it in one, two, or even three sittings. Given the nature of my schedule, I can only read sporadically. The same novel is read by the same reader in various moods and degrees of physical and mental fatigue. There were passages in this novel I found impossible to read. Closer inspection revealed that those passages were the anthroposophic drivels of Charles Citrine (main character) in the latter half of the book. They work only as an elaborate joke. A joke stretched too far probably. My state of mind while reading the passage might have something to do with it. James Wood sums it up perfectly when he say - 

…it is easy to forget that many of his heroes are failures or clowns in thought; the comedy of the novels has much to do with the prospect of the inefficacy of ideas, the piles of intellectual slack which truss these schlemiels like babies.

This is the only complaint I had with this novel. Now to what I love about it. 

The novel’s prose is so full of brilliance that it is exhausting to pause every time you notice something good. After a point you move on with a promise to come back to it. Take the description of this minor character who doesn’t appear in the novel more than once and has absolutely no role to play in the overarching narrative - 

The gentleman who lived here was elderly, in a brown hopsack sports jacket with gold threads and a striped shirt on his undisciplined belly. White hair was slicked back upon his narrow head. The liver stains on his hands were large. Under the eyes and about the nose he did not look altogether well. As he sat on the low sofa which, judging by the way it gave under him, was stuffed with down, his alligator loafers extended far into the ivory shag carpet. The pressure of his belly brought out the shape of his phallus on his thigh.

How can someone go on reading the ‘story’ after encountering the adjective ‘undisciplined’ used for ‘belly’? The description is so precise that one can sit back, brood over it, and forget about what’s happening in the novel. Without resorting to a metaphor, Bellow has made the physical come alive. 

He also does it using metaphors. Take this for example where he is describing the lights being turned on in under-construction buildings - 

As the tremendous trusses of the unfinished skyscrapers turned black, the hollow interior filled with thousands of electric points resembling champagne bubbles. 

The reason this metaphor works is the visual similarity between the tenor (unfinished skyscrapers) and the vehicle (champagne bubbles). One can imagine a film shot starting with the electric points turning into close-ups of champagne bubbles, and zooming out to show the room. 

There is another passage where metaphor works in a different way. Consider this - 

I walked out and saw Humboldt, a dying man eating a pretzel stick at the curb, the dirt of the grave already sprinkled on his face. 

The dirt of the grave, or any dirt of that matter, is not literally sprinkled on his face. What it says is that the dying man’s face looked like a dying man’s face. This passage hits hard as it comes laden with the guilt Citrine carries about not helping his friend Humboldt. 

Passages like these might seem unimportant to the larger narrative of the book. But they trick a reader like me into believing that he is interested in knowing what happens to this character or that. In this case, what becomes of Charlie Citrine and what gift his dead poet-frenemy, Humboldt Fleisher, has left behind for him. 

Saul Bellow is one of the most celebrated American writers. He has a Nobel Prize and a body of critical praise to go with it. There is no point harping about how great a writer he was, as better-read and more articulate people have done so in abundance. The essays of VS Pritchett and James Wood are must-reads. Also, there are links in the end where writers like Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie talk about how and why they love Bellow’s work. 

I noticed a passage where Bellow gets away with something an ordinary writer might have found difficult to do. I am sure there are other passages in the book where he gets away with it in style but I happened to notice this one - 

He was not perhaps too clear in the head, but the actual head I always appreciated. It was long and high, banked with well-brushed silver hair, the uneven ends of long strands giving a spiky effect at the back.  

The writer wants to switch to the physical description of the person. The double meaning of ‘head’ acts as the pivot. That sentence almost reads like a bad pun. It makes too evident the intention of the writer. This is risky territory because now the reader knows the trick. The only way to get away with it is to make the description so vivid that the reader forgets how he got into it in the first place. The last sentence quoted above is only the beginning of how he vividly he describes this character. I have not quoted the full paragraph because it is a bit long and at times the less one gives away the better. You will have to read the book for this. 

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Links -

There are multiple Orwells one comes across. There is the Orwell of 1984 and Animal Farm - two completely different books slotted together by the reputation of being important works. So important that people who haven’t read them go around recommending them. When I was preparing for my MBA entrance exam, I saw my fellow students carrying these books around as if they contained the key to improve their reading comprehension and vocabulary. These two books had infiltrated the list of essential readings of coaching classes. This says a lot about their perceived seriousness. This is the Orwell who propagates big ideas through his fiction. There is also the Orwell who tackles big ideas more directly through his essays. Then there is the Orwell of A Nice Cup of Tea. It is this Orwell that one encounters in Down and Out in Paris and London. 

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Since all these works are written by the same author, this distinction between different Orwells is farcical. These works must be intricately linked to each other, their source being the same mind. This distinction is about how readers are made to perceive some work as important and others as merely pleasurable. Importance being measured by the loftiness of the idea that is pushed, even prescribed, by the work. Ideas like anti-imperialism, communism, socialism etc. occupy the top tier in the hierarchy of importance while the humdrum bits of a tramp’s life lie unnoticed in the bottom tier unless elevated by the undertones of any of these isms. If you are a connoisseur of the bottom tier, Down and Out in Paris and London is the book for you. It humanises the writer of great ideas. In this book, you see him go out in the streets of Paris and London and respond viscerally to whatever life has to offer. First as a plongeur in Paris, then as a tramp in London. My favourite bit in the book was a casual description of quarrels he used to have with a Russian cook (his co-worker) - 

The quarrels, intermittent at first, had now become continuous. For hours one would keep up a drizzle of useless nagging, rising into storms of abuse every few minutes. ‘Get me down that saucepan, idiot!’ the cook would cry (she was not tall enough to reach the shelves where the saucepans were kept). ‘Get it down yourself, you old whore,’ I would answer. Such remarks seemed to be generated spontaneously from the air of the kitchen.

Imagine Orwell saying this. What he says about this remark is also applicable to the whole book. This book seems to have been generated spontaneously from the air of leading a poverty-stricken life in the streets of great cities. 

Of course this book can be read as a social commentary on poverty - show the poverty, don’t tell there are poor in the streets. Orwell himself has called it an account of being poor in the streets of Paris and London. But the personal voice is too strong for it to be called a primer on poverty in the 20s. 

Orwell is known for his rare insights that sound like truisms. This book is no exception. Consider this for example - 

For, when you are approaching poverty, you make one discovery which outweighs some of the others. You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the future.

One has read things like ‘the redeeming feature of poverty’ in the works of Kabir etc. But a great writer showing you how he discovered it is something else altogether. Also, ‘annihilates the future’ is such a dramatic and precise way of saying that if you don’t have anything, you don’t have anything to worry about in the future. Later in this paragraph he uses words like ‘relief’ and ‘pleasure’ at being genuinely down and out. But this book doesn’t romanticise poverty except for a paragraph or two. Orwell was genuinely poor when he was not famous and he recognises the ugliness of it - 

And he put four sodden, debauched, loathly cigarette-ends into my hand.

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Hoping to get away with the fraudulent idea of multiple Orwells one last time, I’ll leave you with the Orwell I like the best. It is the writing teacher who famously wrote the six rules of writing of which the sixth one is -

Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.  

PS - I have made it sound like I don’t like Animal Farm and 1984. I love these books. They are great works and I enjoyed reading them, though it has been a long time since I’ve re-read them. They are great not because they are great allegories but precisely because they are way more than that.

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Every once in a while I get obsessively stuck with a seemingly unresolved question about literature. Despite the answers and explanations being right in front of my eyes, I foolishly resort to literary whataboutery and get myself surrounded by doubts again. Without dwelling further into this curious behaviour, I’ll let you know the question I was recently obsessed with - what is the difference between prose and poetry? The answer is out there and everyone agrees with it, including myself. Poetry is written in lines and prose in sentences. The rhythm of a poetic line is determined as much by the sound of the words as it is by their sense. Prose too has sonic rhythms but it is generally less pronounced as sentences tend to be longer than lines and are read at a pace a tad bit quicker. Of course, there are poetic sentences in prose and prosaic lines in poetry. Depending upon the effect a writer is trying to produce, the boundary between prose and poetry keeps oscillating between being pronounced and blurred. In any case, the easiest way out of this question is, and always has been, to read a bit of prose and a bit of poetry. It is much easier to ‘feel’ the difference than to articulate it. Dom Moraes’s Collected Poems was lying in front of me. I impulsively ordered his book of prose called Under Something of a Cloud. It is a selection of his travel writings. 

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I learnt nothing new about the difference between poetry and prose because there was nothing new to learn. But I got properly introduced to the style of a great and probably underrated prose writer. I use the word ‘underrated’ hesitantly because to be able to call someone that, one has to have read a lot, which is not the case with me. But while googling about his prose, I stumbled upon this article that makes a similar statement. The article goes beyond admiration and also cogently states the drawbacks of Moraes’s nonfiction writing. It also lambasts the book I’m writing about today - Under Something of a Cloud - calling its selections ‘vague’, its criterion for what constitutes travel writing ‘sterile’, and its depiction of the writer’s image as generic (any creative type). It also says this - 

Not all of the prose was written with an eye on the future. Many of the selections in Under Something Of A Cloud and Where Some Things Are Remembered, two recently released volumes of his nonfiction, seem to bear out an unkind remark attributed to Ezekiel. “Do you know what Dom’s columns are like?” Ezekiel apparently said. “‘So and so stepped into my room and we shook hands. I offered him coffee, and Leela brought him a cup. He told me he had boarded the flight at Bangalore at such and such time. Both of us cursed the weather—sticky and hot. Then he left. I saw him to the door.’” 1

I am in no position to either contradict or confirm this opinion about the selection. Partly because I haven’t read all of Moraes’s work and partly because his meeting different people, boarding flights to travel to different places, and describing the weather is something I would love to read anyway. But this book has selected pieces that are more than that for sure. For me, witnessing a writer witnessing a place is what constitutes reading travel writing and this is exactly what we get in this book. The inaccuracies and flights of fancy can easily be ignored, enjoyed rather, as the writer’s quirks. The moment one stops giving importance to the writing in the larger scheme of things, the quality of its prose comes to the fore. This would still be a decent book if one read it as objective accounts of different places Dom visited but then it would be impossible to ignore the inaccuracies. But if it is read as the first person narrative of a poet visiting different places for a variety of reasons, it becomes a fabulous read. 

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There is a somewhat overemphasised argument that poets write better prose than prose writers. The underlying assumption here is that since poets deal with a smaller unit of text - lines, phrases, clauses - they pay more attention to the individual sentences. There is also the ‘writing by the ear’ thing. That the poets are more sensitive to how the sentences sound. Of course, this is not true and a bit unfair to prose writers. But while reading Dom Moraes’s prose, one is tempted to believe this lie. In poetry, more often than not, something ordinary is transformed into something extraordinary with the use of imagery and metaphor. Dom employs this quite often in his prose - 

So much was unfamiliar: daily my home melted away where I stood.

The idea of a home melting away when its things are being packed and moved out is something that will stay with me for long. Or, when he writes - 

...white beaches spread out like drying washing.

This is an image very few writers I’ve read can evoke. Mountains get a special treatment when it comes to imagery. The one I liked the most is when he describes the mountain’s reflection on a lake - 

The mountains lay, wobbling gently, under the water; the water was powdery and blue, like an eye, like a pearl, and shivered all over by the rising of fish.

It might as well work well as a poem if commas and semicolons are replaced with line breaks. 

There are sentences that start an imaginative thread one finds difficult to move on from. Take this sentence for example when he is describing a jungle in the dark - 

It was less a place than a creature that dwelt in the dark. 

One immediately starts thinking ‘in what ways?’ and starts finding answers to this. 

He is not just the brooding poet I have made him sound like. He had a great fiction writer’s eye for minute details and the way he employs these details in his sentences make them come alive. Take this for example when he is describing the area outside a temple in Nepal where people go to wait for their death - 

Little heaps of dung, from different sources, lay about.

‘From different sources’ makes the scene a bit more specific and hence something more than mere information. Or when he is describing what he sees on his way to Sikkim - 

...a few peasants stood waist-deep in the water, manipulating fishing-lines with idle flutters of the wrist.

The observation is so keen that one wonders how close Dom physically was to be able to observe that the flutters of the wrists were idle. But without this detail, the scene doesn't come alive. The pieces in the book are full of such details. Take this one for example - 

It was nearly dark by the time we reached the Landrover, dumbly faithful at the far side of the landslip.

Dom and his journalist friend had just returned from a gruelling on-foot journey in the mountain jungles of Sikkim in bad weather. If the Landrover had a mind of its own, it would not have waited for them to return as it was getting dark in that godforsaken place. Dom could have simply written ‘waiting for us’ instead of ‘dumbly faithful’. But the sentence would not have been the same, would it? 

Jame Wood talks about ‘thisness’ in fiction - 

By thisness, I mean any detail that draws abstraction toward itself and seems to kill that abstraction with a puff of palpability, any detail that centers our attention with its concretion.2

I’m not sure about bringing abstraction forward but the details in Dom’s prose do centre our attention with its concretion. 

I read the back cover of the book after reading the whole book and was disappointed to find the term ‘darkly comic’ there. My notion of having discovered the dark humour in Dom’s work was thrown into the bin. I’ll leave you with a sentence that hit me the hardest. He is talking about the height of the waves during the Bangladesh cyclone - 

Nobody, obviously, took a tape and measured it, but some peasants have said it was fifty feet high.

I think I have said enough about the book. I hope you read it and enjoy it as much as I did. 

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This is a book about fish as the title suggests written by Samanth Subramanian, a journalist. It was published in 2010. The introduction of the book says - 

But this book goes beyond considering fish merely as food. Particularly in a nation with as lengthy and diverse a coastline as India’s, fish can sit at the heart of many worlds – of culture, of history, of sport, of commerce, of society.

It is a part of this world that the author explores in this book. To even mildly suggest that a book of two hundred pages can capture all of it would be ridiculous but the author has done an excellent job at what he has covered. The book has nine chapters, each devoted to a region. The journey of this book across chapters starts from Bengal and through Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, Goa, and Maharashtra finally concludes in Gujarat. 

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For different regions he picks different themes. While the Bengal chapter is centred around the hilsa fish and the mastery it takes to savour it without choking on its bones, the Gujarat chapter solely talks about the boat building factories. 

One looks forward to travel books to learn something new about the places one thinks one knows well. This book didn’t disappoint. There are many new facts I got to know about cities I claimed to be familiar with. Like in Hyderabad, there is someone who supposedly cures asthma by feeding people a live fish. I also got to know where the name Colaba came from.

In an ever-changing world, there is a risk of a book like this becoming outdated. There are so many things that can change the very nature of the city. But this book doesn’t sound outdated, though I am no authority. It should be read for the reason I think most books should be read - for its luminous prose.

There are sentences in this book that will remain with me for a long time. There is nothing like finding a familiar word being used in a completely new way. The freshness of it gives one pleasure that can only be matched by encountering a good line in a poem. Take this sentence for example -

D’Cruz was my passport into Tuticorin’s Parava community; he is so well known there that Fernando lubricated many of my interviews by simply saying: ‘Joe sent him.’

The use of the word ‘lubricated’ for interviews (conversation) is something I’ll never forget. The word very much belongs here and yet I don’t recall it ever being used like this before. Another such moment comes in the book when he says ‘papers…jaundiced with age’. 

It is an entertaining book. The strength of its prose lies in the descriptions. Like when he tries to describe the profession of a person he has just met in Goa - 

When I met him, Borges was professionally a doer of a bit of this and a bit of that.

I found a bit of a Wodehousian touch in this sentence. 

Or when he tastes a disappointing Mackerel curry at a restaurant in Mangalore -

Mackerel has a famously insistent taste, but this fish was shy and reclusive, as if it would have rather been at home with a good book.

It is sentences like these that made me look forward to parts where he meets new people and tries new food. 

Or even when he is observing a stranger. This is how he describes a disinterested angler - 

A dreamy expression had settled upon her face, so when, half an hour after I had started to watch her, the rod started to writhe in her hands, she looked down with an air of astonishment, as if a fish had swum up to her and begged to be taken home.

These are only glimpses into what the book is about. Hope you pick it up and enjoy reading it as much as I did.

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Here is New York is a long essay written by EB White. It is, as the title suggests, about New York. It was written in the summer of 1948 during a hot spell as mentioned in the Foreword by the author. 

White was one of the early staff writers of The New Yorker magazine. His name became synonymous with the magazine as the years progressed. He is considered one of the leading essayists of America. He also wrote children’s books - Stuart Little, Charlotte’s Web, and The Trumpet of Swan. 

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Here is New York talks about the idiosyncrasies of the city back in the day. It is not so much the observations that would interest a reader today, as she has been exposed to many such books written on many other cities, but the way they are put to language. It makes one feel a strange familiarity with the city that no longer exists and is highly likely to not exist in the future. What is written about New York rings true for most of the metropolitan cities one has been to - 

A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning. The city is like poetry: it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines.

Even for someone who has never been to New York, the crisp prose makes it easy to imagine the internal engines White is referring to. What he says about poetry can be said about his sentences too. They pack so much into them without sounding awkward or cluttered. This scene when he is describing a slum for example - 

It is folksy here with the smell of warm flesh and squashed fruit and fly-bitten filth in the gutter, and cooking.

It is not an exposition of but a meditation on the city. While describing some aspects of it, White sometimes breaks into interludes that explore themes not specific to New York - loneliness, love, poverty, prosperity and so on. Though these interludes are never more than a couple of sentences long, they still manage to make one think hard. The most succinct one is quoted below (italics mine) - 

Money has been plentiful and New York has responded. Restaurants are hard to get into; businessmen stand in line for a Schrafft’s luncheon as meekly as idle men used to stand in soup lines. (Prosperity creates its bread lines, the same as depression.)

This book is a delight for readers who are interested in cities and more importantly, in meditative lean prose. White also happens to be the co-author of one of the most famous style guide for writers - The Elements of Style. 

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She makes the physical space come alive (from her point of view, of course) by describing it in great detail. Her descriptions or details give precise information to the reader of how a place looked, smelled, or sounded like. But they do something more than that. They induce a sense of recognition. You end up thinking how you couldn’t see something so evident, like in the following bits from her poems. Reading them feels like putting on glasses to sharpen a blurry image - 

On the unbreathing sides of hills
they play, a specklike girl and boy,
alone, but near a specklike house. 

the brook sings loud
from a rib cage
of giant fern

Finally a grave green dust
settled over your big aimless hills.

How far can descriptions go? If someone told you that X looks like Y, your natural reaction would either be ‘so?’ or ‘I don't think so’. Bishop’s descriptions lie somewhere in the middle of these two extremes. But her work is not all ‘descriptions’ or ‘details’. The sense of recognition in her poems is not limited to physical spaces. It works at an emotional level too and at times it is difficult to tell the difference. It looks as much inwards as it does outwards. The poem I am sharing today is an example of this -

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In the last line of this poem, the speaker’s gaze turns inwards. Until then, she makes herself absent from the drama and plays the role of an observer. ‘A yesterday I find almost impossible to lift’. What does she mean by ‘lift’ here? How do you lift something as abstract as ‘yesterday’? Is it because it’s a heavy baggage that animals and birds don’t have to carry? Is this a lament or just an objective observation? One can never be sure and that’s exactly the point. I hope, dear reader, this poem serves as the perfect fodder for your thoughts, whatever they might be at the moment. It certainly has for me. 

When it starts raining

when it starts raining
pigeons stop flying
street to some distance goes running
and then returns 

cattle forget their direction of grazing
and only protect the mellow murmuring
that falls from the leaves
ssip, ssip, ssip, ssip…

when it starts raining
an ancient mine-like smell
comes out of public buildings
and spreads across the city 

when it starts raining
nothing happens
except rain
man and tree
keep on standing where they were
only the earth turns to the abode where
the face of the act of water falling rests 

A short story of mine was published in a journal called ‘On Eating’. Please click on this link to read the story - The tea was not good enough

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According to their ‘About’ section -

On Eating aspires to create an archive of various cultures of eating that characterise the Indian subcontinent. In this most basic need that keeps us alive is art, history, politics, sociology, science, literature, poetry, and spirituality.

In this multilingual genre-agnostic journal, we feature stories about various eating cultures in India. Our aim is to create a journal of contemporary writing about eating in English and the Indian languages as well as contemporary art on the subject.

Please feel free to comment your thoughts on the story.

And during these months of illness and despair he was struck again and again by the wonder of being in his own house, the audacity of it: to walk in through his own front gate, to bar entry to whoever he wished, to close his doors and windows every night, to hear no noises except those of his family, to wander freely from room to room and about his yard, instead of being condemned, as before, to retire the moment he got home to the crowded room in one or the other of Mrs Tulsi’s houses, crowded with Shama’s sisters, their husbands, their children.

It is a long sentence. The longest on the first two pages. It carries a lot of information about Mr. Biswas - his current state of being, the nature of his relationship with his family and in-laws (Shama is his wife and Mrs. Tulsi is his mother-in-law), his obsession with his house, and his semi-reserved nature. The sentence tells all this without sounding like a feature-list of a new gadget in the market. 

Though the sentence is long, there is not a single unnecessary word in it. Let’s try to drop a few words without changing what the sentence conveys.

If the sentence were written in silo, the first word ‘and’ would be unnecessary. But it’s a continuation of the previous sentence which reads - 

“He thought of the house as his own, though for years it had been irretrievably mortgaged.”

So, ‘and’ cannot be dropped. 

Can ‘despair’ be dropped? ‘Illness and despair’, on first look, sounds redundant. Both words convey a similar state of being. This is valid only if you assume that illness is the cause of despair which, in this case, might not be true. The previous sentence says that his house ‘had been irretrievably mortgaged’. This, I think, might also be the cause of his despair and hence it is necessary to use this word in the sentence. 

There is another way in which ‘and despair’ is adding immense value to the sentence. Read out loud ‘illness and despair’ (/ - - - /) and ‘again and again’ (- / - - /). There is a nice symmetry here. Almost poem-like. 

Can ‘as before’ be dropped? It marks the end of the list that elaborates what Mr. Biswas was able to do in his own house. For me, ‘as before’ works as a portal leading to a different contrasting image, a prompt that the scene is going to be changed. Without ‘as before’, the scene of ‘Mrs. Tulsi’s houses’ comes and goes too quickly without warning. 

There are no other words that I think can be considered to be dropped without changing the meaning. 

In the chapter, this sentence seems to be serving the purpose of introducing us to the idiosyncrasies of Mr. Biswas. It locates Mr. Biswas to a unique corner where few characters go. 

Before this sentence arrives in the book, we have a general sense of Mr. Biswas’s life, the facts so to speak. We know that Mr. Biswas ‘...was forty-six, and had four children. He had no money. His wife Shama had no money’. We also know that he hated his in-laws, and his house ‘had been irretrievably mortgaged’. This sentence deepens our understanding of Mr. Biswas. Let’s see how. 

“And during these months of illness and despair he was struck again and again by the wonder of being in his own house”

If the sentence were to stop at ‘wonder of being in his own house’, no one would have complained. It would have been a well-rounded sentence that brings an open thread to a definite closure with a familiar image - a bed-ridden sick person thinking back about significant people and places of his life in wonder. In this case, the object of significance happens to be his own house. But the sentence doesn’t stop here because the word ‘wonder’ can take it only so far. It is expected of someone who’s been financially screwed all his life and ends up owning a house, to be struck by ‘wonder’ because it is a big deal. But to be struck by ‘the audacity’ of being in one’s own house? This is new and this is what takes the sentence to the next level. It tells the degree to which the house is important to him and also in what ways. 

“And during these months of illness and despair he was struck again and again by the wonder of being in his own house, the audacity of it”

An action is considered audacious if it is out of reach or unthinkable for the person committing it. Now we know something more about Mr. Biswas. Being in his own house was something unthinkable for him. But what does ‘being in one’s own house’ mean? I am sure it would be different for different people. It might as well be an indicator of who one is as a person. The idiosyncrasies of a person are revealed when he is off-guard and there is no place more suited to be off-guard than one’s own house. 

For Mr. Biswas, what are the audacious actions he does in the name of ‘being in his own house’? The sentence addresses this question by giving us a list of actions. This list deepens our understanding of the character. Actions that a normal person would consider basic - walk through the front gate, bar entry to whoever one wishes, close doors and windows every night, roam around freely from room to room and so on - are audacious for Mr. Biswas. Clearly he had been denied these and the last item of the list tells us how. He was not a man who had nowhere to go. He was a man who had a very specific place to go to - Mrs. Tulsi’s house. The phrase ‘instead of being condemned’ tells us that he hated it. The way this sentence ends, it opens the possibility of scenes that elaborate on the interaction of Mrs. Tulsi et al with Mr. Biswas. This is a perfect set up for the drama the novel unfolds. The more we know about Mr. Biswas, the juicier the premise becomes. 

Flowers will smile and drop

My being
is everyone’s being
but my not-being
will only be mine

All days will 
fill to the brim 
with my not-being

Flowers will smile
and drop from my hand
beside a febrile man

dust will blow 
around the world

without home,
address,
visa, or
passport
will persist across the universe
the business of souls

all currencies will merge
with the currency of air

and perching on a branch
a bird will sing
a line of Mir - 
‘I’m this,
my friend’s that,
my business something else’

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