June 26, 2008

Leaving Uganda

We’ve talked about it here before: In 1972, Idi Amin gave all 80,000 Asian Indians living in the Uganda 90 days to pack up and leave. As the BBC reported on August 7, 1972, “Asians, who are the backbone of the Ugandan economy, have been living in the country for more than a century. But resentment against them has been building up within Uganda’s black majority. General Amin has called the Asians “bloodsuckers” and accused them of milking the economy of its wealth.”

A new young adult novel Child of Dandelions by Canadian author Shenaaz Nanji sheds much needed light on the upheaval of Asian Indians in Uganda. It’s worth checking out, even if you don’t have a young adult in your household, or don’t normally pick up books for younger readers.

The protagonist of Child of Dandelions is fifteen year old Sabine, a girl whose comfortable life is torn asunder on August 6, 1972, the day that Idi Amin issues his expulsion order for all Indians in Uganda. Shaken by the protests she walks into while window shopping in Little India, Sabine turns to her parents for protection.

Sabine’s mother is afraid and eager to leave Uganda, but her father, a wealthy Ismaeli businessman and landowner, is determined to ignore Dada Amin’s orders:

“Nonsense!” Papa laughed his conch-shell laugh, and her little brother echoed it. … “We are even more Ugandan than the ethnic Africans. Not only were we born here, but we chose to be Ugandan citizens when other Indians remained British…

Sabine agrees with her father. She is different after all. Her best friend Zena is African. They’ve grown up together like “twin beans of one coffee flower” and Zena is just like her sister, even if others (like her Indian friends) don’t see it that way.

Narmin …Nasrin … Sabine’s hands clenched at the names of her classmates. They were prissy prunes. She’d had a big fight with them after they called Zena goli. Mixing her African and Indian friends was like mixing oil with water.

As the 90 day countdown continues, Sabine’s optimism is drowned out by the growing chants of “Muhindi, nenda nyumbani! Indian, go home.” Amidst reports of violent attacks against Indian families, the mysterious disappearance of her favorite uncle, and strained relations between her and Zena (whose uncle is a general and crony of Idi Amin), she is forced to reexamine her understandings of race and class.

The novel is what Nanji calls Faction, a mix of facts and fiction.

Some of the characters are real, others fictional, but every event is based on history. Nanji grew up in Mombasa, and regularly visited family in Uganda throughout her childhood. “In fact the very day Idi Amin took power, I was in Kampala and to my embarrassment cheered him at a rally waving the Uganda flag, not knowing what was to follow,” she told me in an e-mail interview. [read the full interview here]

The book’s title comes from a powerful scene halfway through the novel when Zena tells Sabine that she can no longer associate with her because of Dada Amin’s orders.

Sabine folded her arms to steady herself. “You’ve joined them?”

“Them? Them are us. Your people have clogged up our land as the British bwanas did before. Your people, your family included, are doing magendo.”

“Uncle and Papa help out of kindness.”

“We don’t want kindness.” Zena gave a short, dry laugh. ‘You took our land and made us look after it. Now we want it back.”

Sabine stared at Zena. But Bapa had cleared that land and cleared it to grow coffee.

“We have to clear our land. The weeds must be uprooted. What can I do? You are the child of dandelions.”

Sabine reeled as if struck by lightning. How dare Zena accuse her of being a weed?

Though Sabine is furious at Zena’s rejection, she slowly starts to see discrepancies in how Indians treat the native Ugandans. For example, she realizes that though she’s known her driver Mzee (a term of respect for all elderly gentlemen) all her life, she has never touched him before or known anything about him.

She and her family were no different from the standoffish mzungus and other Indians who distanced themselves from their African employees. Mzee had worked for Bapa at his farm for many years before he moved to the city to get an easier job and became their driver. …

“Mzee, what’s your name?” She looked up at him. His eyes lifted in surprise, and she saw that they were gentle and crinkled like Bapa’s.

“Mzee Kabugo,” he said shyly, returning his gaze downward.

As someone who grew up in Ghana, I really appreciated Nanji’s nuanced take on the complex dynamics of race and class. The expulsion of Indians from Uganda was not a black and white issue, Nanji’s story shows us. “Earlier versions of the story showed the military regime was wholly responsible for the crises,” Nanji told me. “Later upon reflection, I learned that no one group of people is evil. There were many factors – poverty and class distinction, legacy of the colonial powers who carved up Africa like a pie, some Indians engaged in magendo, corruption, and Indians living in close-knit communities, refusing to integrate with ethnic Africans.”

Nanji started writing her book in order to find answers to the questions her children asked her while they were growing up. “My mind began to spin with questions I struggled to understand: how could an entire community that had lived for three generations suddenly be uprooted like weeds and expelled just because they were brown. Why was the rest of the world silent?” she said.

When she searched for books in the library on such issues, she came back empty-handed. “Then came the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and the massacre in Rwanda and I knew the story had to be told,” she said. “Yes, the story takes place thousands of miles away in Africa, but the emotional experience of Sabine may transfer to the American readers as part of their own reality.”

To date, there are very few fictional works that examine the personal, social, and political turmoil caused within the Indian community by Amin’s orders, so right off the bat, Child of Dandelions is a welcome addition. That it is gracefully executed and emotionally evocative makes it a book worth owning and sharing both with adults and young adults alike.

Sandhya at 10:08 AM in History, Kids, Literature · 120 comment(s) · Direct link

June 24, 2008

"Indian Nonsense"

I came across an anthology called The Tenth Rasa: An Anthology of Indian Nonsense, while browsing in a bookstore in suburban Philadelphia. The book is a collection of nonsensical poems and short stories from all over India, most of them translated into English. It’s one of those rare Penguin India titles that ended up getting distributed in the U.S. (An earlier book that I discovered in exactly the same way, was Samit Basu’s The Simoqin Prophecies. Also, I should point out that the editors of The Tenth Rasa have started a blog to promote the book.)

I’ll say a bit more about the idea behind the collection below, but what I have in mind for this post is a celebration of nonsense by example, not so much a thorough review (I’m also curious to know whether readers can remember their own South Asian nonsense rhymes, in any language. Anyone? Translations would be nice, but not required).

For now it might make sense to start with a couple of poems. First, the spirit of the collection is perhaps best captured by a favorite Sukumar Ray poem, “Abol Tabol,” (translated alternatively as “Gibberish” or “Gibberish Gibberish” to catch the reduplication), first published in Ray’s book of the same title in 1923:

Come happy fool whimsical cool
Come dreaming dancing fancy-free,
Come mad musician glad glusician
Beating your drum with glee.
Come O come where mad songs are sung
Without any meaning or tune,
Come to the place where without a trace
Your mind floats off like a loon.
Come scatterbrain up tidy lane
Wake, shake and rattle ‘n roll,
Come lawless creatures with willful features
Each unbound and clueless soul.
Nonsensical ways topsy-turvy gaze
Stay delirious all the time,
So come you travelers to the world of babblers
And the beat of impossible rhyme.
(Translated by Sampurna Chattarji from the Bengali)

(“Glusician” is not a typo, by the way; its utter unjustifiability is in some sense the point of the poem.)

Another of my favorites from the collection is an almost-limerick, originally written in Oriya by a writer named J.P. Das, and is called “Vain Cock”:

Taught to say ku-ku-du-koo, ku-ku-du-koo
He only said, ‘cock-a-doodle-doo’
Such a vain cock—
You’re in for a shock:
Not tandoori, you’ll only be stew.

(The joke here of course is that in many Indian languages a rooster’s cry is rendered along the lines of ‘ku-ku-du-koo’, and presumably in the Oriya version of “Vain Cock” the phrase “cock-a-doodle-doo” is rendered phonetically exactly as in English. The Vain cock, in short, is due for stew because of irremediable Anglophilic tendencies in his onomotopoeic ejaculation.)

And yet one more, this time by Annada Sankar Ray.

“What the Little Girl Learnt”

A-ha!
Yes ma!
Baa baa black sheep
Have you any wool?
No ma! No ma!
That’s all bull.
Not black, not a sheep.
Not at all woolly.
So where’ll I get wool?
You’re wrong, fully.
(Translated from Bengali by Sampurna Chattarji)

We obviously lose a little here in translation from the Bengali, especially at the end. But the point still comes through: “No ma! no ma!/That’s all bull” is a way of talking back to the dominance of English nursery rhymes in India, even outside of “English medium” elite spaces. Shakespeare and Dickens may have begun to give way to Tagore and Rushdie in Indian English literature classrooms, but “Baa baa black sheep” and the gloom-filled “Ring a Ring a rosies” still rule the nursery rhyme canon. (In this case, “black sheep” also has a certain possible racial tinge, which Ray seems to be resisting.)

Other nonsense rhymes in The Tenth Rasa have a bit of an anti-colonial flavor to them as well. For instance, there’s a Tamil folk rhyme translated by V. Geetha:

Mister Rat, Mister Rat
Where are you going?
I’m going off to London
To see Elizabeth Queen.
You’ve got to cross the seven seas
Pray, what’s your solution?
I’ll buy a ticket for a plane
And fly across the ocean.
You will get hungry on the way
Pray, what will you eat?
I’ll buy bajjis and vadas, hot,
And give myself a treat.

(Vadas, yum. Exactly what I would want to eat if I were going on a journey across the seven seas, to see the Queen of England…)

The many words for different kinds of food, in different Indian languages, is also widespread theme, as we see in a short tidbit from Sampurna Chattarji’s collection, “The Food Finagle: A Culinary Caper”:

Idli lost its fiddli
Dosa lost its crown
Wada lost its violin
And let the whole band down.

(The above was originally written in English, and part of the pleasure here is in hearing the sound of south Indian dishes – Idli, Dosa, Wada – spilling phonetically into English.)

As I hope these examples illustrate the pickings in The Tenth Rasa are quite rich. People who haven’t been exposed to this type of writing before might want to also get ahold of Sukumar Ray’s wonderful Abol-Tabol, for which a quite decent English translation is available.

And Heyman, Satpathy, and Ravishankar have piqued my curiosity about the Indian experiences and writings of the father of English nonsense writing, Edward Lear (Lear spent two years in India, and left an extensive travel journal, as well as a handful of excellent poems, including “The Akond of Swat” and “The Cummerbund”)

For the curious, here is a bit more on the way this volume was put together:

The Title. The title is an allusion to Bharata’s Natya Shastra, which has a famous chart of the nine literary Rasas, or moods (“spirits”): love, anger, the comic/happy, disgust, heroism, compassion, fear, wonder, and peace. The one that was missing was perhaps the rasa of “whimsy” – or nonsense. The Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore noticed the absence, and suggested that a tenth rasa might be needed (he also published a volume of writing for children, as well as a collection of Bengali folk rhyms called Khapchhada (1937), which has never been translated in its entirety. And Sukumar Ray, the most famous Indian nonsensicalist of all (the Indian Lewis Caroll) took up this charge quite directly, which contained an apologia at the beginning of the Bengali edition: “This book was conceived in the spirit of whimsy. It is not meant for those who do not enjoy that spirit.” In his introduction to The Tenth Rasa, Heyman points out that the Bengali for “spirit of whimsy” is “kheyaal rawsh” – where “rawsh” is the Bangla version of “rasa.” Thus, The Tenth Rasa.

The Sense in Nonsense. Some readers might think we are just talking about “pure” nonsense, but Heyman defines the specific literary genre he is working with quite carefully:

We may begin by classifying literary nonsense texts as those where there is a type of balance between ‘sense’ and ‘non-sense.’ Such balance is necessary if the text is not to become either plane sense, as in a best-selling crime novel, or utter gibberish, as in a baby’s babbling. The former is unremarkable, the latter, unintelligible. Good nonsense engages the reader; it must ‘invite interpretation’, implying that sense can be made, but at the same time it must foil attempts to make sense in many of the traditional ways.

In order to keep the balance, the ‘sense’ side of the scale must weigh heavily: Nonsense thus tends to be written in tight structures, that is, with strict poetic form or within the bounds of formal prose. It also usually follows meticulously many rules of language, like grammar, syntax and phonetics. Nonsense stories are about identifiable characters and the usually simple plots are understandable.

In short, in order to be interesting, nonsense has to be carefully crafted; it usually bowdlerizes the kinds of literary forms with which we’re most familiar.

A little bit later, Heyman describes the distinction he makes between nonsense and related genres like riddles, fantasy, and fables:

Jokes, riddles, light verse, fantasy, fables—none of these forms is in itself nonsense. A joke is funny because it makes sense; nonsense is funny because it does not. A riddle is clever because, eventually, it makes sense; nonsense is clever in how it suggestively does not. Light verse, fantasy, fables… nonsense can live in any of these forms and more. Indeed, it thrives on some overarching form that gives it some recognizable shape and meaning—something to make sure the nonsense techniques do not make the text explode into boring gibberish—yet the form itself provides only such (necessary) restraints; it does not equal nonsense. Thus, nonsense is a kind of parasite inhabiting a host form, yet it has a life of its own.

In short, what we’re speaking of is not just any old bakwas, but the most refined rubbish.

amardeep at 03:39 PM in Haiku, Humor, Literature · 23 comment(s) · Direct link

April 28, 2008

Notes From a Punjabi Literature Conference in Vancouver

I was recently in cool Vancouver to give a talk at a conference on Modern Punjabi Literature. The conference was at the University of British Columbia, and it was hosted by the Asian Studies department (where they have a strong program in Punjabi language instruction, part of which includes the study of literature in Punjabi).

The community was invited in, and they most definitely came — including a number of poets and novelists in Vancouver’s surprisingly large Punjabi language writers’ community. One of the best-known Punjabi poets in Vancouver is of course Sadhu Binning, who has also taught the Punjabi language at UBC for more than 20 years (he’s now retiring, sadly). His collection, “No More Watno Dur” is one of the very few collections of Punjabi poetry I’ve seen to be published in a bilingual edition (which is especially helpful for someone like me — a person who reads Punjabi only haltingly, and always with reference to a dictionary).

Among the many other writers in attendance, it was great to meet, for instance, the Punjabi-Pakistani-Canadian poet, Fauzia Rafiq (who didn’t mention she had a blog!). Another writer who seems well worth checking out is Ajmer Rode.

At the poetry reading on the last night of the conference, Nadeem Parmar sang a ghazal in Punjabi. I Googled him today, and was surprised to find that he’s written lyrics for many well-known singers, including Jagjit Singh. I also Googled Darshan Singh Gill, and was intrigued to find that he had actually been featured in a CBC documentary about new immigrants in Canada, back in 1958. And those were just a few of the names.

I met a Dhol player who plays for a “world music”/fusion group called “Delhi To Dublin”, which seems worth checking out. He also plays Dhol for a “pure” Bhangra group called En Karma. (There might be another post about these Vancouver bands once I’ve had a chance to listen to the music.)

Those are some links to start off. After the jump, I’ll discuss some of the more substantial issues discussed at the conference.

I was surprised by the number of writers who showed up, and how prolific they all seemed to be. One of the questions we’ve sometimes discussed on Sepia Mutiny is the future of the Punjabi language (and other Indian languages) at a moment when English and Hindi seem ever more culturally dominant in India. But even more urgent in some ways right now than language in general is the question about the status of Punjabi literature — with the commercial market for Punjabi-language books apparently drying up quite quickly within Punjab (Punjabi writers in India have an obvious commercial incentive to write in English). Several writers at the conference voiced concerns to the effect that Punjabi language literature runs the risk of becoming more parochial and isolated — no longer a natural, organic part of the culture (where people publish in Punjabi because they think of it as their primary literary language). Even if it doesn’t disappear entirely, there is certainly a live danger of literature written in the Punjabi language becoming a kind of museum piece.

Of course, that is only one part of the discussion. The more “internal” academic issues, including some close readings of major Punjabi writers from the mid-20th century, including Gurdial Singh, Nanak Singh, Bhai Vir Singh, among others. A number of diasporic writers were discussed, including especially Gurumel Sidhu and Gurcharan Rampuri.

There were also discussions about the mistake entailed in conflating “Punjabi literature” with “Sikh literature.” Most of the authors discussed in the scholarly talks were Sikhs (in fact, most of the authors were Sikh men — I did discuss a short story by Ajeet Cour in my talk, but I was one of the few to do so.) But of course, there is a considerable body of writing in Punjabi by Pakistanis. The problem, of course, is that while the language is very close, Muslim Punjabis tend to write in Shahmukhi script (based on Urdu), while Sikh and Hindu Punjabis tend to write in Gurmukhi (the script thought to have been invented by the Sikh Gurus).

The conflation of “Sikh” and “Punjabi” is also an issue when we’re thinking about the disciplinary questions surrounding “Punjab Studies” and “Sikh Studies” in North American universities. The Sikh community has, in recent years, raised money to create a handful of Sikh Studies endowed chairs at different universities — including the University of Michigan, Hofstra University in Long Island, and UBC itself. And while these universities have learned, sometimes the hard way in some cases, that they must retain control when it comes to hiring and evaluating faculty for these positions, questions about how independent these scholars really can be have remained in some people’s minds, in part because of recent history.

Those of us who want this kind of scholarship to happen are in somewhat of a double-bind. Without support and encouragement from the community, it is highly unlikely that there would be much interest in studying Sikhism and Sikh history seriously in North America — universities aren’t funding it widely enough to support a sizeable community of scholars on their own, and very few religion departments are well-staffed enough to justify more than one “South Asian religions” person. But then, if scholars in “Sikh Studies” positions partially endowed by the community come out with scholarly work the community doesn’t particularly like, the universities find themselves on the receiving end of vehement criticism.

My own paper was called “Secular Sikh Writers,” and I was trying to do two things: first, provoke a debate about what is entailed in identifying oneself as a “secular Sikh.” In my view, one of the unusual features of the idea of secularism in (and from) South Asia is the possibility that one can retain an “observant” relationship to a particular religious community, while also being strongly committed to freedom of religion (or even freedom from religion), socially and politically. By contrast, in the west, secularism usually is thought to be more or less synonymous with “atheism.”

The paper I gave also tried to briefly chart a history of secularization in fiction by Punjabi Sikh writers, starting with Bhair Vir Singh (who was not, I don’t think, “secular,” according to my definition), then moving forward to Social realist writers like Kartar Singh Duggal in the 1950s and 60s, and finally to the “contemporary” moment, with writers like Ajeet Cour. My argument was that even the contemporary writers continue to interrogate the line between “religious” and “secular” experiences of the world.

Most of the discussion, not surprisingly, revolved around the first topic — what is a “secular Sikh”?

Overall, a fun — and humbling — weekend.

amardeep at 04:45 PM in Literature · 28 comment(s) · Direct link

April 23, 2008

Q&A with V.V. Ganeshananthan, author of “Love Marriage”

Sepia’s very own guest columnist V. V. Ganeshananthan’s debut novel “Love Marriage” [book excerpt] is a haunting family drama about the ramifications of decades of civil war in Sri Lanka. [Cicatrix’s review is forthcoming.] It hit bookshelves earlier this month, and while on her book tour, Sugi took a few minutes to answer some questions via e-mail about the book, her writing process, and her inspirations.

You began Love Marriage as your senior thesis, I’ve read. Was there a particular image or incident that inspired it, apart, of course, from your own background as the child of Sri Lankan immigrants? No single thing inspired the book. The first page seemed to write itself, almost by accident. They were just some musings, but then I took them into a creative writing class, and my classmates were very encouraging about it and wanted to hear more from that voice. That voice belonged to a particular character who was starting to realize how Sri Lankan politics had affected—and continued to affect—her family. And therefore her.

Why did you choose to write the novel in these vignettes? Did this form help you accomplish something that a straight narrative could not? The currency of family stories is the anecdote. This is the manner in which most of learn about our families, so in that way it is organic to the story.

Time is dealt with in interesting ways in Love Marriage . There are two sections in the novel that I thought were especially powerful where you describe simultaneous events - they are almost cinematic. For example, while the main character Yalini is being born, Black July is happening in Sri Lanka. Can you address the question of parallels? There are lots of parallels in the book. Some were quite intentional, and others were not. I hadn’t really thought of the birth scene as a parallel until you mentioned it, but I suppose it is. I think of it as the one moment when Murali is in two places at once. Here is this young Sri Lankan couple having their first child, and it’s supposed to be this joyous moment. And it is. And yet at the same time Murali has this singular experience of watching disaster at home through the lens of the news. He is watching it and he is not part of it. There’s the distance of the eye of the camera. And at the same time he is a part of it in two weird ways: He is part of a removed group of viewers, and he can also imagine himself on the screen. He’s powerless, except for the act of viewing and knowing that.

Quite often when we see upsetting news about the developing world, or countries in the East, on the news, it is a strange experience. What does it mean to show violence, and show violence, and show violence?

When I first heard the title of the book, I have to admit that I thought, “Oh, no, another book about love vs. arranged marriages” - but that presumption was very quickly blown away. At the end of the novel, we come to see the notion of marriage as many different things, between people but also between “person and a country.” In light of current political climate, was there a political statement that you wanted to make with this novel? Of course the book is political. It has a range of characters with a range of political opinions. The Sri Lankan diaspora’s political views are sometimes understood as two opposite poles with nothing in between. (As though arranged marriage and love marriage were the only two kinds of marriage.) But there are so many communities and opinions and conversations out there. It’s important to create room for dissent in any dialogue—and this one in particular.

Yalini spends much of the novel digging up her family history. In this way, she reminded me very much of myself, always trying to find out my family’s stories - so many of which are buried deep. There are talkers and there are people like Yalini’s mother, who tells about herself by talking about other people. I take it that you conducted many interviews for this book. Was it difficult to get people talking about their painful memories? It depended on the person and their personal situation, but most people were very open about it. If I had been doing something journalistic, perhaps that might have been more difficult.

Your training as a journalist is evident in the meticulously researched novel, which was written without your having visited Sri Lanka more than twice in your lifetime. Did you go there while writing the book? What were the special challenges of writing about a historical event from a distance? I did go there twice while writing the book. Of course, many novels include historical events at which the author was not present. I interviewed people and read a lot of books and had to deal with competing narratives of what had happened. And that’s something I’ve dealt with as both a journalist and a member of a family: competing narratives. I wanted to acknowledge that, and the existence of multiple stories. I was fortunate that I was at the University of Iowa for part of the time while I was working on this book, and on my second novel. I was surprised when I went to the library in Iowa to find that they actually had a lot of books on Sri Lanka. If my memory is correct, there were about a thousand books. So I did a lot of reading.

Writers always want to know: what was your process in writing this book? Did you do it from start to finish? Did you do it in spurts? Did you write a first draft then go back and rewrite it? Tell us about discipline. I wrote in spurts and yes, mostly from start to finish. A few pieces here and there moved around, and some large chunks were cut; the first draft, that I turned in as my senior thesis at Harvard, was about 140 pages, and the uncle character wasn’t in it! I wrote through it a couple of more times after that, and of course, the uncle character appeared and I found him very interesting. Which each draft he became more of a presence.

I tend to write when I feel like. I write in bed. I was teaching this weekend in Chicago, where Mary Anne and DesiLit were my hosts, and Mary Anne was talking about writing in cafes. I know a lot of writers who like to do that, but I don’t generally write fiction in the presence of others. I have to be alone. I also really like writing in bed. It makes for easy transitions between writing and naps. Very important, especially as things percolate when you sleep.

Tell me about the authors you most admire, the ones who have served as a model for your fiction and creative work. Many of my teachers are also my creative models. I started writing Love Marriage as a student of Jamaica Kincaid’s. She is extremely meticulous and precise. When I was a senior in college she spent a lot of time with me, not just editing Love Marriage, but teaching me how to edit Love Marriage. It was an incredible lesson.

At the University of Iowa, I studied with the late Frank Conroy, who was the director of the Workshop; I have also been particularly fortunate to work with Elizabeth McCracken and James McPherson, among other generous permanent and visiting faculty members there. More established writers have in general been very kind to me. And of course I am a longtime fan of Sri Lankan writers in English, including Bodies in Motion author Mary Anne Mohanraj—whose family and mine have known each other for a long time; Shyam Selvadurai, who wrote Funny Boy, which I still reread all the time; Michael Ondaatje, whose body of work is so compelling; A. Sivanandan, whose book When Memory Dies is wonderful; Romesh Gunasekara, whose book The Match has just been published in the U.S.; and other writers. There are also wonderful Sri Lankan poets and spoken word artists (Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and D’lo are both terrific, as is Marian Yalini Thambynayagam). I’m always especially eager to meet other Sri Lankan diaspora writers and artists.

Are you working on your next novel right now? Yes, I am a couple of hundred pages into another novel about Sri Lanka. In North America, Random House has already agreed to publish it. I’m really excited about it, but because things change so much, I’m going to be oblique about it until it is closer to a final form. I will say that it is very different from Love Marriage.

Journalism and fiction. One is based on facts. One is about going into your imagination. You do both. Why? They really do feed each other, at least for me. (I’m very grateful to my mother in particular for insisting that since I was so interested in English, I ought to join my high school newspaper.) I always knew I wanted to write fiction, but I never expected my journalism skills to be so helpful. My interest in fiction and imagination helps me to empathize with people I interview as a journalist. Journalism has given me an appreciation for speed and deadlines. More importantly, my career as a reporter has taught me the importance of logic and facts, as well as how to research. (Each piece of fiction, after all, must have internal logic.)

Sandhya at 08:14 AM in Fiction, Literature · 9 comment(s) · Direct link

April 05, 2008

The Dalai Lama’s “Common Present”

Pankaj Mishra writes a detailed review of Pico Iyer’s new book, The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, in the recent issue of the New Yorker. Mishra’s review makes it evident that Iyer has elicited a far more complex story of the Dalai Lama than is typically shoveled to and slurped up by the West. Instead of treating him merely as a figure to be awed, Iyer describes him as “Forrest Gumpish,” simple yet revolutionary. He is a religious leader who is actively attempting to weaken the dogma of his own religion:

Last November, a couple of weeks after the Dalai Lama received a Congressional Gold Medal from President Bush, his old Land Rover went on sale on eBay. Sharon Stone, who once introduced the Tibetan leader at a fundraiser as “Mr. Please, Please, Please Let Me Back Into China!” (she meant Tibet), announced the auction on YouTube, promising the prospective winner of the 1966 station wagon, “You’ll just laugh the whole time that you’re in it!” The bidding closed at more than eighty thousand dollars. The Dalai Lama, whom Larry King, on CNN, once referred to as a Muslim, has also received the Lifetime Achievement award of Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America…

Precepts such as “violence breeds violence” or “the quality of means determine ends” may be ethically sound, but they don’t seem to possess the intellectual complexity that would make them engaging as ideas. Since the Dalai Lama speaks English badly, and frequently collapses into prolonged fits of giggling, he can also give the impression that he is, as Iyer reports a journalist saying, “not the brightest bulb in the room…” [Link]

But, would a “dull bulb” espouse an idea as revolutionary as this:

The most famous Buddhist in the world, he advises his Western followers not to embrace Buddhism. He seeks out famous scientists with geekish zeal, asserting that certain Buddhist scriptures disproved by modern science should be abandoned. [Link]

Can you imagine the Pope coming out to say to Catholics, “Yeah. I guess science and statistics do show that condoms are a good idea after all. Let’s git rid of the whole no birth control part of the religion.”

The Dalai Lama’s ideas are rooted in the fact that he believes that globalization is unstoppable and the interconnectedness of the world demands that we loosen our strict dogmas. You can either seek to rebel against the oneness, trying to maintain local culture and beliefs by any means necessary (including violence), or you can seek to truly understand the connectedness of everyone and become better off (spiritually and economically) because of it.

“For the first time in history,” Hannah Arendt wrote in 1957, “all peoples on earth have a common present… . Every country has become the almost immediate neighbor of every other country, and every man feels the shock of events which take place at the other end of the globe.” Arendt feared that this new “unity of the world” would be a largely negative phenomenon if it wasn’t accompanied by the “renunciation, not of one’s own tradition and national past, but of the binding authority and universal validity which tradition and past have always claimed…” [Link]

That “binding authority and universal validity” is what we see in radical Islam and in other movements marked by their turn-back-the-clock attitude. Arendt wrote, and the Dalai Lama has recognized, that one can maintain their traditions without considering them to be a last wall of defense to keep at bay the common present. The Dalai Lama also recognizes that a religious leader is really just a politician. They do not have some divine moral authority or clairvoyance which makes them closer to God. Why not admit that and just elect them like any politician?

Recently, he offered his most radical idea yet, one that overturns nearly half a millennium of tradition: that the next Dalai Lama be chosen by popular vote. [Link]

If you look deeper though you begin to realize that perhaps his ideas are not that revolutionary. Perhaps they are nothing more than Buddhism applied to the present:

In his public appearances before English-speaking audiences, he prefers to speak of “global ethics” rather than of the abstruse Buddhist concept of Nirvana. Doubtless he doesn’t want to put off the largely secular middle-class Americans in weekend casuals who crowd Central Park to listen to him, but, as Iyer points out, this is also a reaffirmation of a Buddhist philosophical vision in which all existence is deeply interconnected. Indeed, this notion may be why the Dalai Lama was early to grasp the existential and political challenges of globalized human existence, decades before they were underlined by the disasters of climate change…

Iyer’s book makes it plausible that the boy from the Tibetan backwoods may be outlining, in his own frequently Forrest Gumpish way, “a process of mutual understanding and progressing self-clarification on a gigantic scale”—the process that Arendt believed necessary for halting the “tremendous increase in mutual hatred and a somewhat universal irritability of everybody against everybody else…” [Link]

Imagine that, Buddhist philosophy might be made more relevant by a man who seeks to give up much of his religious authority.

abhi at 12:14 AM in Literature, Profiles, Religion · 46 comment(s) · Direct link

April 02, 2008

Unaccustomed Earth

Jhumpa Lahiri’s much-awaited collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth, hits bookshelves this week. As she makes her way around the US on an eight-city tour (she has a sold-out reading at Symphony Space tonight), gushing reviews have started pouring in.

The Village Voice’s Lenora Todaro compares Lahiri to a “young Alice Munro” and praises the emotional wisdom of these stories. [link]

Eight long short stories (three of which were previously published in the New Yorker) make up this striking collection whose title was inspired by a Nathaniel Hawthorne quote: “Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same wornout soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.”

The Christian Science Monitor [link] says of Unaccustomed Earth: “Returning to themes she explored in her first novel, “The Namesake,” Pulitzer-Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri details with quiet precision the divide between American-born children and their Bengali parents in her new short-story collection.”

I disagree. I don’t think this book is so much about the divide between generations as it is about the lives of the second-generation, the lives of the children of immigrants. The parents here play a secondary role - they are lenses through which children grow to understand themselves better.

Lisa Fugard of the Los Angeles Times gets it when she writes [link], “In her latest work, “Unaccustomed Earth,” a powerful collection of short stories, those children have left home and are starting families of their own, as they struggle both with tangled filial relationships and the demands of parenthood. The straddling of two cultures has been replaced by the straddling of two generations.”

In New York magazine’s profile of Jhumpa Lahiri, “The Confidence Artist: Jhumpa Lahiri Isn’t Afraid to Provoke Tears” [link], Boris Kachka writes:

Unaccustomed Earth is, once again, about upwardly mobile South Asians from New England, and so is the novel she’s working on. “ ’Is that all you’ve got in there?’ I get asked the question all the time,” says Lahiri. “It baffles me. Does John Updike get asked this question? Does Alice Munro? It’s the ethnic thing, that’s what it is. And my answer is always, yes, I will continue to write about this world, because it inspires me to write, and there’s nothing more important than that.”

Yes, Lahiri’s latest stories are once again about Bengali Americans, many of them set in Cambridge and London (where she was born), but keep going and it’s obvious that she has gone further and deeper, taken a turn in another direction, choosing to write about the experiences of second-generation Indian-Americans, about their fraught relationships with their parents, about multi-racial marriages, and at the end of it all, the human condition. (Elsewhere in Unaccustomed Earth, she takes us to Italy, Thailand, London, but what she does keep coming back to is Mass., Cambridge.)

The title story “Unaccustomed Earth” is (in the incredible Lahiri third person voice, as so many of the pieces in this collection are) about the fragile relationship between a 30-something daughter and her widow father. She is expecting, the mother of a young son, and married to a non-Indian. Her father’s first visit to her new home in Seattle is fraught with unspoken tension — her fear that he’ll expect her to invite him to move in with her family and his wish not to have her know about his “girlfriend.” (It was refreshing to me that this story was set in Seattle because it gave me a window into Lahiri’s amazing ability to create a sense of place.)

“Hell-Heaven” is written from the 1st person perspective. A daughter reminisces about her mother’s relationship with Pranab kaku, the “adopted uncle” who had such an important role in her childhood—and realizes as an adult that her mother was actually in love with him. This is at its core a story about the broken hearts of a mother and daughter; about how as adults we see situations in a new light because of our own experiences.

The protagonist of “A Choice of Accomodations” is Amit, a 40’ish year old husband and father who is on a weekend getaway with his wife Megan. They are attending the wedding of one of his high school and college friends (and crush) on the campus of his prestigious prep school in Massachusetts. This is a beautiful story about the unspoken expectations of a relationship, of marriage — and by placing Amit in a setting that so rooted in “a piece of his past that had nothing to do with the life he and Megan shared,” Lahiri explores the maze and intricacies of marriage, themes of companionship and aloneness, habits, and unspoken expectations.

“Only Goodness” is about Sudha, a sister who carries the guilt of her brother’s alcoholism and is forced to come to terms with it. Like so many of Lahiri’s characters, she too carries a burden, a grief, a secret … a heaviness that touches me in a deep place as a reader.

Maybe the biggest departure from the Jhumpa that we know is “Nobody’s Business” where the protagonist is Paul, a white graduate student who is in love with his Indian-American housemate Sang (Sangeeta). He carries a secret about her troubled relationship and struggles to figure out whether to say or do something about it or to stay silent.

And, finally, there’s the trilogy “Hema and Kaushik,” where Lahiri experiments with perspective in a way that blew me over. The characters are tied to each other loosely because their families are friends and they lived under the same roof for a few months as teenagers. We are taken into each of their worlds, the loss of Kaushik’s mother, his shock at finding that his mother has remarried, his complicated relationship with his new step sisters … Then life brings them together again years later in Rome. Written in a take on the first and second-person (you), the characters take turns addressing each other in parts I (Hema in “Once in a Lifetime” and II (Kaushik in “Year’s End”), then Jhumpa returning to the third person for most of Part III (“Going Ashore”), but returning to Hema’s voice as she once again talks to Kaushik.

On NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross, Maureen Corrigan says, “To read Lahiri’s short story collection and to only take away an experience of cultural tourism would be akin to reading Dante only to retain how medieval Italians slurp their spaghetti. Lahiri’s fiction delves deep into the universal theme of isolation.” She defines the collection as “tales of immigration but also takes its rightful place with tales of modernism.”

Adele Waldman in The New Republic [link] writes, “Jhumpa Lahiri’s books are more about the coastal elite experience than they are about the Indian-American one. … Her tales of marriage, divorce, becoming a parent, and grappling with the death of adult parents are the opposite of exotic; her fiction winds up painting a very intelligent portrait of upper middle class life. They aren’t immigrant stories, not in a traditional sense…”

Maybe that is true on one level, but I don’t think any Indian-American who picks up this book can say that Lahiri’s stories do not reflect nuances of our existence as children of immigrants, as cultural minorities, as the oft-represented “other”; nuances that we rarely encounter in the books that make their way into our hands. I’d venture to say that these are immigrant stories too - stories of a new America where culture and race and tradition collide in unexpected ways and where, at the end of it, we are left with a better understanding of both sides of a story and of the (this is cliche, I know, but I can’t think of any other way to say it), the universal human condition. I think that’s what makes Lahiri’s work genius - she gets at this without going cliche on us.

One final note: And yet, Bengali-American is the defining characteristic of this book for the publishers, it seems. I’m always fascinated by the labeling of books, the copyright page, where this book is categorized as: 1. Bengali Americans-Fiction 2. Bengali (South Asian people)-United States-Fiction … Whereas Lahiri’s first collection, Interpreter of Maladies is defined as: 1. East Indian Americans-Social life and customs-Fiction.

Sandhya at 06:59 AM in Literature · 121 comment(s) · Direct link

March 31, 2008

You liked that book? Pretentious crap. Get out of my bed.

Discussion over an article published Sunday night on the NY Times website dominated my email inbox today. Given the fact that so many SM readers are hyper-literate (or at least think they are) this simply had to be shared, discussed, and dissected to death here as well. Ready yourselves:

We’ve all been there. Or some of us have. Anyone who cares about books has at some point confronted the Pushkin problem: when a missed — or misguided — literary reference makes it chillingly clear that a romance is going nowhere fast. At least since Dante’s Paolo and Francesca fell in love over tales of Lancelot, literary taste has been a good shorthand for gauging compatibility. These days, thanks to social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, listing your favorite books and authors is a crucial, if risky, part of self-branding. When it comes to online dating, even casual references can turn into deal breakers. Sussing out a date’s taste in books is “actually a pretty good way — as a sort of first pass — of getting a sense of someone,” said Anna Fels, a Manhattan psychiatrist and the author of “Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women’s Changing Lives.” “It’s a bit of a Rorschach test.” To Fels (who happens to be married to the literary publisher and writer James Atlas), reading habits can be a rough indicator of other qualities. “It tells something about … their level of intellectual curiosity, what their style is,” Fels said. “It speaks to class, educational level.”

Pity the would-be Romeo who earnestly confesses middlebrow tastes: sometimes, it’s the Howard Roark problem as much as the Pushkin one. “I did have to break up with one guy because he was very keen on Ayn Rand,” said Laura Miller, a book critic for Salon. “He was sweet and incredibly decent despite all the grandiosely heartless ‘philosophy’ he espoused, but it wasn’t even the ideology that did it. I just thought Rand was a hilariously bad writer, and past a certain point I couldn’t hide my amusement.” (Members of theatlasphere.com, a dating and fan site for devotees of “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead,” might disagree.)… [Link]

I confess, I went to theatlassphere.com to see if Vinod had posted a dating ad there. The article goes on to conclude that you must be incredibly shallow if you dump someone based openly (or secretly) on the fact that their taste in literature sucks compared to yours. In fact, it wasn’t until I read this article that I wondered, for the first time in my life, if I was shallow. Am I destined to be “Baioed”? Not only would the pre-32 year old Abhi break up with a girl if she had ever in her life waited in a line for a Harry Potter book, he may also have dumped her if she didn’t like Mos Def The Cure (yes, I am a music snob as well). However, the new Abhi is reflective about the depth of his shallowness, mostly because he had been completely unaware of it until recently. The new Abhi wants to change. There have always been hints. Let me tell you all about one recent break-up. Well, it still feels recent but I guess it has actually been a while.

It was a blogger. I read this person daily and they opened my eyes to new things (even stuff I didn’t care about like Bollywood was made mildly tolerable). About a year into the relationship the cracks started to show. I think we both saw them but…its hard to give up on something that you’ve invested time in together. Eventually they went their own way. And then, just recently, after I wrote this book review he wrote this counter review, and I knew we weren’t meant to be together. The passive aggression (see the second stab) over literature is plain for all to see. A good friendship was a better idea. He just doesn’t get my rawer tastes.

Continuing on with the article, I realized how formulaic some of our behaviors have become in this internet age. For example, I confess, I’ve done this (and I’m sure many of you have as well):

Still, to some reading men, literary taste does matter. “I’ve broken up with girls saying, ‘She doesn’t read, we had nothing to talk about,’” said Christian Lorentzen, an editor at Harper’s. Lorentzen recalls giving one girlfriend Nabokov’s “Ada” — since it’s “funny and long and very heterosexual, even though I guess incest is at its core.” The relationship didn’t last, but now, he added, “I think it’s on her Friendster profile as her favorite book…” [Link]

Even if it didn’t work out, a scar on your heart in the form of a good book feels tolerable. When I thought about it I realized that some of my previous failed “relationships,” that were in retrospect marked by unsustainable high highs and low lows, were foreshadowed by literary incidents. I once dated a girl that loved Lolita by Nabokov (brilliant) but also liked Waiting for Godot by Beckett (pretentious waste of time).

“You mean you haven’t read it yet? I read an advanced copy. She really has outdone herself”

Being South Asian makes it even harder with respect to finding literary compatibility, especially if you want to date someone desi or someone who is dating you because they find you exotic. There is the added pressure of having to always know when the newest desi-lit book is coming out so you can be prepared to sound like an expert on it. Well you know what? I don’t read desi-lit! *Gasp*

The single best line in the article however, has got to be the following:

Compatibility in reading taste is a “luxury” and kind of irrelevant, Levy said. The goal, she added, is “to find somebody where your perversions match and who you can stand…” [Link]

That really is a transcendant statement. I’ve never heard it put so concisely and correctly. I recently went on a date with a girl that confessed to being a Chopra (yes, that one) fan in her younger days. The old Abhi would have snuck out the bathroom window. The new Abhi finished the date only to learn that some of our perversions matched.

Baby steps.

abhi at 10:41 PM in Humor, Literature · 109 comment(s) · 1 reader(s) linked · Direct link

March 24, 2008

From George to Jyoti: The Famous Five Get a Disneyfied Makeover

OK, Enid Blyton fans, get your hankies out. The Famous Five are getting a 21st century makeover, courtesy of Disney. Think multicultural meets technology in the new animated series “Famous Five: On the Case” which premieres in the UK next month. The crime busting gang of George, Dick, Julian, Anne, and Timmy the dog that Enid Blyton created in 1942 with the bestselling book Five on a Treasure Island is going to be replaced with characters who are the children of the original Famous Five, including a lead Anglo-Indian character.

That’s right, the team leader is the daughter of George (the tomboy and the original gang’s leader), Jo, short for Jyoti. According to Jeff Norton at Chorion, which owns the rights to Blyton’s books,

“We tried to imagine where the original Famous Five would go in their lives …Because George was such an intrepid explorer in the original novels we thought it would be only natural that she travelled to India, to the Himalayas, where she fell in love with Ravvi. That’s the back story (to Jo). We spoke to Enid Blyton’s daughter and she thought her mother would love what we have done …” [source: BBC News]

Don’t anyone try to tell me that the Disney executives don’t know how wildly popular Enid Blyton’s books are in India. I’m sure that the decision to have the lead protagonist be connected to the subcontinent somehow had a little something to do with this fact.

Other characters in the revamped series are Allie, a Californian shopaholic (and the daughter of Anne) who is sent to the British countryside to live with her cousins; Julian’s son Max, an “adventure junkie”: and Dylan, the 11-year old son of Dick. Only Timmy the dog gets to keep his original name.

Don’t anyone try to tell me that the Disney executives don’t know how wildly popular Enid Blyton’s books are in India. I’m sure that the decision to have the lead protagonist be connected to the subcontinent somehow had a little something to do with this fact.

Other characters in the revamped series are Allie, a Californian shopaholic (and the daughter of Anne) who is sent to the British countryside to live with her cousins; Julian’s son Max, an “adventure junkie”: and Dylan, the 11-year old son of Dick. Only Timmy the dog gets to keep his original name.

You can safely forget about “gay” times or excited expressions such as “gosh”, “golly” and “jolly nice” (think “cool”). And, instead of poring over maps, these famous five will wield web phones with GPS and laptops.

I don’t know about you, but what I loved about reading the Famous Five (and in general Enid Blyton books) was that they took me to a place I did not know, allowed me to be part of a secret club of empowered kids who spoke in a language familiar and yet unfamiliar to me, and immersed me in “exotic” (think ginger beer and creams and the rambling English countryside) landscapes. I’m not so sure that the type of program being created will retain any of the charming qualities of the original Famous Five … besides the crime-solving kids aspect, which we have enough of — eg: Scooby Doo.

And though part of me feels that perhaps I should feel happy about the attempt to multiculturalize the cast of characters, it seems like a token effort, not an authentic extension of Enid Blyton’s vision. But maybe I’m just being a stick in the mud; too tied to my childhood nostalgia. (I know that when I was 9 or 10, I watched Mary Poppins, the original Doctor Dolittle, and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang … and even though they were set in different periods, I could still identify with the themes, the characters, and emotions.)

On the other hand, there is something to be said about diversifying children’s literature so that there are more characters like us to be found in books and movies [see Abhi’s post about Sesame Street]. I guess that’s why — as a constant reader of children’s and young adult books and as a writer of children’s stories — I feel so lucky that we have publications like the South Asian children’s literary magazine Kahani which provides kids with authentic and high interest fiction and nonfiction (as well as access to books and films) that speaks to their experiences as kids of South Asian descent growing up in North America. Kahani just won the highly respected 2008 Parents’ Choice Award for magazines for the second year in a row. That’s a huge deal. This is a prestigious award from the Parents’ Choice Foundation which has been reviewing mainstream children’s media since 1978.

When I see that desi kids today have access to reading experiences such as Kahani (in India, there’s Tinkle and Amar Chitra Katha, as well as a host of new children’s books set in the subcontinent and I’m sure there are UK offerings as well), it doesn’t bother me so much that they’re continuing to read Enid Blyton’s original Famous Five … or watch the original TV series. They’re getting the best of both worlds — the contemporary and the classic (yes, to me Enid Blyton is a classic) — and isn’t that what the true reading or cultural experience should be all about? Traveling to both known and unknown places in your imagination?

Sandhya at 07:17 AM in Kids, Literature, TV · 66 comment(s) · 1 reader(s) linked · Direct link

March 21, 2008

Poetry Friday: Corona, Queens

Friday means a poetry party at sepia this month. To mark Women’s History Month, I’ve been featuring works by desi women poets all month long [catch up on past week’s poets: Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Shailja Patel]. Today’s featured work is “Corona, Queens,” by Bushra Rehman, a bi-coastal, Pakistani-American poet whose words sing of place, family, religion, and identity with an honest, insightful, and poignant sensibility.

A few years ago, the Bowery Poetry Club and City Lore asked a bunch of NYC poets to write an epic poem about New York. Bushra was one of them, and of course, she wrote about Corona, Queens, the neighborhood where she lived as a child.

Corona, Queens

Fitzgerald called Corona the valley of ashes
when the Great Gatsby drove past it, but
we didn’t know about any valley of ashes
because by then it had been topped off by our houses,
the kind made from brick this tan color,
no self-respecting brick would be at all.

We knew Corona,
home of World’s Fair relics
where it felt as if some ancient tribe
of white people had lived there long ago.
It was our own Stonehenge,
our own Easter Island sculptures
made from a time when New York City
and all the country
was imagining the world’s future.

Back when the future still seemed exciting and glossy,
like some kind of old stainless steel science fiction movie, not now
when the future seems like the inside of a dark coat sleeve.

We knew Corona,
under the shadow of Shea Stadium
where brown men became famous
and moved to Long Island
where our brothers played baseball
in the tar school yards on the weekends.

Back then, our brothers’ futures
were so open and they were so close,
they all dreamed the same dream together.
That with the crack of a bat
and the pull of their skinny brown legs
they could run away from the smell of garbage,
the fear on the streets,
the boys beating them up
when they came out of the masjid in the evening.

They could hit with that bat
and it would land them
all the way into the safety of Shea Stadium
and then past that,
into the island that was long and rich
where all the baseball stars lived.

[A version of this poem appeared in the NY Times in April 1996.]

I’ve said this before: I like to pair literary and artistic selections the way people pair wine and cheese, so when I read this poem, it seemed to me a perfect accompaniment to Crossing the Blvd: Strangers, Neighbors, Aliens in a New America, a critically acclaimed book and multimedia exhibit which is currently showing at Queens College through June 28 [details]

… When I think of Bushra’s poem, it speaks directly to Crossing the Blvd [check out the interactive website and submit your own ‘Crossings Story’ which focuses on Queens, the most ethnically diverse county in the United States. As the authors and artists Judith Sloan and Warren Lehrer put it so well:

“Home of New York airports, Queens, ‘the modern day Ellis Island’ is no longer made up of neatly partitioned ethnic enclaves. Today, the choreography of Queens, a place where residents speak 138 different languages, is one of chaotic co-existence. This group portrait of a multi-ethnic, multi-racial community [of new immigrants and refugees] is a magnifying glass for the future of America.”

“Corona, Queens” to me is a poem of place, but it’s also a poem of dreams – what are the dreams of immigrants? And, how does the physical place where we live assume those dreams? The images—of the Great Gatsby, the World Fair, Shea Stadium, the corner masjid, and the future that is the “inside of a dark coat sleeve” (a powerful metaphor for a post 9/11 America)—they all sit with me. Each tells its own story of the American Dream and perhaps even prompts us to think about the neighborhood where we grew up as immigrant kids, or as children of immigrants, or where we have arrived at as adults …

I’d love to hear some of those stories or memories that this poem might stir up.

Sandhya at 05:35 AM in Identity, Literature · 13 comment(s) · Direct link

March 20, 2008

Arthur C. Clarke, RIP (with excerpts from a novel)

Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke died earlier this week, at the age of 91. He was one of the best-known sci-fi writers of the 20th century, the author behind 2001: A Space Odyssey, among many others.

As is well-known, Clarke moved to Ceylon/Sri Lanka in 1956 — in large part for the year-around access to diving — and remained there until his death. The locale inspired at least one of Clarke’s novels, Fountains of Paradise:

Clarke lived in Sri Lanka from 1956 until his death in 2008, having emigrated there when it was still called Ceylon, first in Unawatuna on the south coast, and then in Colombo. Clarke held citizenship of both the UK and Sri Lanka. He was an avid scuba diver and a member of the Underwater Explorers Club. Living in Sri Lanka afforded him the opportunity to visit the ocean year-round. It also inspired the locale for his novel The Fountains of Paradise in which he described a space elevator. This, he believed, ultimately will be his legacy, more so than geostationary satellites, once space elevators make space shuttles obsolete. (link)

I first read The Fountains of Paradise many years ago, and I pulled it off the shelf this afternoon for a refresher. There is an intense opening, set in the classical period, 2000 years ago, involving a “Prince Kalidasa,” who does not seem to resemble the actual Kalidasa (who was not a prince, but a poet). And there are some rich descriptions of the island of Sri Lanka (named “Taprobane” — Tap-ROB-a-nee — by Clarke).

Here are a few paragraphs from the historical section involving Clarke’s Prince Kalidasa:

The air was so clear today that Kalidasa could see the temple, dwarfed by distance to a tiny white arrowhead on the very summit of Sri Kanda. It did not look like any work of man, and it reminded the king of the still greater mountains he had glimpsed in his youth, when he had been half-guest, half-hostage at the court of Mahinda the Great. All the giants that guarded Mahinda’s empire bore such Crests, formed of a dazzling, crystalline substance for which there was no word in the language of Taprobane. The Hindus believed that it was a kind of water, magically transformed, but Kalidasa laughed at such superstitions.

That ivory gleam was only three days’ march away - one along the royal road, through forests and paddy-fields, two more up the winding stairway which he could never climb again, because at its end was the only enemy he feared, and could not conquer. Sometimes he envied the pilgrims, when he saw their torches marking a thin line of fire up the face of the mountain. The humblest beggar could greet that holy dawn and receive the blessings of the gods; the ruler of all this land could not.

But he had his consolations, if only for a little while. There, guarded by moat and rampart, lay the pools and fountains and Pleasure Gardens on which he had lavished the wealth of his kingdom. And when he was tired of these, there were the ladies of the rock-the ones of flesh and blood, whom he summoned less and less frequently-and the two hundred changeless immortals with whom he often shared his thoughts, because there were no others he could trust.

Thunder boomed along the western sky. Kalidasa turned away from the brooding menace of the mountain, towards the distant hope of rain. The monsoon was late this season; the artificial lakes that fed the island’s complex irrigation system were almost empty. By this time of year he should have seen the glint of water in the mightiest of them all— which, as he well knew, his subjects still dared to call by his father’s name: Paravana Samudra, the Sea of Paravana. It had been completed only thirty years ago, after generations of toil. In happier days, young Prince Kalidasa had stood proudly beside his father, when the great sluice-gates were opened and the life-giving waters had poured out across the thirsty land. In all the kingdom there was no lovelier sight than the gently rippling mirror of that immense, man-made lake, when it reflected the domes and spires of Ranapura, City of Gold-the ancient capital which he had abandoned for his dream.

In this made-up history of the ancient kingdom of Taprobane, Clarke actually seems to know whereof he speaks; the injections of bits of Hindu culture seem to come from a position of knowledge.

And here is a little from the main section of the novel, set in the present day. The protagonist is a Sri Lankan named Raja (short for “Johan Oliver de Alwis Sri Rajasinghe”), who has retired from public life, and moved to an estate built on the site of “Kalidasa’s” original pleasure gardens:

That had been twenty years ago, and he had never regretted his decision. Those who predicted that boredom would succeed where the temptations of power had failed did not know their man or understand his origins. He had gone back to the fields and forests of his youth, and was living only a kilometre from the great, brooding rock that had dominated his childhood. Indeed, his villa was actually inside the wide moat that surrounded the Pleasure Gardens, and the fountains that Kalidasa’s architect had designed now splashed in Johan’s own courtyard, after a silence of two thousand years. The water still flowed in the original stone conduits; nothing had been changed, except that the cisterns high up on the rock were now filled by electric pumps, not relays of sweating slaves.

Securing this history-drenched piece of land for his retirement had given Johan more satisfaction than anything in his whole career, fulfilling a dream that he had never really believed could come true. The achievement had required all his diplomatic skills, plus some delicate blackmail in the Department of Archaeology. Later, questions had been asked in the State Assembly; but fortunately not answered.

He was insulated from all but the most determined tourists and students by an extension of the moat, and screened from their gaze by a thick wall of mutated Ashoka trees, blazing with flowers throughout the year. The trees also supported several families of monkeys, who were amusing to watch but occasionally invaded the villa and made off with any portable objects that took their fancy. Then there would be a brief inter-species war with fire-crackers and recorded danger-cries that distressed the humans at least as much as the simians - who would be back quickly enough, for they had long ago learned that no-one would really harm them.

Reading this, I can’t help but think of Clarke himself, one of the world’s most famous writers, living in a remote part of Sri Lanka — away from it all.

After the opening, the novel has a more conventional science fiction story arc — the goal is to build a kind of massive space elevator from the top of a mountain in Taprobane…

amardeep at 12:50 PM in Fiction, In Memoriam, Literature, Science, Science and Technology · 23 comment(s) · Direct link

March 19, 2008

The Aunt Also Rises

I take my duties as an aunt very seriously. Ever since I became a massi a year ago, I’ve started reflecting more and more on the important role that my aunts and aunties (the female family friends and mothers of friends) played in my life, both when I was a kid and in many cases, now.

So, I’m not exaggerating when I say that one of my life goals is to be the best massi ever. I can’t help it that I want to be adored and worshiped by my nephew in the same way that I adored and worshiped my aunts (the sisters of my mom and dad who I called tata-French for aunt—or simply by their first names, as in Dipika or Poupee) and aunties (I can never forget the glamorous Auntie Veena in Ghana who baked cheese sticks for our picnic at the Tesano Sports Club in Accra when I was 10) throughout my childhood.

Which is why when I first heard about the UK bestselling tribute to the institution of aunty-dom, The Complete Book of Aunts, by Rupert Christiansen with Beth Brophy, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it. It even includes “ten golden rules for aunts”! From the book jacket:

Of all our blood relations, an aunt offers the most potential for uncomplicated friendship. THE COMPLETE BOOK OF AUNTS is an entertaining and touching exploration of aunts in all their guises and varieties, culled from real-life, literary and historical sources.

The book was inspired by a kid’s question to the author: “Why are there aunts?” In response, Christiansen takes a thorough look at the etymology of the word aunt, the many words for it that exist in world languages, and great aunts in (mostly Victorian) literature. He also highlights various aunt types: Bargain Aunts, Mothering Aunts, Damned Bad Aunts, X-Rated Aunts, and Honorary Aunties (think of all the older desi ladies you call ‘auntie’).

We’ve all had most of these varieties of aunts in my life (perhaps not the X-Rated Aunt!). And, I definitely know a little something about mothering aunts. From the ages of 6-11, I lived in Pune with my grandmother and my own massi (the fact that I called her by her nickname Poupee, rather than using a title of respect indicates not a lack of respect but just our level of intimacy), while my mom shuttled back and forth between my father who could not leave the politically tumultuous Ghana and her children, who were getting a “good education” in a relatively stable India. My aunt Poupee was, in effect, my surrogate mother. Throughout my childhood, I saw my mom and her as different sides of the coin of grace, protection, discipline, affection, and unconditional love.

While reading The Complete Book of Aunts though, I was also especially interested in the “Honorary Auntie.” (How many of us when we meet an older desi woman—even if it’s someone working at a shop—want to call her ‘auntie’?)

“The auntie is a particularly potent figure in India, crossing several complex linguistic and cultural domains. Probal Dasgupta’s study The Otherness of English: India’s Auntie Tongue (1993) explores the auntie as “a significant fact in the domain of English usage,” quoting Kamal K. Sridhar’s view that she “functions as a marker of Western sophistication among the upwardly mobile middle classes in urban and semi-urban India.” In Indian English, it emerges, “middle and upper middle class children who got to English-medium schools address their friends’ mothers as Auntie.” This cannot be new: In The Raj Quartet, Paul Scott’s novels about the British withdrawal from India in the 1940s, the ingenuous Daphne Manners shyly asks whether she can call Lady Chatterjee auntie.”

I’m not so sure that only kids who attend English-medium schools used the word “auntie.” I’ve had salespeople and hawkers call me “auntie” when trying to draw my attention to their wares. And, of course, street kids who knock on the windows of a car or hang out by the autorickshaw asking for a rupee or two — they’ve called me “auntie” too …

At wikipedia, the entry on Indian English had this to say about the use of the word auntie:

Use of the English words ‘uncle’ and ‘aunty’ as suffixes when addressing people such as distant relatives, neighbours, acquaintances, even total strangers (like shopkeepers) who are significantly older than oneself. E.g., “Hello, Swathi aunty!” In fact, in Indian culture, children or teenagers addressing their friend’s parents as Mr Patel or Mrs Patel (etc.) is considered unacceptable, perhaps even offensive—a substitution of Sir/Ma’am is also not suitable except for teachers. On the contrary, if a person is really one’s uncle or aunt, he/she will usually not be addressed as “uncle”/”auntie”, but with the name of the relation in the vernacular Indian language, even while conversing in English. For example, if a woman is one’s mother’s sister, she would not be addressed (by a Hindi speaker) as “auntie” but as Mausi (Hindi: मौसी). It is interesting to observe that calling one’s friends’ parents auntie and uncle was also very common in Great Britain in the 1960s and 70s but is much rarer today.

I want to know: What are your aunty or auntie memories? Are there any great aunts and aunties you know of in Indian folktales, mythology, contemporary literature, art, and movies (yes, I mean Bollywood too!)? Me thinks it’s time to pay tribute to the desi aunt and auntie.

Sandhya at 07:10 AM in Literature, Musings · 94 comment(s) · Direct link

March 14, 2008

Poetry Friday: Shilling Love

In honor of Women’s History Month, I thought I’d feature South Asian women poets on Poetry Fridays for the remainder of March. Today’s selection is “Shilling Love,” by Kenyan-Indian-American spoken word artist Shailja Patel. Her work “Migritude” premiered last fall in the San Francisco Bay area to packed audiences—it uses her collection of saris, passed down by her mother (another take on Mama’s Saris!), to unfold hidden histories of women’s lives “in the bootprint of Empire, from India to East Africa.”

“Shilling Love” is the first poem from “Migritude” that I came across a couple of years ago, and it has stayed with me since.

Shilling Love
By Shailja Patel

They never said / they loved us

Those words were not / in any language / spoken by my parents I love you honey was the dribbled caramel / of Hollywood movies / Dallas / Dynasty / where hot water gushed / at the touch of gleaming taps / electricity surged / 24 hours a day / through skyscrapers banquets obscene as the Pentagon / were mere backdrops / where emotions had no consequences words / cost nothing meant nothing would never / have to be redeemed

My parents / didn’t speak / that / language

1975 / 15 Kenyan shillings to the British pound / my mother speaks battle

Storms the bastions of Nairobi’s / most exclusive prep schools / shoots our cowering / six-year old bodies like cannonballs / into the all-white classrooms / scales the ramparts of class distinction / around Loreto Convent / where the president / sends his daughter / the foreign diplomats send / their daughters / because my mother’s daughters / will / have world-class educations

She falls / regroups / falls and re-groups / in endless assaults on visa officials / who sneer behind their bulletproof windows / at US and British consulates / my mother the general / arms her daughters / to take on every citadel

1977 / 20 Kenyan shillings to the British pound / my father speaks / stoic endurance / he began at 16 the brutal apprenticeship / of a man who takes care of his own / relinquished dreams of / fighter pilot rally driver for the daily crucifixion / of wringing profit from business / my father the foot soldier, bound to an honour / deeper than any currency / you must / finish what you start you must / march until you drop you must / give your life for those / you bring into the world

I try to explain love/ in shillings / to those who’ve never gauged / who gets to leave who has to stay / who breaks free and what they pay / those who’ve never measured love / by every run of the ladder / from survival / to choice

A force as grim and determined / as a boot up the backside / a spur that draws blood / a mountaineer’s rope / that yanks / relentlessly / up

My parents never say / they love us / they save and count / count and save / the shilling falls against the pound / college fees for overseas students / rise like flood tides / love is a luxury / priced in hard currency / ringed by tariffs / and we devour prospectuses / of ivied buildings smooth lawns vast / libraries the way Jehovah’s witnesses / gobble visions of paradise / because we know we’ll have to be / twice as good three times as fast four times as driven / with angels powers and principalities on our side just / to get / on the plane

Thirty shillings to the pound fourty shillings to the pound / my parents fight over money late in the night / my father pounds the walls and yells / I can’t — it’s impossible — what do you think I am? / My mother propels us through school tuition exams applications / locks us into rooms to study / keeps an iron grip on the bank books

1982 / gunshots / in the streets of Nairobi / military coup leaders / thunder over the radio / Asian businesses wrecked and looted Asian women raped / after / the government / regains control / we whisper what the coup leaders planned

Round up all the Asians at gunpoint / in the national stadium / strip them of what / they carry march them / 30 miles / elders in wheelchairs / babies in arms / march them 30 miles to the airport / pack them onto any planes / of any foreign airline / tell the pilots / down the rifle barrels / leave / we don’t care where you take them / leave

[The poem is pretty long, so you can read Part II here.]

The first time I read “Shilling Love,” it resonated with me on a very personal level. I too grew up in Ghana during the military coups of the late 70s/early 80s, so I’m all too familiar with some of the scenes she paints and the challenges she describes. In my essay, “Children of a Coup” I write more about this:

On June 4, 1979, just a few days before scheduled elections in Ghana, the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council overthrew the government. This was the fourth coup in the nascent democracy since 1957, when Ghana became the first sub-Saharan African nation to achieve independence from colonial rule. At the time, I was five. Those were turbulent days. The government’s body fell apart and violence replaced peaceable discomfort. Lines at gas stations grew long, schools were closed more often than they were open, and SPAM and Baked Beans came close to gaining the status of staple foods.

Unlike me - still struggling to put words to that experience which I half-remember; to piece it together based on family memory and historical narratives, Shailja’s poetry is her activism. She has been described by CNN as an artist “who exemplifies globalization as a people-centered phenomenon of migration and exchange.” I see her as a desi Sarah Jones; there’s power in her punch.

In fact, Shailja is currently in Kenya, where she’s working with the organization Kenyans for Peace with Truth and Justice (read her “Open Letter to Samuel Kivuitu, Chairman of the Electoral Commission of Kenya”); touring various arts festivals in Africa, and working on the second show in the “Migritudes” cycle. I think this seven minute documentary from KQED Arts is worth checking out (You can also click on her picture above to get to it.)

And that’s all for this week’s poetry party.

Sandhya at 06:09 AM in Arts and Entertainment, History, Identity, Literature · 9 comment(s) · Direct link

March 13, 2008

Q&A with Indra Sinha, author of the Booker shortlisted "Animal's People"

The following interview with Indra Sinha, author of “Animal’s People,” was conducted over e-mail while he was in India on his recent book tour. He lives in a wine-making region of France, and was kind enough to indulge my questions about “Animal’s People,” his writing childhood, and the art of making wine, amongst other things. He also told me that Animal, the main character of his novel, would be happy to answer a few questions, so that interview is also included. [read Sepia/Sandhya’s review of the Booker-shortlisted novel.]

What is the one thing that Animal’s People was never supposed to be? A polemic.

How long did you take to write the book? Were its origins a short story? It grew out of notes I was making for a screenplay. But did not come to life as prose fiction until the character of Animal appeared. He immediately began haranguing me and I learned eventually that the best course was just to write down everything he said. The actual writing took about three years, over a five year period.

Obviously your work with the Bhopal Medical Appeal and their newsletter was your research basis. In the first place, how did you get involved with the cause? A man from Bhopal approached me on the basis of the work I had done with Amnesty International and asked if I would help raise funds to start a clinic in Bhopal. You can’t just start something then walk away, so I then became involved in fundraising to keep it going. The clinic is now in its thirteenth year and we have given free medical care to more than 30,000 people.

In 1994, you “published an appeal in The Guardian asking for funds to start a free clinic for the still-suffering survivors of the Union Carbide gas disaster in Bhopal. This led to the founding of the Bhopal Medical Appeal. The clinic opened in 1996 and has so far helped nearly 30,000 people.” Is a little bit of Elli in you? Nothing at all.

Why did you choose to set this book in a fictional town, rather than in Bhopal itself? Because I wanted to free my imagination and to concentrate on the characters. This book is about people, not about issues. The disaster that overtook the city of Khaufpur is always kept sketchy, the Kampani is never explicitly named, it is just the Kampani, and as such is not simply Union Carbide or Dow Chemical, but stands for all those ruthless, greedy corporations which are wreaking havoc all over the world. In Jaipur at the literary festival Vickie and I met Alexis Wright, who has written of the aboriginal peoples’ struggle against Rio Tinto Zinc, in Bombay we spent time with Sudeep Chakravarti who has written a powerful book called Red Sun, about the Naxali and Maoist movement in India - again tribal peoples forced off their land by mining corporations and steel companies, including Tata, which is trying to get Dow off the Bhopal hook.

I was really struck by the description of the factory. “Eyes, imagine you’re in the factory with me. See that thing rising above the trees, those rusty pipes and metal stairs going nowhere? That’s the place where they made the poisons. It used to be bigger, but bits kept falling off. Each big wind pulls more iron sheets loose. We here them banging like angry ghosts.” In fact, I kept going back to it. You’ve visited the plant? Several times. It is as described, I have been there many times. However I wish people would not automatically assume that Khaufpur is literally Bhopal in every little detail. Khaufpur is a city of the imagination and at one point I had thought of calling it Receio and setting the story in Brazil. It could just as easily have been set in West Africa or Indonesia, because the story is really about how powerless, disenfranchised people deal with the monstrous injustices that are heaped upon them.

The San Francisco Chronicle says that you have a magic realist inheritance. Is that a style that you identify with your work at all? No. There is no magical realism in Animal’s People. There is a two-headed foetus which talks, and Animal has an unusual aptitude for learning languages of all kinds (and even inanimate objects talk to him), but one should never forget that everything we know is from Animal himself and none of it may be true. By his own account Animal hears voices which tell him to do and say things; he has “mad times”. Or conversely it may all be a true account of a crazy imagination. I doubt if there is much magic in madness and as for realism, Animal says, “To believe in what you can’t see or hear, and deny what you do see and hear, that you could call crazy.”

Tell me about your relationship with the author Mulk Raj Anand. What was the best advice he ever gave you about writing? Mulk was a family friend and I knew him from the age of about six onwards. When I was a child he told me to write. When I was grown up (and used to meet him in London) he urged me to write about my childhood. The Death of Mr Love is dedicated to him. In it I quote a piece of advice that I later followed myself with Animal’s People. He says (this is from memory), “burn your so-good stories and poems, give me a true picture of our poorest people.” Never in India’s history has there been such need of writers who tell the stories of the forgotten people, those for whom India is neither Incredible nor Shining. I wish Mulk had lived to read Animal’s People.

You have created this amazing website khaufpur.com, which takes us into Animal’s world and city. What was your favorite part of this project? Did it remind you of your copywriting days in any way? Khaufpur.com is a work in progress, albeit in temporary abeyance while I was in India and out of regular broadband contact. I liked the horoscopes, and the ads for Dr Ali Faqri’s all-conquering medicaments.

Speaking of copywriting, what part of that aspect of your career helps you most when you’re writing your novels? Copywriting is of no use whatever in writing novels.

You’ve been compared to Salman Rushdie (you both used to work at the same ad agency back in your respective pre-novel days) in almost every article I’ve read about you in the British press. What do you have to say about that? Everyone pigeonholed as an “Indian writer” is inevitably compared to Salman Rushdie, but Salman is unique. His writing has this marvellous fecundity - every sentence could burst open and hatch a new story.

I was interested in how Zafar asked Animal not to curse the first time he met him, but at the end of the book, he throws caution to the winds and allows himself to use the same words that used to trouble him. And, Animal says, “If you want my story, you’ll have to put up with how I tell it.” Did editors question Animal’s use of language at all, and ask you to tone it down? I guess Zafar has learned something from Animal, not about swearing but about living. No editor has objected to the swearing (and there are now about 20 editors in different languages involved). Some readers and critics have said that the bad language was “unnecessary”. I informed Animal, who said, “have these cunts spent even one day in Khaufpur? They can fuck off all, and you too.”

Much of the book is written in the present tense. I’m curious to know why you made that choice. What were the challenges of executing this? Animal’s choice, but it’s actually written in a mixture of simple present, various past tenses, but the defining characteristic is his use of the present perfect. If you think of these as notes in perfume, base, mid and top, you get the ripe stench of Animal.

As I was reading the book, I kept praying and wishing for a “happy ending.” In a sense, you delivered on that, though I least expected it. Why? It was not a happy ending, nor an unhappy one. It was just a goodbye point in a story that has no ending. Yes, there were two marriages, but there were also deaths. In Khaufpur, as in Bhopal, it is meaningless to look for large resolutions, justice, all those Hollywood things …there is no justice and probably never will be. Yet the people involved will never give up, when hope is gone they will fight without hope.

Can you see this turning into a film? We’ve just signed a deal.

What was the most interesting thing about the Booker experience? (And, of course, congratulations.) For me it was meeting the other writers and the fantastic book bloggers. The media attention was always going to be an evanescent and superficial. The thing is not to believe that being involved in the Booker suddenly makes you important or more than you are.

What are you working on now? A novel set in Greece a long time ago.

You grew up in Bombay. Now you live in the countryside of France. How the big metropolis seep into your writing and your imagination? Bombay is my hometown and a place I’ve always loved. It’s there in my first novel, The Death of Mr Love but I don’t see myself returning to Bombay or to India in future fiction.

Who did you read as a kid? Tell me about your reading childhood. My mother was herself a writer and had a huge collection of books and decided tastes. She started me off on Gorky when I was eight. “Childhood”, if I remember, opened with a funeral scene. I’d rather have been reading Superman comics. After Gorky, Turgenev and Pushkin came Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and a slew of Soviet children’s books. There was Dickens of course, and all the English children’s classics. A book I much prized was “The Guide to Fairyland” Dion Clayton Calthrop. Later I found Joyce, Beckett, Lawrence Durrell, Henry Miller and William Faulkner. I read everything Enid Blyton ever wrote and the Wishing Chair, the Faraway Tree and the Ring O’Bells Mystery remain favourites.

What are you reading right now? Red Sun, by Sudeep Chakravarti, The Sea by John Banville (glorious prose), City of Falling Angels, by the marvellous John Berendt, The Calcutta Chromosome, by Amitav Ghosh.

How and where do you write? Laptop, wherever I can plug it in. Garden by the sea in Goa, balcony above Pushkar lake, endless late night hotel rooms, at home I work in my library overlooking our little river, the Vert.

Stephen King’s ideal reader is his wife. He writes all his books with her as his audience. Do you have an “ideal reader”? My ideal reader would be the sort of intelligent book blogger (of whom happily there are several and I have one or two in mind) who are extraordinarily well read, read for pleasure and don’t have axes to grind.

Tell me about the grape harvest in the Lot. What does it have in common with the writing process? The vines come into leaf later than you might expect, the black gnarled stems in spring stand out against a sea of yellow hawkbit. A great deal of careful pruning produces large and juicy bunches of grapes. Sun and rain are both needed, though careful husbandry can to some extent offset a lack or excess of either. When the grapes ripen and are pressed, the skins are brought to a distillery nearby where they make brandy and whole valley is filled with the scent of gentle fermentation. Across the Lot from us the valley is wide and green with vineyards. It’s the heart of the Cahors wine region and the source of the famous “black wine”. I don’t know how much of it percolates into my writing but a good deal certainly goes into me.

Q&A with Animal, from Animal’s People

Several interviews with the larger than life character Animal can be read in the Khaufpur Gazette. Here is a recent Q&A, which will be of most interest to those who have read or have started reading this novel.

Tell me what music you’re currently listening to and what it says about your current state of mind. That is, what’s on your playlist today? Jashn-E-Bahaara from Jodha Akbar, I too can sing like Javed Ali, just listen. Now ask what is history what is fiction, what is truth?

Have you seen the movie The Bhopal Express? What are your thoughts? Seen it? I starred in it, bloody, alongside Naseer and Zeenat. In that scene when everyone is running for their lives, don’t you see me? I’ve kept on asking Mahesh (the director) to give me some dialogues, or a song to sing, but he said my talent would shame the other performers.

What’s going on between Nisha and Zafar nowadays? Do you still eat lunch at pandit Somraj’s house everyday? Nisha Zafar? So boring. I go often to Panditji’s house in the Claw but since all this Booker Shooker attention I’ve developed a liking for mutton so I have made one raw silk kurta to wear with my kakadus and I’m going all the time with jarnaliss to the hotel Jehannum. I said to the manager, “will you throw me out like your doormen refused entry to that old lady who came wearing slippers?” Actually, Sandhya-ji they threw her out because she was poor, even though she was willing to pay for a meal. Cunt’s kind of embarrassed, says “You are welcome, Animal.” So I say, “And if I smoke a beedi by your pool?” “Smoke, smoke,” he laughs, but you can hear his teeth grinding as he goes away.

Religion. You’ve seen it all. Ma Franci’s vision of the apocalypse. Muharram. Hindu festivals. What’s your take on it? The best thing I ever heard on this subject, it’s this little girl who is asked what she knows about god and she replies, “She’s a horse”.

This article points out how the Indian government is trying to roll out the red carpet for Dow Chemicals to invest in India again. What say you to this? Sandhya-ji, how do you feel about it? Is it okay? If not what will you do about it? Will you call anyone? Will you write about it? Will you mention it at the next smarty party you go to? The Bhopalis, like our Khaufpuris, have suffered a catastrophe that the world has forgotten. Nobody fucking cares, that is the truth. Even now, Bhopalis and Khaufpuris are walking to Delhi again to see that weird little Prime Minister guy who looks like a monkey passing wind. He’ll treat them with contempt, like always,who isn’t fit to wash the dust from their feet. You, people like you, he might listen to. If you know these things and keep silent, your silence is a bigger obscenity than any word I might utter.

Sandhya at 07:52 AM in Fiction, Literature · 14 comment(s) · Direct link

Review: "Animal's People," by Indra Sinha

The US edition of Indra Sinha’s Booker-shortlisted novel Animal’s People was just published this week by HarperCollins. Last fall, when I first heard about the book which focuses on the effects of a chemical company explosion in a contemporary Indian city, I didn’t want to wait … so, I immediately ordered my copy from Amazon UK. (I’m glad I did because now I have a paperback copy with a cover that I much prefer over the American edition. See for yourself below.)

Set in the fictional city of Khaufpur—home to a catastrophic gas explosion caused by an unnamed Kampani (if you’re thinking Union Carbide and Bhopal already, you’re not alone)—Animal’s People is the first-person account of Animal, a 19 year old, who walks on all fours, his back twisted by a disaster he is barely old enough to remember. Animal was born just a few days before “That Night” (his Apocalypse) when a chemical factory owned by Americans exploded, killing his parents, totalling his slum, and virtually destroying the health of many of the city’s poorer inhabitants. The Kampani changed his life before he really even knew what his life could be:

“I used to be human once. So I’m told. I don’t remember it myself, but people who knew me when I was small say I walked on two feet just like a human being … Ask people they’ll tell you I’m the same as ever, anyone in Khaufpur will point me out, ‘There he is! Look! It’s Animal. Goes on four feet, that one. See, that’s him, bent double by his own bitterness …”

This is the powerful first line of a novel that I ripped through it at breath neck speed, simultaneously refreshed by Sinha’s raw voice and haunted by the events and images that were unfolding in the novel itself.

When the book begins, Animal is talking into a tape recorder, telling a Jarnalis from Ostrali his story in a singularly unique dialect of Inglis, Hindi, and French, punctuated with a vast and bawdy vocabulary (“The things I say, by the time they reach you they’ll have been changed out of Hindi, made into Inglis et francais pourquoi pas pareille quelques autres languges?”). An orphan raised by Sister Franci, a (nearly mad) French nun, he is an embittered young man, angered by the cards that fate handed him and defiant of a society that expects him to rise above his anger.

Things start to change when he meets Nisha, the daughter of a former music teacher (whose voice was disfigured after the explosion), her activist boyfriend Zafar, and their gang of reformers. Animal is forced to confront his human side as Nisha and Zafar pull him into their circle of trust. He also comes face to face with lust, love, desire for Nisha. To complicate things further, an American doctor, Elli, comes to town, with big plans to build a medical clinic and treat all the suffering masses for free. Zafar and his gang are skeptical of her efforts, suspicious that her clinic is a Kampani-backed effort. They boycott her services. But Animal – he can get anywhere and be everywhere, so small and below eye level that he is – he wangles his way into a number of situations, becoming the eyes and ears of Zafar’s “army” and uncovering various truths not just about Elli but also about himself. Parallel to the conflict with the Kampani is Animal’s own conflict with his desire to be loved, with the ghosts of yesterday (who live as fetuses in a jar and are the voices that speak to him), and his struggle over whether to be or not to be human.

Through Animal - a terribly human and honest character—Sinha weaves a narrative that juxtaposes devastation and darkness with humor and hope,and which speaks for the thousands of disenfranchised individuals whose lives have been thrown upside down by similar catastrophes. Sinha pulls out all stops as he draws stark contrasts for us between what life is like for the haves and the have-nots in Khaufpur; between what life was like before the Kampani explosion and after the Kampani explosion; between corporate interests and social justice. The novel swings between extreme realism and a level of surrealism—or you could call it, magical realism (though Sinha doesn’t agree with that portrayal), which reminded me of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (another parallel that Sinha doesn’t see) [see my interview].

To date, both the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle have featured reviews of the book, critiquing it as unrealistic and somewhat gimmicky—they didn’t buy into Animal’s illusions or the notion of a French nun who speaks no Hindi teaching Animal bits of French. (Those things didn’t bother me at all. I saw them as pieces of the puzzle to understanding the strange, surreal, complex world that Animal inhabits; one that is a mashup of the real and the imagined. But, that’s just me.) At the same time, they have praised Sinha for “an act long overdue in the canon of Indian literature in English: giving the poor a voice that sounds like their own” (SF Chronicle) and “a plainspoken lyricism that brings his subject into sudden focus” (NYT). With this I couldn’t agree more.

After reading Animal’s People, I had many questions for Indra Sinha, both about his intentions and his inspiration, as well as about his writing process. He was kind enough to oblige. Read the interview.

Sandhya at 07:31 AM in Fiction, Literature · 10 comment(s) · Direct link

March 07, 2008

Poetry Friday: Mad About Elephants

A little pre-post note from Sandhya Nankani, your new guest blogger: At least once a day, I come across a link or a piece of literature or an article and I think, “That would be great for sepia!” So it goes without saying that I’m thrilled about coming aboard as a guest blogger for the next month. You’ll read ennis’s little ditty about me later today, so besides inviting you to check out my family ruminations, I’m ready to fly…

For the next month, I thought it would be fun to import a regular feature—Poetry Friday—from my personal blog Literary Safari. I’ll be putting a subcontinental twist on this. Every Friday I’ll be posting a poem by a desi writer that speaks to me.

I’ve always had a thing for elephants. My first (and favorite) stuffed animal was a gray elephant. In those days, stuffed animals were not very soft or fuzzy. Mine is rough and tough, but he has survived three decades, and continues to thrive (despite his half-fallen off trunk) alongside my collection of elephant kurtis; shell, glass, and metal elephants (including Ganeshas); elephant paintings and silkscreens, elephant magazine holder … yeah, OK, you get the point!

So, today’s poem—which I recently discovered in Billy Collins’ anthology 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day—is (brace yourselves for the long title) “Aanabhrandhanmar Means ‘Mad About Elephants’” by