Two new anthologies: Cat People and The Book of Dog

Some news about two new books that I am in (and am very proud of, and looking forward to experiencing as a reader too). Entirely by coincidence, one is an anthology about cats and the other is an anthology about dogs. Different publishers, different editors, and the essays I contributed were commissioned (and written) many months apart – but as these things sometimes happen, the promotional announcements for both books are in the same week, and both are now available for pre-order.

Presenting:

Cat People (edited by Devapriya Roy)

and

The Book of Dog (edited by Hemali Sodhi)

You can scroll down and gape at the list of contributors. Incidentally, as far as I can tell, I am one of only three writers who are in both the cat and the dog book, along with Nilanjana S Roy and Arunava Sinha (two giants of the Indian literary world who have been inspirations for very long). I am as pleased about this as I was to be the only male contributor to the Zubaan anthology Of Mothers and Others nearly a decade ago.

A word about my two essays. The cat piece was one of my most intense (sometimes painful) writing projects of the past few years: a personal essay about my mother and her relationship with animals, about our cats of yore, about old diary entries and how they often contradict one’s memories. Massively self-indulgent, possibly of little interest to anyone other than myself (he says, while hastening to remind the reader that there are many other worthy writers in this anthology) – but I was very happy to have written it in the way I wanted to write it. (The first draft was something like 10,000 words, I eventually cut it down to under 6,000 words. One bit that was removed was a sub-section about the great 1944 film Curse of the Cat People, which I discovered afresh during the Val Lewton course last year. Will revisit and finish that piece soon.)

The dog essay, a little shorter and chattier, is about something that is absolutely central to my daily life: the concept of the “part-time dog” – street dogs that one looks out for on a regular basis and feels responsible for, but also experiences unease about for various intersecting reasons. It is a tribute to some such animals I have known, including the legendary Chameli and Kaali, both of whom have appeared in my earlier posts. And my Lara’s mother, who died earlier this year. Royalty proceeds from this book go to registered animal-welfare charities.

Here are the pre-order links: Cat People and The Book of Dog. Please do spread the word to anyone who might be interested – and let me emphasise that these books aren’t only for animal-lovers (though that will naturally be the primary readership), they are for anyone who likes good, heartfelt writing. Have a look at those two contributors’ lists again.

BONUS

At an unrelated event yesterday, Hemali Sodhi and I continued our dubious longstanding tradition of posing with dog biscuits (or, in this case, a milk bone). Our first such photo session since the pandemic began. See:

A monumental feat – the Sabz Burj restoration

Wrote this short piece for India Today about the newly restored Sabz Burj – a 16th century mausoleum – in Nizamuddin. It looks especially brilliant now with the lights on at night, and it’s a very good idea to have a look while visiting Sunder Nursery or Humayun’s Tomb.
(And yes, that’s Cereberus the hound in the first photo, guarding the tomb’s gates. He was happy to pose…)
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If you crossed the roundabout at the juncture of Delhi’s Lodhi Road and Mathura Road a few years ago, your eyes may have dimly registered the unremarkable-looking monument standing there; one among countless old structures that dot this city of many histories. Take the same route today and your sensory experience will be very different: even through dust and haze and the eyesores of bumper-to-bumper vehicles, the newly renovated Sabz Burj, its blue-tiled dome gleaming, will catch your eye from some distance away. The identity of the nobleman for whom this octagonal mausoleum was built – probably in the 1530s, during Humayun’s reign – is unknown, but there is no longer any question that the burj was an important part of the large necropolis that existed around the Hazrat Nizamuddin Aulia Dargah.

For the Aga Khan Trust for Culture (AKTC) team that began work on the renovation a few years ago, the challenges were obvious. Much of the incised plaster patterns on the eight walls (each a different design) had faded or disintegrated, as had some of the striking large medallions with Quranic inscriptions. Previous restorations had created problems: the use of cement, for instance, leading to increased water penetration. The entire set of turquoise-blue tiles on the dome (approximately 8,000 in number) have now been replaced and fixed with lime mortar, as have a large percentage of the tiles – in four distinct colours – on the monument’s drum or “neck”.

As Ratish Nanda, CEO, AKTC, points out, something of this vintage can’t magically be restored to exactly what it was hundreds of years ago; a certain degree of conjecturing – rooted in careful studies of Timurid architectural trends and construction methods – is inevitable. Take the burj’s sandstone jaalis (lattice screens), which no longer existed and had been replaced with aesthetically jarring metal grills – possibly during a period in the early 20th century when the structure was used as a police station. In recreating these jaalis, the team didn’t know the precise 16th century design, but as Nanda says, the important thing was to restore the integrity of the material originally used, and the processes by which the screens were made.

The big discovery during the restoration was the uncovering of what survived of an intricately painted ceiling in the domed chamber – the earliest existing painted ceiling for a Mughal Era structure. Faded though it is in its current form, a decision was made not to tamper with it to make it look shinier and more “touristy”. “We differentiate between craft and art, and have different approaches for them,” Nanda says, making it clear that the uncovered ceiling was being treated as an example of the latter. A reconstruction drawing has been made by the painter Himanish Das, however, and it creates a mental image of now-forgotten artists lying, Michelangelo-like, on their backs as they did this painstaking work.

There is a poignant subtext here: located where it is, at a congested roundabout that’s tricky to cross, the Sabz Burj is not the sort of tourist attraction that will draw large crowds the way the nearby Sunder Nursery or Humayun’s Tomb do. Relatively few people will step into the interiors and see the remains of the grand ceiling. Many will, however, get to gawp at the beautiful exterior – a reminder that a diligent restoration can make the past feel more real and, well, present.

On Manish Gupta’s 420 IPC: a low-key but engaging courtroom film

(It was good to see two excellent actors, Vinay Pathak and Ranvir Shorey, back together after a long time in the new film 420 IPC, now on Zee5 – though it would have been nicer if they had more to do. I wrote this piece for First Post)
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Few actors can play an unassuming, middle-class everyman as well as Vinay Pathak (whose skills have been sadly underused in the past decade), and this is emphasized by the opening scenes of the new film 420 IPC. Chartered accountant Bansi Keswani (Pathak) is with one of his higher-profile clients, the deputy director of the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA). “There should be different rules for the family members of government servants, no?” says this official during a chat about tax filing; Keswani responds with a quarter-smile and a politely unenthusiastic “Jee” – followed by a bob of the head and a “Main chaloon?” (“I’ll leave now?”)

An honest CA made uncomfortable by suggestions of power-mongering in high places, and by the entitlement of privileged people? Not long after this, we see Keswani disapprovingly muttering “Shakkar mein bhi paise bachate hain” (“They save money even on sugar”) after sipping bland tea served in an office that he knows conducts big financial transactions. At this point the line between the big-shots who pull the strings and the worker ants who serve appears to be fairly well-defined.

And so, when Bansi and his wife Pooja (Gul Panag, in the unglamorous avatar of some of her early films like Dor and Manorama Six Feet Under) find CBI officials raiding their house, the sense of violation is palpable. “Sir, main karze mein dooba hua aadmi hoon, main EMI nahin bhar paaya hoon,” Bansi protests as the officials tear his house apart looking for evidence of financial scams. We don’t know many details yet, but the sight of a middle-class family under siege can raise the hackles of a viewer who knows how vulnerable such underdogs are to miscarriage of justice.

Though Keswani is cleared of suspicion, a couple of months later he finds himself in trouble again when forged cheques adding up to 1.5 crore rupees are stolen from the office of another of his clients. This time matters are serious enough for him to be taken into judicial custody, and courtroom proceedings begin.

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Some ambiguity about characters and incidents is built into this scenario, and 420 IPC makes the most of this uncertainty. While Pathak is ostensibly playing a Decent Man here, he is also a good enough actor to suggest sinister currents below a quiet surface, and he has done villainous or sleazy roles before – so a small question mark hangs over this persecuted-man narrative. What if…? Could it be…?

420 IPC is written and directed by Manish Gupta, who also wrote the 2019 film Section 375, about the legal proceedings surrounding a rape allegation. Both films have a comparable arc: an accusation or an arrest is made, we are privy to different versions of what might have transpired, new information comes in, people’s motivations and interrelationships are seen in a fresh light, there are little twists. Lawyers bicker, discuss the workings of the legal system.

Section 375 involved a courtroom faceoff between an experienced senior lawyer (played by Akshaye Khanna, all eyebrows and smirk) and an idealistic younger one (Richa Chaddha), with the former patronisingly imparting life-and-law lessons as the trial proceeds. Initially it seems like 420 IPC will take the same route: in one corner we have the seasoned Parsi prosecutor Jamshed Ji (Ranvir Shorey), in the other the twenty-something defence attorney Birbal (Rohan Vinod Mehra). Shorey (who, in what seems another cinematic lifetime now, worked wonderfully well with Vinay Pathak in such films as Bheja Fry and Mithya) has played some unlikable characters recently, and here he is now, hair slicked back, giving his opposite number a smug once-over; meanwhile Mehra (son of the late Vinod Mehra who was one of the most genial performers of his era) has a fresh-faced earnestness. It seems likely that for much of the film’s duration, the cards will be stacked in the prosecutor’s favour.

But something more intriguing happens along the way. Without giving away plot spoilers: the greenhorn Birbal turns out to be more street-smart and willing to stretch the rules than one initially thought – this naïve-looking attorney knows how to be manipulative and extract data through police sources and hacker friends, and says things like “Information is power”. At the same time, Jamshed Ji becomes relatively marginalised, or at least not very threatening. There are subtle shifts in our perspective of these characters and others.

In its own way, this is also a story about social relationships and power equations across strata – how the nature of our interactions change depending on who we are with, and also on the language we speak. In the courtroom Birbal speaks crisp and fluent English, which might seem to give him an advantage, but there is a little moment where he is briefly excluded when Jamshed Ji and the judge (also Parsi) engage in a casual aside in their own dialect. There are glimpses of the different ways in which people behave with those who are more privileged and less privileged than they are (though by the film’s end, such categories and hierarchies will be blurred): in one scene, the usually mild-mannered Bansi speaks peremptorily to a security guard outside a bank; frustrated that the bank is closed and that the guard doesn’t recognise him, he mutters “Idiot!” as he walks away. The sophisticated-seeming Birbal growls “Side ho jaao na!” to two men who are taking a selfie on his scooter’s route.

There are a few jarring elements too, such as the occasional underlining of information and the repetition of statements, first in English and then in Hindi, or vice versa. “Woh faraar ho gaya,” someone says, and then after a pause, “He’s absconding.” (This sort of thing continues to a point where Jamshed Ji even ends up saying “Your Honour, shaayad accused ne handkerchief use kiya ho ya roomaal use kiya ho.”) There is also an annoying character, a junior lawyer, whose main function seems to be to ask Birbal at regular intervals (mercifully outside the courtroom): “But what if Keswani’s guilty?” In the process reminding us viewers – not that we needed these jogs – that that is an option too.

Formally speaking, 420 IPC is a subdued film, employing the aesthetic of a moderately well-produced Hindi television drama – not “cinematic” in the obvious ways (and especially not if you’ve just come from watching an Annette or a West Side Story). But it harks back to a type of cosy, comforting, low-budget indie film from a decade or two ago, including some of the ones that Pathak, Shorey and Panag used to work in. Despite the occasional stretching out of dramatic moments (and the little bilingual exercises mentioned above), it knows how to keep the plot moving, and the storytelling is largely to the point. In its better moments, this an engrossing depiction of a world where the line between small finance and big finance – or small scams and enormous ones – isn’t clear, and where it is hard to say who holds the reins of power at any given time.

Given all the balls it has in the air, and the (small and big) revelations that are made in the second half, I almost wished the film was a bit longer. It felt rushed at the end, as if a producer had looked at his watch during a trial screening, turned to the editor and said “Okay, eight minutes more max.” Another advantage of a longer running time could have been that Pathak and Shorey – two terrific actors who don’t have quite enough screen time despite their central-seeming roles – might have been given more to do. Hopefully a meaty role in a high-profile series is around the corner for them.

(My other First Post pieces are here)

‘Wood’ you like a parenting manual with that child? On Annette and Richard Matheson

(In my Economic Times column – why the operatic new thriller Annette reminded me of a classic Richard Matheson story about a vicious child and its exasperated parents)
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There are many things to say about the new film Annette, a delirious rock opera-thriller-melodrama about a sullen stand-up comedian named Henry, his soprano wife Ann, and their baby girl Annette who inherits her mother’s singing voice. I wouldn’t try to summarise them all here, but one of the more obvious talking points – in a film that keeps breaking Fourth Walls and drawing attention to its own building blocks – is that the title character is “played” by a wooden puppet.

To clarify, Annette is not supposed to be a marionette in the story: she is no Pinocchio, she is very much a real child and treated as such – she just happens to be depicted in puppet form, right from the time she makes her first appearance as an amniotic fluid-covered newborn. (I was reminded of the chalk drawings representing the exteriors and interiors of real houses in Lars von Trier’s Dogville.) In any case it might be said that Annette’s adult protagonists, though played by flesh-and-blood actors, are puppets too, as well as their own puppet-masters – dragging themselves across their respective stages, polishing a persona (Ann is tragic, forever dying and bowing; Henry is sneering, self-absorbed, pugilistic).

Given the playful nature of this film, the gimmick of the puppet-child doesn’t really have to mean anything – it can be just another instance of Annette breaking narrative rules and wearing its artifice on its sleeve. But for those who like venturing into the thorny thickets of analysis, there is an obvious interpretation: the idea that children, even well-loved children, are to some degree playthings and blank slates for their parents. In this case, here are two artists or performers who each, in different ways, use their puppet-poppet for their own enhancement. Ann imbues it with her greatest skill, turning it into a voice-box that will outlive her; Henry milks the “magical” gift to bask in reflected fame – and continue leading a hedonistic life – long after his own star fades.

It all becomes very poignant in the end, but the darker, more savage aspects of this film – and the use of the puppet device – reminded me of another parent-child equation (also involving an artistic couple and their baby) in a literary work that is as formally unconventional as Annette: Richard Matheson’s 1954 short story “The Doll That Does Everything”.

At first this tale might seem to be the obverse of Annette: here, the child – a destructive little boy named Gardner – is the one in satanic control, and his parents, trying desperately to concentrate on their creative work, are the victims. But when they try to resolve matters by buying an almost-sentient doll as a companion for Gardner, the story moves towards a twisted resolution – and towards an image of a part-human, part-automaton family that resembles the midsection of Annette.

In terms of content alone, Matheson’s story must have been frowned upon in circles where the institution of parenthood is viewed as deeply sacred. (I wouldn’t know.) But equally central to its effect is how it is told, and this is another quality that links it to the avant-garde new film. A young Matheson used language boldly and fearlessly, taking big risks, paying no heed to the anodyne rules – “don’t use big words”, “be direct” – that get taught in so many writing classes. As the poet Ruthlen and his sculptor wife Athene despair at the balefulness of their child, a litany of startling descriptors (“Foaming moonstruck octopus! Untrammeled farrago!”), phrases (“Ulcers within ulcers throbbed”), and sentences (“Ruthlen, bogged in sticky pentameter, looked up one morning eyes marbleized […] At hipless sides, his fingers shook like leprous stringbeans in a gale”) leap out at the reader from the page. The author is having as much fun here as the cast and crew of Annette must have had putting together their most flamboyant long takes.

There are many delightful passages here to warm the nihilist’s soul, including a climactic scene where the doll starts misbehaving too and the couple are at their wits’ end – until epiphany strikes. “It’s not the doll’s fault!” screams Athene, “What good will tearing up the doll do? It’s Gardner. It’s that horrid thing we made together!”

One can picture little Annette speaking a reversal of those lines: “It’s those horrid things that got together and made me!” No wonder that when we finally do see her as a “real” girl late in the film, it is at a point where she is free from her parents’ control. “Can I forgive what you have done?” she sings to her dad, “And will I ever forgive mom? / Her deadly poison I became / Merely a child to exploit / Can I forgive you both?”

[A couple of earlier posts about Richard Matheson: The Shrinking Man; the "anyways" conundrum]

मैंने मांडू नहीं देखा: on Swadesh Deepak and his memoir of “madness”

(At a literature festival in 2016, Jerry Pinto told me about one of the many projects he was working on, a translation of Swadesh Deepak’s memoir Maine Mandu Nahin Dekha – an account of having lived with madness, written by someone who was not chronicling a long-ago mental affliction from a safe distance, but who was still to a degree steeped in it. Anyone who has spoken with Jerry knows how contagious his enthusiasm is when he is holding forth on something he finds interesting, but this was a special conversation even by those standards: his fascination with Swadesh Deepak’s book was evident, and now that the English translation is out I can see why.
Wrote this piece about the book for Scroll)
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I don’t want to write about my illness, says Swadesh Deepak, the celebrated Hindi playwright who has recently re-entered the world of the sane after being a “prisoner of a mental illness” for seven years. I don’t remember the events in any order.

“When did I say you have to describe your illness?” replies the writer-editor Giridhar Rathi, “You have to say what it feels like to be crushed by a mountain […] Write it down as it comes back. Genre, style, forget about these things. If you want, write a poem; put in dialogue as if it’s a play – a fractured prose for a fractured autobiography. And then we will have the first book that is like us.”

And so, Swadesh Deepak wrote a memoir of his descent into madness – a journey that supposedly began when a woman (whom he calls Mayavini, or seductress) asked him to come to Mandu with her.

Maine Mandu Nahin Dekha, published in 2003, includes an account of the above conversation with Rathi. By the time the reader arrives at that self-reflexive passage – on page 119 of the English translation by Jerry Pinto, I Have Not Seen Mandu – it should come as no surprise. Because by then we know that this frightening, unclassifiable book is not just a tour through the darkest corners of a damaged mind, it is a tour conducted by that mind itself (which, as it happens, was not fully healed after all. Three years after the book was completed, Swadesh Deepak, his condition having deteriorated again, left his Ambala house and was never heard from again).

In telling his story, Deepak moves feverishly between past, present and future: the meeting with Mayavini after a Calcutta performance of his play Court Martial; the time spent in the ICU, and later in the general ward, of a Chandigarh hospital after a suicide attempt; conversations and encounters with friends before, during and after his illness; the growing despair of his family – his wife Geeta and their children Sukant and Parul. Doctors ask him questions. (“I was tired. I was answering like a telephone. I was in a country where no one spoke my language.”) Mayavini comes to visit him, sometimes accompanied by three white leopards. He shrewdly conceals her existence from others. (But when she laughs too much, the religious books in the room frown at her.) The wind is personified, it whispers at him. He rants about “destructive women”, from Draupadi to Helen of Troy. A badly burnt arm heals very slowly. Other patients jabber around him.

There are time lapses in the telling. In one passage, he and Mayavini get into her “long foreign car” and begin chatting; a short while into this conversation, with no change of setting mentioned, a woman comes in with a tea tray. The effect is a bit like surrealism in fiction – in a Bunuel film or an Ishiguro novel where space and time don’t follow the usual rules – except that here one can believe Deepak is simply recording what he experienced as faithfully as possible.

At times the section transitions are haphazard, as if mirroring the random workings of a disoriented mind (the section head “The Present” might be followed by another “The Present”), but at other times there is writerly method, or sense of structure, in the madness: Deepak ends a brief section about his first meeting with Soumitra Mohan with the line “Now I understand that his sthaayi bhaava, his permanent aesthetic mode, is a fear of his wife”. The next section, “the present” in the hospital, begins with “Today I am afraid of Geeta.”

Attempting to capture the entirety of a work like I Have Not Seen Mandu in a review is impossible, but here’s a catalogue of some of the things this book is.

It is (obviously) a chronicle of madness, a mind trying to make sense of itself, and using writing – the only available tool – to do so; while perhaps being aware that obsessively writing down everything one can think of is also a type of mental illness. (“Yeh dard bhi hai, yeh hai dawa bhi,” to misquote the lyrics of a popular Hindi song.) Like many people who feel things are constantly slipping away from them and that they must make a special effort to stay tethered to reality, Deepak remembers and cites specific dates even for mundane incidents. (“On 20-02-2000 Nirmal Verma asked me…”).

It's a story about language and its many uses – by a Hindi writer who was a professor of English. “When I speak English continuously, I have retreated to my secure country. No sorrow there, no joy. A limbo of the half-dead,” Swadesh says, but he also calls it “the language of lies”. He makes references to William Blake, Shakespeare, TS Eliot, sometimes misquoting them or rearranging the words in the awkwardly pedantic way in which some people who are proud of their knowledge of English literature – despite English not being their first language – do (and Pinto dutifully notes the correct versions).

So this is also, in a very real sense, a book about writers and writing. At times it reads like a Mad Hatter’s account of a tea-party populated by the cream of the Hindi-literature fraternity – gossiping, encouraging, ribbing each other, being friendly, envious, vindictive in turn. Here is the great Krishna Sobti, saying characteristically naughty things (after glancing at Swadesh’s wife: “Yaar, to look at her taut body, you’d think you hadn’t even raised the wedding veil”) – he clearly reveres her, describes her with awe, and but also accuses her of hiding behind her pseudonym Hashmat “like Arjuna hid behind Shikhandi” to mount a premeditated attack on him in print. And here are other writers and creative people in extended cameos – Nirmal Verma, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Jehangir Sabavala, Soumitra Mohan, Ebrahim Alkazi, Gyan Chaturvedi, Sheila Sandhu, Nadira Babbar, Piyush Mishra.

Some of them speak words of wisdom, which Swadesh seems to recognize as such, even if he can’t really make use of them. “You should always be afraid of someone,” Alkazi tells him, “It keeps your mind intact.” (This is a thought that finds a strange echo elsewhere in the book, in the idea that those who most believe themselves to be impervious, like a Karna protected by his kavacha, may be the most vulnerable.) Theatre director Ranjit Kapoor advises him to make friends with women if he wants to lessen his rage. Again, unlikely.

More unexpected guests – leopards aside – glide through these pages too: during one of his episodes, Swadesh is visited by WB Yeats, who speaks to him in Hindi and explains “I made friends with your poet Nirala in Heaven”. On another occasion Krishna – the God, not the divine Sobti – shows up and, during a philosophical conversation, makes a casual reference to August Strindberg. Of course, we can reflect that someone as widely read as Swadesh Deepak would be susceptible to such visitations. As Pinto puts it in a footnote, it may or may not be a measure of Deepak’s disorder that he can move from Gogol to the potboiler-writer H Rider Haggard in the same passage. This is a condition that is at least partly shared by many prolific readers, writers, movie-nerds, critics. When you have a large swathe of cultural references, highbrow and lowbrow, to draw on and be stimulated by and obsess about, is such “madness” far away?

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This book is also about the tragic-comic effect of Swadesh’s illness on his family, and about the neglect of mental disease in India – the lack of acceptance that adds to what is already an intolerable situation for afflicted as well as caregivers. A few years ago Swadesh’s son Sukant wrote a piece titled “Papa, Elsewhere”, for the Pinto-edited anthology A Book of Light: When a Loved One Has a Different Mind. Here is Sukant’s account of the family’s reaction to the disappearance of Swadesh in 2006:

When we – my mother, my sister and I – were convinced that he was not coming back, there was a collective sigh of relief. There was almost a celebration.
“I hope we never see his face again,” my sister said. I hoped so too. So did my mother…

Read in isolation, this might sound callous, but what it won’t tell you is how much the family had to deal with during Swadesh Deepak’s long period in the wilderness – and how an apparently unfeeling reaction can be a survival technique, a distancing device, as well as a genuine expression of relief. In the same piece, Sukant also writes with affection and concern about being the first to listen to chapters from his father’s memoir as it was being written. “He would spend hours in his study working on the book at a pace we had never seen before. Maybe he knew he was going down again.”

Revisiting Sukant’s piece after reading I Have Not Seen Mandu, I found it even more poignant, partly because its lucidity is in such stark contrast to Swadesh Deepak’s writing. Taken together, these two works – one a short essay by a “sane” son, the other a long and rambling memoir by a “mad” father – offer a complementary view of what losing one’s grip on oneself can be like, and what the continuum between “normal” and “crazy” might look like for those who have to constantly stare such things in the eye.

Both Maine Mandu Nahin Dekha and the story surrounding it (with Deepak’s relapse and eventual disappearance) are cautions against our tendency to build comforting or affirmative narratives, to tell ourselves that an illness can be meaningfully conquered with the right amount of care, with the right people doing or saying the right things. Life – and certainly the caregiving life – shows us repeatedly that such narratives are flawed; that very often you might do your very best and it still might not amount to much.

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There are questions that any reader of this book might have. If (to simplify things a bit) Deepak is writing this memoir during a period of relative lucidity after having moved past the worst of his illness, then how does he remember and objectively describe details that were symptoms of that madness? Such as watching a politician’s photo in a newspaper turning into that of a lizard (“slowly his tongue began to extrude”). On one hand, Swadesh says he doesn’t remember anything from his days in the ICU, that he has to rely on other people’s accounts; yet he also describes seeing the goddess Durga in his wife when he turned to look at her from his ICU bed. Deepak does try to explain in his own Introduction – “Many years later hazy and fractured memories began to return, but not in sequence. I began to make notes” – but some of the specifics are still mysterious to someone attempting to understand his condition and how it is expressed through writing. One does, however, get a definite sense – especially near the end of the story – that some of Swadesh’s experiences helped him to slowly come out of his seven-year writing paralysis and find new muses and inspirations, which would lead to such works as the play Sabse Udaas Kavita after his temporary recovery.

Some sections of I Have Not Seen Mandu are not easy to get through – and not just because of the morbid subject matter. When Swadesh describes his experiences in the hospital, with other patients, doctors and nurses, page after page full of staccato exchanges, it reads like part of a play set in a madhouse; you almost expect these people to address us directly and put on a performance, like characters in Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade or some such work. But fun though that sounds, it can become stifling in ways that might be too much for many readers (even those who are interested in mental illness or have encountered it up close). This is a narrative that is riveting and exhausting at the same time, with many passages that are precise, moving or illuminating, and a few that are incomprehensible (and can only be comprehended, if at all, by Deepak himself). In its rawest, nastiest passages, it reaches places that few other books can. I was often confounded, but wanted to reread it immediately – even without the hope that I would be able to understand everything in it.

If it’s possible to “sum up” a book like this, one might say that it is as fragmented and as full of contradictions as the human mind is; and that it makes most other memoirs – however self-aware they might seem – look polished and contrived in comparison. Perhaps that’s what Giridhar Rathi meant when he said “And then we will have the first book that is like us.”
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P.S. Here are a couple of Krishna Sobti references from the book. Feel like sharing screenshots of many other excerpts, but for now, here is my piece on Sobti’s A Gujarat Here, a Gujarat There.

Notes on an online and offline friendship

See below for some pictures with my friend Tipu Purkayastha (who was passing through Delhi on his way back to the US) at the Khan Market Big Chill last week – grim-visaged fate reserved an empty table for us right next to a poster of one of our favourite films (the title of which is also well-suited to the masked world that Covid made). In pic 2, Tipu, most erudite and witty of film scholars, holds debut books by two sharp young writers – Shrayana Bhattacharya's Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh and Uday Bhatia's Bullets Over Bombay. (The Khan Market sleeping hound in the frame is not accidental.)

Funny how this plague has had different ways of affecting relationships. Tipu and I first began corresponding around 15 years ago when he started following my blog, being as nerdy about Old Hollywood (and a few other types of cinemas) as I was. In the following years I met him 4-5 times during his India visits (running theme: he would email me each time there was a big Barnes & Noble discount on Criterion DVDs, asking if there were any specific ones I wanted to buy; I would send a list, and he would bring them along on his next Delhi trip). While those meetings over coffee were always nice, there was also a rushed component to them – a sense of “this is an obligatory catch-up in a small window of time and we’ll chat briefly, ogle those lovely DVD covers, discuss the disc Extras, then say bye”.

But over the past year and a half, Tipu has been a regular presence at my online film discussions and courses, and in a weird way I feel like we got to spend more “quality time” during this period: through the Zoom sessions and the subsequent email exchanges where he shared trivia and wisecracks with the group. (He usually looks a bit drowsy during the sessions since most of them happen at 5 or 6 AM California time, but still diligently shows up for most of them, and makes sure to say goofy things on chat every now and again – “Shoulder Shoulder, meethi baatein bolkar”, for instance, when Lara nibbled on my shoulder to the delight of the participants.) Zoom windows are understandably seen as a less-than-ideal way to meet friends, and the video fatigue of this period is a very real phenomenon – but for me this has felt like one of those cases where online meetings have *strengthened* a friendship. When I met Tipu today in the so-called real world, it felt more relaxed than our previous real-world meetings; like we were catching up after being in regular touch for a while...

 

Mum's birth anniversary today...

...so here are a couple of very old photos. 

I like the way my nani is just sitting there, cigarette in hand, right next to a baby. Between her and my father, I probably inhaled more tobacco smoke, narcotics and hallucinogens in my first few years than most people do in a lifetime...

(Some posts about my mother and her illness: Rooms and private traps; mum and the JJ School of Art; revisiting July 4, 2016; a scan report)

Bees saal pehle: a journalistic anniversary

(Guilty yet again of putting something on Facebook and neglecting to share it here. A short nostalgia post about November 23, 2001) 

From the archives: 20 years ago on November 23 I technically became a “journalist” by joining India Today’s 24-hour website TheNewspaperToday – after a very intimidating interview with the then-ferocious-but-now-puppy-dog-like Sudeep Chakravarti (and an HR fellow who shall remain unnamed here but whose glinting spectacles put me in mind of The Efficient Baxter in PG Wodehouse’s Blandings Castle books). This wasn’t my first job (I had worked for over two years for Encyclopaedia Britannica and got many bylines on their website, apart from writing occasional pieces for the first iteration of Tehelka, CafeDilli, The Statesman and a few other publications), but it was my first experience of being in a newsroom-like environment – though I spent most of my initial weeks at The NewspaperToday on the 2 AM to 10 AM graveyard shift, almost alone in the big Videocon Towers office.

 

Many stories to be told about my stint there (which included being part of the original team for the afternoon tabloid Today, launched from the same office after the website wrapped up), but for now: the two images below are reminders of the boilerplate film “reviews” I was doing for The Statesman around the same period. (Including one dated Nov 23, 2001.) There were even three pieces on a single weekend, after watching previews of all those films – Cats and Dogs, Kiss of the Dragon and Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – at the stinky little auditorium at Mahadev Road. (I was disdainful about these sorts of 400-word reviews even back then, but I remember being pleased with a line I used in the Captain Corelli piece: “These men come across more as troupe than troop.”) 

 

 

 

Though Sudeep and my other bosses didn’t get to know this, I continued moonlighting for The Statesman for a few months despite being chained to the India Today Group – the byline I used was the not-spectacularly-imaginative “JA Singh”, and I assume the reason I was never caught was because no one other than the Statesman’s desk guys (and maybe not even them) read those pieces…

The dying king's descendants: on the new Anees Salim novel

One of our best contemporary novelists has a new book out. The Odd Book of Baby Names isn’t among my two or three favourite Anees Salim novels, but it’s still pretty good. Wrote this piece for Open magazine.
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In a palace, an old king – once very powerful, now diminished – lies comatose, life slipping away from him as the days roll by. We don’t at first know anything about the place, the period, or even whether this is a “realistic” tale – more details will come later – but the storytelling has a fable-like quality: it is divided between many narrators, all of whom are the king’s progeny.

The official sons speak to us first: the rival princes Moazzam – fat, alcoholic, childlike – and Azam, outwardly more poised but with a small addiction, or obsession, of his own. This is followed by a din of voices of illegitimate children, each name accompanied by its meaning. There is the stammering Hyder (“the one who is as brave as a lion”) who is employed as a nurse in the dying ruler’s room: “The spacious bed looked like an oc... oc... ocean, and he, withered and tiny, a blue bedspread pulled up to his chin, like a man about to be drowned.” There is Zuhab, who was conceived in a village when the king’s train happened to break down there many years earlier. A poetic young man named Shahbaz, who lives in an alley, and the marble-playing ghost of his childhood friend (and half-brother) Sultan, who had died of the black fever at thirteen. Muneer the tailor, hoping to stitch a new fez and take it to the palace so he can have a glimpse of his father. The enigmatic Owais, trying to get through to Cotah Mahal on the phone, but repeatedly rebuffed.

And there is Humera, the only woman in the group, who tells us that her mother wasn’t just a concubine or mistress but the king’s “lover”. Among the illegitimate children, she alone received birthday greetings and gifts from her father.

Thus unfolds Anees Salim’s sixth novel The Odd Book of Baby Names. It begins with an account of a false alarm (the king is mistakenly thought to be dead), after which we are taken back and forth in time as personal histories are revealed. We also learn about a slim book in which the ruler had recorded the names of all his children – dozens, perhaps over a hundred, of them. (“What necessitated such a cryptic register was the history of poor memory that ran in the family like an incurable disorder,” Azam tells us, a line that recalls themes from Salim’s earlier novels, especially The Blind Lady’s Descendants.)

As names from this private journal are listed, the reader might inevitably become curious about what the lives of those many other children are like. And how big would a novel have to be to accommodate all of their stories?

It would probably have to be an epic, a baggy monster aiming to be the latest Great Indian Novel – but that isn’t the kind of writing one associates with Salim, who is a master of the small, intimate story that grows in the telling. Over the past decade he has established himself as one of our finest novelists, winning well-deserved accolades for a style that combines chatty, colloquial prose with sharp and poignant observations about families, communities and the inner and outer conflicts faced by individuals within those groups.

As a long-time fan, I felt the special pleasure of sinking into a new Salim novel as soon as I opened this one: the effortless mixing of moods, from throwaway humour to heart-breaking insight, the unexpectedly rude or bawdy asides. Here is a description of a pitcher that has been covered by a jacket in a tailor’s shop – an attempt to make it look less ugly but instead giving it the appearance of “a destitute man with amputated limbs, piddling drip by drip onto a bedpan”. And here is a depressed young woman pretending in turn to be herself and a “doctor who mended minds”, switching from one chair to another on opposite sides of a table, even ruffling her own hair as one part of her gets up to leave. A funny passage where Shahbaz, taking a woman and her ill son to the hospital on his bicycle, sings a love song that frightens the child. An irreverent but accurate-sounding description of a dead man on a couch, as a child might see him: “Bada Topiwalla lay almost smiling at the ceiling like saying hello ceiling how are you”.

As often happens in Salim’s work, the universal and the very particular move alongside each other: on the one hand, the clamour of competing voices represent a gamut of human experiences and concerns; on the other hand, the characters are all Muslim, and there are culture-specific references, such as a passage where two boys anger a Quran teacher with a prank involving millipedes. As incidental details creep in, one gathers that the present day of the story may be sometime in the late 1960s or early 70s: there is a reference to a recent conversation set a few years after Nehru’s death; another reference to the king making it to the cover of Time magazine in the 1930s as the wealthiest man in the world and a great leader. It is tempting to play connect-the-dots with this information, to wonder if the king is an alternate-world stand-in for a real figure (if so, Jinnah would be one obvious choice) – but such inferences aren’t necessary for a deeper appreciation of this story: this is not as pointedly allegorical a novel as, say, Salman Rushdie’s Shame or Midnight’s Children, it is more relaxed and free-wheeling.

There are, of course, larger themes at play in the story of a ruler and his “children”, from various classes and walks of life, forming an orchestra of aspirations and delusions. (“Each family had an exotic name,” goes a passage that is ostensibly about a large tree full of birds’ nests, “Each name had a meaning, a purpose. When all the birds sang together, the air was heavy with the sound of 100 maracas, probably 1,000.”) In a strangely moving scene, one of the sons recalls his old father thinking he was once a circus-owner rather than a king, complete with startlingly detailed descriptions of the beehive of activity in the circus tent. Isn’t this how any dying leader might feel about his constituency? This is, after all, a story about life’s rich pageant – about our many performances and acrobatics, the many ways in which pleasures and disappointments criss-cross. I think of life as a game of hide and seek, one narrator says late in the book, as he watches children playing that game – a boy tiptoeing up behind a girl who thinks she hasn’t yet been discovered, each of their faces marked with a different sort of joy or anticipation.

Structurally this may be the most atypical of Salim’s novels. It is the only one other than The Vicks Mango Tree (the first to be published, in 2012) that moves between multiple protagonists. In the other books, we were tied to the consciousness of a single person: the delightfully outspoken Hasina in Tales from a Vending Machine, working at an airport, dreaming of escaping on one of those “little planes” she sees from the windows; Imran in Vanity Bagh, an imam’s son living in a mohalla nicknamed Little Pakistan; the melancholy Amar in The Blind Lady’s Descendants, feeling like he was born into a doomed family, drawing morbid inspiration from the story of an uncle who committed suicide decades earlier; most recently the unnamed adolescent narrator of The Small-Town Sea who moves with his parents to the small coastal town where his father had grown up (and where he now wants to die).

The effect of reading The Odd Book of Baby Names is trickier. One is more aware of the author’s efforts to distinguish one narrator from another (through Hyder’s stammer, for example, which gives his narration a distinct texture). Some voices are more engaging than others: I particularly liked the ones of Muneer the tailor, and of Humera and Shahbaz as their paths slowly converge; Zuhab’s story was less interesting to begin with, but becomes more central as the book progresses – and as its narrative moves towards small misdeeds followed by bigger crimes: from deception to possible incest to robbery to murder (which also happens to be fratricide).

Much as I enjoyed reading this novel, I was also left with a niggling feeling of dissatisfaction at the very end – as if it had wrapped up too abruptly, something important had been left unsaid, or I hadn’t got to spend enough time with any one narrator. The Odd Book of Baby Names is a book of vignettes – a flash from one life here, another flash there – and very engaging as the minutiae is on its own terms, on the whole I prefer Salim’s single-protagonist novels. Perhaps because one of his major strengths is building a person’s life over a span of time, with new revelations or insights coming at intervals (while we are also allowed to conjecture the more unreliable aspects of the narrative). One of this book’s most funny-sad descriptions is that of the unconscious king’s farts playing “a sad tune” (perhaps like a jester with a bugle in that circus?) and providing the only sign that he is alive. It made me wonder what this novel might have been like if his had been the sole anchoring voice, with the others floating around it as an accompanying chorus.

[Two earlier pieces on Anees Salim's work: The Small-Town Storyteller and A Tree Named Franklin]

A quick (and belated) note on Mumbai Diaries 26/11

I don’t usually post the (very) tiny “reviews” I do for Reader’s Digest – thought about writing expanded versions for the blog, but no energy now for that sort of thing. Still, it makes sense once in a while to share something about a film or series to provide information about its existence (for those who might not have heard of it in this OTT-clutter age). Among the ones I liked in recent months was Mumbai Diaries 26/11, a medical drama set on the first night of the November 2008 terrorist attacks on Mumbai. The main location is a south Bombay government hospital where doctors and nurses (and three interns, on a first day that is much more memorable than they would have liked) must cope with the influx of wounded patients, and with a possible threat to their own lives.

There are a few slack threads here and there – not every character or back-story is compelling – but on the whole this was a well-paced show. Among its visual signatures are many long takes and a constantly moving camera in relatively congested settings – this sort of thing can be dizzying and not to all tastes, but it catches the chaos of the night and the constant confusion and fear of the characters. Hospital staff like Chitra (Konkona Sen Sharma) deal with their own personal demons, a doctor’s wife (Tina Desai) tries to keep guests in the Palace Hotel safe from the terrorists, an ambitious journalist (Shreya Dhanwanthary) causes trouble for everyone.

Ironically the story became less gripping for me at the point where the hospital itself comes in the line of fire, with a couple of terrorists infiltrating it to get to one of their group who has been admitted as a patient. When this happens (around episode 5 or 6) Mumbai Diaries 26/11 begins to play like a more conventional, gunfire-in-the-corridors action show – as opposed to what it was earlier, a story about the frenetic goings-on in a place that was at the centre of the storm but insulated from the actual violence.

Also: I actually began my tiny RD piece by mentioning how impressive Mohit Raina is as the bandana-wearing trauma surgery chief Dr Kaushik, and how long my mind took to process that this was the same actor who played Lord Shiva as a beefcake in the TV show Devon ke Dev…Mahadev. (I have never watched that show, only seen snippets here and there, but I remember Raina’s Shiva from a couple of scenes in the Star Plus Mahabharata of 2013-2014, such as the one where he interrupts the Bheeshma-Parashurama fight and sonorously Godsplains to the traumatised Amba. Wouldn’t have imagined him in the Mumbai Diaries role.)

Last Night in Soho: a film about monsters in the Swinging Sixties

(As an old-movie nerd who often wistfully dreams about bygone worlds, I found the premise of the new film Last Night in Soho appealing. Wrote this for First Post)
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“The past is a foreign country,” goes the famous opening of LP Hartley’s novel The Go-Between, “They do things differently there.” These lines could serve as a very generalised epigraph for Edgar Wright’s new film Last Night in Soho, though the following might be more suitable: The past is a monster that doubles up as your security blanket, providing warmth and reassurance before smothering you in its labyrinthine folds.

Last Night in Soho starts off very promisingly, maintains that promise till past the midway mark – and then goes somewhat bonkers in its second half. But disappointed as I was by how the film ended up, I never stopped feeling a connect with the state of mind of its protagonist: a young woman named Eloise (or Ellie) who lives in the present day but idealises and yearns for a bygone period that she never experienced firsthand: in this case, the London of the Swinging Sixties.

Shortly after moving from rural Cornwall to London for a fashion-design course, Ellie – who, we gather, has the “gift” of seeing things, including the spirit of her long-dead mother – begins to have dream-visions of the mid-1960s where she becomes a sort of doppelganger to a young woman named Sandie, an aspiring singer. As Ellie moves between her own contemporary life (slowly gaining confidence despite the bullying of city-bred classmates) and participating invisibly in the past world (populated by theatres showing films like Thunderball and Darling, and nightclubs where Cilla Black and Petula Clark perform), she is privy to the gradual shattering of Sandie’s dreams. The visions become darker, she gets increasingly concerned about her new “friend”, uncertain about who or what to believe.

All this places the film in the fantasy-cum-psychological-horror genre, and it is hit and miss in this regard, with a couple of tonal shifts that won’t be to all tastes – though some of the dreamscapes created by Wright and cinematographer Chung Chung-hoon are vivid and unsettling, as subtly creepy encounters yield to full-blown horror. (Some night-time scenes play like tributes to Dario Argento. A parade of the ghosts of predatory men, their features indistinct, faces appearing to melt, is evocative of the famous “Return of the Dead” sequence from Abel Gance’s silent film J’Accuse, though it could just as easily have come from a modern slasher film.)

However, I was more interested in the film’s treatment of nostalgia and the use of time travel (real or imagined) as a therapeutic tool. Perhaps because I could relate to Ellie, a misfit who says things like “If I could live anywhere in any time, it would be 1960s London” and gets puzzled looks from classmates when she completes a reference to “Kylie” with “Minogue”. (Even the 1980s/90s star feels like a relic now compared to the much more contemporary Kylie Jenner!) She uses old music as a cocoon that enables her to shut out her immediate surroundings – to the degree that she almost misses her first class because, lulled by the music, she over-sleeps.

Watching these scenes, I was reminded of a conversation with a much older colleague when I was in my first job. I was in my early twenties, she was in her fifties, and we were at a copy-desk together, tracking changes on a cinema-related article. Gathering that I was somewhat into “old cinema”, she started talking about mid-1960s films, and about actresses like Jane Fonda, Julie Christie and Audrey Hepburn. After going on for a while, she laughed self-consciously. "Why am I saying all this to you?" she said. "It's so far before your time."

“Actually,” I replied, “the reason I’m being quiet is that Jane Fonda is way after my time – though I know everything there is to know about her dad’s career. Also, my preferred Hepburn is Katharine, who predates the other one by around 20 years.” Then as always, I was in my 1930s and 1940s Hollywood phase. When I was much younger and even more precociously intolerable, I had annoyed a visiting aunt by interrupting her proclamations about old films (high on her own version of nostalgia, she claimed among other things that Audrey had won an Oscar for My Fair Lady, and didn’t take kindly to being corrected – “no aunty, she wasn’t even nominated” – by a 14-year-old).

This is a long-winded way of saying that I know what it’s like to be a freak who constantly fantasises about being transported to another time and place – say, a place where your favourite films were being created. I can imagine gliding, mouth agape, from one studio lot to another in the 1940s or 1950s, watching iconic scenes being performed for the first time, or the playing out of personality conflicts that derailed or strengthened film history. Or watching the first Live performance of a soon-to-be-legendary song from a major album. Or just feeling a strong desire to visit the period when your own parents were growing up, to get a sense of the texture of that world and how it shaped their personalities and lives.

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Though Last Night in Soho is broadly speaking psychological horror, it has kindred spirits in other genres – in Woody Allen’s delightful Midnight in Paris, for instance, where an American writer visiting Paris finds himself back in the 1920s, rubbing shoulders with Salvador Dali and Gertrude Stein and F Scott Fitzgerald . (That film was different in tone from Last Night in Soho, but it also slyly warned of the pitfalls of idealising the past, or of thinking of a specific period as a “golden age”.) I also thought of Stephen King’s novel 11.22.63, which was on the one hand an intense nostalgia exercise with its plot where a teacher goes back in time to the Eisenhower era, the period of King’s own adolescence – but also a sharp caution about the not so savoury aspects of the past (with one vivid scene involving a clump of poison ivy near a ramshackle toilet for “Coloured” people in the segregation era).

Last Night in Soho also has a self-referential side, in its casting of the veteran actors Diana Rigg (who died last year, after the film was completed; it is dedicated to her) and Terence Stamp. Both were an important part of the British pop-cultural landscape of the swinging 60s: Rigg became a star in that decade with her iconic role as Emma Peel in the TV series The Avengers, and by playing arguably the first “Bond girl” of real substance, in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service; Stamp, though best known to my generation for playing Superman’s arch-enemy General Zod, was genuinely sinister in the 60s in such films as The Collector and Spirits of the Dead. In a sense, these actors – or their youthful versions – are as much ghosts of that decade as the spirits in this narrative are. Wright’s film knows this, and uses their wrinkled faces and still-striking personalities to good effect. (Minor spoiler alert) The film also derives some tension from a similarity in features between the octogenarians and the much younger actors Anya Taylor-Joy and Matt Smith.

In any case, one immediate effect of this film for me was that it made me want to re-watch a few 1960s films starring Rigg and Stamp (and Rita Tushingham, who is also here, in a more peripheral role as Ellie’s grandmother). The past, as LP Hartley didn’t say, can turn out to be a dangerous country – too much nostalgia can cloud one’s vision, there is peril in living somewhere other than the present – but for many of us it is an irresistible lure. “Do you have any plans tonight?” a nice young man in the present day asks Ellie shortly after she has returned from her first time-traveling excursion. She is tempted to go out with him, but then faces from the previous night’s adventure encroach into her mind, beckoning her back to them for some old-world fun and games, and she realises that she does have somewhere better to be. Or so she thinks. 

[My earlier First Post pieces are here. Related post: on Danny Boyle's Yesterday, about a world in which the Beatles never existed]

It’s all about bludgeoning your family: on the new show Tabbar

Really liked the new series Tabbar, on Sony Liv – and not just because I remember the frequent and boisterous use of that word by Punjabi grandparents and aunts as I was growing up. Wrote this for my Sunday Economic Times column
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The eighth and final episode of the gripping new series Tabbar – about a Jalandhar-based family in escalating trouble – opens with a flashback. Much of the show has centred on the retired Sikh cop Omkar Singh and his wife Sargun (played by Pawan Malhotra and Supriya Pathak), but now for the first time we see the younger versions of these characters, bantering and flirting during an early meeting.

“I don’t trust policemen,” young Sargun says teasingly, “They get so busy protecting other people, they forget about their own families.” In response he makes a grand yet intimate gesture, taking out a page from a notepad, writing “I, Omkar Singh, will always protect my family”, and handing it to her.

Shy smiles are exchanged; a relationship is on the brink of being solidified, a new world is about to begin. But sweet as the scene is in itself, there is something unsettling about it. And that isn’t because a viewer like me remembers the young Supriya Pathak and Pawan Malhotra (two of our most likable character actors of the 1980s) and can’t quite relate to these faces in the flashback. It’s because Tabbar has by now given us a dark demonstration of what it might mean to “look after your family” – through a series of events that the Singh clan has become unluckily caught up in, but to which small missteps or transgressions have also contributed. By the end of the show (no spoilers), the idea of familial unity has been so diluted that you aren’t sure whom to root for. In fact, the flashback itself ends with a cut to the present-day versions of Omkar and Sargun returning from a horrific night-time car drive, after a tragedy that made nonsense of another promise that he had (very sincerely) made to her.

From unobtrusive beginnings – a mix-up involving two similar bags, one of which turns out to contain a drug stash – Tabbar builds and builds, one incident begetting another, one small lie necessitating a bigger one, with moments of tension located in such details as a red smudge on a shirt (explained away as beetroot juice) or someone surreptitiously examining a house’s walls while a prayer ceremony is underway. Though it briefly threatens to become a psychotic-road-killer show (via the introduction of two peripheral Bonnie-and-Clyde-like characters), it remains consistently engaging – unlike most other Indian series I have watched (even the generally excellent Scam 1992), it didn’t sag in the midsection.

Part of the reason for this is that the episodes are mainly 30 to 40 minutes each, not hitting the one-hour mark that many other shows do. But also, Tabbar maintains its focus on a relatively small group of characters: the four-member Singh family living in their “Happy House” in a middle-class neighbourhood (Omkar and Sargun have two sons, Happy and Tegi); a nosy neighbour; a cousin named Lucky who is a diligent young cop; and the potential antagonist, the politician Ajeet Singh. Many other shows, as they expand their canvases, add too many characters and subplots to the mix. This one finds the right pacing, and the right level of identification, to tell its story.

In recent times there have been a few Indian films and shows about families – dysfunctional or otherwise – falling into a vortex: some that come to mind are Titli (2014), Gurgaon (2017) and the series Mirzapur (the first episode of which has a pulsating home-invasion action sequence that Tabbar offers a lower-key variant on). But the protagonists of many of those stories are already into some form of crime and there are enough reminders that being a good, united family doesn’t have to imply a good value system. (Leatherface’s family in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was sanskaari too – staying together, eating together, roles neatly defined and allocated – even as they chopped up teenage passers-by.)

In Tabbar, though, the family that ends up claiming first outsiders and then its own is not just innately “nice” but also clearly outside the ambit of such corrupting things as crime or politics. (An early scene has Omkar riding along on his scooter, the epitome of the powerless common man, looking dazed and lost as he is ordered to take a detour because of a political rally.) The man who stumbles into their lives and gets killed isn’t an innocent kid in a teen slasher film but the drug-dealing brother of a local politician. In such a scenario, you’d think the Singh family would be our object of sympathy and concern. And so it is for the most part, but something shifts along the way as they perform cover-ups and as we learn more. And this is the show’s real complexity: we never stop thinking of Omkar as a decent, humble, well-intentioned man; yet, by the final moments, one is forced to question everything.

While a film like Titli was about a history of violence in a family ridden with masculine energies, the three-quarters-male family in Tabbar is more grounded and likable (even if the two sons are hiding secrets). But here too, a testosterone-driven idea of what it means to “protect” emerges. Inevitably, then, the Sargun character – who seems marginalised at one point – becomes the tragic figure, taking refuge in home and hearth but incurably haunted; even as she loses her bearings, she seems to be the only one who fully realises how far stepp’d they are in blood. A cynic (or a realist?) might say that she has seen families, and people within families, for what they are – and that madness is the only sane response to such understanding.