Big thrill to have The Popcorn Essayists reviewed by Baradwaj Rangan for Tehelka, though I'm greedy enough to wish that the review had been longer. A note about the accompanying photograph - it probably looks a bit cocky (author striking narcissistic pose in front of mirror), but anyone who knows me will know that the thought bubble above my head reads thus:
"What an idiot I'll look like if they use THIS photo along with a negative review of the book! Heck, what an idiot I look like anyway. Oh no, the chair is tipping over. Must maintain balance and grin simultaneously. Grin. Balance. Grin. Keep the kitschy red shirt in the frame. Oh phew, there's the flash. Thud."
P.S. for an even sillier photo, see this.
Advance notice for Delhiites about the Popcorn Essayists book launch: Samit Basu, yours truly and a handful of popcorn essayists will be talking movies and movie-related writing at the India Habitat Centre on March 22. Apart from the conversation, there will be beer and popcorn, though probably not in the same mug. And no, there aren't any World Cup matches happening that day - so mark your calendars/set a reminder on your phones/tattoo the date on your foreheads and be there!
P.S. From the blogs of two of the contributing writers, here's a taster of two pieces in the book: Amitava Kumar's "Writing My Own Satya" and Madhulika Liddle's "Villains and Vamps and All Things Camp". (If you're interested in movies from the 1940s, 50s and 60s, you should also promptly subscribe to Madhulika's blog.) And of course you can read Manil Suri's Helen-dance piece "My Life as a Cabaret Dancer" here.
[From my weekly books column; some earlier snippets here, here and here]
The evolution and use of language is vital to any study of our species, and for an insight into the human tendency to tiptoe around delicate subjects, you can’t do much better than consider the history of euphemisms. It goes back a long way. Thousands of years ago, predators were alluded to rather than directly named; since people couldn't always distinguish between spoken words and the things they stood for, they feared that simply saying “tiger” aloud would result in the undesired appearance of the beast. (Candyman, anyone?) Today we are a wiser lot – in some ways, anyhow – but plain-speaking is still well beyond our skill set, especially when it comes to subjects such as sex, death and bodily excretions.
Ralph Keyes’ book Unmentionables (originally published as Euphemania and now subtitled “From Family Jewels to Friendly Fire – What We Say Instead of What We Mean”) is an entertaining look at the history of euphemistic language, ranging from ribald Shakespearean lines (Iago to Desdemona’s distraught father: “Your daughter and the Moor are now making the beast with two backs”) to Winston Churchill being told by an American lady at a dinner party to say “white meat” instead of “breast of chicken” (a probably apocryphal story goes that he sent her a corsage with the message “Pin this on your white meat”). Along the way, Keyes reminds us of the often-surreal consequences of indiscriminate bowdlerising, such as the Associated Press article that changed the name of the athlete Tyson Gay to Tyson Homosexual, or the email filter in the Internet’s early days that prevented residents of Scunthorpe from registering themselves online. (Why, you ask? Check the second to fifth letters of the town’s name.)
Unmentionables starts to wear a little thin after the first few chapters (the book is primarily a trivia-trove), but I liked its recurring motif that certain words come to be perceived as “good” or “bad” as their associations change over time. Steven Pinker and other experts on language have written about how (for instance) the word “nigger” was once used benevolently – including by progressive-minded people who campaigned for equal rights – but eventually became taboo because of its widespread pejorative use by bigots. Many of its "politically correct" replacements have become similarly corrupted through association with prejudiced attitudes. In a world entirely free of discrimination, censorship of this sort would be unnecessary – but then, reading and writing would be drabber processes too. As it is, it’s fun to speculate that many of the words we today regard as being innocuous will have sinister connotations in a few decades.
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It’s been a good month for classic Indian fiction – Penguin’s new editions of R K Narayan books were followed by Random House India’s Classics Series, with Arunava Sinha translating Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Durgeshnandini into English. The Narayans gave me a chance to catch up with a writer whom many Indian readers of my generation take for granted – if your memories of Malgudi are restricted to short stories in class 6 textbooks, rediscovering him is quite an experience.
One myth about Narayan should be quickly dispelled: that his writing is “simple” in the sense that you can just pick up one of his books and race through them. This notion has been perpetuated by some of today’s mass-market writers who seek to validate their own non-literariness through association. For example, Chetan Bhagat has admitted to being influenced by Narayan’s no-flourishes style, which might create the misleading impression that Narayan can be read in the same way that you can read a Bhagat novel (it took me barely an hour to finish Five Point Someone). Certainly there is a basic directness in Narayan’s prose – an emphasis on narrative rather than “style” – but sentence by sentence, his best work has the refinement, the carefulness, the knack for observation and description, that you expect in good literary fiction. There’s little that’s casual about it.
Consider this early passage from The Vendor of Sweets:
The bathroom was a shack, roofed with corrugated sheets; the wooden frame was warped and the door never shut flush, but always left a gap through which one obtained a partial glimpse of anyone bathing. But it had been a house practice, for generations, for its members not to look through [...] A very tall coconut tree loomed over the bath, shedding enormous withered fronds and other horticultural odds and ends on the corrugated roof with a resounding thud. Everything in this home had the sanctity of usage, which was the reason why no improvement was possible. Jagan’s father, as everyone knew, had lived at first in a thatched hut at the very back of this ground. Jagan remembered playing in a sand heap outside the hut; the floor of the hut was paved with cool clay and one could put one’s cheek to it on a warm day and feel heavenly.
The prose here is functional, but it’s also assured and humorous, and commands the reader’s full attention (the passage is randomly selected, by the way; you can open the book almost anywhere and find another like it). One also senses a pioneering Indian writer in English trying to create a visual picture of his world for the foreign readership that he knows his books will reach - it’s ironical that many people take jingoistic pride in the idea that Narayan was a provincial man who never wrote for the West.
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“We wanted to challenge certain notions about what a comic is, about what it can do and should do,” says the editor’s note for a slim new graphic novel titled Hush. The book’s title couldn’t be more appropriate – this story about an unhappy, angry schoolgirl with a gun in her hand is completely wordless, propelled not by written text but by vivid black-and-white drawings. The experience of “reading” it can be initially unsettling, but as I turned the pages for the second time I found the images speaking with the force of a good, visually inventive sequence in a silent movie – a film made in an era when directors could aspire towards pure cinema.
Hush – based on a story by Vivek Thomas, and drawn by Rajiv Eipe – is the first title by the independent publishing house Manta Ray Comics, set up by former engineering students Dileep Cherian and Pratheek Thomas. Cherian and Thomas are big fans of graphic novels, but as the former tells me on email, they feel the need for more mature material in the genre in India. “We think we can produce original material rather than rehashing mythology for a Western audience, and we want Manta Ray to become a platform for original creators, artists and writers.” If one of their goals, as Cherian says, is “to amplify the voices of interesting people”, they've made a good start.
[Did this review for Biblio. The table of contents for the latest issue is here - many fine pieces, which can be read on PDF after free registration]
Detectives in noir fiction are frequently described as “hardboiled”, which suggests a tough, cynical man carrying the baggage of a tragic past but soldiering on regardless – masochistically working on unpleasant cases that deepen his view of things, tailing scoundrels and femme fatales through shadowy places that serve as metaphors for the darkness in his own soul.
This adds up to a brooding figure of the sort played in films by charismatically world-weary actors such as Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum and Robert Ryan. But now consider Public Intelligence Officer Herman Barsk, the lead in Zac O’Yeah’s novel Once Upon a Time in Scandinavistan. Eighteen pages into the book, when confronted by evidence of cannibalism in a restaurant kitchen where he himself has just eaten, Barsk does “the only thing an old cop could do in a situation like this: he shat his pants”. It’s an early clue that he might not be the typical noir hero. As the narrative progresses, we will get many more.
But then O’Yeah’s novel is hardly straight-faced crime fiction, or straight-faced anything. A genre-hopping work of speculative fiction (as the title suggests), it’s set in the near future, in a world where most of continental Europe has not just been rendered tropical or desert by global warming, but also colonised by India, with some very ulta-pulta results.
When the European Union was being liquidated, and its member countries sold off their industries and privatised their highways and railroads, international conglomerates with head offices in Asia bought up pretty much everything. Sweden was given away as a special discount offer when Germany and Switzerland were sold – perhaps due to the fact that most people could not really tell Sweden and Switzerland apart. These things happen in a global economy.
Thus, the restaurant Barsk has his epiphany in is called the Tandoori Moose; it’s one of the few non-vegetarian joints still operating in Gautampuri (formerly Gothenberg), because vegetarianism is the dominant lifestyle choice in this world, and Buddhism the key religion. Concepts like reincarnation and karma are taken entirely at face value, and why not – after all, “the weather had transformed alongside the political and economic changes, bestowing a sense that it was fated to happen – that all was pre-destined”.
In this desi-fied Sweden, India and Indianness impinge on the local culture in the most unexpected ways. Roads have been renamed (and have “randomly blinking traffic lights”), the Ashoka Pillar dominates town squares, and Committing Nuisance in a Public Place is against the law. Rowdy kids have access to “Thums-Up bottle bombs containing an explosive cashew-fenny kerosene mix”, cries of “Hain?” merge with the local “Höh”, and a policeman chasing a female hooligan might yell “Hey, goondi!”
Extremely entertaining though all these details are in themselves, there is also a plot – it centres on the dead bodies found by Barsk in the tandoor and involves a group of murderously sociopathic girls, a mysterious ashram, a cheap restaurant that serves food to the poor, and a British submarine preparing to “liberate” Gautampuri. Barsk himself is in love with a married Indian woman named Kumkum, and the personal stakes rise for him when he discovers that her husband is connected with the murder case.
Actually, I didn’t think the storyline was the most compelling thing about this book: it sags a little midway as subplots proliferate, suspects and stool pigeons flit in and out of sight, and chapters end in the patented style of pulp thrillers – “Presently, he became aware of a shadow sneaking up behind him” – with a few (deliberately?) corny analogies thrown in: “It was the sound of the silence one might hear while balancing a trampoline over purgatory”. The plot gets confusing near the end; I had to revisit the final few chapters to confirm how everything fit together.
But Once Upon a Time in Scandinavistan is a winner because of its premise and especially because Barsk is such a memorable character. We stay with him for each of the book’s 400 pages, as he trips morosely from one misadventure to another. At one point we are told that when he volunteered to donate his organs, his body was rejected as “not usable”. (He has poor eyesight too; trying to identify a lurker at a crucial point in his investigation, he wishes balefully that he had got himself a pair of spectacles.) Constantly aware that the only reason he exists is that his prostitute mother “had been so drunk she had forgotten to take an abortion pill the day after the condom burst”, he spends much of the book swallowing Loperamide tablets to keep his bowels in order, and mooning about his recently deceased dog.
Bobby used to come and sniff his sweaty socks, but the mongrel (75 percent Husky) had died after accumulating too much negative karma from pissing on every lamp-post on town. Bobbylessness was hard. All that remained were the memories of pattering paws and claws scratching the creaky floorboards. Time healed no wounds, at least not in Barsk’s soul.
Even when, against all expectations, he finally gets to undrape Kumkum’s sari, the potentially erotic moment is described thus: “It came off a layer at a time. Kumkum turned like a tandoori chicken on an automatically rotating skewer, Barsk thought, and the analogy made him hungry.”
In short, there is nothing remotely dashing or heroic about Barsk. He isn’t even the sort of character who is sometimes referred to as a “little hero” – the Frodo Baggins-like underdog who triumphs against the odds. The few times he does come good, it feels more like an accident of karma than anything he might reasonably be credited for.
Of course, his actions and responses are defined by the chaos that continually unfolds around him, and the narrative is full of passages of inspired absurdity (a dead horse being perfumed by a coolie on the location shoot of a Hindi film - don't ask), funny asides (“In the Masti Mela amusement park, a pyromaniac had set the ghost house on fire and several ghosts had to be hospitalised”) and too many clever ideas to keep track of. (A less imaginative writer might have developed a whole sub-plot around the theme of the Nobel Prize being renamed the Reliance-Nobel Prize, but in this book it gets exactly one casual mention.)
O’Yeah himself is of Finnish ethnicity but he has married into India and lived in Bangalore for the last few years, and his writing suggests a basic affection for the country combined with the bemused perspective of someone who comes from a vastly different cultural landscape (and who must still sometimes feel like he’s been thrust into a Terry Pratchett novel). He has a ear for the cadences and peculiarities of middle-class Indian speech, such as the young corporal calling a potential trouble-maker “Uncle” even while preparing to arrest him. At other times, there is light caricaturing of Indian “types”: a popular movie actor is named Phillumappa Ishtarjee, a yoga teacher is Swamijee Consultantwallah, and Kumkum’s husband is – what else – Patiparmeshwar Gharwallah.
Occasionally one gets the sense that the vision presented here isn’t fully thought out; that the author, having defined the broad contours of his world, is basically having fun as he goes along, throwing in eye-popping bits as they occur to him. Some details read like O’Yeah thought them up in a trance while he sat typing, so that you have to go back a few pages to confirm that you read what you thought you read – was there really a reference to butter-chicken-flavoured condoms? What’s with the remote-controlled camera that looks like a mutton samosa? Some of this stuff gets outright silly at times. Take this reference to a recently colonised Mars:
The Red Planet had since become an overpopulated suburb of New Delhi, renamed NOIDA Phase 819, and due to its colour it was a favourite retirement destination for old Maoists who demonstrated every other day and called for bandhs to have the planet renamed “Maors”.
Given that the fictional world described in Once Upon a Time in Scandinavistan is not one of notable technological advancement (Internet connections are still slow, for example, and the “holophones” used by people have to be knocked about before they yield a dial tone), the passage above doesn’t seem organic to this setting. But that might be the wrong approach to reading this book. As I went along, I found it useful to think of Scandinavistan not so much as an internally consistent fantasy universe created from the bottom up with meticulously defined rules and limits of its own, but as a hysterical, hyper-exaggerated rendering of the idea that India – with all its chaos and contradictions – might become a world-dominating power someday (an idea that in any case doesn’t belong exclusively to the realm of fantasy these days – just read newspaper editorials).
Rereading the Mars passage in this light, I thought of the times I’ve joked with friends about how Delhi’s suburbs might engorge and devour the entire country some day, given the relentless expansion of the National Capital Region in all directions. Then one wonders: given a scenario where India takes over the world, is it so hard to believe that things would become as anarchic and outlandish as described here? Would anything be off-limits? Probably not – by the end of the book, it seems almost normal that a naked, marinade-coated Barsk should be running down Bangla Marg with a sword in his hand. I hope O’Yeah revisits Scandinavistan and its endearingly ungallant hero soon.
[More information on O'Yeah and his earlier work - including a Gandhi biography that is still available only in Swedish - can be found at his official website]
The Popcorn Essayists: What Movies do to Writers is now available on Flipkart, so get thee forth and order copies for yourselves, your friends, family and pets. More about the book here.
[Pure coincidence that this is the second novel with a cricket theme that I've read recently; wrote about the first here. Though both books involve the making of a film about an underappreciated cricketer, they are very different in most ways]“Wasting talent is a crime,” says Graham.
“A sin,” concurs Ari.
I think of Pradeep Mathew, the great unsung bowler. I think of Sri Lanka, the great underachieving nation. I think of WG Karunasena, the great unfulfilled writer. I think of all these ghosts and I can’t help but agree.
I don’t know if Shehan Karunatilaka’s Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew is “the Great Sri Lankan Novel” (as some of the publicity has suggested), but it’s a tremendously moving and funny book that works on many levels. It deals with big human subjects such as mortality, regret and self-actualisation, but does so with admirable lightness of touch. It’s a highly engaging cricket book too, one that uses the sport to examine aspects of Sri Lankan history, politics and contemporary life. But cricket isn’t just a MacGuffin in this story. To appreciate Chinaman fully, you need to have at least a very basic interest in the game, even if you don’t live and breathe it the way the man who tells the tale does.
That narrator is a 64-year-old sports journalist named WG Karunasena (“Wije” or “Gamini” for short), and as the book opens we learn that he is dying, his liver ravaged by years of alcohol abuse. Soon we will gather that Wije’s personal list of his life’s proudest moments includes (in no particular order): his wedding; the birth of his son (named Garfield, after Sobers); being awarded Ceylon Sportswriter of the Year; watching his son hit three sixes at age eight; and “watching Wettimuny at Lord’s in 1984, the first time I realised that a Sri Lankan could be as good as anyone else”. We also learn that a disagreement about the legitimacy of Muttiah Muralitharan’s bowling action turned into the ugliest argument Wije has ever had: “More foul-mouthed than when Ceylon Electricity overcharged me Rs 10,000. Angrier than when my wife found out I had been fired from my third successive job.”
Generally speaking Wije has no illusions about having led a particularly consequential life, but in the tradition of tragic protagonists who have a date with the Reaper, he has one magnificent obsession: he wants to make a documentary about the 1980s spin bowler Pradeep Mathew, whom he considers an unsung hero, the greatest cricketer Lanka ever produced. With the help of his closest friend Ari Byrd, and financial support from a former English cricketer, Wije gets the project off the ground, but there are snags - for one thing, it turns out that Mathew may no longer be alive. And if he is, he’s doing a bloody good job of being elusive. Wije’s search for this enigmatic man will lead him to meetings and conversations with disparate types ranging from cricketing coaches to match-fixers to a mysterious underworld figure.
Among the many notable things about Chinaman is Karunatilaka’s spot-on portrait of the interior life of an old man searching for fulfilment – his loneliness and cynicism, his regrets about his estranged son, his relationship with his wife and friends. (A lovely, unexpected passage three-fourths of the way through the book relates a beachside conversation between Wiji and his wife Sheila that rings so true it’s hard to believe it was written by an author only in his thirties.) Through all his trials, Wije also retains a broad, nihilistic sense of humour – lying on a hospital bed near death while a nurse adjusts his bedpan and his wife smothers him in kisses, he reflects that this moment “is the closest I have come to a ménage a trios in my wretched, uneventful life”.
Absorbing and believable as this voice is, the book’s non-linear structure – darting about like a ball on an uncovered, crater-ridden pitch – is just as effective. The plot is interspersed with little subsections containing asides and bits of information about the game, even drawings; less adeptly done, this sort of thing might have impeded the narrative, but here it allows us to glimpse the inner world of a man who has spent much of his life thinking about the game.
Fact and fiction mix in intriguing ways here: there are references to matches that actually took place – such as this one in the 1985 Benson & Hedges World Series, which was Lanka’s heaviest defeat – but with minor alterations. (In Karunatilaka’s revised version of the match, the eventual result is the same, but Mathew takes five wickets.) There are several mentions of real-life cricketers, but there are also names that mash two or more real-life personalities together, such as “Graham Snow” (a former English captain who, in an amusing passage, bawls about his personal problems to WG and Ari, thinking they are psychiatrists) and “Mohinder Binny”. I thought the use of these composite names was gimmicky, but much more effective is the tantalising way in which Karunatilaka incorporates himself – or at least a character named “Shehan Karunatilaka” – in the book’s last section, which could be a comment on the relationship between a fiction writer and his creations, or the relationship between fiction and non-fiction. Does Pradeep Mathew really exist, it makes us wonder. Who or what is he?
Well, on one level it’s easy enough to see Mathew as a cipher that enables other stories to be told. He can also be viewed as a wish-fulfilling device, a representation of the idea that Sri Lankan cricket could have had a genuine world-beater even in its sorry 1980s – a true force of nature, a bowler who could dismiss such batsmen as Allan Border and Dean Jones with "miracle" deliveries. (Karunatilaka has gone to some lengths to create an online world for the fictional cricketer, including a webpage with photos, stats, articles and a fake Cricinfo profile.)
However, Mathew is also a tragic figure, a victim of countless external factors, and a reminder that sporting genius doesn’t ply its trade in isolation. In the alternate universe described in Chinaman, he bowls one of the great spells in cricketing history against New Zealand – such a brilliant spell, in fact, that it leads to the pitch being declared unfit and all record of the match being erased from the books! He takes on a supercilious Yorkshireman during a TV interview, an improbable instance of a cricketer from a diffident team giving it back to a white supremacist. Years later, he encourages Arjuna Ranatunga to beat the Aussies at their own game by sledging them back, advises Muralitharan not to change his action, and insists that Jayasuriya, the new one-day opening batsman, be allowed to play his natural game and hit over the top in the first 15 overs. None of these priceless contributions to Lankan cricket become public knowledge.
In a fairer world, Mathew might also have been a uniting force in a country sundered by racial conflicts – a cricketing superstar who happens to be the son of a Sinhala mother and a Tamil father. But then sport at its best, Chinaman postulates, can make the injustices of the real world more tolerable, sometimes even balance them out – even if its effects are temporary. “I have been told by members of my own family that there is no use or value in sports,” Wije says at one point. He retorts that there is little point to anything. “In a thousand years, grass will have grown over all our cities. Nothing of anything will matter. Left-arm spinners cannot teach your children or cure you of disease. But once in a while, the very best of them will bowl a ball that will bring an entire nation to its feet. And while there may be no practical use in that, there is most certainly value.”
An entire nation was, of course, brought to its feet when Sri Lanka won the World Cup in 1996, and the Chinaman narrative covers the sense of wonder and triumph of those days (“Sri Lankans across the world stand taller, believing that now anything is possible. The war would end, the nation would prosper and pigs would take to the air”), while never losing sight of the possibility that it might turn out to be an illusion – a flare of light in the midst of a continuing darkness.
But what a flare!
In 1996, subcontinental flair overcame western precision and the world’s nobodies thrashed the world’s bullies. Sixty years earlier a black man ridiculed the Nazi race theory with five gold medals in Berlin before Mein Fuhrer’s furious eyes.
In real life, justice is rarely poetic and too often invisible [...] In real life, if you find yourself chasing 30 runs off 20 balls, you will fall short, even with all your wickets in hand. Real life is lived at two runs an over, with a dodgy LBW every decade...
...Unlike life, sport matters.
[Here's an old post about my relationship with cricket, which coincidentally began just before the 1996 World Cup. And here's a piece I did for Cricinfo about the two cricket-loving fops in Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes]
I’ve written earlier about the spate of mass-market novels authored by young students/graduates and published by low-investment houses like Srishti** – mostly simplistic stories about youngsters who learn hard truths about life through friendships and romance, and eventually grow up (or, in some cases, achieve the all-consuming goal of losing their virginity while remaining just as mentally stunted as before). The majority of these novels move at a brisk rate, with lots of conversation but very little description. Rarely if ever are the protagonists genuine introverts or loners, though in some cases they think of themselves as such.
This is no surprise: many of these writers pride themselves on not being avid readers themselves (see this old post); what matters is that they think they have a story to tell and that they’ve mugged up thesauruses so they can (mis)use “big” words while expressing simple-minded ideas.
On the surface, Aditya Sudarshan’s Show Me a Hero might seem like the standard-issue youth novel, what with its dramatic subtitle “Lights, Camera, Cricket...and Murder” and its mass market-friendly plot about a group of young people trying to make a film about a controversial batsman who once played for India. And sure enough, this book is quite a page-turner in its way – especially the second half, which centres on a mysterious death and an investigation, with a few red herrings strewn about. However, Sudarshan is a wise reader himself (he’s done some fine literary criticism for the Hindu and other publications) and this makes itself felt in the book’s central voice. The narrator Vaibhav, a thoughtful young man with a mature head on his shoulders, spends a lot of time observing the people around him, trying to make sense of the world and his place in it, analysing (sometimes overanalysing) his own reactions to situations.
Vaibhav comes from a well-to-do family and has had a sheltered childhood, but as the story begins he is living in a rented room in a Patpatganj apartment while half-heartedly holding a low-paying job with a wildlife organisation. A hint of excitement enters his life when he reencounters an ex-classmate named Prashant, a mercurial young man on a mission. Prashant turns out to be obsessed with the former cricketer Ali Khan, who had stirred hackles during his playing days because he didn’t conform to the expectations we tend to have of our public figures (wear your patriotism on your sleeve, say all the politically correct things, respect the tradition you were born into). As Prashant, Vaibhav and a small circle of friends begin the shooting of a film about Khan, their paths cross with goons who want the project scrapped, and tragedy soon follows.
Show Me a Hero isn’t a completely satisfying novel, but (and this might sound strange) I don’t really mean that as a criticism. The thing is, it’s dressed up as a work of genre fiction - and marketed to seem like more of a cricket novel than it is, presumably to cash in on the World Cup - but it doesn’t provide the reader with the comforts, the cosy tying up of loose ends, that genre works are expected to provide. Sudarshan has a real feel for the uncertainties of sensitive youngsters trying to deal with a complicated world (and with the hegemony of older people), and his writing doesn’t involve neat resolutions. He has the courage to reach for a downbeat ending, whether it involves a man who might not have been the proud, individualistic hero everyone thought he was, or the likeable girl who gently turns down a likeable boy just when it seems they are “destined” for the perfect romance.
There are some good character sketches here too: an intrusive landlady, a typically belligerent Delhi driver who is ready to “kill” someone because they dented his beloved car but who turns into a fawner when he meets a former celebrity, a grief-stricken mother who wants to believe the best about her abrasive boy. At times I felt a minor conflict between the self-conscious solemnity of Vaibhav’s narration and the demands of a fast-paced story, but on the whole Show Me a Hero does a fine job of ignoring the hazy line between “literary” and “genre” fiction. It’s good to come across a youth novel that has some interiority.
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** For more on such writing, see the last two paragraphs of this post
Just to direct readers' attention to a new online book rental service called Tender Leaves - you can read about how it works here. Sudarshan Purohit, who co-founded the service, asked me to provide a few recommendations of cinema-related books for their blog, which I've done here. (Those are only a few of my favourite movie books, more titles will be added to the list soon.)
What happens when you gather a line-up of established authors who don't write professionally about cinema and ask them for personal essays about a cherished film or film-related experience?
This happens:
[Click to enlarge]
The anthology will be out in a month or so, but here's a quick summary of what the pieces are about:
- How do you "read" a film, how do actors recapture the immediacy of their feelings when they dub for a scene months after the original shoot ...and other questions that movie buffs ask themselves ("Jellyfish" - Manjula Padmanabhan)
- A tongue-in-cheek analysis of a cult Punjabi film as a Bible for foot-fetishists ("The Foot-Worshipper's Guide to Watching Maula Jatt" - Musharraf Ali Farooqi)
- On dreamlike vistas, from Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill Jr to a surreal chase scene featuring Kader Khan and Vinod Mehra ("Perchance to Dream" - Rajorshi Chakraborti)
- How the Bihari actor Manoj Bajpai passed himself off as a native in an archetypal Mumbai movie ("Writing my own Satya" - Amitava Kumar)
- From watching Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire to reading Michael Cunningham’s ‘White Angel’ - how does the language of film differ from the language of prose? ("Two Languages in Conversation" - Kamila Shamsie)
- On the tumultuous romance between a man and his car in Ritwik Ghatak's Ajantrik ("Gaadi Bula Rahi Hai" - Sumana Roy)
- Why a middle-aged male author performed a Helen dance in drag after a public reading in Brooklyn (Manil Suri's "My Life as a Cabaret Dancer", which you can read here)
- Secret agents, suave detectives, fake ghosts ... on Hindi film noir and thrillers from the 1950s and 60s ("Villains and Vamps and All Things Camp" - Madhulika Liddle)
- What the silences in the Kaurismaki brothers' movies reveal about Finland and its people, and why an Indian writer should be so interested ("Going Kaurismaki" - Anjum Hasan)
- When you're starved for moviegoing experience, a Charlie Sheen thriller can be "the greatest movie ever made by man" ("Terminal Case" - Sidin Vadukut)
- On why being scared is a good thing ("Monsters I Have Known", by yours truly)
- A novelist recalls her time publishing a gossip-driven film magazine in the 1970s, steeped in "a Film Lok parallel to Indra Lok" ("Super Days" - Namita Gokhale)
- A writer who worked for the British Board of Film Classification on the occasional need for - and her ambivalence about - censorship ("The Final Cut" - Jaishree Misra)
And here's the video of the Popcorn Essays session at the Jaipur lit-fest, where four of these writers read from their pieces.
Updates to follow as the release date draws near.
“At a festival this chaotic,” a friend remarked during one of our many chai breaks on the Diggi Palace lawns, “you have to keep a look out for the small pockets of pleasure – a clever remark made by a favourite writer at an otherwise middling session, an impromptu conversation with someone you chance to meet over lunch. Seize that moment and use it as oxygen to tide you over the next few hours.”
I spent most of this year’s Jaipur lit-fest in a haze, looking for sitting space and finding none, being shepherded hither and thither by a sea of people, or fretting about the panels I was moderating. More than once, I envied the hundreds of book-lovers who had come with plenty of time on their hands and with absolutely no agenda other than to sit down and hear authors talk. For such people, the JLF must be heaven. Not so much for the reporters hunting for “exclusive” quotes or filing multiple stories on harsh deadlines. Or for someone, like yours truly, who can only take so much of crowds.
So after a while, I decided that the only way to survive the madness was to take my friend’s advice and greedily accumulate as many of the nice little moments as possible. A few personal highlights, randomly listed:
– In the course of a warm discussion with Zac O’Yeah, the Swedish crime writer Henning Mankell told a funny story about his experiences in a Mozambique town where a police force had only just been introduced, and the protocol between the confused young men who were inducted as policemen and the small-time thieves they had to apprehend was unclear. Thus, you might see a policeman walking down the street holding a freshly caught thief by the scruff of his shirt, but then casually stopping to have his shoes polished – while ordering his detainee to fetch him some cigarettes from a nearby shop, with the latter dutifully complying.
For Mankell, a writer who trades in methodical police procedurals with clearly drawn lines between detectives and civilians, this must have been quite an eye-opener; no wonder he remarked, “It’s fashionable nowadays to say that the world has become very small, but that isn’t true at all – it’s still just as big as it is, and people in one part of it can’t begin to imagine what daily life is like in the other parts.”
– There was also the pleasure of hearing Martin Amis speak about “the myth of decline” – the tendency to look at the past through rose-tinted glasses, going as far back as pre-historic cave writings that lamented “Where are they now, the heroes of old?” Discussing the supposed death of the novel, Amis quipped that when the second edition of Cervantes’ Don Quixote was published in the early 17th century, there would have been critics who said, “Well, that’s it, that’s the end of the novel – it has no future.” (Note: if the human mind is hard-wired to think of the past as being forever glorious and the present as being bleak, little wonder I spend so much time reminiscing about the cosier days of the Jaipur lit-fest.)
– Amis being sardonic during his introduction of a talk dramatically titled “The Crisis in American Fiction”: “I’d like to begin by asking these three struggling, panicking American novelists about the ongoing crisis in American fiction.” The writers he was speaking to? Richard Ford. Junot Diaz. Jay McInerney.
– I was unhappy about missing the “Cinema Bhojpuri” session moderated by the incomparable Amitava Kumar, but was gratified when I later heard (from Amitava himself) that he said “Dabangg ek Bhojpuri film hai, behanchod” during the course of the session. (On the other hand, it wasn’t nice to hear about the censoring of Faiza S Khan's reading at the “Pulp” session.)
– Thoroughly enjoyed Jeet Thayil’s reading from his forthcoming novel Narcopolis at a session where I introduced him and CP Surendran. (I think this was shortly before poor CP was attacked by an offence-taking sardar.) Jeet’s reading included a lengthy stream-of-consciousness passage where the word “chut” is used almost as a poetic refrain; the drug-addled narrator employs it to describe all varieties of Indians (except for Maharashtrians). After the session, an audience member asked Jeet the inevitable question “If you hate India and Indians so much, why do you continue living here?” Sigh.
– Had a brief chat with the novelist Marina Lewycka, who joked that when she wrote serious books that intended to probe the human condition, they ended up being nominated for comic prizes, and vice versa. Lewycka, incidentally, leads a fairly quiet life in Sheffield, Yorkshire, and she looked understandably dazed by the largeness of the festival. (While on that, poor Ruskin Bond! He probably saw more people in a single day in Jaipur than he has his entire life in Landour.)
– Following the Popcorn Essayists session, a group of schoolboys came up to me and asked me to sign their lined registers. “Sir, are you involved with Bollywood?” one of them asked as I scrawled my name for the third time. I considered telling them I was Aamir Khan but instead shook my head. Boys and registers vanished in a puff of smoke.
Such was Jaipur.
[If you don’t already have festival reports coming out of your ears, try Google: there’s plenty of media coverage, good and bad. Some really good photos on Mayank Austen Soofi’s blog, for example (the ones above of Kiran Desai and Martin Amis are from him). And the official website is putting up videos of sessions, though some of the links are wrong.]
Off to Jaipur for the lit-fest soon and won't be online much till the 25th, so here are a few reminders/notes about the fest and other things:
- The "Popcorn Essayists" session of readings and conversation with Kamila Shamsie, Anjum Hasan, Namita Gokhale and Jaishree Mishra will be on the 24th, at 10 AM in the Mughal Tent - so if you're at the festival, please try to come for it. (More here.)
- Later on the 24th, I'll be moderating a session with Jerry Pinto and Jaishree at the Baithak; they will also read from their latest work. And I'm in conversation with Kiran Desai on the front lawns on the 22nd afternoon.
- Jaane bhi do Yaaro: Seriously Funny Since 1983 is still available on Flipkart and, I'm told, doing reasonably well. Astonishingly, it can also be found in a few bookstores now (I thought the day would never arrive) so do spread the word to anyone you know who might be interested in narrative writing about cinema. Reviews and general media coverage are on the blog's right sidebar.
- I did this short piece about Jaane bhi do Yaaro as a "concept film" for the Hindustan Times last Sunday; they asked me to do it to accompany a review they were carrying.
- Vinay Lal's Deewaar book is now on Flipkart too. Here's an interesting blog-post by Lal on "the act of writing in Deewaar". (A bit more on that theme in this Time Out feature). And here's a very old post I wrote about Deewaar, a film I intend to see again soon.
- Meanwhile I made my first ever online books purchase a few days ago (from Flipkart): got a replacement copy of an old favourite, Joy Gould Boyum's Double Exposure: Fiction Into Film (a superb analysis of movies adapted from literature), and am waiting eagerly for Andrew Sarris's The American Cinema: Directors and Directions to be delivered.
- A few things I've been reading: Matt Ridley's The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature, Shehan Karunatilaka's Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew, and the elegant Penguin Modern Classics editions of R K Narayan's The Vendor of Sweets and Waiting for the Mahatma. Will try and write about some of this if I get the time.
- Movies recently seen include Victor Erice's beautiful The Spirit of the Beehive (which I need to see again and perhaps write about). Have also re-watched Satyakam, Aranyer Din Ratri, Out of the Past and The Apartment, and there's been a superb mini-fest of Chaplin films too: City Lights, Modern Times and Limelight. Very satisfying.
I don’t spend much time in bookstores these days (it’s the old conundrum: most of my reading is for review purposes), but one of my favourite recent buys was the anthology The Best American Noir of the Century, edited by James Ellroy and Otto Penzler. Thirty-five stories in all, beginning with Tod Robbins’ 1923 “Spurs” (this quaint tale about a dwarf’s obsession with a beautiful bareback rider formed the basis for Tod Browning’s creepy film Freaks) and including such writers as Evan Hunter (also known as Ed McBain), Jim Thompson, Patricia Highsmith, Elmore Leonard and James Lee Burke.
“The thrill of noir,” writes Ellroy in his Introduction, “is the rush of moral forfeit and the abandonment to titillation. The social importance of noir is its grounding in the big themes of race, class, gender, and systemic corruption.”
And then: “The overarching joy and lasting appeal of noir is that it makes doom fun.”
Making doom fun – that’s a good way of putting it. Noir, French for “black”, was thoroughly incorporated into American popular culture in the 1940s – through a series of pulp novels and “film noirs” – until it came to stand for the dark and unknowable places in the human heart, and the character types are familiar even to readers who don’t know the genre well: the femme fatale who spins a fatal web around her victim; the morally weak patsy who helps her get rid of her husband for the insurance money; the hard-boiled detective with demons of his own. Needless to say, there are few happy endings in this world.
It isn’t easy to do a comprehensive review of an anthology that contains 35 stories, most of which are very good, so here are some short notes:
– I used to think of noir as relevant mainly to literature and films produced between the 1930s and 1950s, and indeed this book includes some solid, representative work from that period: I particularly liked Steve Fisher’s “You’ll Always Remember Me” 
(1938), David Goodis’s “Professional Man” (1953) and James M Cain’s bucolic, darkly funny “Pastorale” (1928) about a murder followed by problematic attempts to dispose of a bodiless head. But to my own surprise, some of the most impressive stories are from the past few decades. Twenty-one of the 35 pieces included here were written from the 1970s onward, and some of them intriguingly challenge the reader’s expectations of the genre and its tropes.
For example, Thomas H Cook’s intense “What She Offered” begins with a very familiar scenario – a weary, self-consciously cynical male narrator being approached by a mysterious woman in a bar (“What she offered at that first glimpse was just the old B-movie stereotype of the dangerous woman”). But from here, the story heads in a completely unexpected direction – it turns out that what this woman really has to offer the narrator is the emasculating knowledge that “her darkness is real; mine is just a pose”. I thought there was also a sly little observation about self-important writers and their knowing readers, and the story's beginning reminded me a little of Woody Allen's "The Whore of Mensa".
– Some of the recent stories are more sexually explicit and daring than stories written in the 1930s could be. Take Andrew Klavan’s “Her Lord and Master”, a disturbing take on the power equation in gender relationships, with a female protagonist who preys on men by stoking their appetite for violent sex games. The classic theme of the femme fatale using her wiles on a gullible sucker is given a very different spin here, and I doubt that the old masters like Mickey Spillane, Mackinlay Kantor and Cornell Woolrich (all of whom also feature in this collection) could have published something like this, even though much of their work was often controversial and politically incorrect in its own time.
– A special word for the longest story in this collection: Harlan Ellison’s powerful and literate “Mefisto in Onyx” is about a black man with a very special – and, to him, a very troubling – ability to “jaunt” into the minds of other people and scan their mental “landscapes”. To Rudy’s dismay, an old friend – a woman with whom he had a sexual liaison once – asks him to scan the mind of a convicted serial killer, whom she believes to be innocent. (The premise is slightly similar to that in Tarsem Singh’s excellent film The Cell.) I won’t give much away, except to say that the story climaxes with a fascinating game of one-upmanship and one twist following on the heels of another. It’s also one of the very few pieces in this collection that has anything resembling a “happy ending”, though given what has led up to it one can never be too sure. Incidentally, Lawrence Block’s gripping “Like a Bone in the Throat” is also about a series of mental games between two men: a rapist/killer and the brother of one of his victims.
– And some personal favourites that I haven’t mentioned above: David Morrell’s “The Dripping”, Brendan Dubois’s melancholy “A Ticket Out”, Chris Adrian’s “Stab”, and especially William Gay’s very dark and poetic “The Paperhanger”, about the strange disappearance of a little girl while her mother was just a few feet away. Also, Ellroy's own "Since I don't Have You", set in the 1940s and prominently featuring real-life figures Howard Hughes and Mickey Cohen.
The Best American Noir of the Century is a reminder that though the themes and narrative arcs of noir might appear to be limited in scope, their treatment isn’t. Reading these stories you never get a sense of repetition: in nearly every case, the characters’ actions and choices lead to the inevitable cul de sac, but it turns out that there are different ways to get there - as well as many forking, unexplored paths that might just have led them to a sunnier place.
P.S. The Windmill Books edition I have is missing four of the stories that were in the original publication, including one by Joyce Carol Oates. Pity.
The monthly magazine The Caravan is an excellent forum for long-form feature writing and journalism, and the January issue is special for me on two counts: first, it carries a piece I've written about Jaane bhi do Yaaro - the film and the book. Here's the link.
Second, the issue excerpts this wonderful essay by author Manil Suri about the "Helen dance" he performed in drag after a public reading at the Brooklyn Book Festival. The piece is one of 13 original essays in The Popcorn Essayists: What Movies do to Writers, an anthology of film-related writing that I've edited for Tranquebar. The book should be out in February, and needlesss to say I'll keep feeding you information and updates about it. But for now, do read Manil's piece, and watch his Bollywood dance here.
P.S. It's purely coincidental that the Helen number Manil picked for his dance was from a film titled... Caravan.
It’s no secret that cats and writers are temperamentally suited to each other. Dogs are more dependent on human attention, needing to be regularly played with, spoken to and taken down for walks, but felines are moody and unsocial and independent - and hence perfect companions for someone who spends much of his time in fierce concentration, or sulking about being unable to write. (Ironically, though I was an unqualified cat person when I was young, I’ve become seriously involved with a very demanding dog at a time when I’m writing professionally and working from home. Not easy.)
Besides, as Aldous Huxley said, “If you want to be a psychological novelist and write about human beings, the best thing you can do is to keep a pair of cats.” Which brings me to Pallavi Aiyar’s lovely novel Chinese Whiskers, told in the alternating voices of two young cats living in Beijing.
Soyabean is born in reasonable comfort – being part of a courtyard litter that’s cared for by a kindly old lady – while Tofu is from a family of dustbin scavengers, but as kittens they are both adopted by a waiguo (foreign) couple named Mr and Mrs A. It’s a cosy and happy life until threatening winds begin to blow in from the World outside: animals are being held responsible for a nasty bing du (virus) and groups of mean-minded vigilantes prowl the streets, kidnapping unmonitored pets, stuffing them in vans and driving them off to a terrible fate. Meanwhile, the rotund Soyabean is roped in to model for a TV ad for a delicious new brand of Chinese cat-food. He is soon seduced by his newfound celebrity, but Tofu – timid, introspective – is dubious from the start:
And what was all that nonsense about “Chinese food is better”? I wasn’t a very smart cat and there were many things I didn’t know, but I did know there was something wrong with making a statement like that. Maybe some Ren liked Chinese food more and some preferred waiguo food, but how could you say that Chinese food was always better? Even though I wasn’t so interested in food at all, I still thought it was more interesting to have many different kinds of foods than just one type all the time.
The subtext is clear enough; it isn’t just food that is being talked about here. Chinese Whiskers examines many aspects of Chinese society – insularity, the city-dwellers’ prejudices against migrant workers from the countryside, the friction between tradition and modernity, the hard-edged materialism of the younger generation – but it does this with a lightness of touch that is sustained from beginning to end. Many people will see it as a book for “young readers” (with the patronising tone that sometimes accompanies that phrase), and indeed it can be enjoyed by eight-to-ten-year-old readers in the undemanding way that they might enjoy Enid Blyton’s Bimbo and Topsy stories. But I think it also makes for a good 
companion piece to Aiyar’s prize-winning Smoke and Mirrors: An Experience of China, which was a more overtly serious work of narrative journalism about the Middle Kingdom (and which also had an outsider-narrator – Aiyar herself – looking with fascination at a multilayered World).
Needless to say, the perspective in Chinese Whiskers is a very different one, but it’s insightful in its own special way. What more succinct comment on the human condition than these words of wisdom delivered by a mama cat to her daughter as they discuss the fickle ways of people: “Ren are as the wind. Who can say why they blow this way or that?” It’s a line plucked out of a children’s book featuring anthropomorphized animals, but the context for the conversation is an old professor who got into trouble with the authorities because of the dissenting views he expressed in a book. Even so, despite the hints of danger, the melancholy asides and the sense of a society in flux, the overall tone is optimistic and comforting: the story's leering villains are more than offset by Good Samaritans such as the animal-rights activist Madam Wang and the construction worker Four Fingers Fu who cares for Tofu when she is lost.
The use of Soyabean and Tofu as narrators provides a fresh perspective on such real-life events as the frenetic build-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics (some of the details of which mirror the preparation for the Commonwealth Games in Delhi), but it’s also a useful plot-mover: the cats understand what humans say, eavesdrop on crucial conversations and eventually help expose a cynical money-making scheme. The one very minor reservation I had about the voices is that both Tofu and Soyabean are fairly docile, domesticated sorts, rarely displaying the tartness that characterises the best of their kind. I wouldn’t have expected the caustic tone of Saki’s “Tobermory” from a story like this, but an ill-tempered hiss every chapter or two would have been nice! That little detail aside, Chinese Whiskers was one of my favourite reads of the last few months.
P.S. The book includes some beautiful black-and-white drawings by Gerolf Van de Perre, some of whose other work you can see here.
[Did a shorter version of this for The Sunday Guardian]
The daunting thing about having written a book on Jaane bhi do Yaaro is the number of encounters I’ve had with people whose relationship with the film is more intense than my own. Whenever I mention the book to one of these ardent fans – someone who claims to have seen the movie fifty or more times – they respond by 
pirouetting around the room and reciting entire sections of the script. They toss one-liners at me like Satish Shah throwing pieces of cake out of the window in the “Thoda khao, thoda phenko” scene. “Heck, you’re better qualified to write about this film than I am,” I’ve heard myself say on some of these occasions, only half-jokingly.
I’d love to be able to proclaim that this book was the culmination of a lifelong ambition to write about Jaane bhi do Yaaro – that Kundan Shah’s cult classic is closer to my heart than any other movie, that I’ve watched it dozens of times over the years and been spellbound each time. But that wouldn’t be true. What happened was more mundane.
More than two years ago, during a chat at a book event, the Harper Collins India editor V K Karthika told me about a series they were planning on Indian films and asked if I’d like to contribute to it. After my neck had recovered from the whiplash caused by excessively vigorous nodding, I began thinking about cherished movies I might be able to write about: an early frontrunner was the inventive, dialogue-less Kamal Hassan starrer Pushpak (which I blogged about here), and I also considered a few underrated mainstream films, but I wasn't sure about being able to sustain a whole book on any of them. (Sidenote: when I first heard about the movie series, I misunderstood that it was going to be a single book with a collection of 3,000-word essays by different writers. This complicated the brainstorming process more than somewhat. Writing an essay about a single film is very different from investing time and energy in a 55,000-word book about a single film.)
Then Jaane bhi do Yaaro came up during a discussion with the series editor Saugata, and something clicked immediately. I recognised that this would be a very interesting film to write about – with many potential talking points – and that gathering material on it would be fun. There was also the pleasing coincidence that I had watched JBDY just two weeks earlier – for the first time as an adult, and after a gap of at least 18 years.
If you believe in predestination or “stars aligning” or “the universe conspiring to make something happen” (I don’t – bah!), here’s a bit of information you might enjoy: three weeks before my meeting with Saugata, during a chance visit to the Landmark store in Gurgaon (a place I very rarely go to), I happened to see the Moser Baer DVD of Jaane bhi do Yaaro and picked it up on a whim. If it weren’t for that unlikely visit, I wouldn’t have re-watched the film recently enough to be really enthusiastic about it. Astonishingly, in the two years since that day, I haven’t seen another DVD of it in the dozens of times I’ve been to music stores in Delhi. You’d think this film would be easily available, but the only other DVD I’ve seen in all that time was Kundan Shah’s personal copy, in his office.
Of course, like most other movie-lovers of my generation, my relationship with Jaane bhi do Yaaro goes back a long way. As a child I saw it many times on Doordarshan, and of the many fragmented memories it were the last few seconds of the movie - the coda that follows the framing of the innocent heroes - that stayed etched in my mind: Vinod and Sudhir walking about in prison clothes, Lata Mangeshkar’s soothing voice (very incongruous to this scene) singing “Hum Honge Kaamyaab”, the sudden, strident sound of drumbeats, the protagonists looking directly into the camera and making a throat-slitting gesture, the brief shot of the Gateway of India and the sickening “thud” with which the film ends.
How those drumbeats and that gesture haunted me all these years! When my wife and I first talked about Jaane bhi do Yaaro, it turned out that this was her most vivid memory of the film too.
Watching it through adult eyes in 2008, I liked some scenes and performances a great deal, I loved the wackiness of the screenplay and the bizarre, unexplained moments such as the scene where Tarneja (Pankaj Kapur) sprays perfume under the armpits of a foreman (who beams gratefully as he raises his arms). But to return to my original admission: if I had to make a personal list of my 10 favourite Hindi films (and no, I'd never actually do this), I’m not sure if Jaane bhi do Yaaro would figure on it.
This is not to undermine the film, just to say that I admire it more for its concept than for the execution. I think it’s an important movie for many reasons, including its blurring of the line between Serious Cinema and Entertainment (which are facile and misleading distinctions in any case). However, watch it with pen and notepad in hand and you'll find that parts of it are shoddy. You can tell that it was made on a very small budget, in less-than-ideal conditions, by struggling artists who weren’t sure if anything would come of the endeavour. You can see the haphazard way in which it must have been put together, the last-minute alterations and deletions, the lack of options available in the editing room, the compromises necessitated by budget or scheduling.
And yet, this very aspect of the film was what ultimately made researching and writing about it such a pleasure. I’m going to abruptly end this post here because I’ve just finished an essay about the researching and writing process for The Caravan magazine. Will put the whole thing up when the January issue of the magazine is on the stands. So watch this space, and - as ever - look out for the book.
Ralph Keyes’ book Unmentionables (originally published as Euphemania and now subtitled “From Family Jewels to Friendly Fire – What We Say Instead of What We Mean”) is an entertaining look at the history of euphemistic language, ranging from ribald Shakespearean lines (Iago to Desdemona’s distraught father: “Your daughter and the Moor are now making the beast with two backs”) to Winston Churchill being told by an American lady at a dinner party to say “white meat” instead of “breast of chicken” (a probably apocryphal story goes that he sent her a corsage with the message “Pin this on your white meat”). Along the way, Keyes reminds us of the often-surreal consequences of indiscriminate bowdlerising, such as the Associated Press article that changed the name of the athlete Tyson Gay to Tyson Homosexual, or the email filter in the Internet’s early days that prevented residents of Scunthorpe from registering themselves online. (Why, you ask? Check the second to fifth letters of the town’s name.)
One myth about Narayan should be quickly dispelled: that his writing is “simple” in the sense that you can just pick up one of his books and race through them. This notion has been perpetuated by some of today’s mass-market writers who seek to validate their own non-literariness through association. For example, Chetan Bhagat has admitted to being influenced by Narayan’s no-flourishes style, which might create the misleading impression that Narayan can be read in the same way that you can read a Bhagat novel (it took me barely an hour to finish Five Point Someone). Certainly there is a basic directness in Narayan’s prose – an emphasis on narrative rather than “style” – but sentence by sentence, his best work has the refinement, the carefulness, the knack for observation and description, that you expect in good literary fiction. There’s little that’s casual about it.
“We wanted to challenge certain notions about what a comic is, about what it can do and should do,” says the editor’s note for a slim new graphic novel titled Hush. The book’s title couldn’t be more appropriate – this story about an unhappy, angry schoolgirl with a gun in her hand is completely wordless, propelled not by written text but by vivid black-and-white drawings. The experience of “reading” it can be initially unsettling, but as I turned the pages for the second time I found the images speaking with the force of a good, visually inventive sequence in a silent movie – a film made in an era when directors could aspire towards pure cinema.
Extremely entertaining though all these details are in themselves, there is also a plot – it centres on the dead bodies found by Barsk in the tandoor and involves a group of murderously sociopathic girls, a mysterious ashram, a cheap restaurant that serves food to the poor, and a British submarine preparing to “liberate” Gautampuri. Barsk himself is in love with a married Indian woman named Kumkum, and the personal stakes rise for him when he discovers that her husband is connected with the murder case.
[More information on O'Yeah and his earlier work - including a Gandhi biography that is still available only in Swedish - can be found at his official website]
The Popcorn Essayists: What Movies do to Writers is now available on Flipkart, so get thee forth and order copies for yourselves, your friends, family and pets. More about the book here.
That narrator is a 64-year-old sports journalist named WG Karunasena (“Wije” or “Gamini” for short), and as the book opens we learn that he is dying, his liver ravaged by years of alcohol abuse. Soon we will gather that Wije’s personal list of his life’s proudest moments includes (in no particular order): his wedding; the birth of his son (named Garfield, after Sobers); being awarded Ceylon Sportswriter of the Year; watching his son hit three sixes at age eight; and “watching Wettimuny at Lord’s in 1984, the first time I realised that a Sri Lankan could be as good as anyone else”. We also learn that a disagreement about the legitimacy of Muttiah Muralitharan’s bowling action turned into the ugliest argument Wije has ever had: “More foul-mouthed than when Ceylon Electricity overcharged me Rs 10,000. Angrier than when my wife found out I had been fired from my third successive job.”
Among the many notable things about Chinaman is Karunatilaka’s spot-on portrait of the interior life of an old man searching for fulfilment – his loneliness and cynicism, his regrets about his estranged son, his relationship with his wife and friends. (A lovely, unexpected passage three-fourths of the way through the book relates a beachside conversation between Wiji and his wife Sheila that rings so true it’s hard to believe it was written by an author only in his thirties.) Through all his trials, Wije also retains a broad, nihilistic sense of humour – lying on a hospital bed near death while a nurse adjusts his bedpan and his wife smothers him in kisses, he reflects that this moment “is the closest I have come to a ménage a trios in my wretched, uneventful life”.
Fact and fiction mix in intriguing ways here: there are references to matches that actually took place – such as this one in the 1985 Benson & Hedges World Series, which was Lanka’s heaviest defeat – but with minor alterations. (In Karunatilaka’s revised version of the match, the eventual result is the same, but Mathew takes five wickets.) There are several mentions of real-life cricketers, but there are also names that mash two or more real-life personalities together, such as “Graham Snow” (a former English captain who, in an amusing passage, bawls about his personal problems to WG and Ari, thinking they are psychiatrists) and “Mohinder Binny”. I thought the use of these composite names was gimmicky, but much more effective is the tantalising way in which Karunatilaka incorporates himself – or at least a character named “Shehan Karunatilaka” – in the book’s last section, which could be a comment on the relationship between a fiction writer and his creations, or the relationship between fiction and non-fiction. Does Pradeep Mathew really exist, it makes us wonder. Who or what is he?
Well, on one level it’s easy enough to see Mathew as a cipher that enables other stories to be told. He can also be viewed as a wish-fulfilling device, a representation of the idea that Sri Lankan cricket could have had a genuine world-beater even in its sorry 1980s – a true force of nature, a bowler who could dismiss such batsmen as Allan Border and Dean Jones with "miracle" deliveries. (Karunatilaka has gone to some lengths to create an online world for the fictional cricketer, including a webpage with photos, stats, articles and a fake Cricinfo profile.)
On the surface, Aditya Sudarshan’s Show Me a Hero might seem like the standard-issue youth novel, what with its dramatic subtitle “Lights, Camera, Cricket...and Murder” and its mass market-friendly plot about a group of young people trying to make a film about a controversial batsman who once played for India. And sure enough, this book is quite a page-turner in its way – especially the second half, which centres on a mysterious death and an investigation, with a few red herrings strewn about. However, Sudarshan is a wise reader himself (he’s done some fine literary criticism for the Hindu and other publications) and this makes itself felt in the book’s central voice. The narrator Vaibhav, a thoughtful young man with a mature head on his shoulders, spends a lot of time observing the people around him, trying to make sense of the world and his place in it, analysing (sometimes overanalysing) his own reactions to situations.
I spent most of this year’s Jaipur lit-fest in a haze, looking for sitting space and finding none, being shepherded hither and thither by a sea of people, or fretting about the panels I was moderating. More than once, I envied the hundreds of book-lovers who had come with plenty of time on their hands and with absolutely no agenda other than to sit down and hear authors talk. For such people, the JLF must be heaven. Not so much for the reporters hunting for “exclusive” quotes or filing multiple stories on harsh deadlines. Or for someone, like yours truly, who can only take so much of crowds.
– There was also the pleasure of hearing Martin Amis speak about “the myth of decline” – the tendency to look at the past through rose-tinted glasses, going as far back as pre-historic cave writings that lamented “Where are they now, the heroes of old?” Discussing the supposed death of the novel, Amis quipped that when the second edition of Cervantes’ Don Quixote was published in the early 17th century, there would have been critics who said, “Well, that’s it, that’s the end of the novel – it has no future.” (Note: if the human mind is hard-wired to think of the past as being forever glorious and the present as being bleak, little wonder I spend so much time reminiscing about the cosier days of the Jaipur lit-fest.)
- Vinay Lal's Deewaar book is now on Flipkart too. Here's an interesting blog-post by Lal on "the act of writing in Deewaar". (A bit more on that theme in this Time Out feature). And here's a very old post I wrote about Deewaar, a film I intend to see again soon.
- Movies recently seen include Victor Erice's beautiful The Spirit of the Beehive (which I need to see again and perhaps write about). Have also re-watched Satyakam, Aranyer Din Ratri, Out of the Past and The Apartment, and there's been a superb mini-fest of Chaplin films too: City Lights, Modern Times and Limelight. Very satisfying.
“The thrill of noir,” writes Ellroy in his Introduction, “is the rush of moral forfeit and the abandonment to titillation. The social importance of noir is its grounding in the big themes of race, class, gender, and systemic corruption.”
(1938), David Goodis’s “Professional Man” (1953) and James M Cain’s bucolic, darkly funny “Pastorale” (1928) about a murder followed by problematic attempts to dispose of a bodiless head. But to my own surprise, some of the most impressive stories are from the past few decades. Twenty-one of the 35 pieces included here were written from the 1970s onward, and some of them intriguingly challenge the reader’s expectations of the genre and its tropes.
– A special word for the longest story in this collection: Harlan Ellison’s powerful and literate “Mefisto in Onyx” is about a black man with a very special – and, to him, a very troubling – ability to “jaunt” into the minds of other people and scan their mental “landscapes”. To Rudy’s dismay, an old friend – a woman with whom he had a sexual liaison once – asks him to scan the mind of a convicted serial killer, whom she believes to be innocent. (The premise is slightly similar to that in Tarsem Singh’s excellent film The Cell.) I won’t give much away, except to say that the story climaxes with a fascinating game of one-upmanship and one twist following on the heels of another. It’s also one of the very few pieces in this collection that has anything resembling a “happy ending”, though given what has led up to it one can never be too sure. Incidentally, Lawrence Block’s gripping “Like a Bone in the Throat” is also about a series of mental games between two men: a rapist/killer and the brother of one of his victims.
companion piece to Aiyar’s prize-winning Smoke and Mirrors: An Experience of China, which was a more overtly serious work of narrative journalism about the Middle Kingdom (and which also had an outsider-narrator – Aiyar herself – looking with fascination at a multilayered World).
pirouetting around the room and reciting entire sections of the script. They toss one-liners at me like Satish Shah throwing pieces of cake out of the window in the “Thoda khao, thoda phenko” scene. “Heck, you’re better qualified to write about this film than I am,” I’ve heard myself say on some of these occasions, only half-jokingly.
If you believe in predestination or “stars aligning” or “the universe conspiring to make something happen” (I don’t – bah!), here’s a bit of information you might enjoy: three weeks before my meeting with Saugata, during a chance visit to the Landmark store in Gurgaon (a place I very rarely go to), I happened to see the Moser Baer DVD of Jaane bhi do Yaaro and picked it up on a whim. If it weren’t for that unlikely visit, I wouldn’t have re-watched the film recently enough to be really enthusiastic about it. Astonishingly, in the two years since that day, I haven’t seen another DVD of it in the dozens of times I’ve been to music stores in Delhi. You’d think this film would be easily available, but the only other DVD I’ve seen in all that time was Kundan Shah’s personal copy, in his office.
Watching it through adult eyes in 2008, I liked some scenes and performances a great deal, I loved the wackiness of the screenplay and the bizarre, unexplained moments such as the scene where Tarneja (Pankaj Kapur) sprays perfume under the armpits of a foreman (who beams gratefully as he raises his arms). But to return to my original admission: if I had to make a personal list of my 10 favourite Hindi films (and no, I'd never actually do this), I’m not sure if Jaane bhi do Yaaro would figure on it.
