Sense

Mermaids, metamorphosis and murder (Part 1)

2011-12-08T20:22:00.001+05:30

The city heaving withsultry weather, the local trains suffocating with the sour smell of sweat andshit, and the sea-side walk-way drowning with beggars, snack-sellers and untalentedperformers – that fateful Saturday night of November 13, 2001 had seemed nodifferent than the many Saturday nights before it. We, the three of us, had settledat our favourite Alta Vista Bar after a brief walk by the dirty fringes of theArabian Sea, which one of us flippantly called “the piss of the sheiks” and anotherone “an odious ocean”. Our agenda that night, like on every Saturday night, wasto discuss our infinitesimal progress as aspiring writers, to bemoan the burdenof a writer’s consciousness, to give shapes to our inchoate literary ideas, andalso to drink enough alcohol till passions gurgled inside us and we becamecreative hooligans of sorts, vowing to continue the struggle for another lousyweek. I thought of these Saturday meetings as serious artistic exercises not becauseI always emerged from them drunk to the point of being wasted, which I queerlyregarded as important, but because they loaded my head with a rollickingheaviness inside which all the curious accumulated inspirations would balloonand become top-notch stories. In those days the best of my short stories, oneswhose subjects were light years away from the weekly social-real garbage I wasmanaging to get placed in obscure journals, were written on Sundayafternoons, when battling the static of a hangover the sweet music of narrativeand character, of word-play and witticisms, and of bungled beginnings, non-existentmiddles and fantastic ends, would come to me in astounding fidelity. Many ofthese stories are still lying as ignored kilobytes inside my old desktop, stillawaiting emancipation on paper, like foetuses put into cold storage in somenether, nether world.

It must bementioned here that I was not alone in having a distaste for plain-vanillasocial-real literature. The antipathy was shared equally by the other two aswell, who were similarly disgusted by what it did to creativity in fiction. Infact, our common view was that writing social-real fiction of the kind thatdwells excessively on traditions, family issues, societal shifts et ceteraabraded the talent of a fiction writer. It turned him into a socialcommentator, a kind of exalted journalist who understands his task merely todescribe what he sees before him – and that too in a pathetic hope to improve thelot he describes with his writing. Net-net: the historical-sounding,oh-look-look-society-is-changing social-real concept was to us feeble andhollow, a way for writers to find an easy way out in detailing the most obviouscharacters and their most obvious conflicts; and drugging themselves with theillusion that the more real and relevant their recording of it, the moresubstantial would be the change that it can effect. We, nevertheless, hadrespect for the oldies – guys like Balzac, Chekhov, Prem Chand et al. Ourill-will was directed only to those who still thought of social-realism asimportant. Not a small number, this. But let me also direct you to our irony:the only pieces that we were able to get placed anywhere were the social-realtypes; we wrote them in the hope that one day we could write what we wanted.

We were ambitious andfoolish, the way all aspiring writers are. We wanted to establish an cult ofour own, and these Saturday meetings provided a time for us to reinforce thismutual desire. We were seeking an amalgamation of the trite and the extra-ordinaryin literature. Magical realism,post-modernism, irrealism – we had heard all, but none described fully what wewanted to do. A working title for our school of thought was “Improbabilism”though we all agreed that it was a horrible name for what we had in mind. Thebasic rules of Improbablism had been crafted. There were seven of them, butsadly I remember only four:

1. The narrative has no liabilities of coherence. It must appear to have followed its mind.

2. The story-line should stay unpredictable till theend. It is better if the writer also doesn’t know the story at any point

3. The characters should appear to do the improbable atall times without proper reasoning for their behaviour

4. If the reader cannot imagine, he should be offeredthe choice at some point to stop reading

Who were our heroes,our inspirations? Well, Kafka and Borges were our heroes, though the former’slimitations in themes and the latter’s encyclopaedic tone we had decided tocall unfortunate. Even more, we bemoaned the ever-existent plan in their fictions.

Why did we discussthings like this? Well, our ambition was too big for our comprehension, and Isuspect that each one of us was aware of that. It was exciting to be anaspiring writer, but it was also scary. We needed each other. We needed eachother to validate the usability of our own ideas. It seemed essential to gainsome confirmation before writing something. More so because we felt that wecould not afford to write non-sense. Aware of the urgent requirement to make itbig with our originality rather than our adaptations, we felt that our time wasrunning out; and that it was necessary to crack the arcane code of publicationquickly and decisively.

On Saturdays, we woulddiscuss things with zeal, too much zeal in fact, and also with what we calledwriters’ foolhardiness. Digressions were welcome. Quite often, the meat of themeeting was arrived at through a lengthy digression.

That night, whilewalking on the sea-side platform at Marine Lines, our discussion had stayeddour and desultory as ever, the customary cussing of mainstream publishing –its “slit-wide vision”, one of us said – being its focus. But within a shortwhile at the Alta Vista bar our discussion, making use of the artificial, liquid-inducedliberty began to hop around from topic to topic. Parentheses entered intoparentheses, and blatant detours – led by strong tugs of nearby shouldersinevitably degenerating into violent shakings – entered our discourse. It wasexactly the same as what happened on every Saturday night. Soon, literary ideas– unearthed or hit upon in the preceding week – began to be shared. The ideasthat were tabled that night, I must warn you, were all bizarre. But this wasnot unusual either. For us, this – the bizarre, the weird, even the paranoid –had become quite normal.

By 9 PM, ourperceptions had been amply muddled by a curious combination of cheap vodka andcheaper rum. After twelve rounds ofdrinks and umpteen cigarettes in between, we were in a sort of delirium, a veryfuzzy zone of knowing and forgetting that seemed particularly acute, almosthallucinatory, that night. This delirium, I believe, was the cause of all theabsurdity that was to follow. In fact, my memories of that night are laced witha lot of noise, and I confess that I cannot recount the story exactly. Forexample, who among us was the one to introduce the concept of metamorphosis,using which we were to later digress to the topic of mermaids, is unclear tome. It could have been me, but that seems unlikely, for in my mind the majoridea of that night was something related to science fiction, about thepossibility of reproduction in androids or something like that. Of this I’msure, for I have an unpublished story draft dated November 12 based on thisconcept – in which the protagonist, an android called Zen, is frustrated at thepermanent failure of its reproduction system (caused due to an accident) andcommits suicide.

Coming back to thematter of my confusion, I would further like to stress that who-said-what thatnight is a definitive dilemma for me, one that I feel I will never be able to resolve.Maybe it is better to say that my identity fused a little bit with those of theother two present that night, and we can from here-on only be understood as awhole with three different voices. Which means that my version is an imperfect reconstructionof events. But then, in being so, in being rendered, it is still theclosest version of the truth that you will ever have available.

Facebook

2011-11-13T12:41:00.001+05:30

Fruits of my good life -- my good muses,
my good discoveries, my good friends -- pickled
in a sea of other.

This book of faces. Aargh.

(5) Short poems

2011-11-13T11:37:00.001+05:30

1.

Eagle, traipsing the air,
too far from the city sough,
the smell of rust.

2.

A crack in the wall.
It grows into a crevice, and more.
Till geckos go inside and hibernate.

3.

Pink house; windows with chintz curtains.
I peeped in.
Coughing old man. Coughing TV.

4.

At the fruit market:
"Pomegranates, 160 rupees a kilo,
for freshening the soul right now right now"

5.

"Ladies, move," she says
and I get a new woman in my arms.

LA style salsa.

Home

2011-11-13T09:47:00.001+05:30

I woke up on that worn out bed-sheet.
A train of elephants on the border.
Entwined flowers, convoluted, conjoined, in the middle.
On the ceiling that yellow fan from forever, dithering.
Father, I heard you working the garden among birds.
Mother, I heard you humming with the boiled potatoes.
Yes. Home.
No need to wake up; no need to face the world.
Snuggle in this nest of hard bed, hard pillows:
The sum of the velvet of the world.

View from Seventh Floor

2011-11-03T18:47:00.000+05:30

The delights on your chest, O Black city.
Moving twinkles - red and yellow and green and blue.
Flies from another planet flitting in their tar.

The briefest sketch of Muzaffarnagar

2011-11-03T12:35:00.000+05:30

Motorcycles blare like a hooter
behind baleful buggies
lugged by defecating he-buffalos,
the greenery splattering
on the road to someday become hay -
pierced often, in its warmth,
by the thin wheels of rickshaws.
In the afternoons, neighbourhood women discuss
schemas that lead to a baby boy.
Positions. Durations. Lunar Calendar. Love.
At the theater unknown movies play;
their posters with bursting bosoms,
fake torsos of enraged heroes,
ugly villains raping someone,
and guns, guns galore -
pasted everywhere.

Kayaking

2011-10-23T22:48:00.001+05:30

The way you had drawn on the map.
A zig-zag of blue. Trails of a measured pen.

The water was a lullaby, but we couldn't sleep.
Your wide eyes wanted to see everything.

Mine didn't know how to focus.
And see the sublime. That, which was all around.

Book Review - "Everything is Illuminated" by Jonathan Safran Foer

2011-10-12T20:14:00.001+05:30

Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Oh, the naked ambition of Mr. Jonathan Safran Foer! How urgently he wants to be propelled to the summit of literature; how desperately he desires to be spoken of in the same breadth as Rushdie, Marquez, Calvino, and other such greats. And how fascinatingly (for the critics) this ambition has made him fall.

"Everything is Illuminated" is the work of genius, a brazen genius - and that is its problem.

Jonathan - lets talk not in not-truths but in truths, as I would have it. You set out to write the best post-modern novel ever. And you knew, or rather, you had learnt, how to do it, and were confident of your abilities. For example, you knew how to play with time; how to include various seemingly disconnected snippets of text, and thus spruce your work hither thither with these inanities; how to use two narrators commenting on each other's work, thus providing a Borgesian mirror-to-a-mirror angle to the whole thing.

But you wouldn't stop at that.

You also set out to write the best holocaust novel ever - one that would be feverishly comic and infinitely tragic at the same time. While conceptualizing the holocaust part, you perhaps figured (not very originally) that the novel's scope would expand enough to allow you to include something of a personal treatise on love (which does have more than a few exceptional sentences, along with massive repetitions).

The problem is Jonathan, what you're trying to do is obvious to the knowing reader, and this hampers his enjoyment to a great degree.

But perhaps, in a freakish post-modernish way, you knew this would happen. I remember a point in your book when another (imaginary) book called "Trachim" - all about love, the narrator called it - was mentioned. And then elsewhere, or perhaps at that point itself - I don't remember - the narrator mentioned the book receiving huge popular acclaim and critical indifference. I can only now see how post-modernishly accurate your insinuations were.

I feel like giving my piece of mind to America and American Literature. And it is simple - If you already rate Jonathan Safran Foer as a great, God save your literature. I've no doubt that he will become one, but he should let himself some time. And be allowed to have the clarity to see his overdoings. I do not know what his second novel is like, and I'm very eager to follow Foer. I wish him the best. Don't get me wrong. The guy has real potential, the kind of potential that could do to this century what Joyce and Nabokov did to the previous one. But he is too smart to let it happen the way it should - simply.

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A break in a long journey

2011-10-10T20:34:00.000+05:30

To be published in Xenith

A whimper and a burst

2011-09-29T22:55:00.002+05:30

To be published in Decades Review

Super duper

2011-09-29T22:47:00.002+05:30

It was but a matter of time that Mr. Rubric Smith reported a contagion of incest among Saharan elephants. I'm looking at a speed dial and all I see is the desert and sex. Three years back a cloud went inside the soil and made many inquiries. Who is David Viscott? We do not accept Credit / Debit cards. They let you pay for some cancer research fund but you can never be sure. Today i had beer with a friend and he was fat. He was fat and he was holding his belly in his palms and playing with it. Social weight! All my life I didn't love you mother but tonight I did. I talked about you in jest and my heart felt claustrophobic. Love me, he says. Who? Jonathan Safran Foer. Love me, because it doesn't exist, and I've tried everything else that does. Super line. Super duper! Love me as if you just saw me, because we have seen each other too long... long enough to sketch portraits. This city is a prison. Bombay! Oh Bombay. Death of my youth, challenge of my life... the love, the love of all my hatreds!

Book Review - "English, August" by Upamanyu Chatterjee

2011-09-25T09:05:00.002+05:30

English August: An Indian Story by Upamanyu Chatterjee
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"The mind is restless, O Krishna"

I couldn't at once decide - in fact, I debated it a lot internally - whether to brand Agastya Sen's story as a 3-star serio-comedy or a 4-star piece of literature. I've finally decided on the latter. The variability of criticism that this book has received has astounded me. My reasons for placing it where I have are below:

1. This is a first novel
2. It is beautifully written for a first novel. The language is consistently top-class
3. It is an Indian story. As Chatterjee even points out in the novel, this is not the NRI author pining about India. This is an Indian author writing about the severity of dislocation that we Indians may sometimes feel in our own vast country. The character are real (although the dialogues may sometimes appear to be unreal. But then, so many authors have been excused this) and Indian. The differing world within India are the cause of the protagonist's conflict.
4. Although the many sly literary references appear too cute at times, the main ones - Bhagwad Gita and Marcus Aurelius' Meditations - are masterly used. The ending, with a superbly befitting quote from Marcus Aurelius, can be read many times without losing the pleasure in doing so.
5. Written just seven years after "Midnight's Children" Chatterjee achieves a feat, esp being a first timer, in not trying to ape the stupendous language-dependent humour of Rushdie. Upamanyu has developed his own unique style, a blend of situation and causticity, that may often find the reader clutching his stomach in laughter.
6. Although there seem to be many variables floating throughout the novel - Indian bureaucracy, corruption, tribal development, moral turpitude among the ruling, etc. - Upamanyu resists the temptation to get preachy about these. This maturity is particularly appreciable - especially in my personal case - because of how it differs from the senility of Indian writers in Hindi (Case in point is Amritlal Nagar's "Karwat" which was written just three years before this book - and goes on and on about Swami Dayanand and arya Samaj and what not). Upamanyu relates this flotsam of topics to his protagonist's inner world beautifully, and never once does he commit the error of making the making the disillusioned Agastya take a side. Chatterjee classifies himself as an Indian Writer in English here.

But there are also the flaws of the first novel, which I believe a good editor would ahve tighetened a great deal more. For example there are long passages / phases which seem to be inserted only to accentuate the depiction of the dour and dull life of the protagonist. The reader can sometimes have too much of this life, yes. But all in all, the boredom manages not to seep to the reader too much, and the ride remains a humorous, enjoyable one.

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लघु-समीक्षा - 'करवट', अमृतलाल नगर जी का उपन्यास

2011-09-18T13:06:00.001+05:30

Karwat by Amritlal Nagar
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

एक उपन्यास में क्या होना चाहिए? उपन्यास लिखने का औचित्य क्या है?

अमृतलाल नगर का उपन्यास - 'करवट' - मुझे तो उपन्यास प्रतीत नहीं होता. नगर साहब ने इतिहास पुनर्रचन की कोशिश को इतनी शिद्दत से पकड़ा है, कि उनके पात्र भी इतिहास की पोथियो को साहित्य में पिरोने के अलावा कुछ नहीं कर पाते. एक बार फिर एक हिंदी उपन्यासकार वही गलती करता है - मनुष्य के निजी जीवन से हटकर समाज को सुधरने की बकवास कोशिश. अपने हीरो की अंदरूनी समस्याओं से तो नागर साहब का फोकस इतनी आसानी से कई बार हट जाता है, कि पूछिए मत. एक और बात: नगर साहब आर्य समाज का खुलकर समर्थन करते है - जो कि उपन्यास को एक नैतिक शिक्षा पात्र जैसा भी कई बार बना देता है.

नागुइब महफौज़ का उपन्यास 'पैलेस ऑफ़ देसिर' साल कि शुरुयात में पढ़ा था. उसमे में इतिहास की एक कड़ी को पकड़कर जीवन के फिर से रचने की चेष्टा थी. पर वहां परिणाम अति उत्तम हो गया था. क्यूंकि महफौज़ साहब ने इतिहास को सिर्फ एक दर्पण की तरह प्रयोग किया. पात्रों के अंतर्मन को उन्होंने खूब तसल्ली से दर्शाया था. और उस समय की मिस्र की नैतिकता - जो कि परिवर्तन में थी, नागर साहब के लखनऊ की ही तरह - में अपनी, यानि लेखक की कोई जगह न पकड़ी थी.

नागर साहब के पास पूरा मसाला था एक महा-उपन्यास लिखने का. उनकी उस समय की समझ, बोलचाल के लहजे की पकड़, और लेखन पर भी कोई टिपण्णी व्यर्थ होगी - सब लाज़वाब! पर उपन्यास की जगह हमारेलेखाक साहब न जाने क्या लिख बैठे.

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The rebellious vector

2011-09-17T02:06:00.001+05:30

Three weeks from now time reversed. I've noticed my hair reduce in length. Not a big deal and I don't really care. All the soiled clothes have become clean, which is good. The bad thing is that my poems are getting erased; this confusing time is killing them. It's as if I never thought them, as if they never existed. The basil saplings in my little pot have gone underground - I mean, they have become seeds - and seem to want water but I'm biding my time as I don't know whether time will stop and move forward once again and whether these seeds will eventually become an old basil plant. That's logical, right? Seeds should give plant, forward or backward. Which makes me think about sex. I'm getting better and better at it, which is good. Intellectually speaking, I am more an existential than after - something that I don't really appreciate. But now I have to read that stupid Richard Bach again. It's funny, no, that time has reversed but I still keep my predictions (is this the correct word? I felt like saying memory, but memory, perhaps, is more suitable when time is moving forward) Yes, prediction. I still keep my predictions. The predictions are the memories now, right? Snippets of all that I've done. But then, what really is the difference? Does it... huh... does it not matter... oh come on... how time moves? That would be silly.

Book Review - The Storyteller by Mario Vargas Llosa

2011-09-14T14:03:00.003+05:30

The Storyteller by Mario Vargas Llosa
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read the hindi translation which, to my surprise, was good enough to keep me convinced of its sanctity till the last page.

The highlight of the novel is its unique subject, which concerns itself with the flux, and inevitable extinction, of aboriginal cultures caught in the advent of civilization in 60's and 70's Peru. Citing the endangered traditions, iconoclasms and superstitions of one such group of people (the Machigwenga tribe, who have survived for five thousand years by moving further and further into the Amazonian jungles whenever civilization - the Incas or the Spanish in the past - approache). Llosa indicates the final, real, and certainly inescapable threat faced by them in the 20th century. By finding a worthwhile human value in the customs of the this tribe, Llosa attempts to create a tenuous yet permanent feeling of loss inside the reader. He is successful, primarily because he tends to stay away from any moral position and regards the effacing of these archaic cultures as an unavoidable outcome. Never does he pretend to offer a way to prevent this loss, or pass a judgment denoting culpability. His sole objective is to record it, to represent it before the reader in the exact way that he felt it, in, perhaps, a way that this emotional loss needs to be felt.

Large parts of the novel are Llosa describing events from Florence, where photographs of Peruvian tribes in a gallery have plunged him into memories of a dear friend - an ugly, albino (jewish, for a reason) ethnologist with a red mark on his face - who held a particular interest in the Machigwenga tribe. In the first third, Llosa reminisces how the friend's interest had slowly converted into an unyielding, fierce, and later secretive passion regarding the sanctity of the beliefs and stories of the tribe. The two friends then take their respective ways; and it is only years later, after becoming an established writer, that Llosa's curiosities regarding his maverick friend are reignited. In the narrative of the novel, this reignition is linked closely to the small mystery of the 'disappearance' of this friend, and a gradual revelation of the particular story-telling custom of the Machigwenga tribe. Mario keeps learning more and more about the quiddities of, and the importance attached to, the story-telling in the social life of the tribe.

In between all of this, and also Llosa closing in on discovering the truth behind his friend's disappearance, there are chapters that provide us Llosa's renditions of the story-telling. Here, Mario Vargas Llosa writes in the voice of the tribal story-teller, reciting tales, doing a little Peruvian Panchatantra for us all. And, it is in these chapters that the novel acquires its new meaning and importance, where the modern novelist understands the importance of the the 'hablador' (the tribal teller of tales), and attempts to mimic him, even if vainly, announcing his brotherhood with the story-tellers of Machigwenga. These chapters are naive and beautiful, so much so that by the time the novel ends, the reader feels an acute urge to have Llosa say more in the tone of the 'hablador', or even become one; in exactly the same way, perhaps, that Machigwenga tribals would prod their 'hablador' to keep on.

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Meet me outside

2011-09-13T19:29:00.002+05:30

Around these cubicles there is a post-it on your noses people, little tag that I have put there - Good / Bad / Pontificator / Procrastinator / Egoist / Harmful / Unsure / Guileless. Meet me outside sometime, I will remove it. I will talk, I will listen, I will smile. We will discuss the lilac sky, how the city's lights drown it in exactly four minutes, or share our views on Woody Allen's claim to the Nobel. I will share poems that I wrote while you regurgitated your Aboslutely's and your Why not's; I will tell you what I was really thinking when I made that face and you thought I disagreed. Meet me outside people.

The bus

2011-09-12T17:57:00.001+05:30

Old, rickety Tata bus: a chariot of petulant engine, thin metal sheets and cheap glass panes, all patched together in an unseemly whole. From the exhaust pipe, dark diesel fumes gush out every time the driver makes the engine roar. The smoke rises up to the windows below which portentous crumbs of old vomit - bad memories of previous trips - stick to the body. Some seated passengers have placed their elbows on the window edge. They are unconcerned with the oral waste, with the foreign indigestions their skin might be contacting. And I, standing at this boisterous bus stand full of zany vehicles clamoring to be elsewhere, cringe with disgust and frustation. There it is in front of me, waiting for me to embark. My inescapable transport, my impending torture. .

Hemingway

2011-09-12T17:50:00.002+05:30

They never told you that the rented studio in Paris where Hemingway wrote was just above a brothel where Parisian beauties had insurmountable difficulty getting used to their cantankerous customers. They never told you that as he sat inside that room next to the open west-ward window, forcing himself on literature with those short sentences, with those words that never would send anyone to a dictionary, he often feared that nothing exceptional would come out, for the all-day-all-night pandemoniums from below always made him sick and devoid of imagination.

Not the city

2011-09-12T16:28:00.001+05:30

Not the city, no. It is what he remembers from outside it - the stuff that he has brought inside. That is his prison. He is convinced there is no life to be made here, but he also knows that there is no life to be made elsewhere either. The trap is in his head. In his memories. Wherever he goes it will be walking inside him. Even his dreams have become like day-dreams, static - standing in the middle of a road he looks at a eucalyptus tree. Nothing else happens. The world, the world of open eyes, his being in it... his being itself... is the trouble.

Dawn

2011-09-12T07:07:00.001+05:30

Far far away to the west there is midnight, but where his eyes look the sun is a bright ball in a muddy field. He watches as three stars peek at it in fear, and disappear. Slowly, the universe becomes a pale blue shadow. There is breeze but it is confused: anywhere she goes there is the past; anyplace she leaves there is the future. In the mountains, he imagines, dew is dying, even as birds blink, and bless each other, and count their numbers beak by beak. He breathes in all the air around him, and holds it to feel full. This moment, to sleep in its wakefulness, he thinks. But then he sighs, and time leaks like a gas.

Bitter Tree

2011-09-12T07:06:00.002+05:30

Some leaves are thinking suicide, you say, looking at the neem tree. You’re wrong, I say. My words are made windy by a sudden breeze. They get inside my blouse. They flirt with my breasts. You smile. In your eyes the world’s yellow truth glistens. Your face is bronze: you have stared at time for too long. Long ago with you in my eyes I climbed a mountain and tumbled down. Now I want to make my fingers cotton, or something softer. I want to touch your face. We’re near a bitter tree, you mention. You’re wrong, I say again. The breeze doesn’t pick up my words this time. Because they’re loud. All they can do is fall like stones all around me. I pick them up, put them in my pockets. They’re heavy. Your words are in the air, like drying clothes. Specimens of our solitude, wan and wandering, fall from the tree. They feather your words in approval.

Night to Day

2011-09-05T11:03:00.005+05:30

While I wrote on this desk, a lousy coffee by my side, God went and sat in the bar not so far away. He gulped down two JD's on-the-rocks, then took an auto to the nearby multiplex and saw again 'The Tree of Life', getting confused again by the light - its dimming, fading, shining, etc.- in the whole of the movie. "I get the fucking story, but what does this light-play mean" Yes he used the f-word, and yes he is a sucker for meaning like us. When he came back he told me eveyrthing and he asked me if I was done. I said No, or maybe Yes. "What do you mean he said?" again concerned with meaning, and I replied I had added some 100 words. "Phew," he said, "You're seriously missing on life outside." We opened some beers from the fridge then and smoked Marlboros till dawn suffused out of nowhere and he told me how difficult it was to decide how to break from night to day.

Dabblings

2011-09-03T21:34:00.000+05:30

1.

शिकस्त-इ-गम तो खाई यार तुमने भी

फिर इस ज़ालिम से कैसे बैर कर गए

इस सूखे दरिया से कैसे नाता न जुड़ा

इस मदहोशी को कैसे बहरहाल कर गए

2.

इस दरिया में चाँद है ढूढता, कह दो उससे

कह दो कि इस शहर को न समझे फ़िज़ूल

यहाँ दरिया को है एक बुखार

चाँद है किसी दूसरे में मशगूल

3.

जो न तुम इस राज़ को समझे कि कल सवेरा न होने देंगे

तो इस कमसिन रात में कहीं तुम भी शराबी ये कह दोगे -

बस अब और नही

The shore's difficult demand

2011-09-02T10:20:00.003+05:30

Once again,
skimming the
warm cotton
on the sea's
fringes, wetting
his hairy toes
with it,
he wonders -
what if the
city-bound bus
is not taken.

The sand had
yesterday
asked him to stay.

The reader

2011-08-08T18:12:00.002+05:30

It was only when the cover of the book had curled upwards and its pages had acquired a musty discreteness that somewhat reduced the pleasure in touching them, that he started reading the book. Inside the book, the smell of crispness and ink had dissolved a bit and had become a round smell, one without edges; but he knew that even this smell preserved over time would become old and papery and supremely delectable, when the pages would have acquired circly yellow stains on their un-printed parts - edges and inner margins -, and the covers would have become straight and hard due to the strange terrible tautness induced by grime. The book would be good to read a second time then, he thought, while reading the first few paragraphs.

Flipping the first page, he once again felt the unpleasant softness that was now embedded in the book's pages and wished that the book become available in its neat avatar once again, the way he had purchased it a few days earlier. Then he cursed himself for not having displayed the required respect to it earlier, when it was sufficiently new. "I should have read it then" he thought and kept it aside, not registering a single thing of what the book had said in its first page. Then, feeling a heavy melancholy that clouded his head and chest and also comforted him at the same time with its own cumbersome logic, he went outside his house to the bookstore to look for new books whose front covers would titillate him and whose short descriptions on the back cover- which he was aware were never written by the author himself - would convince him. There were other eager customers too, poring books with their eyesight and fervently flipping through the pages of the ones that they had picked up from the shelves. "Spoiling their intactness" he thought, and grew especially disgusted at a lady who, in order to reach a particular point right in the middle of the 300-odd pages of a book, as it were, folded the first part rather roughly behind the page that she wanted to read, thereby holding the book rather irreventially in one hand. The book: folded, marauded, ruined too early in its life, was sure to become unenticing for all, while this lady would consume the paragraphs that she wanted consumed, would deftly place the bookback on its exact shelf as if nothing had really happened, and would move away without a mote of realization or guilt.

"How unromantic" he thought, and to sever his mind from this puerility, purchased a book that he had long been wanting. While coming back to his house, he opened the book slightly and put his nose in the small slit that was thus created, taking in wafts of newness and getting enchanted, like always. He wondered what greater pleasure could there be in life.

Short comment from the blogger

2011-07-27T16:00:00.004+05:30

The impulse that drives this blog has little to do with the joys of writing, or - more abstractedly - of creation. It is fed by the same desire that feeds a collector's vanity. Each post, each poem is an object, part of a personal museum. Some inspiration might also be due to the urge to participate in the world from a distance, like a commentator, thus sharing something with a jousty journalist or a mischievious historian, both of whom essentially play word-games with time. Nothing grave, nothing geo-political, the subject matter here is the privateness of life. And as may have been guessed, the irony is in all of it being public.

Of them watching the search for talent

2011-07-25T18:22:00.002+05:30

Evenings they switch on the TV,
browsing for a just myth --
a dune of the mainstream.

At that hour each channel
is looking for the perfect voice,
the perfect talent --

looking for a nightingale
who will sing to them their cliches
in an inexorable melody

so that they may start living,
even enjoying, even meaning something
within their blinks.

The encumbrance of beauty

2011-07-25T13:22:00.007+05:30

This dissipated sunlight: She calls it 'necessary lambency'.

The shore's cold, grainy chest breaking the waves into swash; our feet's hollows filling in a hurry; the wind carrying sailors' stories, labours, the salt of their armpits; a crab strolling --

All that I fathom here, all the tantivies issued in my brain, for sharing, for conversation, for being in her, with her, are blunted, blurred, overwhelmed by themselves, by the encumbrance of beauty.

She is smiling. There is silence in her eyes.

ANOTHER VERSION:

Sunlight: She calls it 'necessary lambency'.

The shore's cold, grainy chest breaking the waves into swash; our feet's hollows filling in a hurry; the wind carrying sailors' stories, labours, salt of their armpits; a crab strolling.

What I fathom here, the tantivies issued in my brain - for conversation, for being in her, with her - are blunted, blurred, overwhelmed by themselves, by this encumbrance of beauty.

Marquez's grandmother

2011-07-25T13:16:00.005+05:30

Her cheeks, withered gnarls of skin:
under their weight her toothless mouth,
a sunken source of sundry stories,
still struggles with undulations of wisdom,
though it's true that these first chapters and
first paragraphs and first exclamations
are weary of falling on impatient ears.
Her talk is older, slower, maimed of many memories maybe;
only some fables, frizzles of a faded imagination are left.

Book Review - Amsterdam by Ian McEwan

2011-07-18T11:53:00.001+05:30

Amsterdam by Ian McEwan

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Average Read.

McEwan belabored prose, over-engineered story -- his overall swindling the reader into the final farce -- all come up short rather pathetically. Each sentence carries a certain beauty, but as a whole the novel is colossally unconvincing. Never once does the reader care, think about, or even believe in, what McEwan is driving him into. I understand now why McEwan has been panned for his over-worked plots. 'Amsterdam' - not too kindly for its author - seems to be a novel thought of by a master, but brought into the realm of words by a much lesser mortal. The whole work, the whole construciton behind it, exists for the end and the end alone - an end that the reader really doesn't give a fuck about.

I wonder how Coetzee must have felt winning the Booker a year after 'Amsterdam'. Its a pity that 'Disgrace' and 'Amsterdam' will stand side-by-side in the Booker list.

'Amsterdam' is a wholly avoidable piece of literature. Please read 'Atonement' again if you really have to read McEwan.

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I see you there

2011-07-15T08:25:00.003+05:30

a train,
a linked list
of thought,

ekes out
a stipple
of love

makes out
a mote
of disdain

knocks out
a trunk
of disgust

in the
morning things
be better

I see
you there
where nobody

I see you
there where nobody
nobody dares

I see you there
where nobody dares
to fall out

I see you there where
nobody dares to
fall out

What has daring got to do with it

I see you there where nobody
falls out of love
nobody

Elsewhere

2011-07-14T23:17:00.005+05:30

Every man elsewhere

Within, outside

Eyes open
bullied banished
immerse in blindness

Thoughts
of becoming
not being

Every man elsewhere

The present, the here,
is where no one lives.

Questions / Answers by the poet

2011-07-14T14:24:00.003+05:30

Knowing the seven hues,
have you tried to make them out
in a rainbow

Where the last hair meet her neck
have you put your nose,
buried it there, ever

The world computes,
commutes, convolutes,
chokes itself with itself, doesn't it

Mange: how it burdens
the dog on the street with disgust
Think of it

Your borrowed life
your collateral of death
running through you, past you

A cumin seed, black, burnt,
floating on the daal,
inside that transperant circle of oil

One of the things that I see

Questions to the poet

2011-07-14T14:01:00.005+05:30

Isn't this sedition:
the private looming over the world
uninvited, within whorls of whim.

And what exactly is it:
the roiled liquid, the sediment,
the tumbler itself

You gave your puzzle to the world,
and you smile when it solves,
and you smile when it stays

Is it the cryptic past, yours and mine
Do we really share it
Or is it today tick tock

Why have you done this to time
Made it a piston,
made it a vent

'Dogs dabble with itching' here
'Cars give company' there
What are these - pictures

Just what do you see

The poet

2011-07-14T13:35:00.005+05:30

The alluvium of his soul,
in each poem,
in each prophecy.

His heart, his brain, his penis:
blood billows into each,
then leaks in words.

As a child he stood bemused;
the world, too big for his eyes,
lost its corners

Today, it films past the car window,
its reel playing, replaying,
its music humming, buzzing

What is lost, he wonders, what aches
How can one be expected
to live with thoughts

We made four seasons out of a year
and lost our days,
our shades

We made a ball out of being,
Heavy, like melancholy,
it stays inside us

It stays inside him

Critique

2011-07-09T00:44:00.003+05:30

limpid language

dabblings denounced

by an anonymous

cussed commentator

as pretentious first-works

trying, teetering to

solve the world

in a single swoosh

a poem of paltry purchase

by a brown beatnik

within whorls of

smoke, semen and solitude.

Going to work

2011-07-08T11:38:00.003+05:30

The books have soaked water on the fringes:
same fate as the man who holds them in hand

Tyres: a jet spurts behind them, racing,
Cars shrouded in mist, drizzle, look like a myth

Two strokes, four strokes, soundless swooshes,
a unidirectional hurry in the air, redoubtable, like a reproach

He doesn't try to protect them, the books,
soggy pages don't flip, he smells them, those stories

At work they discourage printing, good for the planer
Earth: earth on which our realities jostle, emanate, conclude

The writer didn't write the paragraph on the back-cover
he vows never to read that again.

Porquerolles

2011-06-24T20:56:00.005+05:30

You were crushing lavendar in your fingers;

pushing on those old roots, big and strong like

stones, that had made our path.In between the

little rosemary needles the sky was blue and clear;

below, waves had colored the sea - a green, a

turquoise, a navy blue. The sweat on your

neck was trickling down, down to that necklace,

behind that flimsy lace of hair.

Your sky

2011-06-24T14:22:00.003+05:30

There are more Boeings in your sky,

thin cloud-streams zig-zagging

horizon to horizon -- semicircles of gas,

growing, fading, making an art out of the blue.

Sea link

2011-06-10T12:28:00.002+05:30

Going up the bridge --
buzzing within an auto--

looking to the left I see
an agile bulge of the sea

merging in color with the
sky behind -- the fat sky

of this season, groaning
and tumbling with its milk.

Their crease has dissolved;
their passions have rumbled

them into each other. Just that
the rank of bulbs at the sea-link--

that thing whose curves and rectangles
are darker than its background--

tells me, which is which.

For things to talk

2011-06-08T01:02:00.003+05:30

A bra would not talk
to a butcher's knife.

They could share a room
at times, but no words.

There are things around
us, on us, with us that

don't talk. X may use
an eraser and Y may

dabble with a drill. No
connections. Things talk when

they belong to a subject,
when they are objects.

Like how my uncle's screw-
drivers converse with his carpets.

Or how his wife's new dishes
gossip with her green shoes.

Or how my uncle and my auntie
talk and talk and talk and talk.

The first flush

2011-06-08T00:22:00.003+05:30

Bombay in the rain, in the
puddles of brown water
where phlegm floats.

An antiquity falls from
the fat grey skies. Lovely
transperant nuts of yore.

Are the roads salivating,
or did someone kiss them
wetly, too wetly, in love?

There, even beggars' nostrils
are filled with new airs not
redolent of time's alarm.

When a tyro is read with acuity

2011-06-03T07:07:00.003+05:30

Adamant, the room would not let be described;
the filth, the jaundiced light of the bulb
churned by the slow fan, the senescent almirah,
the bed pushed to the wall, first and last
pages of curriculum stuff strewn on the floor --
all would not mix the way they need to.

The conversation would not let be put to paper
Unreal too-real conversation: 'stifling
of the consious', 'the search and demand for poetry',
these phrases would not appear conversed, not on paper.

On paper, they say they would be lost
in that canyon of disbelief that stays
when a tyro is read with acuity.

The bulb

2011-06-01T00:04:00.002+05:30

Yesterday, just as we were on the cusp of discussing
something philosophical the bulb went off,
its filament coming unstuck, dangling within its universe,
seeming to be a thing that had nothing ever ever to do with light.

This is Chapter 3

2011-05-17T23:22:00.000+05:30

“What is he reading?”

“He reads Vonnegut before sleeping, says he wants to come unstuck in space, get inside pages and be a part of them, become 2D and all. He learned the word Kunstlerroman recently, somewhere, I don’t know where, and says he wants to become one. ‘A portrait in pages,’ he explains, ‘a man in black words against the white background of paper.’ Sometimes he smells the pages of that book, digs his nose deeper and deeper till the bind disfigures further. Then he takes out his nose and I find a conniving smile on his face, as if some new treasure has just been discovered, and he is the one and only Indiana Jones who knows all about it.”

“Hmm… go on.”

“One day he was writing late in the night, something I detest squarely, and I asked him politely what it was. He replied: ‘I’m writing the work that I’m and will be. From now on you will find me busier and busier till I transform myself completely into words. You see, I’m making words of myself. I’m mutating myself into pages, into a book. And you too! When it is over, we will both cease to exist in the form that we are today, and stay inside. You know what I mean? I’m getting us unstuck in space, and unstuck in time too, hopefully.’ I may not have recounted it verbatim, but what crap does all that mean, Doctor?”

“What else is he reading?”

“Oh, in the day, in his commute, he reads this South African guy called Coetzee. You know what he says about him, he says, ‘Coetzee is a coagulator of time. He slows things down.’ Now what can that possibly mean? The other day, he talked about the joy of reading two completely different writers alternatively in the same day. He said: ‘Coetzee numbs me for the day, and Vonnegut charges me for the night. They expand compress my time. Together, they do to me what they do to their characters, dilating some parts with tedium, pacing through others with celerity. It helps me live, but only so much.’ This scares me Doctor. What does he mean by ‘helps me live, but only so much’? Is he not happy with me? I have to know, right. And then he keeps repeating this one thing again and again: ‘I desperately want to be a Kunstlerroman: owner of my time, living off epiphanies, unstuck.’”

{Pause}

“Ok, Alexandra. I have to tell you something.”

“Please go ahead.”

“It all depends on you…ok… how you take it and all is important. You may even regard it as something very very cool. You see… ok, how to say it… he … he… succeeded.”

“Succeeded? In what?”

“In what he set out to do. In mutating himself into words. And you too. It will be difficult for you to understand Alexandra, but as of here, as of now, you’re the words he wrote down in Chapter 3. In fact, this is Chapter 3 of his book. It’s not exactly a Kunstlerroman, strictly speaking, but it’s pretty close, and yes, this is Chapter 3. And you’re lucky Alexandra, because you’re a central character. You have a name and all. I mean look at me, all he uses for me is ‘Doctor’. I mean he could have called me anything, even a borrowed one like ‘Doctor Zhivago’ would have done. But no. He’s cruel to me. I’m just a nameless narrative ploy he is using to tell the truth. But hey, as I think about it I realize that he is crueler to you, because for a reader who hasn’t read Chapter 1 and 2, you’re a middle-aged white woman distressed by her eccentric husband, crazy about writers and writing. By not revealing you, he binds you to the psychological extrapolations of the reader. Me, I’m just a faceless white coat. But may be the readers are right about you? How do I know… how can I ever know?”

“What… the… fuck… are you talking about?!!”

“And do you know when, exactly, did he write this Chapter 3… the exact time? He wrote it in one of his daily evening train travels, office to home; when he was going away from Coetzee and coming towards Vonnegut; when he was in the flux between expansion and compression’; when he was in the short time that actually used to make him unstuck, everyday.”

NO

2011-05-17T22:58:00.002+05:30

Rebellion, though apparently negative since it creates nothing, is profoundly positive in that it reveals the part of man which must always be defended

-- Albert camus in The Rebel

Inside my head the word NO sounded. NO... as a self-reproducing mot, shouting out itself. NO... its two letters feeding themselves on its singular sound, and replicating in a stream - the unifocal, negative stream of my consciousness, as good as a knot. NO... that became NO NO NO NO NO... without any effort. NO... to the worthlessness of modern existence; where nothing is left to discover for the common curious man, and to venture is to suffer knowingly; where comfort has been made enticing, and is marketed, but is achievable only through submission; where youth is bullied into tapering its impulses and life is presented as an exiting quest to best accept and absorb tedium; and where death is an allegory playing en masse in faraway lands, with visible gore and visible hide and visible putrefaction and visible decadence, yet is distant to the individual in front of the tube, evoking unfelt quasi-moral sympathies at best, that like vapours dissolve in the air. (Unless a man smells or tastes, he doesn't act; fables, verbal or aural or visual, don't evoke anything anymore) NO... to individuals exiting and entering unchanging locations; where the sounds and tastes and the sights and smells stay the same, everyday; where work, with its monotony and stupidity and facetious intellectual challenges, is posed as the supreme component of life, thereby justifying its presentation as a meaningful quest for an un-meaning tedium. NO... to this world, where currency is the end.

Book Review - A New World by Amit Chaudhary

2011-05-16T16:30:00.000+05:30

A New World: A Novel by Amit Chaudhuri

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A book that is perhaps as challenging to review - and by review I mean judge - as it was to write. Chaudhari's restraint is stifling at times; his minimalist narrator divulges little; and the reader, while understanding the rationale of the repose of the novel, invariably ends up asking for a little let-go. But apart from the fettering of the narrator, there is something more structural that one may also decipher and unequivocally cede to the writer: the dexterity of design inherent in the inception of this novel. 'A New World', if one looks finely, is a feat of literature, really - one that will not blow you away, but tend to you with sleep-inducing, sultry caresses - like the pre-monsoon weather of the city of Calcutta that it so obliquely yet aptly describes.

Chaudhary reads like a mixture of Joyce and Woolf and, a tad bemusingly, Naipaul. The details, as in the consciousness of Jayojit Chaterjee - the divorcee from America who is spending a vacation at his parents' house in Calcutta with his son, vacation-rights with whom he has recently won in a court battle with his deviant wife - are the meat of the novel. His somnambulant views of the irrelevant and unimportant happening and meetings and objects are pretty much all there is to this book. But there is a blended hint of post-colonialism, of East meets West, of the complexity of filial obligations. And like an undercurrent below all of that, there is the paricular treatment of the content with a linguistic certainty that faintly resembles the wand of the great 19th century novelists - more specifically, their twentieth century embodiment in Naipaul. Chaudhary, while invoking memories of many masters of yore, adroitly avoids getting clubbed with any one in particular. His voice is original, and his subjects, as uninteresting as they are; and his plots, as sub-plot like as they are; are nevertheless a direction for the novel that is - quite surprisingly by the end of the book - very novel indeed. 'A New World' ails from a fuzzy ineptitude in realistically chanelling the content of conversations, but even that passes along, for Chaudhary convinces you with his abstruse development of characters to such degrees, that after a time you understand and accept the fact that his characters - bound by relations of blood as they are - have nothing to say to each other, except sharing the banalities of every day life. In this way, even the deficiencies in Chaudhary's writing seem to work in his favour, which is predominantly due to the choice of plot and setting. There is realism here, but it is a somnambulist realism, which serves the purpose of justifying most of what Chaudhari does in this book.

Many reviewers have blamed Chaudhary of giving us nothing in his novels. But Chaudhary's work, as one intelligent reviewer noted, is not the stuff of novels, but of what might happen between novels. By doing so, it fills a space in modern literature, and questions, knowingly or unknowingly, the Jamesian notion of the 'interesting' requirement being imposed on this art form. A novel - if a definition was to be winnowed from Chaudhari - can be a celebration of language; can be a somnolescent drifting away of life, captured in words; can be an evasion from the heart-wrenching emotions that surround its characters. A novel, certainly, can also be defined by what it is not. And for sensitizing us to this interpretation, Chaudhari deserves an emphatic thumbs-up.

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Book Review - Chitralekha by Bhagwaticharan Verma

2011-05-10T01:00:00.001+05:30

Chitralekha by Bhagwaticharan Verma

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Central Idea: No saintly act, no sin; a man just does what he has to do.

Plot: Two students, keen to understand the true nature of 'sin', are commissioned on a project by their Guru. One is sent to a rich young man enjoying all the pleasures of life, while the other is sent to a Yogi, who has abnegated all that is worldly for the spiritual. The students are required to serve these masters for one year and then revert with an answer to their question.

Pathetic Novel! But this terrible novel does one good thing: it reveals the truism that stylization, restraint and contextual relevance are necessary components of all fiction, even one -- in fact especially one -- whose purported aim is philosophy. With this thought, 'Chitralekha' may not even be regarded a novel, for it is a brutal failure on all these aspects. Its characters -- or rather types -- are so deplorably tied to the inescapable, shrill voice of the author, that it reads not as a subtle display of his intelligence -- as it could have -- but as a loud, over-the-top honking of it. Verma grossly marginalizes texture, concentrating unceasingly on ill-conceiving events to enable him to engage his characters in debates on philosophical issues. The fake characters exist solely for the delivery of the author's point and counterpoint, and nothing else. A Dostoyevsky reference may be made here, but any comparison is impossible; Verma is too verbose and straightforward to come anywhere close to the Russian (who, incidentally, is not a big hit with me). So pathetic is Verma's desire for control, that at no single page is he able to distance himself from the work and let it flow.

All in all, the plot and the central idea are simplistic yet strong, but their translation into fiction is poor. 'Chitralekha' is paragraph after paragraph of logical conversation (the logic by the way, if it really matters, is solid at times) delivered by characters who are clueless of what they will do next, other than talking, that is. 'Chitralekha' is hurried, as if it was written by a writer restless to provide his soul some deliverance from his own cumbersome intelligence.
But now I'm wondering. Should I deliver the final insult? I think I should: Chitralekha, ostensibly a masterpiece of Hindi literature would have never EVER found a decent publisher if it was written in English (Is that the reason why there are no translations in print?) You may call me biased. I have read one more book by Bhagwaticharan Verma -- 'Veh Phir Nahi Aayi' -- and it had the same problems as Chitralekha (the stentorian philosophizing was absent, which made it passable). I have not yet read 'Bhoole Bisre Chitr', supposedly Verma's best book, and so I will abstain from making an unqualified comment about his writing -- or about Hindi-Urdu-literature-that-is-not-social-realism. But after reading some examples 20th century Hindi novel, I have decided to be a bit skeptical of its claim of being as good as its Western counterpart.

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A stream on James Joyce

2011-05-10T00:41:00.005+05:30

James Joyce is hyper-real. Do not know the literary context where is hyper-real used? Say it no matter. James Joyce is hyper-real. So real. Shows reality so closely that it is disorienting. If a novel is a video, 'Ulysses' is a high resolution photograph, where each pixel is propounding its chromaticity. Dubliners is amateurish. Can't be sure. Have read only seven of fifteen. First seven, that is. 'Eveline' was good. And 'An Encounter' too. Starred both in the name I gave to the doc files on the office PC. How will I recover those files? Logged in there today but will sit in a different office tomorrow. Overall 'Dubliners' is bad. Loved 'Portrait'. A1 stuff. How he must have realized that he was set for failure after 'Dubliners'? And how he thought of this inside-the-head reality stuff? But can his characters really be themselves. The Dedalus, the Mulligan, the Bloom. We can't know such inside stuff about anyone else than ourselves. No we can't. And no research will tell it. No. Then his characters are all him. All Dedalus. Which make it easy to write what he does? No can't be. Seven years from 1914 to 1921 it took him to write Ulysses. I saw on the internet how he cancelled draft after draft. Clear crosses. Rewriting and rewriting. Curious fellow. Smithy of my soul the unformed conscience of my country and race or whatever. No conscience he makes in Ulysses. Don't know about Finnegan's Wake. Nabokov says Finnegan's Wake is terrible. Fine man Nabokov. Clear views about Dostoyevski, too. Gave him a 'C-'. Read an afterword of a O Henry story collection where the author said that for Finnegan's Wake, James Joyce would search an entire day for the exact word. Le mot juste Flaubert called it.

What did Joyce give the novel? Can I understand it? An undeniable meaning to the alert reader, that is the only necessary and sufficient condition of the novel. Approachibility is not an artist's concern. Rest anyways is blah!

Only later

2011-05-08T23:04:00.000+05:30

Yesterday when her hair dobbled on the treadmill as she burned joules and calories and today when the belt of her white linen skirt dangled by the side of a papayaseller’s cart all sounds and backgrounds of all the world ceased Her feet thumping on the rolling carpet muffled the world at every impact In the market the honking of the cars muted the crowing crows lost their vocal chords The weightlifter on her side stuck himself in a position of strain and the toppled guavas of the cart behind stayed toppled in mid-air In neardeath experiences human time slows down but it tends to stop perhaps when a lover’s loving gaze fixates on an object too fine focalizing thus to the singular denomination of his desire sharpening to a degree that time is nonplussed and space becomes constrained in an image Both relieved only later by the words of a poem

Dabbling with Nabokov

2011-05-08T18:42:00.001+05:30

From the balcony, through the leaves of the neem tree, all I saw was the walk. Stiff, confident, directed, yet holding the books to breast. The hair would be open or tied. The top would be pink or green or black. Everyday I gazed.

Then schedules changed.

Tuesday. Raindrops as big as a walnut. We crossed. I saw her face. Everything stopped.

It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.

This strong day

2011-05-08T01:44:00.002+05:30

This strong day has forgotten its tremulous dawn. It burns unaware of night, spreading a sheet above that obfuscates eternal light-specks. Its clouds, dressed white like cunning sages, hallucinate.

Book Review - Tar Baby by Toni Morrison

2011-05-01T11:58:00.000+05:30

Tar Baby by Toni Morrison

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Should a writer of Toni's calibre restrict herself with a not-so-grand ambition?

Toni is a master at managing conversations and a writer who reveals her characters more through these, and occasional interior monologues, than actions. In 'Tar Baby', her characters talk out everything, either with themselves or with others; each conflict inside their hearts is mightily verbalized. And all that is fine. So very fine. Because the conflicts are of import: conflicts around the true culture of white-folk and black-folk; and how these two have mingled with each other through time; and how these two should evolve with time -- whether they should confuse their historical roles to the point of exchanging them, or stay comfortable in the faint trails of the master-slave equation. Amidst all these is a love story that is, Tony seems to propose, flawed in its conception -- a black woman white at heart with a black man truly black. In the denouement, the all-so-predictable failure of this love story coincides with the transmutation of every white-black relationship; and Toni leaves things at that.

Could the novel have been written better? Yes. The prose-poetic content of chapter introductions is a deviation; it becomes an expected frustration the reader faces every time he moves on: a case of the rush of closing a chapter being mitigated by the abstruse verbosity in the beginning of the next. The poetic expression is convoluted and lengthy; its incongruous property being revealed here even more, since ‘Tar Baby’ is primarily a novel of conversation not descriptive prose; and although Toni does exceptionally well in linking the poetry with the plot and the characters (she employs interior monologues and omniscient narrator consciousness descriptions to achieve that), the urge to skip all of that and have the characters 'really talking' is overbearing at times.

Add to that the fact that the main character - Son - the black man roiled in blackness - and understatedly portrayed as a kind of an ideal - is colossally underdeveloped, and quite inapproachable at times. You love him when he is brusque and speaks his mindm, but incomprehensible whenever he acts or talks nice to anyone else. The reader gets a lengthy description of his history; Toni even takes you to his hometown Eloe in North Florida; but you never ever get to know the guy adequately. Hows that!?

And thirdly, what does this novel achieve? Does it bare the cultural divides adequately? The answer can be arrived at through another question. Are the characters really important in the context of the conflicts to be explored?: a rich white man living in Queen of France after retirement; his wife, forced into living there while her heart lies with her son in the US; their servants, a black couple; the servants' neice, our heroine, educated with the white man's money; and the black man, our hero, who somehow swims across the ocean to bump into this melee. Do these characters really encapsulate the symbolisms they are purported to. Actually, no. Why? Because the loose definition of the last (and also the main) character ensures that all the other characters fail to consistently portray their symbolic positions - making the whole cast a little lest purposeful, a little less important.

Tar Baby works, but not throughout—because, actually, it doesn’t try hard enough. And for this Toni has to be blamed—partly in her execution, and partly for not starting out with an ambition and an idea befitting her stature.

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Book Review - The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist by Orhan Pamuk

2011-04-18T22:53:00.001+05:30

The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist by Orhan Pamuk

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Schiller's schism of poets - the naive, who jejunely write on impulse; and the sentimental, who write conscious of the act of writing and the artifices it demands - begets this book, which tentatively eschews the pretensions of being a comprehensive treatise, hiding, a bit too smugly, in its inconsequential conception as tome-i-zation of ‘The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures’. The lectures, one conceives, must have been interesting, no doubt. But the book is excruciatingly disappointing, with Orhan's interest restricted solely to a display of intelligence, rather than talking authoritatively on literature. Even the presentation of a novelist’s intelligence, using which the novelist walks over a certain cleft to be able to create, is hardly refreshing, impressive only in little bouts. It doesn’t bring anything unique and new to the existing understanding of the art of composing novels. It’s essence may be gleaned elsewhere – merely by browsing interviews, or even the records of any off-hand quips by some of the world’s most famous writers. To be specific, I quote here John Updike from a not-so-long-back interview, published in Guernica:

Writing is trying hard to do two things, as I see it. One is to be entertaining in itself (naïveté?). Any page of good prose has something of the quality of a poem. It’s interesting in itself even if you don’t know the story or quite what you’re reading. It has a kind of abstract dynamism. But also it is trying to deliver images and a story to a reader, so in that sense it should be kind of invisible (sentimentality?).

It is indeed unsurprising that in a telephonic interview, Updike manages to elucidate the core conflict writers face in writing novels with such accuracy; one that Orhan seems to have arrived at through years of indulgent reading, and re-reading. Though Orhan’s idea may appear to have a certain sheen because of the weight and import of the names it evokes in support, its banality in today’s age makes us ascribe a simple adjective to this first attempt at literary theory – naive!

And there is more. In one instance in the book, Orhan points to Schiller’s envy of Goethe’s naiveté in poetry, and recommends an abstinence from such envy as far as novel-writing goes, for, as he proposes, the sweet-spot for a novelist is the balancing act of the two extreme necessities of writing. Now, peruse the following lines from Updike’s same interview, immediately after the above passage:

And I think I’m a little more invisible than Nabokov is. But the beauty and the comedy, and the poignancy often, of his prose, are something I’m happy to imitate if I can.

Now isn’t that the Schiller-Goethe envy being indicated as a Updike-Nabokov one, by Updike himself? Isn’t this an instance of what Pamuk proposes, and builds on laboriously in this book as far as the art of novel-writing is concerned, being revealed by Updike in candid spontaneity, almost as if the schism, or the divergent forces as they exist in-force during the act of writing, are a de-facto concept in writing novels. The reviewer’s point here being: If a novelist’s intelligence was the key feature of this book (which it is thankfully not), the book may be termed banal, for there is nothing supersedingly new or intelligent in Orhan’s theory in the first place – in fact, it is trite among the legion of writers, so much so that Updike can recite it on telephone, gobbling, perhaps, a square of Lindt.

But if Orhan’s borrowed build-up on the naive and sentimental axes fails to entice when applied to novelists, it has some relevance, and novelty, when the reader is seen from these lenses. It is in these parts that this book is most interesting: As the reader discovers points of familiarity with his own reading exercise and tries, in his own mind, to recite instances where he behaved like a naive one, immersing totally in the landscape of the novel, taking it to be more real than life itself; or like a sentimental one, trying to figure the trickeries and puns and puzzles and artifices of the writer’s craft, denying himself a suspension of disbelief for long terms; the book delivers its punch. Even more so when Orhan advises that one stay away from both types, for none of them can truly experience the real joy of reading novels.

Thereafter, the compulsively joy-seeking reader is looking for even more categorical statements from Orhan, a lengthier list of strict do’s and don’ts. But as Orhan moves into character, plot, time, object and other nuances of the craft of the novel, increasingly from a writer’s viewpoint rather than from a reader’s, the stridence in his voice fizzles out yet again. Interesting things do emerge, however, as Orhan shares his allegiance to Tolstoy, Proust, Mann, and yes, albeit a bit grudgingly, Nabokov; his reverence to Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, Borges and Calvino; and his greetings to many more. The juicy reference here is Dostoyevsky, stated by him as a striking counterexample to his own theory of literary character, where protagonist is brought alive by descriptions of the inextricable connections to the world as he sees it (the concept is confessedly Nabokovian, and therefore Tolstoyan). The building of the protagonists' character, as per Orhan, cannot and should not be the role of the novelist and the task of the novel. (A very correct and nobel thought which the reviewer agrees to). Rather than directing the world through the force of his character, or being directed by the world without wanting to, the protagonists in Orhan's novels are interested only in being involved in the incidents and events. He identifies his role, the novelist’s role, as one of realistically displaying the interplay. All very fine, and quite the opposite of Dostoyevsky, one imagines, where the character, or characters, are the heart, soul, and action, of the novel. Dostoyevski, as Orhan describes him rightly, is one whose rooms are empty but protagonists full of an overbearing character. And after all that Orhan exclaims, a tad bemusedly, that Dostoyevski is successful and great. Why, at that instant this reviewer wonders, could Orhan not muster the courage to chide Dostoyevski, in spite of being so obviously in total disagreement with the Russian? Orhan provides, in fact, a scared schoolchild’s defence to an alternate way of solving a math problem – “That’s the way I did it”. Not a confident – “That’s how it should be done.” May be Orhan is correct, but there are no marks for being correct here. Spare a thought for the reader, trudging on with the urge to discover something in this book that is not mellow, not ridden with qualifications. His major complaint: Orhan praises the greats, and every one is great. How unlike Nabokov he is in this regard?; Nabokov, who faced with a similar question regarding Dostoyevski, did not shy away from delivering the nineteenth century Russian a ‘C-‘ in his evaluation.

If writers of the Tolstoy-Nabokov ilk should condemn Dostoyevsky, and Orhan no doubt is in this camp, shouldn't the post-modernist Turkish giant leave all protections and do that too. Or is he so naive in reading Dostoyevski, and novels in general, that he forgets his duty as a voice on literature? Where is the balance between the naive and sentimental Orhan? Is it restricted only to novel writing, and not extended to when he talks of them? Where is “The Naive and The Sentimental Orhan Pamuk, The Reader”?

All in all, the book is a breezy read that conceals more than it hides. For the reader to glean any interesting meanings out of it, reading between the lines is necessary. At the onset, one wonder how Orhan was shanghaied into sharing this surficial understanding of the art of the novel, considering that he is today a canonised author. The reviewer suspects that this realization might hit Orhan soon enough. In 10 years time then, one can expect a complete, and solid, theory of the novel from Orhan Pamuk. In between, he may want to revert to the task of writing a couple of novels to sharpen it.

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आएगी इधर?

2011-01-29T10:50:00.001+05:30

दिल में फुद-फुद है, मानो एक गिलहरी भीतर घुस खिलंदरी करती हो.
उसकी राह देखता हूँ. छ फुट की बालकॉनी में मैराथन लड़ता हूँ.
बालकॉनी के आगे नीम है, जिसके सर पर डिजाईन-दार तारों की चादर आन पड़ी है,
और हवा छनने जिसके पास आ रही है, सर्र-सर्र करती, खुद में ही डोलती.

सोचता हूँ, क्यूँ सात बज गए, और उसने गली न पकड़ी,
आज किस सखी की हंसी ने उसकी बाह है जकड़ी.

क्या पहना होगा- क्या वाही बैंगनी सूट?
या फिर वो पीला, जो उसके रंग से मिलकर,
शाम की इस धुंध में भी चमकेगा?

क्या गली के इस शोर के बीच आज भी उसकी पायल मुझ तक पहुचेगी?
और क्या उसकी नज़र नीम की तिकोनी पत्तियां पार कर,

आएगी इधर?

खोज के संगी (अध्याय १ - पूर्ण)

2010-12-27T01:39:00.006+05:30

हमारी मुलाकात दफ्तर में ही हुई थी। चौबीस साल की उम्र थी उसकी, मेरी आधी कहना चाहें तो कह लें। उसने यह संस्था दो महीने पहले सीधे कॉलेज से ही ज्वाइन की थी। दफ्तर में वेह दिग्भ्रमित सा रहता था; क्या करना है, कौनसी लाइन पकडनी है, इसका उसे कुछ खासा अंदाजा न जान पड़ता था। मैं उसे बालक समझता था, दफ्तर के दाव-पेइचों की जिसे समझ न थी। ऐसों को देखकर मुझे सफलता का आभास क्यूँ होता था, क्यूँ होता है, इससे में आज भी अनभिज्ञ हूँ। क्यूँ एक जवान को दिशाहीन समझकर और उसे दफ्तर के राजनैतिक किर्या-कलापों की टिप्पणियाँ देकर मेरा सीना चौड़ा हो जाता है, क्या मालूम? शायद जिंदगी में उम्र और तजुर्बे के आलावा कुछ हासिल नहीं किया, तभी तो बेचारा मन इन्ही की डींगे मारता रहता है।

मैं जवान, जूनियर लड़के-लड़कियों पर रौब मारता हूँ, पर यह भी सच है कि मैं इनसे घुल-मिल भी जल्दी ही जाता हूँ। अपनी उम्र के सहकर्मियों में से इर्ष्या और प्रतिद्वंदता कि बू आती है, जो कई बार सहमा देती है। हर शब्द दिमाग के फाटक से दो बार गुजरने के बाद ही मुख तक आता है। फिर उस पर बीवी-बच्चों, शादी-जन्मदिनों, गधे-घोड़ों, ओबमाओं-ओसामाओं कि बातें, जिनमे मुह पर मुस्कान लिए आदमी घुस तो जाता है, पर बाहर निकलने का रास्ता नहीं खोज पाता। बातचीत या तो संवेदनशील हो या फिर नीरस, ऐसा तो कही नहीं लिखा, पर मेरे उम्र के लोगों में यही सच जान पड़ता है। दूसरी तरफ, इन बालकों से तो कुछ भी कहा जा सकता है। ये न तो दफ्तर कि बातों कि चुगली करेंगे (करेंगे भी तो उसकी क्या ही महत्ता होगी) और न ही इनके चेहरों से गृहस्थ जीवन कि बर्बरता झलकेगी। इनकी भी कुछ व्यथाएं तो जरूर होंगी, पर क्यूँ सुने? इन्हें श्रोता ही क्यूँ न बनायें रखें? आखिर इस उम्र में हमारी कौन सुनता था? औदे का इससे अच्छा उपयोग हो सकता है भला?

मैं उस लड़के को, जिसके कारण यह कहानी लिखी जा रही है, जब भी देखता था, तो उसकी कंप्यूटर स्क्रीन पर खोया ही पाता था। उलटे हाथ से उलझे हुए बालों को और उलझता, सीधे हाथ से कंप्यूटर के चूहे को बीच-बीच में नचाता, आँखों से एक-टक अपनी स्क्रीन को देखता वह हमेशा लुप्त सा नज़र आता था। कुछ दिन गौर करने पर मैंने जाना कि वह दफ्तर का कोई काम नहीं कर रहा होता था। यह कोई बड़ी बात न थी। सबकी ही तरह उसे भी कोई काम न था। पर काम करने का नाटक, जो सभी निष्ठा के साथ करते थे, भी वह कभी नहीं करता था। बस कोई न कोई अंग्रेजी कहानी पढता रहता था। 'क्या उसे डर नहीं लगता? क्या उसे मेरा या किसी और वरिष्ठ-जन का खौफ नहीं है?' यह बात मुझे विचलित करती थी। अगर वह मेरे नीचे होता, तो मैं जरूर टोक देता. पर उन दिनों दफ्तर में यह जान पाना बहुत मुश्किल होता था कि कौन किसके नीचे है, और कौन किसके ऊपर। यह स्पष्ट था कि मेरा उस लड़के से पारस्परिक स्तर पर कुछ लेना-देना नहीं था। 'फिर क्यूँ न मन बहलाया जाए'- ज़ाहिर है यही सोचकर में उसके पास गया था।

"क्या उटपटांग चीज़ें पढ़ते रहते हो जनाब?" मैंने उससे पूछा।

"ओह" चोंककर उसने अपनी स्क्रीन पर खुली हुई कहानी बंद कर दी और एक अटपटी सी सूरत लेकर मेरी ओर पलटा। मैं उसकी सीट के ठीक पीछे ही खड़ा था। मेरी कटाक्ष भरी मुस्कान देखकर वो थोडा घबरा गया था शायद, तभी खड़ा होकर बोला -

"क्या आप वाकई में जानना चाहते हैं?"

"हाँ भई, क्यूँ नहीं? हम क्यूँ आज के युवा के स्वादों से दूर रहें, उन्हें न समझे?" मैंने चुलबुलाहट, और हलकी सी अवहेलना, से भरा प्रश्न दागा। पर वह मेरी दोहरी आवाज़ को जैसे समझ न सका, और मजाक समझकर हँस दिया।

"एक समकालीन लेखक हैं, अमेरिका में, नाम है जोनाथन फ्रान्ज़ेन। उनका एक उपन्यास आया है। वहाँ उसकी काफी धूम है। पहले दो अध्याय इन्टरनेट पर मुफ्त में पढ़े जा सकते हैं, वही पढ़कर अपना मन बना रहा था। आप अब तक की कहानी जानना चाहेंगे?"

"नहीं नहीं" मैंने उत्तर दिया। मुझे उस लेखक के बारे में कुछ न पता था। दरअसल कुछ चुनिन्दा नामों के अलावा मुझे किसी भी लेखक के बारे में कुछ न पता था। लेखन के बारे में कुछ न पता था। पिछला कुछ क्या और कब पढ़ा था, इसका बिल्कुल स्मरण न था। यह कहना गलत नहीं होगा कि उस समय मैं किसी भी भाषा के कैसे भी साहित्य के विषय में मैं कुछ नहीं जानता था, समकालीन साहित्य तो दूर कि बात थी। फिर भी मैंने कहा-

"अरे पहले हमारे लेखको को तो पढ़ लो। कालिदास पढ़ा है? कालिदास का शकुंतला पढ़ा है? मेघदूत पढ़ा है? शेक्स्पीर का भी पिताजी था वो, ये क्या जोनाथन-जुनाथान ढूंढते रहते हो।"

यह कहकर, रौब भरी चाल लेकर मैं उससे दूर चल दिया। मन में एक काली संतुष्टि भी हुई, पर क्षण भर को। अन्दर कुछ कुलमुलाने लगा। सोचा, ये क्यूँ मैंने कालिदास की बलि चढ़ा दी? क्यूँ इस लड़के को एक लघु-प्रवचन दे डाला? साहित्य के विषय में जो बेचारा एक अकेला कालिदास जुबान पर आ पड़ा था, उसे क्यूँ साथ के साथ उड़ेल दिया था मैंने? क्या सिर्फ एक अजीब सी शेखी बघारने को?

मिथ्या और झूठे गौरव से भरे इस मन का भी कोई जवाब नहीं। यह सबसे बड़ा ढोंगी है। अपने कवच के मोटापे को बनाये रखने के लिए उलजुलूल बातें बुलवाता है। मेरे कथन का कोई तुक, कोई सर-पैर नहीं था। एक अपरिचित सी उत्तेजना के चलते ही मैंने ऐसा कहा था, मानो उस युवा के ज्ञान के एक तीर ने मुझे क्षुब्द कर दिया हो, और मुझे विवश होकर अपने कालिदास-रूपी ब्रह्मास्त्र का प्रयोग करना पड़ा हो।

अन्दर का एक तार, हल्का सा ही सही, झन्ना गया था। उसी का इलाज ढूँढने मैं थोड़ी देर बाद फिर से उस लड़के के पास गया। मुझे लगा होगा कि उसे अपना औदे से डराकर ही मेरी संतुष्टि हो सकेगी -

"अरे बालक... "

"अरे सर, आप तो चले ही गए, मेरी सुनी भी नहीं। कालिदास पढ़ा है सर। शकुंतला। और जिस दृश्य में यौवन से ओत-प्रोत, नटखट भवरे को भगाती शकुंतला को देखकर, आश्रम में आये राजा दुष्यंत को पहली बार प्रेम की अनुभूति होती है, उसकी पंक्तियाँ भी मुझे याद हैं - पर अफ़सोस अंग्रेजी में। अब आप कहेंगे - लड़के ने रुझान तो दिखाया प्राचीन भारतीय साहित्य पढने का, पर अंग्रेजी में उसका स्मरण कर भारतीयता का तो मटियामेट ही कर दिया... क्या मजाक है, वगैरह वगैरह - पर इसमें मेरा क्या दोष? बताईये। क्या कालिदास इससे खुश न होगा कि इस लड़के ने, पराई भाषा में ही सही, उसके लिखे महाकाव्य को अपने सुपर-सोनिक जीवन में समय तो दिया? क्या कालिदास की आत्मा को मुझसे कोई बैर हो सकता है? जब-जब जो-जो हाथ लगा मैंने पढ़ लिया। जो नहीं पढ़े उनसे कोई द्वेष नहीं, बस यही कहना चाहता हूँ कि जीवन बहुत छोटा है, और पढने-सीखने की चीज़ें बहुत अधिक। मनुष्य ने इतनी सारी कला सम्पन्न कर ली है, इतना सारा महत्वपूर्ण ज्ञान इकठ्ठा कर लिया है, कि अथाह उत्सुकता से भरा एक आदमी का दीर्घ जीवन इसकी एक बूँद भी चख ले, तो बड़ी बात है। इसीलिए, कवियों, लेखकों, और वैज्ञानिकों से माफ़ी तो नहीं मांगूंगा, पर अध्ययन से मिले आनंद में सदैव तैरने का प्रण जरूर लूँगा।"

वह एक सांस में यह सब बोल गया, और मैं एक मूक, बेवकूफ, उल्लू के पट्ठे की तरह स्तब्ध खड़ा रहा। मुह से एक बोल न फूटा। पाँव स्वतः ही दफ्तर के मेरे केबिन की ओर चल पड़े।

"अरे सर, क्या हुआ? कोई गलती हुई तो माफ़ कीजियेगा।" वह पीछे से बोला।

पर उसकी माफ़ी से अब क्या होना था।

केबिन में जाकर मैं भी अपनी स्क्रीन को देखता रहा, मानो उसमे कोई शून्य ढूंढता होऊ। एक चोट लगी थी इस युवक से बात करके, यह तो निश्चित था। ठीक से कारण तो शायद नहीं समझा सकता, पर एक अभाव, जो उम्र के रुतबे के साथ भरा था, उजागर हो गया था।

घर पहुचते पहुचते यह अभाव एक हानी के आभास में रूपांतरित हो गया। दिमाग में निरंतर एक गड्ढे में गिरने की दशा ने घर बना लिया। फिर समझ आया कि कालिदास-रूपी ब्रह्मास्त्र तो दिवाली के सीले पटाखे कि तरह फुस हो गया था। और उसके साथ सफलता का वह एहसास, जिसका ज़िक्र मैं पहले भी कर चूका हूँ, जो इस उम्र के लोगों को देखकर होता था, वह भी जाता रहा. पता नहीं क्यूँ अचानक ही यह लगा कि अपूर्ण अभिलाषाओं के जो घाव वर्षों पहले ही खुरंड बन गए थे, उन्हें सहसा ही किसी ने रगड़ दिया हो।

अच्छा ही तो हुआ था।

Readings - 2010

2010-12-26T12:08:00.003+05:30

Novels read in 2010 (Recommendations are in Green)

Love in the Time of Cholera - GGM (Exquisite piece of Literature)
Of Love and Other Demons - GGM (Average)
Identity - Milan Kundera (Brilliant at times; Gigantic in Ambition; Delivery Story leaves lot to be desired)
Summertime - J M Coetzee (Brilliant - trademark Coetzee 'otherness')
किस्सागो - मारिओ वार्गास ल्योसा (El Hablador in Hindi) (One of its kind - beautiful!)
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - Joyce (Sensed its brilliance; Digested some of it; Need to read again)
वसंत के हत्यारे - हृषिकेश सुलभ (Slightly Above Average)
Everyman - Philip Roth (Above Average)
My Name is Red - Orhan Pamuk (Would have deserved the Nobel even as a solitary piece)
Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie (Why hasn't he got the Nobel yet?)
Journey to the End of the Night - Louis-Ferdinand Celine (The Bible of Misanthropy)
कंकाल - जय शंकर प्रसाद वर्मा (Average)

Writers whose short stories I read this year

Jhumpa Lahiri
Daniyal Mueenuddin
Vladimir Nabokov
Isaac Babel
George Saunders
David Foster Wallace
सादत हसन मंटो
Roberto Bolano
Zakia Mashhadi
Jorge Luis Borges
Nicole Krauss
Jeffrey Eugenides
E. L. Doctorow
Claire Keegan
Kevin Barry

and many many more.... (links to the last two - must reads!)

Face

2010-12-26T09:50:00.003+05:30

Face plastered stoic,
eyes dub-dub-dub with water,
lips trembling,
ravening anger feasting on the heart,
circulation rapid,
finger tightly rubbing with each other:
the only outward motion of rage;

Lips parting to smile
in a close-lipped way.
They tilt to one side,
muscles tight around them,
tight is word
for the face.
Tight, till some anger leaks.

Snippets from my writing in hindi

2010-12-21T23:23:00.002+05:30

Not sharing a complete work because I'm a little ...umm... tentative. These are just snippets from differnet stories.

*
जीवन अगर एक भंवर है तो तैरने की तरकीब भला किसने बेवजह इर्जाद की. क्यूँ न इसी भंवर में डूबते रहे, बहते रहे, गोल गोल, नीचे, और नीचे. अर्ध तक तो पहुचना ही है. फिर संघर्ष से क्या प्राप्त होगा.

*
और ऐसा ही हुआ. मन बगावत की उड़ान कई बार भरता था, कई बार सड़क पर किसी सुंदरी को देखकर इश्क करने की लालसा होती थी, पर उस कसक का वह भीतर ही भीतर, कल्पनाओं के ज़रिये, एक मीठा शरबत बना देता था. उसने अपने मन में कईयों से प्रेम किया था, शायद कईयों का प्रेम मन ही मन प्राप्त भी किया हो, पर ये सभी प्रेम कथाएँ उसने दिमाग के किसी कोने में बंद कर दी थी, और इन्हें अकेलेपन में ही मधुरता से टटोलता था. आज इन चूहों से कुतरे, किनारों से फटे, पीले पन्नों वाले अपने जवानी के उपन्यासों के बीच वह उन सभी पुराने प्रसंगों में जैसे फँस सा गया था. आज ये गाथाएं मधुर नहीं, बल्कि कडवी लग रही थी, लग रहा था जैसे इन अधमरी, अध्जन्मी कहानियों का सत्य उसकी सभी कृत्रिम स्मृतिओं को जैसे कुचल ही डालेगा.
तभी बीवी के खर्रंतें तेज़ हो चले.
उसने भी उन खर्रंतों के साथ पन्ने पलटने शुरू किये. वह पढ़ नहीं रहा था, बस हर पृष्ठ को छूना चाहता था, मानो छूते ही कोई भूला-बिसरा चित्र स्पष्ट होता हो.
रात्रि ने भी अंततः आगे बढ़ने निर्णय किया.

*

An emerging poet's rant on the poetry scene in India

2010-12-19T11:22:00.003+05:30

Poetry, as the act of creating or reporting beauty in words, is accepted, even venerated , in most Indian households, as long as it remains an activity pursued by hyper-sensitive, otherworldly poets. When a member of the family arms himself with pen and paper, stretches his desk outdoors or on the roof, and attempts to capture the magnificence of a setting sun, or of the twilight conference of birds, or of the sweetness of solitude, an alarm is likely to be raised. For the domesticated-- and characteristically unpoetic--kith and kin of the struggling young Indian poet, the idea of poety is beautiful only at a distance; it becomes terrorizing as it gains in proximity and becomes more real.

In intelligent Indian society-- the most relevant part of which, sadly, is the urban educated middle class family-- a poet in English is a poet only if he is famous, is known entirely through books and hardly in person, and has a distinctly English second name that sounds very much like Keats or Yeats. Every other kind of poet-- which includes all young Indian English poets-- is a nobody, a total failure. To the Indian mainstream, the only contemporary poetry scene is in Bollywood, in silly jingle-friendly TV advertisements, or in Western Music; it has, unfortunately, become ensconced in its hermetic poetry-less mass-living. There is no space for a poet, and the thing called emerging poet is non-existent.

A young Indian poet writing in English thus produces work that is, essentially, work of shame and secrecy. He can't push poetic boundaries, for the fear of being awkwardly caught by parents, or being found out by insensitive friends, or being mocked at by a savage sibling, is a constant niggle at the back of his head. I know many of this species, who write pages after pages of verse that remains continually hidden, closed to criticism, and therefore, sooner or later, grows incoherent with itself, leading to disjointed poetry that neither has a head nor a tail. Personally, I see their work transforming from a poetry of beauty to catharsis, where the bits and pieces of insanity they keep on amassing due to their air-tight creation find their way out in words. To me, that's the murder of poetry. Catharsis is not poetry. Catharsis is catharsis.

The truth is that the pursuit of poetry, when compared to that of music, or even prose, is considered by the uninitiated as the most dangerous one. The normal uncreative majority is fearful of poetry more than any other art form. That reflects in their parenting too. Parents who take pride in their child strumming the guitar, or stroking the tabla, will wince with slight confusion at him closing himself in a room and scribbling on pages.

Poetry is not monetarily very attractive, true. But the danger to contemporary Indian poetry (and I restrict myself to poetry in English, although I believe what I say here is pertinent to poetry in any language within this sub-continent), lies not so much in its rate of return-- other allowed pursuits are not considerably financially superior either-- but from it being understood the least. Parents fear their son's poetry, just as they once feared the dark. The possibility that through poetry, their son empowers himself to discover an ugly truth about himself, or about his relationship with them, or about the vanity of human existence, grips them. Poetry is considered, lets face it, a sign of depression, or atleast a loose cannon that can turn that way. What they don't understand is that poetry, at its best, is a mere path towards unearthing the necessary truths of life and living, of being a human being; or it is a path to know the necessary questions for the same, that may or may not lead to any truths; what they don't understand is that this discovery has to go into the areas that their own ignorance and insensitivity have conveniently squandered, areas that their quotidianness has grown accustomed to having lost and forgotten, never to be looked for again. They just fear what they do not know, what they will never know! What a shame! And what better proof of the power of poetry!?

Let me announce that when a generation denunciates, scoffs at, ridicules, looks down upon, questions, or even raises a query regarding the utility of the pursuit of poetry by its next generation, it is denying the latter the chance to discover arenas of human feeling and expression that it itself failed to touch upon. It is the worst form of parental jealousy: I won't let you go where I never felt like going. That that feeling or expression in words has been adequately poeticized in various styles is irrelevant, because even if what is being stalled here is a mere reproduction of the works of past, it is nothing less than stubbing the creative process, a best left untouched thing.

Poetry, my dear friends, has to come, for otherwise, all the world is a big stupid transaction. And good poetry is arrived at, not hit upon by chance or serendipity. Poems that are considered masterpieces today were not conceived by the creators the first time they dipped their nibs in inkpots. All masterpieces all part of a life's work, an oeuvre, if I can use the word. The masterpieces can be understood adequately as stand alone, but to be absorbed in their entirety, they ought to be seen as parts of a larger body of effort. How will our young writers ever get to invest that effort, how will we ever come up with a masterpiece?

A poet, who is by nature bashful, and of a considerably impressionable brain, cannot invest a worthy effort in any work of poetry if he is trained to think of himself as a depressive soul, writing not out of the nebulous urge to create but out of an insidious drive to let negativity out. With years of this mindset, the self fulfilling prophecy comes to life, and a young poet becomes a catharsis-seeker. An act of expression is always stifled by shame, gentleman. Isn't that obvious? If the poet revolts, yes, he will indeed break free and give himself a better chance. But revolt from what? And do we really want this to be the only choice before the aspiring poet-- rebellion?

Early years of pursuing poetry are years of doubt, and of low confidence in the quality of the work created. A great deal of support is needed. Currently, by asking the young poet to revolt, to unfetter himself for the course of his work, we are asking too much, infact we are setting him up for failure, even depression. And why would a poet revolt for what he currently sees as a mere hobby: as far as his acquiesence or stealth leads to a healthy, peaceful, harmonious passing of life, he will chosse not to revolt openly. He will strangle his creative impulse, and then forget all about it;or he will turn it as a mode of expressing his repression. Beauty will vanish. And beauty, my readers, is the only thing worth being for.

Before a dog bite

2010-11-17T21:28:00.003+05:30

the dog's saliva
drips to the ground
a circle of rabies

its tail stiff like
a vigorous penis
eyes locked in mine

I run it runs
we remain broiled
in strategies

wind bubbles
its sound dissoves
in canine waves

tummy injections
a single wound
with four holes

this dog is colonel
kurtz horror is in
just rage shows

if we eat dogs
like koreans we
won't need daal

he barks calves clasp
to bone what is below
knees tightens knees shiver

we remain broiled
in strategies.

Mersault

2010-11-17T21:25:00.001+05:30

sun in his eyes
he presses the
trigger we keep
thinking why
why would rain
be better

Mary Perreira

2010-10-21T07:53:00.003+05:30

Fatima Villa-- an erstwhile villa,
(now it is an unnerving subaltern 6 storey,
a brazen architectural folly, a mild experiment in physics)--
on whose second floor we have made our lovel abode,
has a dentist shop on the ground floor.

Nice young guy, this dentist, polite and all,
aware of money's force in the world.
I didn't like him.
He kept talking of the riches of investment banking,
as if dentistry with its daily cleansing of rotten teeth
had chained him to a bogged-down countryside,
from where the city could only be seen,
yearned for, coveted, but never reached.
I didn't like him also because he asked me,
"Do you smoke?"

Like all tyro dentists
his was also a two person enterprise,
an old emaciated Catholic woman,
with hair braided in a single plait
that climaxed in a point just above the waist,
like the tail-end of a sick african lion they might have shown on Discovery
completed the duality.
She was frail and frumpish,
as if used to the restraint imposed by a strict upbringing,
and growing incoherent with time, inspite of a best effort.

We like her,
for she is always cheery
and smiles as if our happiness leaks into her,
everyday.

I like her
for she is Rushdie's Mary Perreira,
lover of sons and daughters that are not hers,
just that Rushdie forgot to mention
large, sparkling, protruding, contrary to old age, jewel-like,
white teeth,
whose one view makes the dentist redundant,
right at the reception.

Notes on current readings- Oct 21

2010-10-21T03:14:00.004+05:30

Have finished
- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce - LOVED
- Vasant Ke Hatyare by Hrishikesh Sulabh - LIKED
- Everyman by Philip Roth - UNSURE

Have begun
- Luka and the Fire of Life by Salman Rushdie - UNSURE AS OF NOW
- One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn - UNSURE AS OF NOW
- The First Circle by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn - HAUNTED ALREADY (if that's the desirable outcome)
- On Beauty by Zadie Smith - HATE AS OF NOW
- Love in the time of Cholera by GGM - LOVE

Have also read
- A forgotten story by an Estonian writer published by the Soviet press - OK
- Asset by David Foster Wallace - OK

Yet untouched reading list
1. The Trial | Franz Kafka
2. The Plague | Albert Camus
3. The Language Instinct | Steven Pinker
4. In Cold Blood | Truman Capote
5. The Name of the Rose | Umberto Eco
6. All About H Haterr | G V Desani
7. Tamas | Bhism Sahni
8. Nausea | Jean Paul Sartre
9. Life and Fate | Vasily Grossman
10. The Savage Detectives | Roberto Bolano

P.S: I bumped into 'The First Circle' in a raddi store. Got the book for 20 rupees! Cheapest edition on flipkart is 500+

Likes and Dislikes

2010-10-21T01:06:00.003+05:30

I would rather print your poem
than read it on the screen.
I like feeling a poem on paper,
how one can touch it,
or store it to leaven
and develop a color and smell.

I would like a soft perfume on your neck,
where I can bury my nose and stay awhile,
till the warmth of my breadth makes some sweat.
I like perfume and sweat,
how they become friends so easily sometimes.

I don't like the starkness of vulgarity,
but I like to see it slowly become pure and beautiful through words.
I like sitting on my vulgar thoughts,
passing them through a linguistic tunnel,
and gurgling them in a poem.
So if your breathing is about to move a sweat drop
trickle down the curb of your nipple,
I would like to watch and adore the travails of that brine drop,
than squash the scene by taking everything in my mouth.

I would rather have coffee than tea,
for if the phrase 'diligent preparation' was to be given an aroma,
it would most likely be coffee-esque.
Tea, somehow, is more natural for me;
queer really, for I've been to Darjeeling,
and been there to a tea-bar,
and read there the menu that explained first flush and second flush,
and how tea is best positioned to overthrow wine as the posh beverage of the world.
If only tea could be alcoholic,
but hey, neither is coffee.

I can't tell Malbec from Pinot Noir, so I'll just shut up about wines.

I like big writer's big and small names and their big books,
and when I hold a great book in my hand I breathe heavily to expand my heart,
to make it commodious enough to assimilate all the book's promises.
I like to take note of literary techniques in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2,
but from Chapter 3 I like submerging in the story.
In pain-pleasure dimension, reading may be the dual of drowning.

I like reading for it has the pace that I desire for my life,
but it invokes the same fear that all good things evoke--
that life is too small,
and made smaller by the ephemerality of good moments;
it is longer when bad and shorter when good
and only memory can offer worthwhile reassurances.
But alas, memory suffers from a lacunae--
it distributes itself evenly among the good and bad.

It is not coincidence then,
that the words 'memory'and 'melancholy'
sound like sisters.

I like Hemingway's short sentences,
where full-stops have more meanings than words,
but I don't like not loving him as much as the others.
I read his 'Kilimanjaro' around 2500 vertical meters into the Himalayas,
in a place called Naggar,
and I didn't get the end.
The dialogue were evocative, yes, but the end,
as sudden as a power cut,
left me gaping the twilight pines and apples for meaning.
I'm not good at reading fullstops yet.

When I was a kid stories I read would become images, movies,
before my eyes complete scenes would play out,
some with background music:
a tune picked up subconsciously from TV,
always befitting the passion humor tension of the screen.
Now reading is less visual, for the desire to write
has made language an end in itself.
I hate that.
I crave to feel that harpoon in my palm,
and to hear that wooden leg beat that sodden deck.

That innocent imagination,
that once had the power to sprout from inchoate comprehensions
can I have that again,
please.

Pakistani Flood

2010-10-07T00:10:00.003+05:30

Upcoming in Yes, Poetry March 2011 Issue

NO MORE HERE :(

Notes on current readings- Oct 06

2010-10-06T23:41:00.003+05:30

Progress stalled in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce.

Also stalled in Vasant ke Hatyare by Hrishikesh Sulabh

Both books are in my bag, which is in the trunk of some car-- one that I only have access to tomorrow.

Today, in the train, I razed some pages of Philip Roth's Everyman. I havn't seen anyone write a bad review of the book, but it is certain that if a new writer was to write this book as a first work, he would never get published. Maybe Everyman is the kind of work a writer of Roth's genius needed to produce to add a thematic star to his oeuvre; maybe Everyman is a work that a first-time writer can't write, but that doesn't allow me to ignore my first reaction-- if I was to write this, publishers would come back with a single word retort "Rejected".

The novel is average.It describes the regrets of an American man, who has had health issues all his life, and has been married thrice. Roth describes his trangressions, with the sexual ones getting more pages and words. It starts as a book aiming to highlight the deprivations in every American's life. It achieves that, only that we knew this already! And so again we come to the same point-- if this wasn't Roth, it would not be worth reading.

Not recommended for anyone who hasn't read Roth before.

I also read an excerpt from the novel The Wrong Blood by Manuel de Lope published in the Guernica. Amazing piece. I have shared it with may friends. Just go to Guernica Mag and figure. The excerpt describes the rape of a Spanish woman called Maria by a soldier. I think the time mentioned is The Spanish Civil War (which explains Guernica's interest). If you are willing to spend money on someting good, go for it. Take a plunge. The writer is Spanish.

Tomorrow, in the office

2010-09-30T05:42:00.002+05:30

Upcoming in Boston Literary Magazine December 15, 2010 Print Issue

NO MORE HERE :(

Notes on current readings- Sept 30

2010-09-30T05:20:00.004+05:30

Progress only in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce.

I've reached the last chapter, the final fifth of the book. It's clear that if a work follows the technique of the interior monologue, it can't stay away from epiphanies for a long time; the sudden explosion of consciousness, intellect, and articulation is the inescapeable denouement of trackins any stream of consciousness. And it comes out of nowhere. Plop! As sudden as it is true.

Stephen Dedalus has grown up, reached the university, and his intellect has burst forth with irreverent momentum, like a juggernaut of radical sensitivities. He has acquired an individual mind. Now the pursuance of art, any art, is only a matter of time. By depicting the changing hues of an artist, Joyce captures some of the essence of that ineffable concept-- art. That's why the book is a classic. I read somewhere on the internet, "If you don't like this book, you don't like reading". And it's true.

The writing is divine. And as with all things divine it comes with one demand and one danger. The demand is that you avow honesty to it, in your pace and attenton; and the danger is that once you do that, you might find the rest of the world a teeny bit wobbly and lowly. Read this>>

—A day of dappled seaborne clouds.

The phrase and the day and the scene harmonized in a
chord. Words. Was it their colours? He allowed them to glow
and fade, hue after hue: sunrise gold, the russet and green of
apple orchards, azure of waves, the grey-fringed fleece of
clouds. No, it was not their colours: it was the poise and
balance of the period itself. Did he then love the rhythmic
rise and fall of words better than their associations of legend
and colour? Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he was
shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the
glowing sensible world through the prism of a language manycoloured
and richly storied than from the contemplation of
an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in
a lucid supple periodic prose?

Untitled

2010-09-26T23:55:00.003+05:30

You can keep playing on the fringes,
don't have to have any leitmotifs,
there is no zeitgeist to be manouvered.
You see, this can be word play,
kind of like an intelligence parade;
You don't have to get pivotal, it can go wrong,
and it stings when it does.
Or you can choose to write a confusing one,
just requires higher inolvement,
kind of a mixture,
a khichdi of word play and content,
the latter could be a convincing pretension,
that's all they need-- fucking readers.
Sometimes a little abuse here and there,
directed at the reader can help too.
They are all cocksuckers
waiting to be insulted.
You can swindle their imaginations,
start with one thing end with the other,
there is no greater fun than inducing gullibility in the conscious.
And yes calling them names can work too.
Or just reveal something,
revelation, yes...
friendship, love, apologies,
are all acts of revealing oneself,
exposing a little bit of the self,
and creating a larger hidden piece at the same time.
Or just say fuck off and close.
Fuck Off.

Notes on current readings, Sept 26

2010-09-26T22:56:00.003+05:30

Inspite of the weekend, or perhaps due to it, progress has been made in the two books that I'm currently reading.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

Dedalus family has shifted to Dublin; Stephen seems headed for a new college; he has changed a little bit.

One can see the portrait changing in colors, mildly, which is hardly a surprise, since events in a Kunstlerroman are bound to be real, and hence pivotal and quotidian at the same time. It's a work to be chewed on, each sentence to be read and analyzed, each new word (vocabulary is one tool that Joyce will always surprise you with) to be discovered and memorized. One can understand it as sharing a thinnest vestige in spirit with David Copperfield, and nothing more. This is not Dickens, not at all. Although it is as important, and as good.

Vasant Ke Hatyare by Hrishikesh Sulabh

I read Daniyal Mueenuddin's story In other rooms, other wonders on The New Yorker last year and wrote him a congratulatory email. He replied with thanks! That was quite nice of him.

My message was nothing but a typical reader's appreciation for his ability to portray the Hindi/urdu speaking characters from today's Pakistan in English with ice-like clarity. He had, or rather has, achieved a Premchand in English... ditto. And he has done it inspite of being surrounded by innumerable phonies that pretend to do the same. His stories are pure literature... of the Chekovian school. He deserves praise. Even Rushdies thinks so.

With Sulabh's story collection, the above idea has become more complicated for me, it has become personal. In his stories, I think I have discovered a Hindi speaking character-pool that only Hindi knows and only Hindi can tell. Only Hindi has any interest in that India. It's sad, at the same time, that that character pool, us, has little appreciation for Hindi.

Hindi literature should not die, or we risk losing a chunk of India that carries a large piece of its beauty. Sulabh's collection is an effort to create a literature out of a language that is in the final phase of being replaced as the 'primary language of thought' in its own country.

Any translation weakens the work. I've tried it myself. That alone should be its loudest pitch.

Hindi needs a hurrah, a struggle. Sulabh is an established writer, perhaps the best we have in the language. His book is not the best that I've ever read. It will not make my top 10 list. But reading it, I had moments of pure literature: something universal coming forward as a revelation.

The complication is: Vasant makes me gladder than A Portrait or In other rooms. Does that make me an acute patriot? Is this the unadulterated love of mothertongue? What hypocrisy then, and what wretchedness, that I write this in the roman script!!

Chai

2010-09-26T22:20:00.004+05:30

She took out the green plastic condiment box,
different from the black steal Indian spices box.

She chewed the cardamom pod
punctured the green chaff
crushed the black seeds.

They would lend a greater flavor now, she said.

She put in two dried flakes of stelia leaves,
an organic, healthy substitute for sugar.

I missed some things in between.

She tamed the thermal process,
contents came to the brim at each boil,
thrice.

She seived off the solid Assam
and plonked it into the garbage.

And in those two cups
lay my hot, warming, brown poem.

This is just language.

Addresing novelty

2010-09-25T08:11:00.000+05:30

Novelty, ah novelty,
you vixen!
The poet confuses you with beauty
and muddles the poem.

Quadratic

2010-09-25T06:07:00.008+05:30

She's a queer quadratic with two real roots,
one positive, one negative, but different in magnitude.
She can take either inside and become zero, solve herself with them.
Otherwise she's a petite mystery of single variable and some constants
multiplying, adding subtracting, jutting along nimbly, suggesting solutions.
Her complexities can be dilated or contracted, depends on her mood,
but her denouement doesn't change,
neither do her roots,
one positive, one negative.
And when one root fills her, he owns her,
the other stands in a corner and looks on,
like a kid with binoculars in the building across the street.
The solving act is rapid, it nihilizes the rapidly,
the troika evaporates into the solved world,
till she lithely comes back again.

Note on current readings, Sept 25

2010-09-25T06:07:00.005+05:30

In office I'm currently reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. It is an example of a Kunstlerroman-- an artist's Bildungsroman. The first chapter is fantastic reading, as it traces the stream of consciousness of innocent Stephen Dedalus through his days in college, where his innocence suffers a jolt when he is flogged by a Father Dolan-- whose name sounds like one of a woman who washes clothes-- for no fault of his. In my understanding, the child discovers, for the first time, that the world can get unjust and cruel. By being honest to the child's consciousness, Joyce is able to keep Chapter 1 subtle and underplayed, but if you, the reader, had paused to contemplate the situation a brief while, you were bound to be overwhelmed by the impact of the scenario, and know for sure that the Stephen of Chapter 2 will be different.

Before A Portrait, I was reading The Trial by Franz Kafka in my office. But as with most Kafkas, I realized I will need time and space to read this one too. And so I abandoned it after some 20 pages, ready to take it at a later date.

In the train I'm currently reading Vasant ke Hatyare by Hrishikesh Sulabh. It has been four days now, and my assessment of it has changed each day. Since it is the only piece of Hindi literature that I've read in a long long time, my tendency to equate its quality to Hindi literature in sum is high. The first day I had said-- I'm disappointed with the direction of Hindi literature; the second day-- Well, the book surprises me in some ways; the third day-- It's not translateable... it captures an India that only Hindi knows and only Hindi can tell; and the fourth day-- Yes, the first story was a disappointment, but it keps getting better and better... Sulabh is a great writer.

I would be lying if I said that I don't look forward to the part of my day when I read the book. I think that is compliment enough.

Before Vasant I was reading Journey to the End of the Night by Louis Ferdinand Celine. It's a Kunslerroman too, I believe, and a heady journey, mostly misanthropic, through three continents, immeasureable misery, povety, squalor, numerous women, true love (very briefly), and the general wretched nature of the human condition, along with a few streaks of brilliance that it may still possess. The end is brutal, and the only end possible.

Within all this I've also managed to read an essay titled On Literature by Arthur Schopenhauer, The Metaphysical Elements of Ethics by Immanuel Kant, three short stories from Vladimir Nabokov (Symbols and Signs, Natasha, and one more that I forgot the name of; I discovered that his power of depiction is perhaps due to his being a synesthete), the beginning of first story in Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri (my mother is reading the Hindi translation and is way faster than me... she loves it), the beginning 20-odd pages of On beauty by Zadie Smith (which I'm finding to be a terribly boring piece of work as of now), two short stories by Saadat Hasan Manto (absolute classics), two short stories by Jorge Luis Borges (The Book of Sand and The Gospel according to St. Mark), one short story by Isaac Babel.

From my special one, I've also had nuggets from The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. Personally, I havn't heard of a book more beautifully titled. The title itself convinces you that it binds something indelibly beautiful inside. Just rehearsing the title in my head makes me want to caress this book, a feeling similar to the one I had after reading the first chapter of My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk. You feel scared of such books, because you know you will read through them, that you will reach the last page, but you won't be able to reach the end of them... they will keep saying something to you, forever. The best you can do is reminisce about them like an old friend, but no more.

My 10 book reading list, as of now:

1. On Beauty | Zadie Smith
2. Everyman | Philip Roth
3. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man | James Joyce
4. The Trial | Franz Kafka
5. The Plague | Albert Camus
6. The Language Instinct | Steven Pinker
7. In Cold Blood | Truman Capote
8. The Yellow Wind | David Grossman
9. All About H Haterr | G V Desani
10. Tamas | Bhism Sahni

I'm also rather excited with A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. It's a book that I've resisted for some reason, mostly because I've been able to convince myself that something better exists... something that can better occupy my reading time. May be it's a good time now.

In Paris

2010-09-20T02:48:00.006+05:30

where the boulangerie hangs in the air using the cold stillness as an excuse, and travels with your nose;
where five republics speak with you in an anachronism, and a girl walks past you, her perfume making you hope for a deja vu;
where shop-windows pretend to know the human-condition, and terraces serve exorbitant oneirisms;
where to be seduced is the greatest pleasure, and beauty is a totem you're desperate not to lose ...
...
...
...
and tentative not to devour.

Kafka's work cushion

2010-09-20T01:20:00.002+05:30

Many don't know that Kafka worked in insurance companies and wrote only as a necessary psychological avocation. Below is a story that imagines his thought process just before going to work.

There is something wrong at my workplace. And I suspect it has something to do with the cushion of my seat there. My seat needs my careful affection, as I need the same from it. It is not exactly a seat I must say, more stool than seat definitely, but then, not many stools have cushions.

I remember its look when I had first sat on it with a novel and eager anticipation. It yearned to be possessed by me, after a vacancy that had left it alone for too long I guess. From a distance of three meters or more it seemed like an unaesthetic black cushion with white stripes. But, not quite! Because if the eyes came any closer with even a distracted intention of looking at the cushion, the fact that the white stripes were not actually white stripes would be unmistakeably clear. Each white stripe, so to say, was in reality an array of flower bunches, shoddily embroidered on the thick black cloth. To be frank, I am not too sure if it is a work of embroidery or not, and have never decidedly tried to figure that out either. I think the question of the nature of the flower bunches on the black cloth of the cushion of my seat is rather irrelevant. What is of import is that the white of the cushion flower bunches has now become brown, a brown that gets darker each day I sit on the cushion. It is saddening that even Sundays and National Holidays, days in which my ass fails to meet the cushion, seem to add a shade of brown to the originally white flowers of my cushion seat. I have to concede that I am disgusted by this whole event and feel overwhelmed by an intense urge to figure out with decisiveness the cause, or causes, of the categorical sullying of my professional perch.

The reasons don't hit me easily. I know, with reasonable conviction, that all kinds of sweaty grime make all kinds of cloths and cloth-like things dirty. And so it could have been my sweat, filled with traces of semi-dissolved dirt and other equally dirty things, that added the unwanted hue to my flower bunches. That seems unlikely though, as I fail to fathom a scenario where a single drop of my perspiration could have permeated both my underwear and the bottom of my office trousers, and arrived at the fancy flowers. I think a large majority of such drops would stop even before the hurdle of the underwear and any survivors would be positively gobbled up by the cotton-rich fabric of my hidden garment. This, however, brings a second question to my head: If, defying all logic, sweaty grime was really the cause of the dirtification of the cushion flowers, then my white underwear should be as brown as them. Quite surprisingly, as I stand up from my bed where I have been nakedly discussing this issue with myself and check for the white underwear in my cupboard, I realize that my white underwear still possesses a delectable whiteness inside, a whiteness devoid of the degradation of the now-brown cushion flowers. The reasons of this purity are certainly up for slight ponder. Duh! No, not at all! I forget! I bloody wash my underpants, most of them beloved, the night of the day I wear them. I won't call it a religious ritual, but it is certainly more than a mere habit. You see, I have an opinion about washing undergarments, an opinion that I share openly: I believe that washing underwear before sleep is better than not washing them for a long time and then washing them in a heap. Plain wisdom, I say.

Anyways, I have found my lesson from this early morning thought-fiddling, and I must mention it before I let it engender a digression into something less important. The lesson I have learnt is that the cushion cloth of my seat cover needs to be washed, and as is proven by the persistent sparkling of my dear white underwear, which I put on now in gay glee as I dress up for my office, clothes that are washed with regular intermittence retain their chromatic composition without fail, a lesson that I would assume holds greater significance when we talk of the whiteness in cloths.

So my task for office is settled now. And a confession of my relaxation at this point can't be overstressed. Today, at work, I will try to wash the cushion cloth of my work seat.

Where to be?

2010-09-12T10:35:00.003+05:30

I don't want to live in times doped on history;
I want to be in those years in between,
where nothing happens on yellow pages,
no activity except the formation of thought.

And if I'm not fighting buddy, am I at peace? Really?

In between, buddy, in between.

About The Book of Sand

2010-09-12T10:29:00.003+05:30

I

HELP

II

Ideally, everything should be inside a single page in The Book of Sand,
but then, if the length and breadth of a page is finite,
The Book of Sand is bound to have infinite pages,
all crisp.

Why then, should there not be infinite Books of Sand--
infinite representations of infinity?
Or why should we not assume that everything is that one page of The Book of Sand
and that infinite Books of Sand are everywhere?

All is part of an infinite stream, and hence, infinitesimal.

III

We like art because it sets limits on infinity;
it makes us feel that we've won,
infinitesimally.

Philosophical interlude

2010-09-12T10:22:00.002+05:30

After six pages of The Metaphysical Elements of Ethics
I went for an aimless walk in Bandra, or searching perhaps,
for an end that is also a duty, a categorical imperative.

Then I called one of my friends, she is studying art in Delhi
Life is too short, read all that you can, learn all that you can.
Yes, it's beautiful, yes, but it's damn short,
and it's a one-time thing,
and it's unbearable
unbearable, yes.
Short. Ephemeral. Ineffable. Unbearable.

Then I went to McDonald's and enjoyed a McChicken meal,
for one less than 100.

Then I walked back home,
masturbated,
and went back to The Metaphysical Elements of Ethics.

Truffaut's last interview

2010-09-12T10:00:00.002+05:30

I

I read Truffaut's last interview and his detached retrospection hit me;
it wouldn't have, had she not been reading it with me
on one of those daily train rides back home,
Churchgate to Bandra.
She has a knack of interpreting with personal experience,
connecting what-is-met-now to memory and forming a general view,
pacifying the past, preparing for the future.

Truffaut had called his first short films 'pretentious', too ambitious,
trying to solve the world in a single swoosh;
and she had conveniently noted that all first works are,
well, pretentious;
and I, with a history of being disturbed by the undeniable,
of patching the present by scraping the past,
went back to my first works.

She was right, for my first poems were written as if the pen
had understood art as only the act of producing a masterpiece;
there even was a poem titled The Complete Sunshine Cynic.
I hadn't understood that having good taste may approve dabbling
but is no premise for fabricating a cri de coeur;
I was pretentious, using ambition to hide mediocrity.

Anyhow, this act chimed recent memory and a commemorative piece on Chekov,
written in some newspaper on his 150th birth anniversary,
came to fore--
What trash I wrote then, what trash?
he had said of his first works;
and then Truffaut came back anew--
Tell us your story; there is noting more interesting, more important;
and then Bukowski pricked like a tangent's far end--
Don't try.

II

Maybe all poetic questions are of the quotidian;
maybe it's only the daily, the diurnal that needs buttresing in poetic music,
or maybe, I'm just being pretentious again.

III

Poetry is nothing but
reticence in words;
porous cotton filling gaps.

The whirlpool

2010-08-25T20:19:00.003+05:30

If I don't write these poems, love, and try to find subsistence in imagination,
this city will make me puke so hard, my innards will exit through the mouth
and seep into the gutters; there is no outside of it when you're inside it, you should know.

I know that land was before and land will be in the end, but the whilrpool is, love,
clear and present.

Presnyakov and Ivanov

2010-08-24T00:05:00.003+05:30

I

Presnyakov and Ivanov,
one Uzbek, the other Ukrainian,
pianist and violinist
(and I don't remember who's who,
but it doesn't matter),
both born around the time the Soviets cracked
and the Berlin Wall came down--
which is to say that they were young--
performed at the NCPA recently,
played Beethoven and Tchaikovsky--
Fantasie Op. 77 in G minor,
Souvenir d'un lien cher Op.42--
among others.

In early nineties their families had moved to Holland.
I read this in the brochure.

They played well,
except when the Thai-looking page-turner fumbled the pages;
and they looked good too--
short thin men with good looks--
and neat too.

We were there,
me and she,
slightly bogged-down by the a-day-at-work weariness,
and I was wondering,
in total concordance with my general nature,
how a guy from Muzaffarnagar was with a girl from Vannes,
in Bombay,
watching an Uzbek play the piano
and an Ukrainian play the violin;
I even tried to conjure
some obscure towns from these countries,
but Kiev and Tashkent
are far far enough for me.

Amused, I amused myself further with an idea:
Life is nothing but meeting strangers,
getting to know some, forgetting the others;
it starts the moment you first see your strange parents,
and then there are times when you see the mirror.

II

Lean, mean, short;
these Soviet musicians were a threat
since they were playing good,
which meant that they had talent and discipline,
qualities unaware of me;
and these bastards were good-looking,
and white,
and slim.

See!The disbelief of the eastern, baked man!!
Who in being taught the white west's language and literature,
who in exposure to its art,
and music
(and also freedom, which I am certain is either colorless or white)
has chained himself as a poseur in his own eyes;
and who thinks of himself as possessing
an unseemly ring of fat just below the navel.

She cozied my hand,
while I tried to tuck my tummy in,
inhaling air feverishly,
all into my chest,
and exhaling only in short phews;
and hoping earnestly,
importunately perhaps,
that she didn't notice what I had.

III

Interlude:
all came out.
She told me that ludus
means "a play" in Latin,
and then she kissed me, many times, as if to say:
"The concert's really good,
and I'm really enjoying myself,
and it's all because of you,
and all's too good,
and you're too good."
And I thought:
"Why don't those thin motherfucking commies
come out and catch a glimpse?"

Three day later she said the following
(in real this time; with her mouth, not my mind):

"My love,
you're excessively handsome
That night at the concert,
and in the interlude,
I just couldn't resist kissing you."

(Yes, she did say excessively!)

Among other things, I decided to forget
Presnyakov and Ivanov.

Go

2010-08-11T01:21:00.002+05:30

Go,
look for a metaphor for life!
Burn your eyes,
break your back.
Look for flour in a grain of wheat.
Go.

Life is a morning

2010-08-11T00:24:00.005+05:30

Sunlight pours through the window,
moistening the room.
Beauty gets trapped
in the mellow shadows of the bedsheet on itself,
roiled in a night's sweetness.
Each crumple is a caress.

The night, ever uneasy in departure,
is happy with the deal today--
a compartment in memory;
as birds flutter in gossip
and bread stretches itself.
Life is a morning.

"The poem is a by-product"

2010-08-11T00:09:00.003+05:30

A sentence might carry a revolution--
a call to action for a country--
"Do or die"

It might be an appeal--
simmering subtelty staying strong--
"Il faut cultiver votre jardin"

Ssentence are written to feel--
a new pen gliding on paper--
"The poem is a by-product"

From Babel

2010-07-29T20:12:00.005+05:30

Farmers with eyes made hazy
in matching
the blur of the gaping plains

To be forgotten is to have never lived

2010-07-29T20:09:00.001+05:30

Live as a turtle that in its stubborn sloth
provides the steeliest argument against
the celerity of the hare.
Don't argue then, don't fight,
dont prove anything wrong or right.
Just be.
And in being be the starkness,
the bluntness and the doubt
for all those who live otherwise, who disagree,
who scoff, snide, sniggle, simper, or simmer.

But yes, if a knight meets a country maiden
on the edge of a lake brimming with sedges,
don't be the horse.
Who wants to be the horse
in 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci'?
And if, unfortunately, you are,
neigh then, neigh.
Catch the mood in the air around you
and lend your own animal music
to all the stories bigger than you.

And maybe a poet will catch you!
Remember, to be forgotten is to have never lived.

Poem goes to work

2010-07-17T09:47:00.002+05:30

I wrote a poem last night and today
I carried it to work in my pocket
It is trapped in my handwriting, this poem,
and concealed by my shyness of flipping and flapping it around.

At lunch I took it out surreptitiously
and read it softly, velvetly to myself;
while careful not to entice eyeball,
I even sniffed it like a rat;

but do rats close their eyes in pleasure;
do rat-sniffs become progressively longer,
till they are full-lunged inhales of fulfillment?

There is so much to write, so much to read,
so many styles to copy, so many poems to expand;
I want to stretch my brain's bivouac,
while preserving he idiocy (or good habit) of taking a poem to work,

Tomorrow, it will be two in my pocket.

Bombay

2010-07-17T09:12:00.005+05:30

I

Bombay is now a myeloma the coast,
but even here, even in this carcinomatous melange
of blue-plastic-roofed thatches and white-marble-tiled obelisks
--that arise like fungal offshoots from the defiled terra and pretend to touch the sky,
(a sky that recoils in their advance, turning black and blue),--
the wind can touch your face with an intent.

It happens when your taxi hum-hums through Marine Drive,
or when it glides over Kemps Corner
(under the gaze of the gorgeous jewellery girl
who smiles at you perennially from her billboard)
or when you mull oh-what-could-have-been, while absorbing in your eye-balls
the old houses at Queen's Road.

Yes it happens.
The wind here wants to belong to you

II

The city is like the surface of a still liquid,
insect-rippled and with surface tension,
yet the frolicking sea insults it everyday.
You feel insulted too.
"Is all that is good British? Is India the cancer?"
No answer. No umbrage. The affront dissolves itself as an ignored truth.

On the street all microbes escape your vision
till they swarm your window with ugly hands.
You see no faces, for you are scared to look into them;
just hair goldened in filth, noses blackened with snot,
and palms looking to the sky.
Your pocket has no penny and the taxi moves;
you move away from malignant cells.

Yes it happens.
The wind touches you in senile hope.

The last day of eternity

2010-06-24T21:09:00.006+05:30

At midnight tomorrow,

I'll bloom.

Rushdie will like it,

for I too will become a child of some midnight,

born again,

fragment by fragment second by second,

in the clay I have myself prepared;

maybe I will paste my flakes back

(tears shed, and sighs let,

become invisible glue

for tatters of the heart)

Pamuk will like it too,

for I will become a lover suddenly in possession,

like Ka, or Black,

plunged into happiness after solitude,

(instantaneously, like Kafka's country doctor reaching the dying boy)

hyper-charged, yet a slave of emotive inaction

(one doesn't act in love, one is acted on;

driven by the status-quo, driven to the status-quo,

not the end, never the end, there is no end)

Tomorrow is the last day of eternity folks,

the last day of implosions of the heart,

the last day of looking at this city rush through a taxi window each morning, and disappear,

the last day of looking in the mirror to create memories,

the last day of groping the air in sleep,

the last day of zombie-ness,

the last day of longing.

At midnight tomorrow,

when I see her with these pupils

(why are they wet again?)

I'll bloom.

The girl with the soap-chip

2010-06-21T22:56:00.001+05:30

The latrine floor is strewn with burnt and wet bidies, and while squat-shitting, I can't escape the smell of wet leaves and wet arseholes and groin itches. Ah, this is home... India. And see, here, I open my orifice on the commode of my forefathers!! Outside, the village awaits rain as if it wants to fuck with it.

I relieve myself freely-- only a man truly home can ever be so unconstipated.

The arse-washing has left my left hand needing a good wash. I approach the hand-pump, the nalka, and lo, just as I am about to touch the handle with my right hand and do a little up-and-down on it, she rushes in.

"This is where we drink water from, pata nahin?"

"Umm. Sorry"

"Let me help you. Ruko"

She rushes to the other end of the courtyard, fetches a little something in her hand. As she comes nearer, I realize what it is.

"Here, lo"

She presents me a mere chip of a soap, originally pink, but mysteriously mixed with soluble mud, and hence, brownish-pink in color. I refuse, with a high-frequency wave of my hand, and take out the liquid soap from my pocket. She gazes, almost incredulously.

I take some soap in my hands. She volunteers to blow the pump, or whatever verb is used for it.. She goes down, and up, down, and up; and with each down I glance at her chest, rubbing my palms together below the flailing flow of water. The roundest, the juiciest, the eboniest, the perfectest pair of breast look back at me.

Ah, this is home... India.

On blinking

2010-06-21T22:29:00.000+05:30

Rushdie says we blink because it's impossible to look at this world without closing one's eyes; also perhaps- and this is my take on the whole affair of blinking- to remember ourselves within a vision of the exterior, the unself; to recognize the unassailable distance between I and everything else; and also, if I may add, to take us away from our day-dreams -- those hallucinations of open eyes-- for a flash or two. Of the disparity between dreaming and day-dreaming, what else can be stressed -- what these closed eyes achieve in the silence of the night, they resent in the commotion of the day. Isn't that a metaphor for the condition of man?

While reciting a song

2010-06-19T11:03:00.002+05:30

Didn't have a dream last night, then why
do I have this song on my lips
that I had written when
everything was a dream?

Two gunshots

2010-06-19T10:27:00.001+05:30

When you marry this gentleman of yours,
don't expect me to fall away,
to wither, to shrink, to peter out into oblivion.

Find me next door,
twirling the moustache that here stands twirled,
looking over to your bedroom with a thumping chest.

And if I see the normalcy of marriage
arriving with happiness to the confines of your bed,
two gunshots will celebrate the occasion.

My mother's common sense

2010-06-19T10:26:00.001+05:30

My mother, though untravelled, unread,
at her disposal keeps
a handy common sense
that often finds me stumped.

Nothing explains your love,
if you don't drive a car
and she can ride a horse
unless,
her "follow me" gets an "ofcourse"
each time

Without you

2010-06-19T10:22:00.001+05:30

Oh without you? Without you it would have been terrible.
My liver would be twice the size,
the new half full of cheap whisky.
The left lung would have become charcoal.
I would be pronouncing 'Sarajevo' with a 'J'
and be forever ignorant of 'The New Yorker'.
I would have never tried my hand at yoga,
and running for nothing would have been an anathema.
I would not be guilty regarding the inability to swim,
and would not have known how Bollywood pelvic thrusts can make one a better snowboarder.
Without you, my love, life would be shit.
Now I am aware that carbs are bad and proteins are good,
and that soft drinks have too much sugar,
and much more on sugar actually,
like grapes are most sugary in fruits, followed by mangoes,
and that it might be possible to make a mango wine one day.
Oh wine. Yes wine.
Without you I would not have known a good wine,
and never would have reverred the complexity of their taxonomy,
not to speak of the finesse of tasting.
Without you I would have been a jerk.
Without you, perhaps, and with all due patriotic respect to my country,
I would just be normal!

I speak with the Gods

2010-06-19T10:13:00.002+05:30

Readers are expected to read this as a work of art - nothing personal

Is it not time that she too cowered with longing,
first thing in the morning,
wondering if I will picture her in my head;
whether I'll let her scent into my thoughts
and through the industry of my mind tickle my nostrils -
a strange kind of libido;
whether I'll fancy her?

Is it not time that she too woke up
one sunny morning--
the weather good for everything
she wants to do in her day--
and thought not of her muscles
but her heart needing loud and lovely affirmations
from my unbelieving self?

Is it not time that she removed
this placidity in her so-called love?
Is it not time that she loved as if she had never loved before,
and succeeded or failed?
I love, I fear, I am strong, I'm weak
Is it not time that instead of 'maturity'
she gave me herself, for one day, one day, one long day?

Is it not time that I stop dying a heartful
each second?

When does this elusive matchmaking morning happen,
when do the Gods say "Enough O beast,
in your own ugliness that lays surpassed only in your love
you have done enough for beauty,
so rest."

But alas, beauty never meets the beast,
for in his impropriety he is its antithesis,
and she, oh she, dissolved in beauty,
can think of nothing but beauty,
itself.

When does this assumption of understanding end,
when does the test for solidarity end,
when does it becomes an automatic,
devoid of shimmering blots,
here and there,
everywhere,
When do I get tired of listening
to 'You complete me, O ugliness'

When do I get a sign that all is well,
here and now,
forever.

Is it not her duty, her right,
her prerogative?
What should drive her to this,
love, fear, jejunity?
May be all!

Or when does that morning come,
where a cerebral sense hits me in full force,
and I write not such poems with all my power,
but indulge in the passions
that the rest of the world provides
"Al that is not beautiful is not ugly"-
The Gods say

When does love takes a backseat for the beast,
and pleasure and happiness take fore
"If love, pleasure, and happiness were the same things,
there wont be three words.
Love with the other twos heaven,
Love without the other two is the basement of heaven
No love is hell, the underneath below all,
and hell has pleasure aplenty"
The Gods speak again!

The marvelous singing dervish - climax chapter 1

2010-06-13T10:02:00.001+05:30

For the first part of the story click here

The sultan’s court was an august monument that promised fantasy to the born and history to the unborn. It invoked the best in every soul. Not the largest in the world, for the court of the ruler in Persia was known to be bigger; this court demonstrated what could be achieved with excellent architecture. The visibility of the center and peripheries of the court from all angles had been taken care of in a meticulous manner, so much so that the audience was sometimes disoriented from the performer and fixated to the uniqueness of the court itself. It was impossible to bat an eyelid, to whisper a little something, or to itch one’s private parts without half the audience knowing about it. The acoustics, too, had been maintained in a supreme accuracy. Neither the connoisseur watching from an elevated platform, nor the minion watching from considerable distance would miss any word, any sur, any sound. Even a blind man could provide commentary on the happenings in this superb court, and even the deaf claimed to have felt closer to the concept of music.

But today the prescribed setting of this court had been a little betrayed, to achieve a particular arrangement. The sultan’s scheme had ensured that the dervish would sing facing the hindu court masters, the gurus of music in these lands; and so cruelly close that a passionate yelp could make a drop or two of spit to land on the masters’ faces. The idea was to hurt pride and germinate an artistic backlash.

The sultan was the first one to arrive; and after the strenuous fawning formalities had been duly discharged, ordered the dervish to be brought to the court. The hindu court masters had already been seated, enraged by the event and the idea they feared it was based on. Each one of them had definite antagonism brewing within

Master 1: How could the sultan convince himself of this? Has he any value for art? Should any mongrel from the street shit on our years of practice? Has music become a practice of urchins and orphans, of opium slaves, of men who are no better than swine?
Master 2: The calamity that is going to engulf this court, on this most inauspicious of days, is the beginning of the end of this dynasty. Mark my words. The defamation of art is the first signal of the implosion of an empire.
Master 3: Today, our sultan has proven that constant warring has indeed altered his equanimity. His perversion and his flirtation with impropriety, stand on the cusp of overflowing.
Master 4: Perhaps it is true that the dervish has talent, true that his voice has indeed the charm of angels, true that his songs have mastered both rhyme and poise, but is this the way to treat acclaimed musicians that have spent a lifetime worshipping music?
Master 5: We are the ones that have defined music for generations. How can the sultan allow a disgusting beggar to win over in a day what we have earned over years through discipline and propriety?
Master 6: And what if the dervish happens to sing well? Will he be given the same chamber as us, the same pedestal as us?
Master 7: My friends, the issue is not of the insult that the sultan has thrown upon us. The issue concerns music itself, and the way it should prosper. Remember, being artists, our first allegiance is to art. And keeping that in mind, my fears are somehow deeper than yours. You see, in our music schools, fame is the end result of years of dedication and servitude to the process of mastering the art. But in today’s concert, fame is the beginning. It doesn’t matter if the dervish sings well or not, and I promise, even to history, it won’t matter if the dervish had sung well today or not. What matters is the abnormal and colossal change our world has already gone through, in the first instant of this idea reaching the mind of our most beloved sultan. This is a signal of a world to come, or a world that already has come. Call it libertine or licentious, or call it pure sacrilege, but in this single act of allowing curiosity make a hostage of protocol, our sultan has shattered the hierarchy of our world. The worst has already happened, even before the dervish opening his mouth.

As you can clearly see, Master 7, called Bhimsen, was the most intelligent and the most verbose. He had a unique ability, to exaggerate and convince at the same time. But more on the masters later.

Princess Saira was seated with the royal women, scores of queens, and princesses, and royal cousins from close and far. Her sexual anxiety had abated, and was largely overpowered by a curiosity of watching the dervish perform.

Finally the moment came, and the dervish was escorted into the court by two royal soldiers, with utmost elegance. They seemed not soldiers but royal poets, wielding pens not spears. They walked as if rhyme had given itself a quartet of legs and had chosen the life of a demonstrator. The stupid, incredulous grin on the dervish’s face diminished the poetry of the scene by some degrees. But for our story, let’s just assume that the artistic flavor of the day had only begun to gain definition.

The dervish was seated. And in his trademark thunderous voice the sultan spoke with him.

“Do you, O vagabond dervish, know which kingdoms you tread on? Whose land is it that you shower your voice with? Do you know us?”

“All land belongs to Allah. As do the seas that I have never seen. And the mountains that I have scaled chattering my teeth all the while. I don’t know you. But you seem to be the safe guarder of heaven, Allah’s servant. Most certainly, you are the angel appointed to shower rewards on all those who live in this heaven. You must be a nice-hearted angel too. If I be untrue, ignore me, for I’m a recent entrant, and I have had the most pleasurable of nights that has muddled my wits just a little bit.”

“Ho-ha-hum, ho-ha-hum, ho-ha-hum.” The sultan gave out his trademark laugh, and followed it with a signal of acceptance:

“You impress us with your clarity O dervish. We agree with you. We are nothing but Allah’s servant, appointed to shower rewards in our most-heavenly empire. You have pleased us already, but now you have to murder our curiosity. Show us the magic of your voice. And show it also to our court masters, who through repetition have gained a certain mastery of music, but are somehow averse to anything radical and beautiful. Give us a song that captures a new sound, a new feeling, a new rhyme, a new lyric; you see, our heart craves for novelty.”

“Ofcourse O angel. I’m sure being in heaven for too long, you have experienced an extreme freedom every day. It can feel like a prison. I felt it last night myself, although I must admit I had a night most extreme in pleasure. Only a benign reward from you can exceed the beauty of last night for me. You know what I mean, don’t you?”

“Ho-ha-hum, ho-ha-hum, ho-ha-hum. Ofcourse ofcourse.”

The Marvelous Singing Dervish (without climax!)

2010-06-05T15:04:00.002+05:30

Once upon a time, perhaps some six-seven hundred years ago, many dervishes roamed the tiny, sinewy streets of the city of Delhi. Notable among them was a singing dervish whose voice challenged, in beauty and in audacity, the court-masters of the invincible sultan, and whose poetry bettered the shayari of the fat, bearded bards in the palace. The remainder of him was like any other dervish in the city: he wandered with the same unkemptness that marked his brethren, the same lost look on the face, the same raggedy clothes, and the same philosophies that derived their strength from mystique rather than clarity. All in all, he was a mere poetic dervish who could sing exceptionally. There was no beauty, intelligence, or exception in his music-less self. Sometimes, occasional epiphanies would strike him from somewhere deep inside his soul. But these would usually be limited to the scope of his art, not to more relevant metaphysical questions like, say, what happens after death?

After months of singing, the dervish became a queer entity among the masses. He became popular. But he was also tough to spot, for no one cared to remember how he looked like. Soon his fame reached the gates of royalty, sparking a curiosity. Upon hearing of this marvelous singing dervish, the sultan, the jahanpanah, the ruler and shelter of the world, felt pride knowing that there was artistic talent brewing even outside his palace and patronage. This, he thought, was surely an indicator of the most supreme happiness of his dominions. He was also excited at the prospect of a healthy competition within his artistic troupe (if the dervish was found to be worthy enough of joining it). Soon enough then, he expressed a desire to have the marvelous singing dervish perform in his court.

For the sultan's minions, it was difficult to catch and produce the dervish. The description of his countenance or the lack of it was of no help. And after a fortnight of looking around, in which the dervish had sung only sparingly, and that too in very obtuse streets, one of the smarter captains suggested making announcements in and around every square of the city.

It has been noticed by the citizens of this city, and the denizens of the royal palace, that a dervish from the Sufiyana sect, named either Khusrau or Khurram, has transformed his voice and rendered it a sweetness competing with that of the hindu music gurus of our sultan's court. Our sultan, our jahanpanah, is curious to see this dervish perform at the court. The earliest, the better. Anyone who notices this dervish in any street should notify him of the sultan's desire and produce him in the court. A just reward is certain for the dervish as well as the one who finds him.

The silliness of this announcement was not apparent within the first days; most official men didn't realize that by placing a reward on the discovery of an indistinguishable dervish, they were providing a dirty money-making chance to all the raggedy, unrated singers of the town as well.

Within the next few days, many impostors thronged the offices of the city police, hoping to be presented before the sultan to showcase their talents. While some were dismissed instantly, and punished with the lash, there were others who managed to engage some officials in a mini concert. Unfailingly though, people who had heard the mentioned dervish dismissed their claims even before the completion of the first antara.

The original singing dervish was having a bit of a sore throat and was therefore hidden in some filthy street of the town. Opium had precipitated him in a delirium. He had no clue of the search that was all around him.
***

There is another superlative character that needs to be added to make the story interesting. The sultan, as all sultans around the world in those times, had numerous wives. From those numerous ladies, the jahanpanah had been blessed with several offsprings. And the most beautiful daughter, among the set of royal daughters, was called Saira.

Saira was of an age and body most ripe to copulation, and blessed with the finest taste in all the fine arts, including music. Upon hearing of the excessive talent of the singing dervish she had felt a strange twitch in her genitals. Sexual longing had clasped her virgin body like it had never done before. She wanted the dervish inside her body.

In all instances of me telling this story, the previous paragraph has proven to be quite shocking. Needless to say, this reaction has come mostly from men. I wonder why men have this indomitable urge to discover female sexuality to the core, to the point of shredding it beyond comprehension. It never suffices to say that the princess had an astounding urge for the solidness of the dervish, and that this urge was attributable mostly to her fascination of his singing talents, and his generally obscure nature. Men, who lend their ears to my story, want to know her mind, to know what was happening inside to the finest detail. ‘Has she had such urges before? Do they fuck eventually, the slovenly dervish and the royal virgin?’ Men, after this point, are concerned only with the prospect of sex in the story, not the story in itself. And the more I tell them, the more they want to know.

I often end the catechism by saying what men themselves are fond of saying, especially when they are too tired with the above curiosity: ‘How foolish of us, trying to understand women? Has any story ever offered a justification for their behavior? Isn't their unpredictability a given, a spice necessary for the seasoning of the story? Isn't Saira as naughty as your own wife or sister? And isn't she as desirable? What, then, is the point of this curiosity?’ Distraught, with their heads hanging low in apparent defeat, an eternal one, do men let the story take further shape.

***

Almost 20 days after the commencement of the search, the singing dervish finally came out of his opium trance and cleared his throat to sing. He sang in a melodious, unmistakable voice. 'It’s him... he's back'- said numerous people on the street, rubbing their eyes to force them out of the afternoon slumber. Within minutes, a score of men surrounded the dervish, some with arms- knives, swords, and beating sticks of different varieties. And in case you're wondering why, it is perhaps prudent to remind everyone that there is a reward waiting at the palace for the dervish, as well as for the one who produces him there.

Within minutes, outside the conscious realms of the singing dervish and his song, broke out mayhem. A total and bloody pandemonium, very medieval like, in which fights didn't end at consternation or mortal fear or vows of future murders, but in merciless chopping or pulping of human bodies, ensued. It must be brought to notice that in those times killing in a riot, or killing in a religious frenzy, even killing in a misunderstanding, was not considered a crime but a proof of virility. Most verbal duels in the wine-houses included boasts of the number of men killed by each party, along with the number of cities seen and the number of women fucked.

One by one, as the dervish kept on singing, the men in the city killed each other. There were moments when he, eyes shut with the pleasure of creation, would walk right through a carnage of chopped limbs and heads. The police had to intervene. They scuttled off the mobs, latched on to the dervish, and promptly handed him over to the palace guards.

The news of the capture of the dervish, who up till now had seemed to be ever-elusive, was relayed to the sultan at the earliest proper moment. The sultan was excited and impatient, and wanted a concert organized the next day, after letting the dervish rest in a comfortable chamber inside the royal palace.

***

At this point I usually take a break from the story and try to distract people by telling them what was going inside the head of the – well, the dervish (not the princess yet!). His opium effects were over. His head was feeling absent, as far as weight is concerned, and his sudden transcendence into a comfortable chamber of the royal palace had not quite registered inside. He was feeling lost. He tried to relate what he was experiencing now to the last fragments of his memory. He remembered the war-like cries of the street fights he had just witnessed, and some hazy, bloody scenes that he had managed to register through the narrow slits of his eyes. He remembered the song that he had been singing. He remembered the red of blood all around, surrounded by his own poetry. He felt, strangely, that all that he was reminiscing now was his own doing, his own creation. He wondered if he had rendered a meaning to violence, lent it a paranoia of color and beauty, added to it a strange godliness that only dervishes are aware of. Were his visions, which no doubt were a part of his own creations, his supreme work? And if they were, what exactly was the meaning of all this? No, not opium surely. He hadn’t had any for a long time now.

He thought, and thought, as best a dervish can, within sips of the royal sherbet. How was it that allah had allowed his poetry, his lyric, to combine with all that was happening around him, and allowed the total surrender of beauty to that moment?

There was only one conclusion that the dervish could draw from all this: That he was dead. He thought he had finally reached a different realm, one that he was always destined to reach, through his lyric, through his patience, and perhaps due to a lasting effect of the last opium dosage. He took another sip of the royal sherbet, looking queerly at the glass after keeping the liquid pressed between his palate and tongue, trying to savor its taste to the extreme. A drink from allah, he thought. Another question popped in his head. How was it that he had been suddenly transported to this comfortable chamber, and offered a drink dipped in allah’s own voice? Surely he was dead, but what realm was this, where one royally clad person came inside every now and then and asked for his well being? One of them even offered to clean his armpits! This was heaven! Oh surely, he thought, I am dead and this is heaven!

He felt ecstatic for some time after that once-in-a-lifetime discovery. But soon he sobered up. He realized that the thumping in his chest was probably his own heart, and that not much had changed in this new realm, atleast not in the material, bodily aspect of things. He felt unsure. In his life as a dervish, the question ‘What to do?’ had never really struck him. He had been a floater, like all his brethren, and a talented one at that. He had, literally, flown across towns and cities, transported himself over opium ether while crossing rivers, climbed trees with the twitch of an eyebrow, and experienced orgasms with just thought. There had never been anything to do, except to sing, and be in this supernatural state of floating. Now, in his imagined transcendence, in his delusional heaven, he was gripped by an urge for action. He realized that all old motives had to vanish, and new ones had to appear. But what would these motives be? What motives can a deserving man cling to in a place as incessantly comfortable as heaven?

He tried to remember all that he had heard of heaven, of jannat. And the first thing that arrived in the head of our marvelous, singing, and virgin, dervish was the promise of innumerable nymphs (some vague promise that, arguably, had been made to entice all lowly humans to the heights of heaven). His member suddenly acquired a hardness that was immeasurable in all human terms. He was so agitated that sipping the sherbet became impossible and the desire to lend a tight, soft, and lubricated environ to his member, within the pleasures of this most coveted heaven, became disproportionate with the circumstance itself. How was it possible that there were no naked maidens around, trying to fondle his manliness, rubbing his chest, or even offering what he had seen some errant dervishes do to each other in some dark nook of the city? A slight nervousness was also clasping his soul at that moment, for he had never let his biology take over his bachelor dervish-ness in such force. But he brushed aside this coyness with bouts of confidence. He was certain that he was in a place he thoroughly deserved, along with all its charms, and that this place, by definition, made no requirements of celibacy of any kind on any entrant.

Heaven is the peak of pleasure. Heaven is hedonism. Heaven is a fire, where one burns in the satiation of one’s desire. Heaven is a state of perpetual death caused by an overdose of perpetual bliss. Heaven is me, and I am heaven. My songs are in heaven, free, my body is in heaven, free, and so is my cock, free, free, free! I’m not the singing dervish anymore. I’m a singing soul that has retained its body to enjoy the pleasures it abstained from in life. And roiled and soiled in pleasure will I be! Surely!!

But we mere mortals very well know, perhaps a tad unfortunately, that the dervish was not in heaven yet, but in a royal palace which, despite its pretensions of luxury and opulence, was far, far away from the zany concept of heaven.
Nevertheless, the dervish had found his motive inside his imaginary heaven. He was to do all that he had abstained from doing in his bodily self, and explore every thought, however crass, to its ultimate depth. He had decided to unhinge himself from all mental chains. Most imminently, though, he needed to find some relief for a member of his body that had become the visible symbol of his deep revolt. He looked around, and sought to do what he had never done to himself, something that he had heard other dervishes talk of; he had even seen some of them do it, but never tried for the fear of infuriating allah. He masturbated!
***

After burrowing the dervish’s fuzzy mind as best as we could, it is also imperative for the story to know where the princess’ thoughts were leading her. And I can tell you from my experience of telling this story, that the following part has been met with the most appreciation and aplomb by my male listeners.

Needless to say, the news of the capture of the singing dervish had excited the princess in an extreme way. It had filled the princess’ thighs with a unique wetness. Ah, here you go, listeners. I will curb the details if you act like this. Behave!

The princess, using the might that the most beautiful princess always carries within the royal boundaries, had discovered the location of the chamber allotted to the singing dervish. Although she would have wanted to visit the dervish and let him make violent love to her straightaway, a queer sense of propriety made her control her hormones. Passion mixed with propriety becomes curiosity, and so she sent some of her female minions, dressed as men, inside the chamber to offer him sherbet and a massage (the latter with the sole intention of making him remove his shirt, so that the amount of hair on his chest could be reported back to her).

Although the message for the massage, which had been totally misunderstood by the dervish, was lost, other interesting news were filtering through to the princess. One of the shadowed observers reported that it seemed that every sip of the sherbet was hardening the dervish’s cock more and more, and that the size of it was making it impossible for him to hide the monstrosity, leaving him rather uncomfortable. Upon receiving this news, the princess’ sexuality forgot all propriety, like some of you folks in the behind are, and she rushed to the peephole just above the dervish’s chamber. Between two pieces of red sandstone, that provided only a small rectangular slit to the dervish’s chamber from near the roof, she saw him writhe in extreme pleasure as if for the first time. At this sight, her virgin body bathed in spasms so violent that she almost let out a shriek!
***

The sultan woke up the next day, and even before performing his ablutions, or rather, having his ablutions performed, was planning the concert of the singing dervish that afternoon. In a mischievous manner most befitting the cunning of a sultan, he decided to have the singers, the court-masters, and the bards of his royal artistic troupe sit right opposite the dervish. He wanted the dervish’s talent to inflame their jealousy, and to spark a competition that would take the artistic levels of his kingdom even higher. He, like all great rulers of that era, knew that just like empires are made on successive conquests, art is made on successive bursts of the ego; and that both these motivations are either fuelled by internal rage or external competition. How did they know of the concept of ego at that age? Well, let that be a mystery.
***

The dervish was having a hazy morning. It was the morning of a night that had seen a strange commingling of masturbatory fantasies, visions of a divine light, and an understanding of the beauty in death and thereafter. At the core, it was the concept of beauty that had gained most in clarity, among numerous others, in the dervish’s mind. He felt more enlightened than he had in any of his opium hangovers, and more certain of having shed the worldly mediocrity of thought that had insidiously kept him chained. He felt the knots in his head melt away and wondered if The Prophet had also experienced a night like this before having the first revelation of the Holy faith. He hesitated to stretch that thought too far, but remembered his promise to himself the next moment.

To think so is not criminal. Certainly not. After all, there can be no crimes in heaven, simply because there is no judgment. Every indulgence is but an act of pleasure, every thought a logical conclusion in itself. Isn’t this heaven then, also, a strange kind of hell? Is a realm without limits the worst kind of prison?

As you can see, highly intellectual, potent, but circular thoughts were now engulfing the dervish. Within a single night, he had perhaps acquired the wisdom of a thousand sages. But as all sundry can guess: the wisdom of a thousand sages is not an anti-dote for the confusion that surrounds life (or thereafter, as in the case of the dervish) but a catalyst that makes it roil faster.
Minor philosophical circles notwithstanding, the dervish had not lost his belief in this heaven of his, and the countless pleasures it was going to provide him. Each one of his deserved heresies was to come alive here, and all of it would go on till eternity. Only he didn’t know what to do next? Just at this juncture, a minion came up to his chamber to read a note sent by some royal princess Saira:

We introduce ourselves as Princess Saira, the most beautiful daughter of our highness, jahanpanah, sultan Qutub of Bukhara. News of your divine singing, and views of your divinity last night , have lurched us into a sea of desire and loneliness, where there is water everywhere but not a drop to drink. Our thirst can only be quenched in a bodily union with your manliness, which we have managed to watch, adore, and imagine, repeatedly, in moonlight last night.

It is also true that your dervish filth will never be allowed to mingle with royal blood, not even in the seventh heaven. Our father will cut off our throat if we express our desire. And they will do the same to you. But if you combine tact, guile, and talent, to impress our father with a virtuous performance and entangle them in philosophies of your sect, there is a chance. You need to beguile the royal highness into believing that you possess the powers to predict the future of their kingdom, or something as fascinating, and that Allah will grant you that vision only if you are allowed to spend an hour in isolation in the chamber of the most beautiful virgin in the royal palace. Our father, our sultan, although shrewd and worthy of royalty, has an inexplicable taste for convoluted theories, magic, fantasy, and anything that they can’t quite understand; your wish may just be granted.

My prince, play your best moves so that we get to be in a union for one complete hour. I will do everything that your mind can fathom sexually, and more. And for eternity, I will freeze this hour into the royal and interminable annals of my memory. Be your best, for you face a choice between death, and the pleasures within my wet groin.

The dervish could not understand anything concerning the message from the princess. His wits were flying just about everywhere, as if shards from an explosion. His enlightenment, his excitement, his exultation, and now this. The situation had somehow eschewed his understanding initially. But there was one meaning that he could faintly sever from the mumble-mass that he had just been delivered: A good song in some sultan’s court will take me to some wet feminine groin. That was reason enough to rejoice.

He liked believing that the angels and nymphs in heaven were used to playing games with personalities like his own. Thus, he molded the message according to his own understanding, and deemed it to be a riddle that he needed to solve to warm the bed with a nymph called Saira. Suddenly, it started making more and more sense to him. Allah was surely thinking of rewarding him for his singing talents, and wanted to congratulate him with the present of the most beautiful nymph. The sultan, the court, the concert, and everything else were just situations where the he needed to express himself to the hilt, to burnish and brash about his talent and understanding. Although the riddle, like any good riddle trying to fox the solver, deceptively suggested that the nymph in the message was a reward that he had to win, he knew that the reward was already his. He just had to go through a certain process to claim it. And he was up for it.
***

Before describing the eventual concert, and thus the climax of this story, a little enquiry into the mind of the princess is mandatory.

After watching the eventful night of the dervish from her hide-out, the princess had grown increasingly certain of her desire for him. When a soul craves for something immensely, and for too long (and by too long we mean the duration of a long, dark night), the body and the mind are forced into action. That explains the harmless letter.

Many might have guessed that the princess’s cravings for the dervish had emanated from pure lust, and not from the more recent feeling called love. In those times, a man and a woman shared a bed either out of a sense of marital duty or pure animal urge, never the confusion called love. Rampant activity in most beds used to kill any chance for the germination of love; for love, as we know in our times, is borne more out absence and longing than out of physical satiation. Don’t some intelligent story tellers in our times say this: Love-making is the best anti-dote to love?
***

The sultan’s court was an august monument that promised history to the unborn. It incited the best in every soul. Not the largest in the world, for the court of the ruler in Persia was known to be much bigger; this court exemplified what could be achieved with excellent architecture. The visibility of the center and peripheries of the court from all angles had been taken care of in such a meticulous manner that the audience was sometimes disoriented from the performer to the uniqueness of the court itself. It was impossible to bat an eyelid, to whisper a little something, or to itch one’s private parts without half the members knowing about it. The acoustics, too, had been maintained in a supreme accuracy, so that a connoisseur watching from an elevated platform, or one of the balconies, would miss no word, no sur, and no sound. Even a blind man could provide commentary on the happenings in this superb court.