Storyteller, teacher, citizen of three worlds: on Karno's Daughter: The Lives of an Indian Maid

[Okay, here’s one of those increasingly rare “You have to read this book!” posts. The last three or four books I read for review were so underwhelming that I was worrying about having developed an attention-deficit problem. But Rimli Sengupta’s delightful Karno’s Daughter has somewhat soothed those anxieties. We so often hear high-sounding talk about Important or Essential books (people on the lit-beat get quickly exasperated by such descriptions in publishers’ press releases or on jacket blurbs), and in the middle of it all comes a slim, unassuming work like this one, which deals with so many “important" things and does it with such lightness of touch. I can’t recommend it highly enough. Here’s my review for The Hindu]

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Rimli Sengupta’s Karno’s Daughter: The Lives of an Indian Maid opens with a beguiling description, all warm colours and visual contrasts, of a little girl walking through a Sunderbans paddy field in 1969. (“That’s Buttermilk at six.”) Noticing a large ocean crab, she knows she must – though her hands are already full with the day’s labour – catch it and carry it back home to her rice-cultivating family. The next few pages give us a tale of pluck, excitement and reverie (“the impending meal of crab and rice took on mythic dimensions”), eventually tempered by the realities facing poor, struggling people.

The crab episode makes a good short story on its own terms, and is a fine way of drawing a reader into the book, but with hindsight we will see that it is also a subtle metaphor for Buttermilk’s life: a life spent multi-tasking, looking out for others, taking initiatives against great odds, anticipating rewards… then watching as much of it crumbles away. And yet, through it all, not falling to pieces herself.

This lovely work of narrative non-fiction comes from the simplest of premises: the author, who lives in Calcutta, is telling us the life story of her part-time maid (we learn why she is called Buttermilk in a casual aside, much later in the book). There is clear affection and closeness between the two women, but there is also Sengupta’s awareness of her own privileges, and a degree of guilt – “Simply put, Buttermilk makes my life possible. For this, I pay her a monthly salary that just about covers dinner for two at a nice restaurant” – that should be shared by any well-off Indians who pause to consider the gap between their lifestyles and those of their servants (or whatever other politically incorrect but accurate term you want to use).

A book about a poor person, written by someone much more advantaged, is by its very nature – especially in a climate of relentless political discussions around every creative work – vulnerable to allegations of cultural appropriation. It might be asked: what authority does Sengupta have to get into Buttermilk’s mind-space, to speak for her? Personally, I found Sengupta’s methods both credible and respectful, whether she is giving us chunks of text in her maid’s voice or telling the story in the third person. Sometimes, quoted speech from Buttermilk is interspersed with the author’s own commentary (perhaps just a brief clarification here or there), and the effect is that of attentiveness, care not to get things wrong or to over-simplify. There is a clear sense that Buttermilk, though she will never be able to read this book, is a participant in its telling.

And she is an unforgettable protagonist, a storyteller herself (perhaps on occasion a story-maker, as most of us are when revising our pasts) as well as a performer who points to her own goosebumps while telling a particularly fraught tale; a jokester who quips that rice vendors use powder to make the grain look whiter in much the same way as the father of a dark-skinned girl might do while trying to get her married; a philosopher with a stoical attitude toward both government and God (we’ve gone to doctors for many years, now God should get a chance, she says knowingly). When driven to despair, she might broach the possibility of suicide, but she is innately a survivor.

Like Vishnu’s Vamana avatar, Sengupta tells us, Buttermilk straddles three realms: she moves constantly between the village (where she keeps a close eye on her land, the ownership of which always seems to be in dispute), the city (where she works at several houses) and the suburbs, where she lives in a slum. We meet her family, including her dimwitted son Bonomali, who keeps getting into trouble, and her daughter-in-law Rupa, chosen for her plain looks so she won’t be in a position to leave her husband. And an enduring presence, though the author never meets him, is Buttermilk’s father Karno, an ill-starred man – like his near-namesake in the Mahabharata – who nonetheless managed to imbue his daughter with something of his own spirit.

Getting to know Buttermilk, Sengupta becomes aware of how limited her own sphere of experience is. One of the pleasures of this book is that the author – the educated, “sophisticated” woman – learns about so many things from her subject, and we learn along with her. About rice: its many varieties, the planting and harvesting and everything that comes in between. About land management and the ground-level workings of caste politics. About how a slum – which, from a distance, looks unchanged to us city folk – develops over time, even as the young people in it become more aspirational. About the hurdles in the implementation of Aadhaar, and the special difficulties it posed for the poor and voiceless.

This is the most unobtrusive sort of great book: slim, fast-paced, chatty, peeling back new layers with minimum fuss or a throwaway sentence. When Buttermilk returns after taking extended leave for the harvest, we are told “The city homes she had abandoned for those four days were bathed in wintry dust” – another reminder of how dependent city people in India are on their domestic workers, and how few rights the latter have. (In one of many passages where she lightly shares information and research, Sengupta tells us that these part-time workers have no access to grievance redressal or collective bargaining, because labour laws don’t apply to them, and in any case, "well paid and empowered domestic workers would be contrary to the interests of India's vast urban middle class.")

Only very rarely does something in the use of language ring false. On one occasion, the author quotes Buttermilk as saying "They [campaigning political parties] will feed us a set menu the night before the vote." The sentence felt a bit off to me because “set menu” is a very specific term generally used in the context of posh restaurant meals; something more basic like “fixed meal” might have been better here. But this sort of thing is an exception, and only serves as a reminder of how many more potholes there are for anyone writing a book like this, which Sengupta deftly sidestepped.

Karno’s Daughter manages to be uplifting and sad at the same time, a testament to the human spirit without being pedantic, tritely triumphal or showily sensitive. Despite knowing that this was a short, fluid book that could be finished in a couple of sessions, I found I was procrastinating – reading only 10 to 12 pages at a time – partly because there is so much to savour and digest, which a casual reading would do not justice to, and partly because I wanted to stretch the process out; perhaps to replicate the way Sengupta herself learns the story, in bits and pieces. And by the time I reached the end, with a reference to another crab feast –more fulfilling for our Vamana-like heroine than the one described in the first chapter – I thought I knew exactly how overwhelmed and sated Buttermilk must have felt.

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[Related posts: Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers; Pratima Devi and her dogs]

Yeh ghul-istaan hamaara? Terrorists and “anti-nationals” in Ghoul

[The dystopian horror film Ghoul, produced by Vikramaditya Motwane and Phantom, released on Netflix today as a three-part web series. I watched a preview screening last night and was – to my surprise – blown away by a lot of the film, especially the final 20-25 minutes. Here’s a piece I wrote for Daily O. No major spoilers]
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There is a brilliantly suspenseful sequence – hinging on an evil double – in the horror film Ghoul, just out on Netflix as a three-episode mini-series. Without giving away major spoilers, the scene has two manifestations of a particular character, one of whom we know to be the real person and the other a ghul (an ancient, malevolent spirit) who has taken on this physical form. These “twins” behave identically, each is seen in the company of other people who are imperiled, the film cross-cuts rapidly between them, and we have no way of knowing where the true threat lies.

As the sequence unfolded, all of us in the crowded hall vacillated every few seconds; people in nearby seats whispered nervously “Yeh ghul hai, woh asli hai… nahin nahin YEH ghul hai”. It was a classic demonstration of audience manipulation. Even as a long-time horror and suspense buff, who doesn’t get easily spooked, I was captivated.

But thinking about it later, this scene is also apt given the ambiguous (or to use a word with a double meaning, duplicitous) nature of the Ghoul narrative – where we are led to first believe that the horror stands for one thing, then realise that it was about something else.

As any student of the genre knows, some of the most famous horror motifs in literature and cinema have been responses to the real-world concerns or paranoias of the period in question – from Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein in the wake of the 18th century Vitalism debates about the nature of life, to the disfigurement and deformity themes in films and art of the 1920s (a few years after the mass-scale brutalizing of human bodies during the First World War), and so much else in between.

In that context, given the basic story of Ghoul, it is natural to think that the horror in the film represents terrorism in an exaggerated supernatural form. The story begins with the capture of a terrorist leader named Ali Saeed (Mahesh Balraj), and there is some nudge-wink wordplay about this man being a “monster”. The film’s protagonist Nida (Radhika Apte) is one of the military interrogators at a dingy detention centre who must break this dreaded prisoner. Instead, they soon find themselves dealing with something much more fearsome than they had imagined. Midway through, when Ali Saeed (or the ghoul possessing him) starts psychologically manipulating his captors, turning them against each other, it felt like a version of terrorist leaders “brainwashing” their followers and co-opting them to a murderous cause.

But as the narrative progresses, a subtle shift occurs and Ghoul reveals itself to be a sharply subversive film about other concurrent real-world threats: the threats of jingoism, hyper-nationalism and sectarianism, which we in contemporary India are starting to know a great deal about. This is a story very much of a time and place where minorities of various stripes can be judged without a trial, where criticism of a ruling party is conflated with disrespecting the country, where writers can be attacked and murdered in public, or made to feel like traitors if they don’t subscribe to “Us” vs “Them” polarities built around the cosmic accident of being born in this religion rather than that (or on this geographical territory opposed to that one).

In a way, we have been prepared for this by the film’s early scenes, which show us – in a dystopian but recognizable India of the near future – a conflict of views between Nida and her father. He is a conscientious professor, worried about what is going on in the country, and is teaching his students to question everything; while she has aligned herself with the state and strongly disapproves of anything that might be perceived as anti-national, even children’s nursery rhymes. Shortly after this, the main narrative begins, and in the context of what happens in the detention centre, Nida comes across as a sympathetic, diligent figure – but our ambivalent attitude to her is still very much in place. And like many other characters in other horror stories, the events that follow will force her to look long and hard into the mirror – at her twin “ghul” that might be lurking there.

This is not to say that the film ever goes soft on terrorism (or on Islamist terrorism) –nothing as simple as that. Ali Saeed and most of the other prisoners in the detention centre are criminals who were responsible for the deaths of innocent figures. (There is also one prisoner named Ahmed who wasn’t a terrorist at all but was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, and ended up incarcerated possibly because of his religion.) But the film does playfully raise the possibility that if, in an earlier cinematic idiom we had vigilante heroes like the Angry Young Man to fight injustice, today we might need to call on supernatural forces to protect us from bullying and bigotry.

There is a weary cliché, indulged in by people who don’t really understand or care for the genre, that so-and-so film “isn’t simply a horror movie, it is more than that”. As a horror fan, I don’t care for such patronizing language, but I can – just about – forgive someone applying it to the ending of Ghoul. Its final shot (again, no big spoiler), where a character sets out to launch vengeance on an authoritarian state, has the swift, savage directness of a good propaganda film. And yet it comes on the heels of a mostly well-paced story that also works as a genre piece.
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Viewing tip: I watched Ghoul on a big screen, in a dark hall, as a two-hour-long feature film (which is how it was conceived, before being broken up into a mini-series). Needless to say, anyone watching an atmospheric film like this on a laptop screen should try to stay similarly distraction-free – otherwise much of the impact will be lost.

Touch of Evil, on Netflix

For film buffs who didn’t know: Orson Welles’s superb 1958 thriller Touch of Evil is on Netflix India now. The version they have is the original theatrical release, which Welles famously did not approve of (it was the last of his many skirmishes with the Hollywood studio system). The one I have on DVD (and the only one I have seen so far) is the 1998 re-cut by Walter Murch, working with the detailed, anguished memo Welles had sent the studio after watching a preview. I love the re-cut version, but I also look forward to watching the original studio version to see how it holds up, and whether it might not be more interesting in some ways. (As Welles himself noted, the absence of limitations is the enemy of art.) 
 
What I did watch on Netflix was the famous three-minute opening scene, a long, unbroken take that follows a car with a time-bomb in it across the US-Mexico border (while Charlton Heston and Janet Leigh, as a just-married couple, leisurely saunter across the same route). Here, a couple of differences between the two versions are obvious: for example, in the original release, the opening credits play over the scene, which means a viewer might get careless. (I can imagine some viewers, back in 1958, settling into their seats with their popcorn, not paying much attention to Welles’s meticulously constructed shot because, well, WORDS are running across the screen, so the story proper can't have begun yet.) Whereas the Welles Memo version is without the credits and invites us to give the shot our full and uninterrupted attention.

Anyway, a couple of things to look out for if you haven’t yet seen this great film:

-- The influence on Psycho, which came two years later. Janet Leigh being terrorised in a motel… which is run by a twitchy young man (wonderfully played by Dennis Weaver who, to my eyes at least, resembles Anthony Perkins in a few long-shots. Welles paid a sort of return-tribute to Hitchcock a few years later by casting Perkins as Josef K in his 1962 version of The Trial)

-- Charlton Heston is an actor who many people find easy to dismiss today (all those grandstanding, larger-than-life roles in three-hour epics that were roundly mocked by fans of “personal cinema”), but Touch of Evil in my view contains one of his best, most neglected performances -- as an upright but conflicted and discriminated-against Mexican cop (and this just a year before Ben-Hur)

-- Marlene Dietrich and Welles sharing screen time! The 40-plus Mercedes McCambridge as a boyish punk in leather! Heaven

-- For Welles aficionados, the final scenes of this film might lead you to ask the philosophical question "When is a cane just a cane, as opposed to a C.Kane?"

P.S. a little more about Walter Murch and Touch of Evil in this post.

And here's Janet Leigh with two shifty motel-keepers in two desolate motels, two years apart!

On Delhi’s Meatscapes, a book about the Qureshi butchers and their trade

[Did this review for Scroll. As you can tell, I had very mixed feelings about this book – and in full disclosure, some of that comes from the knowledge that it had the backing of a New India Foundation fellowship, one of the more generous of its kind for Indian writers. That isn't something I would normally mention in the context of a review, but I do feel that such fellowships go a long way – or should go a long way – towards discouraging the sort of shoddy or hurried writing one sees plenty of in this publication. Of course, OUP must take much of the responsibility for this]
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Some of my earliest encounters with butcher shops took place when I accompanied my mother to south Delhi’s congested, kiosk-dominated Hauz Rani market, to buy beef treats for our cat. At the time, I was only vaguely aware that the shopkeepers had names like Suleiman and Qureshi and that they were Muslim; it was years later that I learnt about the politics of eating beef (or “buff”) and the discourses around it. I don't remember speaking to the Hauz Rani butchers as a child – maybe just a nervous nod – but today, when I visit a tidier, air-conditioned meat shop in a Saket mini-market, I exchange small talk, in a mix of Hindi and English, with a new generation of tee-shirt-and-jeans-wearing Qureshis.

This swathe of experiences led to a casual curiosity about the Qureshi clan and its ubiquity in the meat trade, which is why I was intrigued to hear of Zarin Ahmad’s Delhi’s Meatscapes: Muslim Butchers in a Transforming Mega-City. This academic book provides a broad-based view of the Delhi Qureshis, their history, and what has changed for them over time, including the challenges facing traditional butchers in a fast-mechanizing trade and given the recent controversies around beef.

Ahmad divides her research over six chapters, covering such subjects as the principal sites of Qureshi life (home, abattoir, meat shop), the increasing diversity of Delhi’s “meatscapes” – from roadside vendors to posh supermarkets in malls – and the effects and attendant tensions of the Pink Revolution, which has seen a growth in India’s meat exports. In the early chapters, she discusses aspects of Qureshi lifestyle and speech that mark them out as being a distinct biradri within the Muslim community; the power equations as they once were – including the status of authority figures like the Chaudhry – and as they are now, in the impersonal city; internal differences of opinion (about how lavish a function or ceremony should be, for instance); the growing independence of youngsters; the initial schism between “bhainswaale” (bovine butchers) and “bakrewaale” (sheep and goat butchers), and how this became more relaxed over time.

She tells us about the few writings available by and about the Qureshis, which “express a biradri in search of its own historical narration” – trying to shed demeaning perceptions, seeking the respectability that has often been denied to those who do “dirty” work, being Muslim while also caring for the Muslim-minority country they live and work in (and aware that they are sometimes expected to make an extra effort to show their loyalty to India). “There are tensions in the Qureshi presentation of their history,” Ahmad notes, “They would like to have no association with the khateek Hindu butchers, so they stress upon an Arabic past. At the same time, since cow and all forms of bovine slaughter is an emotive political issue, they know that their future is entwined with larger Muslim politics in India.”

Early on, there is a translation – by the author herself – of an autobiographical sketch of Sadruddin Qureshi, author of a three-volume magnum opus about Qureshi history. This chatty, four-page interlude, which includes an account of the historian visiting Pakistan in the 1960s and being stuck there for months during the Indo-Pak war (enjoying the hospitality while also yearning to return home), is among the more charming things in the book, and I wish there had been more asides along these lines – humanizing individual members of the biradri, using the personal to shed light on the historical. (Later, there is another short profile – again, demarcated from the main text – of Sirajuddin Qureshi, the prominent exporter who established the processing unit HAIL.)

It would also have been nice to get a fuller sense of Ahmad’s own participation in this story. In her Introduction, she fleetingly mentions the initial difficulties of winning her subjects’ trust (in the current climate, Muslim butchers are understandably wary of a writer approaching them with questions about their trade), or the challenges of venturing into male-dominated spaces like the Idgah livestock market. But frequently, just when the book seems to be adopting an informal or personal tone, it draws back and returns to being a chronicle of dry facts.

Ahmad covers a lot of territory, not just about the Qureshi history and lifestyle, but also about the intricacies and challenges of their profession. As the narrative moves from the lives of the biradri to the workings of the realms they have affected and been affected by, she takes us into the Idgah abattoir (which was shut down and relocated to Ghazipur, amidst protests, in 2009, but which Ahmad chooses to write about in the ethnographic present), and the various “actors” present here, from veterinarians who must pronounce an animal “fit to slaughter” to the slaughterers and cleaners.

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While the word “transforming” in the book’s sub-title denotes a changing metropolis, Ahmad also uses it in another context that can make even staunch non-vegetarians (like yours truly) squirm. The abattoir is “the site where animals are slaughtered and transformed […] into four distinct commodities”, she tells us, a usage of the word that put me in mind of novels about serial killers who artistically “alter” their victims into something supposedly larger and more significant than they were in life. If that sounds like a flippant comparison, it isn’t meant as such. While reading a book like this, any reader – no matter how dispassionate or how non-vegetarian – must to some degree engage with the ethics of killing.

I certainly thought about it during the passages that describe the grisly realities of the slaughterhouse. The closest I ever came to turning vegetarian – the phase lasted three or four weeks – was when, as a child, I passed nearer than I had intended to a chicken-slaughtering yard. Later, after watching the killing scenes in Georges Franju’s Blood of the Beasts, I went off beef for a few weeks. Reading the abattoir descriptions in this book was a reminder of those close encounters with the processes that go into producing the meat on my table, and how removed that final product is from what precedes it.

Of course, complicating any discussion about the cruelty of animal slaughter in present-day India is the knowledge that such conversations are often a mask for cynical politics. As Ahmad points out, even some of the animal-welfare activism that has affected the Qureshis’ trade (the stopping of cattle-carrying trucks from plying at night, for example) are thinly veiled pretexts for exercising hegemony over the minority community. It’s a reasonable point, but I found myself wondering if this book might not have had a bit of space for an apolitical discussion about the less savoury aspects of meat-eating – while sticking within the framework that Ahmad has chosen for her study. For instance, given that youngsters often rebel against their parents and their familial legacies anyway, are there any young Qureshis – even a tiny minority – who don’t want anything to do with the meat trade? And what are the realistic options available to them? It’s one of the questions that hung over the book for me.

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There is no doubt that Delhi’s Meatscapes represents years of research, so I feel a little bad pointing to its inadequacies. But there are lots of typos and grammatical errors, missing words, misplaced commas and even incomplete sentences. Annoying as this sort of thing is – for a reader who expects better from a major publisher – it can to a degree be overlooked if it doesn’t interfere with comprehensibility. But that isn’t always the case.

Reading, on page 137, that “a shop selling buffalo meat should not be located within a radius of 500 metres from a temple”, I found myself making bemused estimations of market-temple distances in Delhi neighborhoods I know well. Then, on page 183, one learns that it wasn’t 500 metres after all, but 50 metres. On another occasion, a footnote tells us that a word mentioned in the text “rhymes with flatter and barter” – two words that are pronounced differently from each other.

Most off-putting, however, is the wholesale repetition of chunks of text. For instance, a paragraph at the end of chapter three reappears, almost word for word, at the end of chapter five. As if that weren't enough, page 190 repeats two full paragraphs from just four pages earlier. One understands that some recurrences are inevitable in academic books – often made up of chapters that present discrete arguments and may have been put together at different times, before being collated into a whole – but this is sloppy stuff at both the writing and the editing level, unworthy of what Ramachandra Guha calls “a model work of scholarship”, “lucidly written”, in a jacket blurb.

This is not to cast aspersions on the book’s other merits, its usefulness as a go-to text, and the seriousness and difficulty of Ahmad’s research. But given the perceptions (not always baseless ones) about academic literature existing in its own echo chamber, which even a dedicated reader from outside the field can find hard to breach, it is all the more important for such books to avoid confusing errors or imprecise writing.

Delhi’s Meatscapes works as a primer to a fascinating subject, with some sections (the personal asides, the bits about the complexities of Qureshi interrelationships and the account of abattoir and marketplace activity) that are more compelling than others. But given that this book is likely to be the only major English-language publication on a highly specialized subject for some time, I hope the author and her publisher fix its mistakes in a later edition.

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[My other book reviews for Scroll are here]

Another sort of "honour killing"

[In my “moments” column for The Hindu, a look back at the great 1962 film Harakiri, scripted by a writer who died just last month]
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When I heard about the passing of the Japanese screenwriter Shinobu Hashimoto – all of one hundred years old – my mind replayed vignettes from the Kurosawa classics Rashomon, Ikiru, Throne of Blood and The Seven Samurai, which Hashimoto co-wrote. Donald Richie’s book The Films of Akira Kurosawa has an anecdote about the great director and his writers sitting at a long table, each individually coming up with ways to execute a scene, then gathering the ideas and rewriting each other’s scenarios (there’s something so Rashomon-like about this!) before reaching a final decision.

But the Hashimoto-scripted scene I remember best is from a film that he got sole writing credit for: Masaki Kobayashi’s magnificent 1962 Harakiri. This is a placid, elegiac and beautifully composed (in both senses of that word) film – and perhaps for this very reason, the scene in question is one of the most harrowing things I have watched.

It involves a young Samurai named Chijiwa trying to commit seppuku (ritual suicide) in a palace courtyard, but struggling to pierce himself with the only available weapon, a bamboo sword. He writhes and groans, twists the inadequate blade this way and that; finally, he ends his agony by biting off his own tongue.

That description makes the scene sound gory, but it isn’t. It is in crisp black-and-white, and discreetly shot; we see only a few traces of blood. The horror comes from the close-ups of Chijiwa’s sweating face, the impassivity of the people watching him, and the narrative context: the impoverished Samurai had come to a royal house asking permission to commit seppuku on their grounds, but he was secretly hoping they would give him employment. To his shock, his stated request is granted and he is forced to carry through with a painful suicide in the name of the warrior’s code of honour.

What I have described above occurs within the film’s first 30 minutes. But to fully appreciate Harakiri, you must experience its many twists and turns, processing new information as it comes, so I won’t reveal more except to say: at first we are led to think of Chijiwa as a mildly comic figure – a wide-eyed, cowardly pretender – and it is only later that the tragedy of his situation is revealed. Over the course of its narrative, the film dismantles many grand-sounding conceits about honour and tradition.

Harakiri is full of quiet, still sequences. Even its fight scenes have a detached, fatalistic tone – none of the kinetically exciting action associated with Samurai films. In the seppuku scene and elsewhere, one senses a scream of anguish trapped just below the film’s restrained surface (much like the characters are trapped by tradition), trying to break through and make itself heard. Perhaps this is why a late scene, where the film’s protagonist Tsugumo laughs coarsely in the face of the palace retainers, has such raw, subversive power.

Though the story is set in a specific place and period, I see it as linked to other sorts of heroism myths – such as the schoolboy fantasy that there’s something dashing and glamorous about the whole project of dying for an ideal, or facing death with a smile. It reminds me of other cinematic moments such as the scene in Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory where a soldier, about to be executed, begins to wail and blubber. Or the ending of the gangster film Angels with Dirty Faces where Rocky (played by the brilliant James Cagney) “turns yellow” as he is led to the gas chamber – a development that takes the wind out of the sails of the young boys who were hero-worshipping him.

From a screenplay-writing perspective, Harakiri’s structure also follows the tradition of artful misdirection. It leads us down a garden path, we become just a little complacent, and then a bucket of cold water is thrown into our gasping faces. You can see this in many other sorts of films – for instance, in the shocking, much-discussed ending of Nagraj Manjule’s Sairat (recently remade in Hindi as Dhadak). First we are lulled by a scene where the heroine’s relatives, visiting her for an apparent reconciliation, sit about in her room looking uncomfortable and out of place, glancing through an album of photos. The initially tense mood is diluted with the mild humour of social awkwardness… but then comes the knockout punch.

Come to think of it, the “honour killing” scene in Sairat (and in other recent Hindi films like LSD and NH10) are – like the Harakiri scene – built around the idea that death, or murder, is preferable to the violation of a rigid social code. Details of place and period apart, there isn’t so much of a gulf between a terrified Samurai being led to a meaningless death and young lovers being savagely “punished” for defying tradition.

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[My earlier Hindu columns are here. Other related posts: Sairat; Paths of Glory; The Seven Samurai; more about Harakiri]

...and a 90th birthday

Okay, this is the last mawkish family post for some time. It’s my dadi’s 90th birth anniversary today. As some of you know, she died in December 2016 - I had been handling her medical issues since her cardiac arrest in early 2014, but had had to neglect her somewhat in her last few months once mum’s cancer treatment began. 

Despite being 88, weak and deteriorating physically, dadi’s mind was as sharp as ever, and her resolve just as strong. In those final months, knowing how much strain mum’s condition had put me under, she decided she wouldn’t go back to hospital even if things got really bad; she managed to get a local doctor’s assistant to make home visits and help her get by with stop-gap medication. And in July 2016, though barely able to move from her bed, she somehow helped organise the enormous amount in cash that I urgently needed for mum’s spine surgery (after an oncologist had f***ed up by giving us a much lower estimate, leaving us unprepared on a weekend).

But that’s just how dadi was, one of the most resourceful people around. She was about the only person I knew who could make me feel like a bumbling, inefficient fool in comparison (*insert gratuitous Mycroft-Sherlock analogy*). I could go on about her, and I will at some other point. 

For now, two photos: this one is from when I took across the MAMI cinema-writing trophy I got for The World of Hrishikesh Mukherjee - one of the last things I could do for her that made her smile. This was in late October 2016, less than two months before she went. 

And here is yours truly being held by his darling grandmother; in her usual style she has taken centre-stage, relegating to the sidelines the two characters who were more directly responsible for my existence. 

(The three adults in this pic - my immediate family - all died within a 14-month period. With two of them, deeply missed as they are, I have the satisfaction of knowing that I was there for them through all the toughest times at the end. With the third, there is a deeper wound, and much more ambivalence too. More on that some other time.)

P.S.  here's an old post about dadi -- so well-traveled in her time, so worldly-wise -- trying to wrap her head around this bizarre new thing called the internet.

A scan report (and photos) from a year ago

Haven’t put much “personal-personal” stuff here for a while — but well, since I have written a few such things about my mother for official publication recently, and shared links (this and this, for instance), here goes…

The images below are reminders of how photos can be misleading, or plain untruthful, in some ways (while of course being truthful in other ways). They were taken exactly a year ago, August 7 2017, a nighmarish day for mum and me. I had gone to the hospital that morning to collect her latest scan report and discuss it with the doctor. Waiting outside his cabin for 20 minutes, I did what I had promised myself I wouldn’t do: opened the report, glanced through it, realised from past experience — and despite the tangle of evasive medical phraseology — that it was bad news. This was confirmed a few minutes later: the doctor took a look, put on his most worried and official face, said “yes, it’s progressed quite a lot” (progress, as we conservatives will tell you, isn’t always a good thing), and that a second round of chemo would have to quickly begin — as early as the 11th. I asked if it were possible to wait until the next week, so she could be better prepared, but no. (I won’t relate his immediate response here — am saving it for my multi-volume series about insensitivity, incompetence and nastiness in the medical profession. But to be fair to him, he did tell me later that even with another 12-week chemo cycle, she probably had 6 to 8 months left at most.)

Anyway, after I got home and broke the news to mum and Neelu maasi (who was in Delhi at the time), I saw one of the very few cracks in the facade of cheeriness that mum had built up — through continuous physical and emotional pain — over the previous year: she didn’t say much, just went to bed and lay down for an hour in the position that was least painful to her back and arm, keeping her head buried in her pillow. Then, as if none of that had happened, she got up, washed her face, combed her hair, settled down for tea, chatted with maasi and Abhilasha (who had dropped in), coochie-cooed at Lara. That’s when we took these photos. In some of them, mum is smiling straight at the camera, something she had rarely ever done even in the good days. Faker. 

Four days later, we were back in hospital for the start of a 2nd chemo cycle that would, almost from the beginning, take a much greater toll on her constitution than the first one had a year before...

Help needed for Kambli the desi pup

Attention animal lovers — please read this and see if you can help in any way, or spread the word to anyone else who might be able to.

Archana Sreenivasan is currently fostering Kambli, an 8-month-old paraplegic and incontinent male puppy. He is an Indie and was rescued from a construction site as a 3-month-old with a spinal injury. After that, he was moved to two different shelters, and finally Archana brought him to her home in Bangalore three weeks ago because he wasn't getting the care he needed at the earlier shelter. She is unable to adopt him, and has not been able to find anyone else who can adopt him.

In Archana’s words:

"Kambli will not do well in any shelter in Bangalore. He needs extra care and multiple vet visits, which no shelter will have the bandwidth for. Kambli's urine needs to be expressed 5 times a day and he needs a surface that is smooth for him to drag himself about on (when he's not in his wheel cart.)
I came to know that some of the rescue dogs of Delhi are fortunate enough to find homes outside India, in the US, Canada and Netherlands, and I couldn't help dreaming for Kambli. I tried contacting the folks in Delhi who work on these international adoptions but haven't received any response from them.
I can help financially with Kambli. I can have him transported wherever required. I'm willing to help in any other way I possibly can, if anyone is willing to help out with his case.
Kambli needs a home, or he will not survive.”

Among the people Archana is trying to reach are:
Dr. Premalata Choudhary (http://www.choudharypetclinic.com/index.html)
Vandana Anchalia or Kannan Animal Welfare (https://www.facebook.com/kannananimalwelfare/)

But if anyone has suggestions for others who might be able to help, please weigh in. (One complication is that most agencies and shelters - Friendicoes etc - already have more dogs than they can handle, especially with people abandoning pets every day.)

Please feel free to share this post, or the poster I have included. Updates, including videos of Kambli, are on his Instagram page, here.

Please help if you can.

Two faces of Haribhai, a.k.a. Sanjeev Kumar

[Inadvertently continuing the mother theme, with this Mint Lounge piece about my mom's favourite actor. In the early years of blogging, I had many run-ins with Sanjeev Kumar fans because I mocked his Great Actor status. Actually, I was restrained and self-censoring compared to my friend Shamya Dasgupta, who often took over my comments threads and wrote sentences like: “Because Ray was the director, even a fool like Saeed Jaffrey acted well in Shatranj ke Khiladi. Sanjeev Kumar didn't have a choice but to do well."

Anyway, here’s an effort to say some vaguely nice things about SK]
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When an acquaintance mentioned recently that Sanjeev Kumar’s 80th birth anniversary had just passed, and wondered why there was no biography of this actor, so admired in his time, I had two contrary responses.

The first went: yes, of course it would be great to have a well-researched book about “Haribhai” (as Kumar, born Harihar Jariwala, was affectionately known). Movie-star biographies – good ones, bad ones – appear nearly every month now, some of them about celebrities who are still in their prime. The recency bias irks me. I often encounter young film buffs who know little about film history, and Kumar is among the old-timers whose work is seen as quaint or stodgy. It’s easy to feel defensive on his behalf.

But the second reaction was a kneejerk one, rooted in my own less-than-kind feelings about Kumar the performer. In fact, a lot of my online time used to be spent mocking the poor man for what I felt was an inflated reputation. One enjoyable blog exchange – nearly 15 years ago – involved a friend and me taking on a Sanjeev Kumar devotee in a thread that became more hysterical and less sincere as it went on. (“Just for the record, Hari didn’t look too bad when he was playing the dhol while his wife made out with Amitabh to Rang Barse,” my friend conceded, tongue-in-cheek.)

Much of our trolling was calculated, aimed at driving our victim into paroxysms of righteous indignation. But it was also rooted in real annoyance about an actor getting disproportionate credit for his choice of roles, for “opting to” playing elderly character parts rather than “heroes”. I had grown up with the idea – expressed by sermonizing adults and by film magazines – that Kumar was a Real Actor, while others were Just Stars. Superb performances by his more glamorous co-stars (Dharmendra and Hema Malini in Sholay, for instance) were downgraded or taken for granted (while SK’s Thakur got all the plaudits for his gritted teeth and trembling lips). This was a simplistic celebration of “subdued” or “understated” over “showy” or “flamboyant”.

Another factor, for me at least, was the tedium generated by numerous bad SK films that continued to be released posthumously right up to the 1990s. I was particularly annoyed by the final scene of Professor ki Padosan, released in 1993: Amitabh Bachchan makes a cameo appearance to say a few nice things about Kumar, then solemnly places a garland over the actor’s photo – all this right at the end of a slapstick comedy, effectively taking the wind out of the audience’s sails and making us feel like we had to stand up for the national anthem.

Which is why it’s fun now to recall another SK avatar: the much younger, mid-1960s version in such films as Nishan and Ali Baba aur 40 Chor. To watch those costume dramas is to see a lithe, beaming young man gamely doing whatever he could with conventional leading roles. These are tacky films by most measures, and I wouldn’t ask you to watch them in their entirety, but look at some scenes like his first appearance in Nishan: an adolescent prince is seen riding and singing along, and then a dissolve gives us the adult version (played by SK), fitted in period costume, long curly hair blowing in the wind.

I’m not saying SK was great in those early roles. He often overdoes things spectacularly (watch him playing drunk while Helen sings “Aap ki Adaon Pe”; the scene at approximately 40 seconds in the YouTube video is unintentional-comedy gold). But in his better moments, he shows personality, panache and a sense of humour, things that faded in later years as he adopted the somber, old-man persona. I feel there’s an element of post-facto myth-building in the idea (often expressed in discussions about SK) that he always set out to be an Actor rather than a Hero. It’s more likely that Kumar would have taken whatever cards were dealt to him by fate and the box-office, but for some combination of intangible reasons, he never found large-scale popularity as a dashing lead. Maybe it’s because he did the wrong films early in his career, or wasn’t conventionally good-looking in the way that Dharmendra or Shashi Kapoor were, or didn’t have the visceral appeal that Rajesh Khanna rode such a wave on. From the mid-70s on, corpulence (brought on partly by alcohol and, rumour has it, romantic rejections) also played a role in his taking on restrained character parts.

Orson Welles once perceptively noted that hamming shouldn’t be synonymous with over-acting. “Ham actors are not all of them strutters and fretters […] a lot of them are understaters, flashing winsome little smiles over the teacups, or scratching their T-shirts.”

Sanjeev Kumar could, at different stages in his career, be both varieties of ham actor, but there was also a middle zone made up of many periods of grace, fueled by scripts and directors – most notably Gulzar, to a lesser extent Basu Bhattacharya, on one occasion Satyajit Ray – who tapped the best of him. Overall I preferred him in lighter parts — in fine comedies like Angoor and Laakhon ki Baat, of course, but also his Satyakam role as the hero’s boisterous friend. Even a non-fan like me can acknowledge that in such films, he found a character’s pulse without being either self-consciously subdued or theatrically over the top.

So, a biography? Bring it on. Just don’t turn it into a Rajkumar Hirani-helmed film with Aamir Khan playing SK as an alien who crashes down into the big bad world of Hindi films and improves it with gravitas.
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[Here, in the interests of 'balance', is a piece where I say appreciative things about Kumar - in Gulzar's Koshish. And here's a post about SK and MacMohan - who would play Sambha in Sholay - sharing space together as young supporting actors 10 years before Sholay]

Rooms, private traps: on living with, and growing away from, a parent

[Re-posting this piece I wrote for Indian Quarterly magazine early last year, about my relationship with my mother — a genuinely close one but also one that had involved very little “casual" talk in recent years. And how that came to be tested when a special situation — her cancer diagnosis — arose in July 2016]

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“Jack is five. He lives in a single, locked room with his Ma.”
(Terse summary on the back cover of Emma Donoghue’s Room)

****

The last film I watched with my mother in a movie hall was the 2015 Room, based on Emma Donoghue’s Booker-shortlisted novel. Two things about that sentence. First: our last film. That sounds bleak and final, and I hope there will be more to come, but at the time of writing there is more reason to be cautious than optimistic.

Second: it wasn’t just the last film we saw together in a hall, it was also the last film we saw together, period. And I can’t think of the last time we saw a whole film together in a more casual, everyday situation, just sitting in front of a TV set while chatting.

But I’ll return to these points.

Here’s how Room became that film. Years ago, before I had read the Donoghue or even known exactly what it was about, I realised that my mother had developed an attachment to it. The novel sat prominently for months on the table where she selected and stacked books that had come to me from various publishers, and whose titles or synopses -- or  jacket covers -- she  had found intriguing. The great majority of those books were abandoned after a few pages when she found they weren’t up her street, but Room she finished, over many sessions of sporadic reading: putting the book down after a few pages, returning to it between her dalliances with less demanding things such as movie magazines.

It wasn’t until I heard about the upcoming film version, and read plot details online, that I learnt what Room was about. And then, knowing that the film was going to show in Delhi and that mum might like to see it, I read the novel myself as preparation, and found myself thinking anew about what she might have found so compelling.

Room is told in the voice of a five-year-old boy who has spent his whole life with his mother in a single small room where she has been kept captive since being kidnapped as a teenager. Here are two people who have been victims of a terrible, ongoing crime -- one  of them in full possession of the facts, nurturing and guarding and making up stories for the other, who is still innocent and unaware that there is a life and a world beyond the tiny space he has known all his short life.

This is, needless to say, an extraordinary narrative situation. The broad premise, and what occurs within it, might be considered unrealistic -- or  at least, very improbable -- but  it also contains an allegory for aspects of a more “normal” mother-child relationship, especially a close one that involves a great deal of mutual interdependence. First there is the womb, a safe space from which the child must eventually be ejected to discover the outside world; and then, in that outside world, there is a still larger “room”, the sheltering one of parenthood, which this infant will stay encased in for at least a few years. Simultaneously the parent must prepare to “free” herself from the belief -- with  its attendant agonies and ecstasies -- that  she alone can walk her child through life.

Did my mother think about any of this when she became so involved with the book? I don’t know, I haven’t asked her (and I won’t), but even if she had, it would probably have been in a subconscious way; she wouldn’t have articulated these thoughts like I just did, all pedantic and reviewer-like. More than a tendency to intellectualise, she has always had what I think of as an intuitive, commonsense wisdom. (The only "literary" observation she made to me about the novel was that she had been first taken aback and disoriented, then gradually fascinated, by Jack’s fumbling first-person narrative; it took her a while to see that the reader was meant to understand more about the situation than the narrator himself did.)

Still, I wonder if she thought about my childhood.

******

“Jack is five. He lives in a single, locked room with his Ma.”

Jai is eight. He and his mother stay locked up in a room at the end of the house, down the hall -- not  all the time, but on days when things are especially bad at home; when the big bad wolf huffs and puffs and threatens to blow the door down.

We were always exceptionally close. She was my life-raft on a sea of uncertainty, at an age when I barely knew enough to be certain or uncertain about anything; a shield not just from my father’s unpredictable, alcohol-fuelled violence but also -- and this I realised only much later -- from  the possibility of my becoming over-pampered, turned into a privileged lout, by well-off grandparents trying too hard to compensate for their son’s behaviour.

I don’t want to get too dramatic about this: our lives were never close to being as bad as those of Room’s protagonists. The terrifying memories -- of  my father hammering on a locked door, or overturning a huge, heaped dining table with unfathomable strength, or physically assaulting a Sikh priest who was reading from the Granth Sahib during an akhand paath in our house -- intersect with other memories of going to school; going (once in a while) to friends’ parties; of mum taking up a part-time job as a doctor’s receptionist when she found that her monthly pocket money wasn’t enough (and maybe that she needed to feel useful). But the bad memories are always there too, and aspects of our life certainly felt horror film-ish -- the  many times we had to sneak out when it got dark, for instance, and spend a scared night at a neighbour’s place, or in the maid’s quarters behind the house.

And yes, ultimately, there is no undramatic way of putting this, we did "escape". Aided by the confidence we had in our relationship, and the rock-solid support of my mother’s widowed mother, who -- her own troubles notwithstanding -- took  us in hand when she realised that things had gone out of control. After a mercifully brief custody battle, we ended up living together in a then-very-green-and-quiet south Delhi colony called Saket, which means “heaven”. (But I won’t underline that. Mustn’t get too dramatic.)

*****

A few years after this, my interest in cinema as something one could think about, read in depth about, perhaps even write professionally about one day, began with Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, and the reservoirs of film literature it led me to. By this point my mother and I were leading secure enough lives that it was possible to smile at the film’s macabre Oedipal theme. Mum (or Amma as I have always called her for some reason, late as it is in this piece to reveal such a central piece of information) told me how, in the early 1960s when the film released in Bombay, her brother came home and solemnly informed their mother that he would like to have her “mummified” after she had passed on.

(“Needles, sawdust… the chemicals are the only things that cost anything,” Norman Bates says, explaining the practicalities of taxidermy; a horror-movie monster, yes, but also someone who knows what it is like to be so close to and so dependent on a parent that you want to keep their physical presence with you “forever”.)

Despite the emotional security that had come with leaving my father’s house, I was cripplingly shy, prone to melancholia and loneliness. And watching it when I did, Psycho touched something deep in me. I found sadness in it, in scenes like the one where Norman responds to the insinuation that he and his mother might have been looking for money to leave their motel and start a new life elsewhere. “This place happens to be my only world,” he says, “I grew up in that house up there. I had a very happy childhood.” He sounds defiant. “My mother and I were more than happy.”

Perhaps on some level, without being able to express it this way at age 14, I was instinctively realising how close I had come to leading the trapped, circumscribed life that Norman and his dead mother do. But then, as he says in the film’s most moving sequence, a long conversation with a conflicted young woman who has “gotten off the main road”, we are all clamped in our private traps anyway -- even  when we seem free. “We scratch and we claw, but only at the air, only at each other.”

*******

Imprisonment, Dependence, Liberation, Self-discovery, Stagnation… those are some big themes, and despite my professed reluctance to get dramatic, I can’t help returning to them. And it isn’t just by chance that I have been talking about two films that involve very intense mother-son relationships and the very unusual situations in which those relationships grow, ossify or decay. I have in recent years become aware of a glitch in my relationship with my mother. Put briefly: it seems that our closeness has almost always been founded on big things -- the Important and the Dramatic -- and not enough on the minutiae of life; the Casual, the Mundane.

From the beginning we always shared the really important stuff, and I never thought this was unusual until I heard stories about all the things my friends -- even  the ones from the seemingly open-minded, cosmopolitan families -- routinely  hid from their parents: about girlfriends, or bunking college, or their first cigarette. When I took my girlfriend -- a young woman in an unhappy marriage, on the brink of separation -- across to meet my mother for the first time, I felt none of the nervousness that most other young people I knew would feel in that situation. It was the most natural thing to do.

And this flowed from how things had always been between us, from my mother’s own openness. When I couldn’t have been more than 12 or 13, she told me about the marriage proposal she had got from an uncle, a childhood friend who had always held a torch for her, and how she had been very tempted but didn’t take it up because it would mean relocating to Lagos, too large a bridge for us to cross at that point in our lives. On another occasion, when the husband of one of her neighbourhood friends made a sexual overture -- figuring that a divorced woman was easy pickings -- I was the first to hear of it, and to be privy to her shock as well as her fear that she may have brought it upon herself by bantering with him at social gatherings.

Taking as much pride as I did in this candour, it took me a long time to discover that I may be undervaluing other sorts of conversations and interactions: the small talk that keeps people going day by day; the sort of behaviour that introverts sometimes dismiss as flippant or inconsequential, but which in its own way brings nourishment and meaning to a relationship over time. Casual chatter and gossip are ways of ventilating the heart, an old grandmother says in Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel Embroideries. In Yasujiro Ozu’s 1959 film Good Morning, when a little boy tells his parents that he’s fed up of their polite, vacuous conversation -- the  repeated “good mornings” and “how are yous”, which seem vacuous or hypocritical -- one  of them responds that such talk is essential: “It's a lubricant for the world.”

My mother and I never quite learnt these lessons -- or perhaps we knew them once and gradually became careless about them. Partly this was a personality matter -- both  of us being, to different degrees, very private people -- and partly a result of circumstances; for many years while growing up I was intimidated by my nani’s boisterous personality and kept to my room while she was around. But it also reflects the growing-away-from-a-parent process that everyone (except, maybe, a Norman Bates) goes through.

The second half of Donoghue’s Room is made sharply poignant by the mother’s realisation that her son will never again be as dependent on her as he was during their years of incarceration. I have never really lived away from my mother -- even after getting married and shifting to another flat in the same colony, I continued spending my working day as a freelance writer in my old room, my comfort zone, in her house. But like most children do, I moved away in other ways: into new worlds populated by new friends, into a job and the circles it introduced me to, but also into my own inner spaces.

There was a time, long ago, when we played Scrabble together, or watched TV shows together, in the first years after satellite TV came to India. This gradually stopped. As I became embarrassed by the tackiness of some of the Hindi films we rented and watched on videocassette every Friday, I started lingering about outside the room where mum and nani were watching the film -- and shortly afterwards, I moved away from Hindi cinema altogether, and into new realms that excluded my mother. One thing followed another, and casual conversation became increasingly hard; we rarely even sat down and had meals together. Despite living in the same house, we became… not estranged, but something else -- something I don’t know the word for.

Can a relationship that is really, really close in essence also be distant and awkward in some important contexts? And when a new sort of special situation comes around -- one  that demands an everyday intimacy -- what then?

********

I have had to think about these things ever since the day last July when I sat down to talk with mum about what I thought would be a relatively mundane medical issue -- her  lingering discomfort and back pain, which I’d assumed was an offshoot of an old kidney condition, worsened by many years of self-medicating -- and she told me, all matter of fact, “No, it isn’t the kidney. It’s breast cancer. I have had it for a while, so it’s probably quite advanced by now.”

World-altering though that moment was, it’s almost funny when I think of it now. The fan whirring above us. A reality show playing on low volume in the background. Me, having come into her room, knowing her aversion to doctors and hospitals, with a speech carefully prepared to put her at ease (“We’ll go once, it’ll take just 10 minutes, you can tell them what medicines you’ve been taking, they’ll tell us if there’s something else you should be doing, and that’s it... you don’t have to agree to any intrusive procedures or examinations if you aren’t comfortable”), the deadpan look on her face as I recited the first two or three sentences of that speech -- as casually as I could, looking around as I said the words, at the dog, at the TV, so she wouldn’t think I was arm-twisting her -- and then her interrupting me with her grand revelation: oh no, this is the start of something much bigger than you think.

Another case of what should have been a quotidian exchange turning into something larger than life, like old Hindi movies about terminally ill patients. Another demonstration that the ‘Casual’ switch is jammed when it comes to the two of us.

In the weeks that followed -- a fortnight-long hospital stint precipitated by a worried-looking oncologist saying “Can we admit her right now? It’s important”; the realization that my mother, with her ridiculously high pain threshold, had a cancer-caused crack in her spine, which had to be mended before anything else could be done; the days and nights divided between handling things in the hospital and looking after our high-strung canine child Lara, who had been completely dependent on mum; watching the deterioration and immobilization of a woman who, to my eyes at least, had seemed in decent shape for her 63 years just a few weeks earlier, certainly capable of living alone -- through  all this and more, I had plenty of time to wonder how it had come to this: how a mother whom I saw every day had been diagnosed so late that the disease was almost certainly incurable; why it had to be her closest friend, an aunt who lived downstairs, who alerted me with a couple of phone calls to say that mum was in so much pain late at night that she had -- and  this was the biggest red light of all -- been unable to feed Lara.

And, naturally, I couldn’t help thinking that if I had spent more “casual” time with her in the previous few months -- even sitting around in the evenings in her room for 15-20 minutes each day while she watched TV or listened to music -- I would have been more alert to the little signs, the displays of pain that she had kept hidden.

*****

One side-effect of mum’s chemotherapy is that it has made her sentimental about little things, and at unexpected times. One day, apropos of nothing, she asked if I would massage her aching shoulder for a bit -- and then, smiling, squeezing my hand, told her nurse that I had “the healing touch”. And I winced. Only momentarily, but I couldn’t help it; this overt display of closeness and affection was discomfiting.

Visiting the toy store Hamleys with a friend and his little daughter the next day, I idly glanced at art-and-craft games that I thought might be useful for mum -- not so much to pass the time but to keep her mind active, since people with lesions in the brain, and risk of seizures or mental atrophy, need to do this. Soon I realised that I was looking mainly at the one-person activities. Given that I had flexible working hours, which I mostly spent in her house, shouldn’t I have made an effort to find something we could share, if only for a few minutes each day? Was I nervous about the small talk that would inevitably accompany such a joint endeavour? Or was I afraid that such proximity would make me privy to the involuntary groans of pain that came from her when she moved her shoulder or back at an awkward angle? And in either case, what did that say about me -- “such a good, dutiful son”, as I am often called by visitors to the house?

But even with the knowledge that time may be running out and every day is precious, how do you suddenly begin doing the things you haven’t been accustomed to doing for years? How do you force yourself to sit down and chat about “trivial” or “inconsequential” things, or just play Scrabble, with a parent-patient who might need a psychological boost, when the two of you have long fallen out of that habit and become locked in your own little boxes?

Inevitably, given the situation, the bulk of our interactions are about urgent and important things: I walk into her room at fixed intervals to check on her medicine intake and her meals, to confirm a blood-sample appointment, to discuss contacting a new nursing agency when the current one raises its fees. But I’m also making efforts now -- small, self-conscious, not very successful ones -- to turns things around: to chat with her about the currency situation, or banter about whether her post-cancer wig is more convincing than Donald Trump’s real hair, or show her a joke someone had shared on Facebook.

Still confined to our own rooms. Stuck in private traps. But trying.

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[An earlier post about caregiving is here. And here is my long essay about Hindi-movie mothers for a Zubaan anthology]