[Did this review for Scroll. For reasons mentioned near the end of the piece, I had thought Low would be a difficult book to read. It wasn’t] ------------------------
Early in Jeet Thayil’s Low – an extraordinary black comedy about loss, numbing grief and a drug-haze vision of the end of the world – we learn about the event that fuels the novel. Dominic Ullis has returned to his home in Delhi’s Defence Colony to find his wife Aki dead, a suicide. Ullis calls her mother, they take Aki’s body to the hospital, she is moved from emergency room to morgue. And then,
“All night the panic sat like a heavy bear on his chest. The bear stayed for many days and nights, until it gave way to exhaustion and blessed amnesia.” That word, “panic”, might at first seem an odd fit here – you expect to see it used when there is still a chance of fixing or escaping a very bad situation. But Thayil is one of the most precise wordsmiths around, and I thought the description was pitch-perfect. Almost anyone who has been in comparable straits – the untimely death of someone central to your life; a busy, commonplace day being suddenly and definitively paralysed – will know the feeling of being so unhinged that “grief” as one conventionally thinks of it takes a back-seat for now – instead, one’s mind (paralysed but also more alert than it has ever been) is racing to process what has happened, what will have to be dealt with in the coming hours and days, what life might look like in the future given this profound absence.
Panic is the sum of those feelings, though of course the more expected descriptors will appear later in the book. For now, here is Ullis, shaken by the robotic indifference of the priests at the crematorium, unwilling to go back home, heading straight to the airport and to Bombay, carrying the box with Aki’s ashes in it. He has no plan, but this is the city where he had spent many years as an addict (and where Aki had also grown up and lived, before they met). “The only thing possible now was oblivion, with the aid of certain powdery or liquid substances […] He was all out of resources, inner and outer. He needed distraction and fortification.”
Low thus becomes an odyssey of sorts – a woman Ullis encounters even calls him Ulysses, but the book doesn’t put this to pretentious use, it is turned into an ironic joke (“…as if she were presenting a Homeric hero rather than a shoeless grief-stricken stranger half out of his mind on Chinese heroin”). With little sense of the passage of time, he moves from five-star hotel suite to high-society party to a seedy bar named Jungle Beats. There are meetings with drug dealers, a hyper-nationalistic politician, a dancer named Meena Kumari, a couple of junkies on a sidewalk. A night-time speedboat ride from Alibag to south Bombay initially feels like a version of the journey from Hades to earth (or the other way round), but also yields an unexpectedly moving funeral rite.
Interspersed with these events are short flashbacks to his life with Aki: their meeting in a university library in New York, his discovery of her melancholia, the “low”, which she could always access, the argument they had in a car a few hours before her death. There are memories from before he knew her, such as a Mandrax buzz – “nothing less than liberation from a dictatorship of the senses” – experienced with friends along the walkway to Haji Ali. He even speaks to Aki’s ghost, who appears in the form of a face embedded in the ceiling above his bed. Uncharacteristically but usefully, she advises him to continue taking heroin. (He obliges, of course.)
And through all this, there is a heightened understanding of the true nature of grief: “Comfort flowed in the reverse direction. Outwards it went from the grief-stricken, in ever-widening circles, first to close relatives and friends and neighbours, then to distant relations, acquaintances, foes, the unknown faces that floated up out of the dark. Comfort travelled in one direction only. There was no return gift.” Ullis realises his duty is to reassure his many “comforters” – and savagely true as this observation is, Thayil also puts it in the service of dry humour, with passages like the one when Ullis finds himself in a car with strangers who are making sympathetic sounds: “He hoped [the silence] would continue all the way to the waterfront and he wouldn’t have to console people he didn’t know.” On another occasion, he hears himself saying “There, there. Never mind” in response to someone who has burst into tears on thinking about what he must be going through.
Low is – like Thayil’s first novel Narcopolis – very much a Bombay book, and it somehow feels apt that this most vibrant of cities should be the setting for a narrative about death and stasis, as well as reflections on a coming apocalypse. If Aki was always in danger of submerging into her low, the city is sinking too, or so Ullis believes. He is fascinated by the antics of the American president, an essential source of entertainment whose very existence seems like reassurance that the end really is near, that the whole world will soon go the way of Aki.
But however depressing its subject matter, this is far from a downbeat or dour work – largely because Ullis’s condition has created an almost palpable attentiveness. As he moves through a world that Aki is no longer part of, a world where people have dinner parties and talk politics and snort coke and watch music videos on their phones as if everything is still sane and ordered, he thinks: “Was this what happened to someone who came home one day to find his wife hanging from a ceiling fan, who tried to breathe life into her lungs and failed? Did such a person begin to see the living as brief and wondrous apparitions, each worthy of affection and attention, whether a chance acquaintance on an airplane, or a stranger dancing in a bar, or an endearingly incompetent criminal president?” That may seem like a version of the cliché about knowledge of death making life seem more precious and immediate, but Low doesn’t reach for inspirational homilies – it is concerned, foremost, with giving us the state of a very specific mind.
There is a reductive view that art must be affirmative, that even the darkest novel or film must offer some light or hope at the end. This book has a very moving ending, one where Ullis achieves a kind of redemption, an almost Capra-esque reminder that all of us are useful in so many little ways. And yet the incident itself is minor and random; it may be “feel-good” in its way, but it won’t mess things up for the determinedly nihilistic reader.
****
Formally, the bulk of Low is in the third-person subjective – we are tied to Ullis’s consciousness, we learn what he thinks and feels and sees. And yet, every once in a while, starting with an early paragraph where we see Ullis through the gaze of a Bombay cabbie (“It was obvious the man needed a cure from whatever ailment he was suffering from. Gutka was reliable…”), there are digressions into other people’s thoughts and experiences. The longest of these are chapter-length: in one, we are in the company of an heiress named Payal, living in the Taj hotel, watching TV news as the Indian prime minister showily practices yoga.
Later, in a key passage, a woman named Brinda asks Ullis to say a small eulogy for his wife. “You don’t have to write a book. Say something about the five stages of grief…” He reflects on the laughable tidiness of the five-stages categorisation – “There was no timeline, no demarcation […] you moved back and forth like a time tourist, at sea without a compass” – and then comes this meta-observation:
“Besides, Brinda, I am writing a book.”
The line is not spoken aloud, it is a stage-whisper directed only at the reader. It is a reminder that Ullis is – like Thayil – a writer, poet and editor, and this casts new light on the narrative. If this is a book Ullis is writing (or thinking), the multiple perspectives are his invention, his version of the inner lives of people he meets. And with one chapter offering us the viewpoint of Aki’s ghost, reminiscing about the past, even talking about her husband with a colleague, I felt a slight trepidation; I thought of the much-discussed trope of male artists using dead or victimised women as a pretext for a male protagonist’s voyage of discovery.
But Low is too capacious and self-aware to fit into such a scheme. The idea that the dead are absorbed into the living is a basic theme of this story, hilariously literalised in a passage where (spoiler alert, sort of) one of Ullis’s new acquaintances thinks the “powder” in his box might be coke (which leads up to the magnificent sentence “Aki would not have minded being snorted in error by the kleptomaniacal Payal”). But the book is also dead serious and conscientious about the implications of this theme. It knows about the responsibility of the living to the dead (“Everything she was, the breath and breadth of her life, now had passed to him”), and knows how this can turn into narcissism and narrative-appropriation. In a painfully lucid passage, Ullis recognises that he had conjured Aki’s ghost because he had needed to see her; he had put words in her mouth; perhaps, by implication, every narrative he had created about what happened between them was inadequate.
“I’m dead,” her ghost tells him during one of their conversations, “which makes me more reliable than I’ve ever been.” This is true of all our relationships with those who have passed on and who now exist only in our remembrances. The best we can do is to be open to the possibility that we never fully knew them.
****
Writing about such a personal book at any length requires making admissions. For instance: I have experience of the loss and grief described here, as well as what Aki means about the “low” being the constant in her life; I don’t have first-hand experience of mind-altering drugs, so I can only say that the descriptions of Ullis’s hallucinations felt authentic to me.
So I also need to mention this: knowing that Low is autofiction – its roots being the tragic death of Thayil’s wife Shakti Bhatt in 2007 – affected my initial reading experience. Some details – politics in the publishing world, Aki’s hula-hooping, a rushed funeral – felt too close for comfort and reminded me of little conversations, with Shakti, with those who knew her, from over a decade ago.
And yet, soon enough the book became its own beast, the richness of the reading experience separated from knowledge of the event that had inspired it. I never stopped imagining Thayil’s face and hearing his voice – expressive and deadpan at the same time – as I read about Ullis, but it became easier to see the book on its own terms: as an account of a crazy trip, an exercise in the use of humour to poke death and oblivion in the eye, a story about how we are always putting things off for later, and about what it means to be a writer (or a husband) trying to recreate someone else’s life.
Low knows that life can be full of dull, all-pervading sadness (“Her low country lay everywhere like a vast spiritual archipelago”), but that this sadness coexists with comical pratfalls (arriving in Bombay, Ullis trips over a stack of coconuts, almost dropping the box of ashes; at airport security on his way back, it happens again). This book is a demonstration that a story about pain and catastrophe (at a personal and planetary level) can be startlingly alive, expressive and funny in the telling. ---------------- [My earlier Scroll pieces are here. And here is a short interview I did with Shakti Bhatt a few months before she died]
I haven't really written here about my Sweden trip in September-October (I put up a few jokey posts with photos on Facebook, which seems the more logical place these days for that sort of thing), but am sharing a little something now -- one reason being that I wanted to thank the writer-editor Anjum Hasan for inviting me to a writing residency in Sweden last year, and Ann Ighe and Marit Kapla for being such wonderful hosts. Another reason is to provide some context for a longish essay I will be sharing in the near future, the piece – for the Swedish journal Ord&Bild – that the residency was oriented towards. A year ago, on January 8, 2019 to be exact, Anjum mailed me to ask if I would consider spending two weeks in the town of Stromstad. I replied on the same day with a clear “Yes.” Anyone who knows me knows how uncharacteristic this was, but the main reason I felt I could do it was because the residency was nearly nine months away – and if that wasn’t enough time to prepare for a long trip, what would be?
And even then, I was nervous. The many caregiving duties of the previous few years, which ended (at least in terms of looking after humans) with my mother’s death, had made travel very difficult: getting away from Delhi for even a couple of days sometimes meant weeks of planning and fretting, making sure the right support system was in place etc. Then, after a few months of respite on that front, new problems had arisen in September 2018 when Krishna, the girl I had employed to look after my Lara in my mother’s old flat, had to leave because of a family crisis. Thankfully I found a new person quite fast, but there were lots – lots – of teething problems that I won’t get into here. Between getting Reena settled, keeping Lara (a very high-strung, dependent, problematic child) comfortable, AND handling the medical crisis of another dog (Chameli, about whom more in this FB post), I essentially lived in my mother’s flat for the best part of three months, even more melancholy and embittered than usual, and my work was often on hold. (When I look at my blog archives and see the few columns and reviews I did during those months, I have no memory of how I found the mental energy for them.)
So Anjum’s offer came at a time when I felt like I had to push myself into doing something that didn’t come easily to me, something that might even worsen the paralysing sadness and isolation I had been feeling. (The first time I left Delhi after my mother’s passing, though it was only for a couple of days, it was almost unbearable to return to her flat knowing she wouldn’t be at the door. I had felt similarly after Foxie’s death in 2012. I wasn’t sure how it would feel returning after being away for over two weeks.)
There were other misgivings in the months that followed, as well as a comical (in retrospect) situation involving a passport reissue delay and visa-related suspense that almost cleanly scuttled my plans... this would have been quite the anti-climax after all those months of biting my nails about the trip! But in the end, fortified with the encouragement provided by Abhilasha and Susmita aunty that things wouldn't come crashing down, I managed to go -- and I'm very glad I did. In a weird sort of way, the apartment in Stromstad came to feel like home: I fell into a routine within the first few days, and felt a sense of loss when I was leaving. Maybe that can only happen to someone who doesn't travel a great deal, and who has never had the boarding-school or hostel experience.
Plus, the essay I wrote turned out okay in the end; or at least Anjum tells me it did. (It is about experiencing various sorts of “religious” cinema, both Indian and European, at different points in my life – and also about my ambivalent relationship with my nani.) It is currently being translated into Swedish for Ord&Bild, and I will share the English version after it has appeared in print.
This post is also a context-setter for a dear-diary-ish piece I did for the “Postcard From____” section of Indian Quarterly magazine. Here it is. (It’s basic and sketchy, so no expectations please.) I’m sure there is much more I can say about my time in Stromstad (and I have shared some posts about the trip on FB earlier), but for now this will have to do. Also sharing a few photos here.
Postcard from Strömstad (You’d think spending a full two weeks in a Swedish town would give you enough time to see and explore everything you need to. But when a place starts to feel like home, you stop behaving like a tourist)
To understand the strange yearning I felt for Strömstad when I returned to Delhi in mid-October, you need to know this about me: the two weeks I spent in an apartment in that small Swedish harbour town (which calls itself a city) was the longest I have lived in a single residence outside of south Delhi’s Saket, anytime in the last thirty years.
During all that time, I listened with a mix of bemusement, envy and pity as friends spoke of their boarding-school days or their years studying abroad. I, on the other hand, am not just a homebody but also a chronic worrier, the house-lizard who refuses to go on vacation because who will hold up the ceiling?**
Which was one reason to say yes to a writing residency in Strömstad – to drag my reptile brain out of its comfort zone. I had months to prepare, yet I never stopped worrying about the daily responsibilities I was leaving behind, or feeling certain that I would be doomed to 16 days of homesickness and missing my dog.
And there WAS homesickness… to go with the inevitable sense of adventure. But there was something else I hadn’t anticipated: finding a different sort of comfort zone, a (pleasant) mundaneness; falling into a routine that wouldn’t be possible on a conventional vacation. My time in Strömstad came to feel like a condensed version of living at home, something I might have guessed would happen from the minute I entered my room in the residency flat and began unpacking my things and strewing them around, achieving a level of messiness to compare with my room back in Saket. There was to be no traveling from one city to another, no checking in and out of hotels; for 14 days my desk would stayed cluttered with books, travel plugs, medicine strips, half-packets of biscuits, chargers, the cup I kept in my room all day, to be refilled with tea or coffee or Baileys Irish Cream.
The apartment – shared with other writers – was a stone’s throw from the main part of town, a short walk from the railway station, the harbour, the promenade, and a smattering of restaurants, bars and shops. The bulk of Strömstad seemed to exist within this two-kilometre radius, and soon I fell into a routine: going on the same walking trails each day, my feet leading me inevitably to the nearby supermarket Coop from where I would pick up seafood and cheeses and big bags of candy.
Since I risk putting you to sleep now, reader, here’s a quick list of the touristy things I did: – I took a 40-minute ferry to the nearby Koster Islands, Sweden’s first national marine park – though it was too much of the off-season to do more than go on a long hike. Which I did, a bit fearfully – the trail markers were spaced out much more than expected, it wasn’t easy to be sure of the route, and no one else was around; there were deserted lodges that put me in mind of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre — but also a growing sense of independence. It was a gloriously sunny day, and one scenic stretch, out of the forest and along a beach, justified the excursion.
– My flatmate Girish Shahane and I bussed it to Blomsholm, six miles away, to see the stone ship, a prehistoric grave made up of 49 large standing stones. Again, the place was almost empty and didn’t feel like a tourist destination: the stone ship, majestic and poignant and creating a real sense of deep history, was just there, in the middle of seemingly isolated farmland, with dozens of hay bales piled up in the distance – worlds removed from the carnival that you’d find around a Stonehenge.
– The thing that most resembled regular tourism, though, was taking a big luxurious ferry – a round ticket ridiculously priced at just 30 kronor, approx 220 rupees – to Sandefjord (one of the reasons for Strömstad’s importance is its proximity to Norway). It was a day trip, but as my friend, the writer-musician Zac O’Yeah deadpanned, “You’ll be able to boast to people: oh Norway – yes yes, I’ve been there too.” We visited the whaling museum, gaped at enormous cetacean skeletons and then walked around the city for a bit, stumbling on a lovely local cemetery – row upon row of tastefully decorated gravestones and dedications – that turned out to be much larger than expected. So: Koster, Blomsholm, Sandefjord… those were the bona fide “outings”. But there were other satisfying ways of filling one’s time: walking around the harbour and finding new angles from which to take photos of the striking stone gate; using an indoor swimming pool at the bath house-cum-spa (there was also an outdoor bath house, the Kallbadhus, from where one could splash around in the river – I was tempted, but desisted); spending an afternoon at the local library, with journalists, on the day of the Nobel Literature Prize announcement; watching Joker in a charming little restaurant-cum-movie hall that seated exactly 79 viewers. The rest of the time was spent mainly on long walks, savouring the hours of sunlight (we were mostly lucky – only three or four consistently gloomy or rainy days), figuring out where to eat every day when one wasn’t content with throwing together bread and egg concoctions (one issue was that hardly any restaurants accepted cash, and our residency stipend was in currency notes). Astonishingly, I even got tiny bits of writing done – in the afternoons, in the apartment’s covered balcony with the sun shining through the glass windows. And I watched some Netflix at night – something I would never do if I was on a shorter getaway with the express aim of cramming in as much sightseeing as possible into each day.
There were missed opportunities. I had already spent ten days in Strömstad when I discovered, by chance, a lovely little walking trail that wound through a foresty area and led all the way up to the river bank, with colourful cherry trees along the way, a quaint little bridge and a fountain statue that seemed like it had been casually left there and forgotten. If I had known about this track earlier, I would have walked it every day of my stay. I think.
Then, on the very last day, like procrastinating writers who had just realised a deadline was right upon them, Girish and I walked up the cliff behind the train station to find a viewing spot, with benches, that we had spotted from far below. There were false starts, we almost gave up, but then located a space where, by clambering from rock to rock, it was possible to reach the right vantage point: from here, one could see almost everything that was worth seeing around the harbour area. In a way it was appropriate that we did this after getting to know the town so well at ground level – but really, ennui was the main reason for the delay.
There were other little things I put off until it was too late – such as taking a photo of the guard-dog statue placed outside a shop. Or consider this: a film buff stays in a small town – to which he knows he will probably never return – for a fortnight, learns that that just 40-odd kilometres south of that town is a place named Fjallbacka, where Ingrid Bergman lived for years (and which has a statue of hers in the town square) … and he still doesn’t find the time or will to visit that place.
But maybe all this was confirmation that Strömstad had come to feel like home, and so one could take it for granted: like all those places – parks, restaurants, monuments – in Delhi that I have still not visited.
In this light, a defining moment of the trip for me happened at the end of that Sandefjord day-trip. Since another big ship was stuck with a mechanical problem at the small Strömstad dock, our return ferry – due to reach Strömstad at 7.30 pm – had to turn around and head back to Sandefjord when the journey was almost complete. This was frustrating – we were tired, the ship announcements weren’t in English and it looked like we were in for a long overnight delay – but Scandinavian efficiency kicked in; we were herded onto buses and eventually, at 1.30 AM, we found ourselves back at Strömstad station, with the apartment a 10-minute walk away.
Teeth chattering, dressed too lightly for such an adventure in the middle of the night, we scampered as fast as our freezing bones would allow us to. “Home, thank heavens” was the first thought in my head when I saw the welcoming light outside the apartment door. Returning to Saket a week later didn’t feel all that different.
---------------------------------- ** House lizard reference comes from Ratika Kapur’s novel The Private Life of Mrs Sharma
[Did this book review for Scroll] -----------------------------
In “Skylark Girl”, the first story in Aruni Kashyap’s new collection His Father’s Disease, a young Assamese writer named Sanjib is invited to a conference in Delhi, to read from an English translation of one of his stories – this despite the fact that “he had never spoken a full sentence” in English. It’s a momentous occasion for him and his family, summed up in these lines:
“She thought this was the most amazing thing to happen to him […] For his mother, Delhi was very far. Delhi meant the army that ‘committed atrocities’ on the villagers in the Nineties. Delhi was for rich people. Its universities were first-class. Delhi was the stepmother who treated the people of Assam poorly.” At lunch, Sanjib feels like a misfit, not understanding the names of the Mexican dishes; even when mingling with Arunachali, Mizo and Khasi writers, he discovers he is the only one among them who doesn’t write in English. He is an odd creature in this setting, easily picked out as “different” – he may as well have been born with leaf buds all over his body, and as it happens the story he has written reimagines a fable about a girl, Tejimola, who has just such a condition. If Delhi is a stepmother to Assam, there is a hostile stepmother in this fable too.
The symbolic undertones of the Tejimola story, as told by someone from a marginalised and often persecuted region, should be clear to anyone who cares to think about it. And Sanjib himself does try to explain: “We find inspiration in the girl who refuses to die." But he also makes the point – when asked after the reading why he doesn’t write about something more immediate, more topical, about the violence and the insurgency in his state – that his Assamese readers wouldn't expect this of him; he would be free to write about anything. As any artist should be.
This meta-story (one can conjecture that it derives at least partly from Kashyap’s own experience as a writer who is often expected to “represent” his region) sets the stage for the book: the nine stories that follow move between personal and political storytelling, between depicting and explaining, between the minutiae of lives and the larger picture against which those lives unfold. Throughout, one is also mindful that Kashyap (unlike Sanjib) has written these stories in English, for a largely urban readership that is comfortable with the language.
What are these stories “about”? There is no easy answer to that question, though one could very broadly say they are about the struggles of people from Assam (the exception being “After Anthropology”, where the background of the protagonist Raj – a gay Indian man with an American boyfriend – is not specified). Many of the characters are youngsters who have travelled far from their villages, who are (with varying degrees of comfort and discomfort, success and failure) enlarging the circles in which they move: from Guwahati, which is hours away, to the much more geographically and culturally distant Delhi, thence to the US to study. But can one really break away from strife-torn roots and become a global citizen? One non-linear story, “Before the Bullet”, is not so much a chronicle of a death foretold as a death made almost inevitable by the nature of politics and military hegemony in the region: even an English-speaking man who has returned home after completing a PhD in the US may be cut down to size if he is perceived as a threat because of his education.
****
Those of us in the Indian "mainstream" who are sceptical about prevalent narratives of nationalist pride have watched in recent weeks as violent government-empowered action has been directed at students and protesters in universities in Delhi and elsewhere. For many of us urbanites, the closest one comes to real danger is gathering a few dozen meters from the heart of the action with friends or acquaintances, making up the numbers, while staying always mindful of lathis and teargas. But for most of the people in Kashyap’s stories, atrocities by the “Indian army” – rapes, gratuitous killings – have long been a way of life. However personal and specific these stories are, the shadow of Assamese politics – the counter-insurgency, the life-defining violence of the 80s and 90s – is inescapable.
And so, the tone varies: in some narratives, e.g. “For the Greater Common Good”, the politics is more or less centre stage, directly affecting the characters’ lives. A milkman becomes unhinged after his cows are killed by the Army, shortly afterwards he is himself shot, and the official record proclaims he was a militant – as has no doubt been done countless times with voiceless people in many places and contexts. Kashyap conveys the sorrow of these events, while relating them with the matter-of-factness that comes to someone who has known about such things for a long time.
In other stories, the main focus is on something else (a family beset by a delusional, suicidal, drug-addicted son; a narrator trying to understand why his 39-year-old friend has been unable to consummate his marriage; a woman dealing with the strange “disease” that afflicted both her husband and her son) – but even in these subtler, slice-of-life narratives, the larger world is always watching from a distance, waiting to intrude. A Minneapolis student finds a “Little Assam” in a town called Shakopee, where people party together but also talk about bomb blasts back home. A tale with suggestions of the supernatural – about ancient manuscripts that may carry a dark legacy – also hinges on a clash between rebels and soldiers. An exclamation like “Oh god, my daughter-in-law knows how to use a gun!” works as light comedy within a given context, but may also raise an ominous question about a character’s past or background.
There is something very free-flowing about the structuring of these narratives. Two pairs of stories involve the same characters but offer different perspectives: in “Minnesota Nice”, a young man, Himjyoti, tries to settle into life in America with a roommate named Mike and his girlfriend Neelakshi; later, in “The Umricans”, we meet these people again but this time the story is told in the second-person voice, and the focus has shifted. In “For the Greater Common Good” and “His Father’s Disease”, we similarly glean new information about the same people. There are echoes between unrelated stories too: in “The Love Lives of People Who Look Like Kal Penn”, another young man attends a conference (this one in Michigan), but the Arunabh of this story is more worldly wise than the Sanjib of the first story, and copes a little better with cultural discomfort. There is also the recurring motif of an Indian abroad, puzzled by the American tendency to use certain words – “amazing”, “awesome” – and distancing phrases, or the term “it’s cultural” to describe something incomprehensible in a foreigner.
And every once in a while, Kashyap’s conversational, no-frills prose yields startling imagery: a woman seeing a bloodied face printed in a newspaper and imagining that the blood has seeped into the red lentils that were wrapped in the paper; another woman swimming compulsively and noisily across a pond because she doesn’t want to hear the sounds of her son making love with another man in his hut. At such moments, these stories strike a fine balance between being stark depictions of real lives and being as fable-like as the tale of the oppressed leaf-girl Tejimola. [My earlier pieces for Scroll.in are here]
[Did this review for Reader’s Digest] ---------------------------------
Meghna Gulzar’s Chhapaak is the second major Indian feature film of the past 12 months (along with the Malayalam film Uyare) about an acid-attack survivor. Both stories are about a woman picking up the pieces of her life and serving as an inspiration to others, but Chhapaak – being based on the real-life experiences of Laxmi Agarwal – is also explicitly an “issue” film about the campaign against easy availability of acid in the market. This makes for an absorbing, if somewhat protracted, story that is well-performed all around, notably by Deepika Padukone as Malti, Madhurjeet Sarghi as her lawyer Archana, and Vikrant Massey as the diligent (and anally retentive) journalist-turned-activist Amol. There has been much discussion about a glamorous actress playing a part like this, behind heavy makeup, but the Malti we see for the bulk of the film isn't severely disfigured; surgeries have at least smoothed over the worst of her scars. This means that her features, apart from her eyes, are immobile and mask-like – she reminded me at times of the girl in the classic French film Eyes Without a Face, the calm at the centre of a storm. And to a degree, this blank-slate effect seems intentional: Malti has, of course, been through something horrible, and is still fighting to get her assailant convicted – but she is also a conduit and a sounding board, trying to help and empower other women in similar situations. Nor does the film shy away from suggesting that – with well-off benefactors facilitating the best medical treatment for her – she is relatively privileged compared to many of those other lower-middle-class victims. In one quiet, nuanced scene, another girl, badly scarred, is astonished to learn that Malti has had seven surgeries already – “I can’t even put together the money for a second operation.”
Chhapaak is at its best in little moments like that one, or in the gently confrontational relationship between Malti and Amol, or in a scene where Malti catches her father drinking and promises she won’t tell her mother. (Affectionate as this exchange is when it occurs, it acquires a bitter tinge in a later scene involving an outburst by Malti’s mother.) Or when a dialogue fleetingly but pointedly raises the question of whether an acid ban can really achieve anything when all people have potential “buraai” in them, which can find other outlets; as Amol observes, acid is created in the heart first, only then does it make its way to the hand that throws it on someone’s face.
Never a formally adventurous director, Meghna Gulzar’s bare-bones style can be like old-school TV, full of reaction shots, and courtroom scenes that can feel static. At times, as in her earlier Raazi, one feels like one is expected to give points to serious intentions over strong filmmaking. But Chhapaak’s strengths lie in its convincing depiction of the many personal conflicts that can play out even when people are together for a good cause. Malti has to find a balance between getting on with her life and fighting the anti-acid fight – which, as her mother suggests, is a luxury available to people like the Anglicised lawyers; their own family, beleaguered on other fronts, can’t afford it beyond a point.
Around three quarters of the way through, I assumed that the film was not going to spell out exactly what had happened between Malti and her assailant Babloo, and how her “boyfriend” Rajesh fit in the picture; that we didn’t need to know every last detail. It would probably have been better that way, because Chhapaak slackens in its final section when it provides this back-story in flashback, complete with a slo-mo recreation of the attack and the cliched image of a courtroom in sombre silence after hearing Malti’s story – followed by a judgement in her favour. Uyare also showed us the series of events that led up to the attack on Pallavi (played by Parvathy), but in that case we were privy from the beginning to her relationship with a domineering, insecure man who goes full psycho when he feels rebuffed. In Chhapaak, on the other hand, the climactic scene is presented as if a great mystery is going to at last be unravelled – and it doesn't work, either within the logic of the narrative (surely Malti has told this story before, during earlier hearings) or in terms of imparting new information to the viewer; Babloo is too peripheral a character, and his jealous, possessive rage is too banal, too predictable, to sustain the drama that is placed on it at the very end of the film.
Perhaps, then, the real function of those climactic sequences was to show us the Padukone we know, in glowing splendour rather than behind makeup, for at least part of the film’s running time. And if that sounds cynical, it’s worth considering that the scene also shows us Malti as she was before the attack, so we can get the full measure of what she lost. The beautiful, lanky Padukone may not seem the ideal choice to play an Everywoman in this sort of narrative, but it’s too easy to dismiss a film for “trivialising” an important issue by casting a big box-office draw. Movie stars also serve as vicarious, larger-than-life self-projections. Perhaps a subtext of this film – whether intended or not – is that many acid-attack victims, regardless of background, height or features, are a Deepika Padukone in their own heads when they fantasise about confidently stepping out into the world, or when they try their wedding jewellery on in the mirror – and that this self-image, cruelly snatched from them, can take ages to regain.
[My Hindu “moments” column on Nicholas Roeg’s 1973 film, the Daphne du Maurier story it was based on, and the literature-vs-cinema debate] --------------
It’s one of the most famous sex scenes in a mainstream film of its time, explicit enough to raise the possibility of an X-rating, and realistic enough to spark shocked whispers that the participants – two A-grade actors – might really have “done it”. In Nicolas Roeg’s eerie 1973 masterwork Don’t Look Now, Laura (Julie Christie) and John (Donald Sutherland) are in Venice, a few months after the tragic death of their little daughter. Understandably, their relationship has been frayed by grief, and now, finally, it looks like things may be coming back together. As they loll in bed, she tells him he has toothpaste on his mouth; she wipes it off, they move into tentative foreplay. Then, in a montage lasting approximately four minutes, they have sex. But it isn’t anything like a glamorous, Vaseline-on-lens scene. It feels gritty, lived in. Christie and Sutherland are attractive people, but the bodies we see are imperfect (“Those lumps are coming back on the side of your waist,” she had told him when they were in the bathroom together a while earlier; he promptly went and stood on the weighing scale). As they writhe about in awkward positions, sucking on each other’s fingers and toes, their gestures and movements suggest both familiarity (they have been married many years) and trepidation (they are doing this after a long time, and the very act – however pleasurable – must carry a reminder of pain; this is also how the now-dead daughter was conceived). But the sense of renewal, and the hunger on display, are unquestionably erotic.
Though I first watched the film long ago, it was only recently that I read the Daphne Du Maurier short story it was (very faithfully) adapted from. It’s a fine, suspenseful, well-paced tale of grief and the supernatural, but see how fleeting the equivalent passage is: “Now, he thought afterwards, now at last is the moment to make love, and he went back into the bedroom, and she understood, and opened her arms and smiled. Such blessed relief after all those weeks of restraint.”
While the point being made is the same – two people picking up the pieces, rekindling intimacy – the effect is very different. On the face of it, the screen version is more elaborate (and explicit) than the page version. (Du Maurier was not the sort of author who would give her readers a long, graphic sex scene anyway.) But it’s equally true that what is clearly spelt out in those sentences – John’s yearning – has to be conjectured in the film through the traces of wary hopefulness in Sutherland’s eyes, and the subtle ways in which Christie responds.
Those who deem literature innately superior to cinema often cite the advantages the former has over the latter: while reading a book, you can exercise your imagination (or “direct” your own story) in a way that a movie, by showing you a specific version, won’t allow. There are many obvious responses to this, one of them being that the printed text, no matter how evocative, can’t show you a great actor giving a great performance, or a skilled cinematographer or editor using light and time, respectively, in ways that heighten a narrative’s emotional effect. RK Narayan may tell us, in his spare and elegant prose, that Raju was besotted by Rosie’s snake dance (“She stretched out her arm slightly and swayed it in imitation of the [cobra’s] movement; she swayed her whole body to the rhythm”), but he can’t convey everything that Waheeda Rehman’s performance or SD Burman’s music can. Which is simply a way of saying: these are two very different mediums and direct comparisons are silly.
Don’t Look Now does many notable things with its visual scheme. Take its vivid use of red as a marker (the daughter was wearing a bright red raincoat when she drowned), with the viewer’s eye always drawn straight to the colour. I was reminded of this again while watching Anurag Kashyap’s short film in the new anthology Ghost Stories. Such cinematic choices have no equivalent on paper – unless you count a graphic novel such as Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s The Killing Joke, which does something similar. But returning to the sex scene, there is also the way in which it is rapidly cut with shots of Laura and John getting ready for dinner (something that happens after they have made love). This toying with chronology isn’t gimmickry for its own sake, it is thematically relevant to the central mystery of the film – which is encapsulated in a key image (a shot of Laura on a boat) that we see twice, at two separate points in time. The love scene is essential not just to our understanding of the characters and their emotions, but also as a suggestion of how the past, present and future are always informing each other.
(Now say that quickly, five times. Here’s a short review – for India Today – of a new book about Dilip Kumar) -----------------------------
During a conversation with a friend about cinema books once, I found myself defending the hagiographical approach. My point was mainly this: our relationship with films and film-stars can be very intense and proprietary; if an author chooses a favourite subject to write a whole book about, and then invests time and effort in doing so, why expect the result to be detached and (loathsome word) “objective”? Surely it’s understandable if the writing is full of fanboy passion. Well, after reading Dilip Kumar: Peerless Icon Inspiring Generations (by Trinetra Bajpai and Anshula Bajpai), I find myself rethinking my position a little. This is a special variety of hagiography, one that involves so many breathless, adjective-laden gasps of excitement, so much hyperbole, on every page, that it almost defeats the book’s purpose: clarity is lost in a tangle of flowery praise, and even diehard Dilip Kumar fans might easily be put off. I count myself as one, but after reading this I feel like I could go many months without re-watching any of Yusuf saab’s films.
It’s best to let some of this prose speak for itself. In just the first few pages – which include a Foreword (by Ameen Sayani) and an introduction (by Ali Peter John) – we are told about “a legend who is the ultimate, the limitless, and the endless […] a superstar far above the unattainable peak of fame, ensconced on a much loftier pedestal”. Dilip Kumar, it is affirmed, “draws [audiences] alluringly into the world of mimeses”, “essayed Sisyphean roles with effortless ease and never stooped low to raise boisterous merriment”, and “painted each emotion in colours of true life with consummate artistry and simplicity of realism”. This sort of thing can quickly get exhausting, and the book rarely lets up. “We have never seen any flaws in any Dilip Kumar portrayal despite a most critical scrutiny,” the authors write, “The overwhelming impact of his tour de force performances has kept us in an inescapably bewitched trance.” Those last few words are very true, and the reader has to bear the brunt. Perhaps it’s reasonable to ask that even fanboy books be written in something like a state of consciousness.
For the rest, there are plot synopses of key movies, with the emphasis being on what the actor does in them – again through generalised gushing rather than in-depth analyses. There are references to contemporary reviews of the time, as well as behind-the-scenes anecdotes – all of which have useful archival value, even if they are presented in a hotchpotch way. The main value of this book is that it is well produced and looks good – I don’t know if it falls in coffee-table category, the text-image ratio is quite high, but there are hundreds of photographs, movie-stills and posters, which frequently make a better case for Dilip Kumar’s soulfulness than the actual writing does. All in all, this is a passable decorative addition to one’s living room, without being film literature in any real sense of the term.
[My latest Bookshelves column is about Parikshat Sahni’s candid and moving memoir about his father Balraj] ------------------
There has been much discussion in liberal circles recently about the cravenness of movie stars when it comes to taking a public stand on issues of national importance. Such conversations are often simplistic, built around the expectation that onscreen “heroes” and “heroines” be not just inspirational real-world heroes but also that they endorse specific positions, and have comprehensive knowledge of politics and history. Consider some of the gratuitous mocking Alia Bhatt was subjected to when, in taking a mild stand about the violence directed at the anti-CAA protests, she mistakenly shared an older version of the Indian Constitution’s Preamble. Inevitably, these occasions also become pretexts to recall the greater heroes (real or imagined) of the past; to evoke a time when celebrities were more explicitly political and spoke for the “right” ideals. And among Indian screen actors, one of the first to be mentioned is the much loved and admired Balraj Sahni. Sahni was an exemplar of progressive thought, much like his younger brother, the writer Bhisham. He was a member of the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA), was involved with socially conscientious theatre and cinema, had a worthy writing career of his own, and frequently rallied against social hypocrisies and injustice. Here is someone who might easily – and even understandably – become the subject of a hagiography.
Which is why I was intrigued by The Non-Conformist: Memories of my Father Balraj Sahni, a heartfelt memoir by Parikshat Sahni, who was an actor himself but stayed in the shadow of his famous dad. Though affection and respect are the dominant tones of this book, there is also a real sense – whether or not the author fully intended this – of the missteps, delusions and contradictions that can mark even the most sincere and well-intentioned life.
Parikshat doesn’t hold back while discussing the barriers in his relationship with his father, the seeds for which were laid when his parents left for England during WWII, leaving their six-month-old child behind – and returned five years later, strangers to his eyes. For Balraj Sahni, making the dangerous voyage overseas to broadcast radio programmes about Indian soldiers was an act of patriotism, but from the boy’s point of view it must have been alienating. Poignantly, in the captions accompanying the book’s photos, Parikshat refers to his biological mother (who died young) as “Dad’s first wife Damayanti”, admitting that he never really got to know her or felt anything particular when she passed away.
Some father-son bonding did eventually take place, and there is an account of a conversation where Balraj tells the child Parikshat about the virtues of Marxist philosophy and the Communist economy, using the sugarcane stalks they have just purchased as a starting point. Genial chatter soon gives way to the assertion that “all property should be owned by the government […] the capitalist class, the petty bourgeoisie, the counter-revolutionaries, and the revisionists should be eliminated, decimated, destroyed, wiped out, crushed and blown to smithereens.” Reading this passage – a reminder that extreme idealism can create its own dark spaces – I couldn’t help thinking of the gentle and noble Balraj Sahni persona in films like Kabuliwala and Anuradha, the melancholy patriarch watching his world fall apart in Garm Hava, the dreamy-eyed romantic singing “Ae Meri Zohra Jabeen” in Waqt.
Elsewhere, in one of the book’s drollest sections, there is an account of an official trip to Moscow in the company of future Indian president Giani Zail Singh, who initially appears rustic and naïve but soon reveals the sharpness of a statesman. While Balraj Sahni repeatedly extols the USSR’s greatness, and even tries to gloss over state oppression and control by invoking “the principles of dialectical materialism”, Zail Singh quietly demonstrates that all is not well with the Russian system; that a regime which doesn’t even allow its citizens to travel abroad may have something rotten at its heart.
But perhaps my favourite chapter is the one that Parikshat saves for the end, almost as a dark coda (it comes immediately after a clumsy filler about the film industry’s “extraordinary people”, which reads like it was imposed on the author by his publishers). This final section is about the doomed house called Ikraam, which Balraj Sahni built for himself and his family in the mid-1960s, a project that, in Parikshat’s words, “was the biggest paradox in Dad’s life”. In direct contradiction to his socialist beliefs – “simple living and high thinking” – the senior Sahni had set about constructing a giant mansion near Juhu beach, unmindful of the sad contrast it created with the shanties inhabited by poor people nearby. This urge – to hanker for something bigger than strictly needed, to lead a “luxurious” life after decades of self-denial – is a reminder of the gap between ideology and experience. Trying to make sense of his father’s grand illusion, Parikshat quotes Winston Churchill: “We shape our dwellings, and afterwards our dwellings shape us.” It’s equally true that as we grow older, life shapes most of us in ways we never expect – and that we can never fully return to our original dimensions.
Reading about Sahni’s other worthy contemporaries too, one often sees how ideals like egalitarianism and open-mindedness must coexist with the thorny business of negotiating daily life. For instance, Bread Beauty Revolution, a compendium of writings by Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, has Abbas saying in an interview that young people are too respectful to their parents; that they must be more disobedient, more willing to question everything they are told and to move away from outdated ideas. And yet, the same book offers a view of Abbas as a conservative elder, exercising hegemony: interviewing the young Amitabh Bachchan for Saat Hindustani, he says the contract could only be signed after he had the written permission of the actor’s father Harivanshrai, because “I wouldn’t like to have a misunderstanding with him”.
None of this is to put down Abbas or Sahni, just to say that we expect inspirational people to consistently meet unreal standards; to be more than human. The standards set by Sahni were exceptionally high anyway: he was known (to a greater degree than others in his profession) for practicing what he preached; the book’s many anecdotes about the beneficiaries of his unshowy kindness include an elderly junior artiste’s recollection of Sahni refusing to be the privileged star, keeping his own thick coat on during a sweltering indoor shoot because other crew members were being made to suffer the worst of the heat. But this doesn’t mean that he couldn’t be permitted other sides. The man who was a humanitarian at heart could also idolise an oppressive Communist system without seeing its flaws; even someone who loathed capitalism might in his later years become over-excited about having a grand house and an ornate dining table as a show of status.
Extra: for me, this book was equally about Parikshat Sahni, his struggles, and his efforts to write it as a form of therapy. And as such, I found it very moving in places and understood and related with much of it. You won’t find many Author’s Introductions that end like this: