Happy birthday, S.

Dear S,

You told me to suggest some books for you to read, as you will be turning 30 soon. I have no clue why that is a prompt for books, but then I don’t wish to tilt at the windmills of your mind (or anyone’s for that matter, but your’s especially). As you are far away, and these times don’t allow hugs, I am just going to tell you about books that feel like one.

We have spoken a lot about the idea of the ‘good girl’, the expectations around it, both from within and outside. How do people come to know what’s being good, and the things we do to feel good (interpret it however you like). When someone says, be better, they are asking you to be good-er, for good, better, best, and a question then is, is being good about yourself, or about the world, or about how you are perceived in this world, or how you want to be perceived?

‘How to be good’ is this delightful and dark book by Nick Hornby. Katie tries to be good, works hard, and cares for the planet. Her husband writes the angriest man in town letters in the local newspaper. And then something happens – he decides to be good. And then what happens, is what the book is about.

I love those books which make you laugh, and horrified that you are laughing at this at a meta level, and Nick Hornby does that. So well. ‘About a boy’ was the first book I read of his, and there too I horror-laughed many a time. It is a genre called ladlit, a companion to chicklit, and as highbrow is something not to aspire for either in literature or life, let’s not bother about such classifications (given our mutual love for 90s Bollywood songs, I think we can dispense with such classifications altogether).

What makes a book high literature or pulp? P., a friend I made during my journalism days, and I once spoke of how the absence of plot, and how that is sometimes a mark of how a book is considered high literature. We both then laughed and decided we will stay firm in our love for both plot and writing.

A book I read recently that does both exceedingly well, while threading in politics and power structures, is the Broken Earth trilogy. The protagonist is in her 40s, so you have some time to go before you can feel comfortable in her worn out shoes. She is in search of her daughter. And the world could end, but not in the way you think.

Talking about age, I was trying to think what I read at the time I turned 30. Yes, yes, it was a long time ago, don’t snigger. And the book that comes to mind is about age and ageing – ‘An artist of the floating world’ by Kazuo Ishiguro. It is set in Japan. I can recall a gentleness that flows through Ishiguro’s writing, and it smells of bread soaked in soy sauce. By which, I mean, he is an immigrant, someone who can claim to two cultures. And so, he has a distinct flavour to his writing. And the story – about this ageing artist who grapples with the mores of a changed society – is as layered and subtle as anything Japanese.

I still haven’t read Ishiguro’s ‘Remains of the day’, though I did read ‘Never let me go’, and didn’t watch the movie. I savoured both the books – as I said, it wraps you in this cloud, and your view of the world is blurry – you don’t know whether you are crying or if it is the cloud.

Speaking of Japanese novels, I read Banana Yoshimoto’s N.P before I read her famous work, Kitchen. N.P is about an author who has committed suicide, leaving an unfinished work. I remember reading it in a train, most probably the Chennai-Bangalore Shatabdi. And I remember desperately wanting to be in a less public place, somewhere I could be alone with the book. It felt like a communing of sorts – I don’t think I can explain that feeling.

Many Japanese authors I have read write about artists. Yasunari Kawabata’s Beauty and Sadness, or Masks by Fumiko Enchi. I have this tremendous affection for artists – and yes, I mean affection for, not attraction to (though, I guess that’s part of it too). Before, an artist for me was associated with the craft – are they a musician, a painter, a dancer, or a poet. And now, an artist is about someone who manages to brave in moments, and confront their selves and reveal it to the world. I feel such people are precious. The beginnings of my affection for such artists came from Salman Rushdie’s ‘Ground Beneath Her Feet’. A famous singer has disappeared in an avalanche. A photographer narrates her story, and of her lover. Even as I type this, I tear up, because something about the book, the time I read it, that fearsome passion, unmaad, doomed love between Vina and Ormuz – all of it in Rushdie’s decadent prose.

“But the truth leaks out in our dreams; alone in our beds (because we are all alone at night, even if we do not sleep by ourselves), we soar, we fly, we flee. And in the waking dreams our societies permit, in our myths, our arts, our songs, we celebrate the non-belongers, the different ones, the outlaws, the freaks.

What we forbid ourselves we pay good money to watch, in a playhouse or a movie theater, or to read about between the secret covers of a book. Our libraries, our palaces of entertainment tell the truth. The tramp, the assassin, the rebel, the thief, the mutant, the outcast, the delinquent, the devil, the sinner, the traveler, the gangster, the runner, the mask: if we did not recognize in them our least-fulfilled needs, we would not invent them over and over again, in every place, in every language, in every time.“

And the book is about music, and that’s the part I always felt Rushdie didn’t understand fully. I loved Rushdie’s writing, and I use the word love as it is meant to be used. At one point I read every word he wrote, I scrounged for more of his writing, writing about his writing, be it non-fiction or memoir. And then, suddenly, I stopped. And it is Rushdie’s writing, not the man – I had no desire to meet or know him. And somewhere, I felt, he didn’t understand music.

I think writing about music is hard. Or perhaps, a reader like me, expects writing about music to be somehow entangled with music itself – and music is what came before writing. Pure sound, the point where thought begins – how do you write about that which is essentially about losing capacity for coherent thought?

On that slightly dissatisfied note, I shall close this letter. The sun has settled behind some clouds, and slowly the light will leach out of the trees, and turning them into black and white snapshots. I will go make some tea, and as there’s some milk, it will be brewed with ginger and some spiced jaggery. I hope we can share a cup soon.

Happy birthday.

ps: I feel dissatisfied because I want to tell you about other books. Maybe another letter in some time?

Challenged by the black and white

My Instagram timeline was filled with photographs of womxn in black and white. As the people I follow are intriguing, the photos themselves were snapshots of something fugitive. The pitter patter of oohs and aahs soothed like powdery rain, the sort you can take a walk in without worrying about catching a cold. The pandemic is never too far away from people’s minds.

Then the context behind the ‘black and white’ challenge made its way into India – it is about women in Turkey protesting against femicide. A part of me thought – here we go again, and as if on cue, there were all the standard responses, especially the tsk-tsk types.

What I think of tsk-tsk

When I was in journalism college, there was a professor who had perfected the tsk-tsk to an art form. He would ask you about issues in a land faraway, or a major social movement, and when I stared back blankly, he would stroke his stubble and give that smile – ‘You don’t even know this?’ And I think, being one of the older students, I actually said, no, I don’t, and that’s why I was there. How can I be shamed for something I want to learn about? I know I don’t know, and I am keen to learn, and willing to work hard, do my homework, and learn – now if this isn’t enough, I am not sure what is, because we are all not born knowing everything. Shaming as a teaching moment cannot become institutionalised – it works in some cases, but to make that as a tool for pedagogy is not something I have been comfortable with.

The medium

To understand the medium, which is Facebook or Instagram, there’s an article I keep going back to. It comes with a pompous title, ‘The accidental bricoleurs‘, the only thing I don’t quite like about it.

What the article says: There is a brand called Forever 21. It promises just that – you will forever be 21. Perpetually young, with all the associated characteristics – vitality, suppleness, health, and of course, beauty. Fast fashion tells you, you can keep buying different kinds of clothes and accessories and can aspire and achieve that blissful state of being forever young, forever beautiful, forever edgy. Even as I type it, I am tired. And that’s the whole point – it is an unachievable goal, that tantalising promise. You keep trying, and you will never get there, and in the meanwhile, you have given all your money to the company. Of course, I exaggerate, but that’s the principle – in practice, there are layers.

Facebook, too (and Instagram now) according to the author offers you that tantalising promise. Best quoted:

It offers a space akin to the fast-fashion retailer’s changing room for the ritual staging of the self, inviting users to seize upon “stylistic elements” from wherever they can be grabbed. We become involuntary bricoleurs, scrambling to cobble together an ad hoc identity from whatever memes happen to be relevant at the time.

https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/the-accidental-bricoleurs/

So, for starters, the medium itself is designed to showcase your ‘self’, and there’s a constant pressure to keep showcasing it. The link to your offline life is always tenuous – and that’s the crucial issue when it comes to activism.

Either or/ Neither nor

In a meet held recently where womxn who were part of workers’ unions, and collectives spoke of their journey. It starts from within – they spoke of noticing how certain practises and situations made them uncomfortable, question things. Then they found the language and space to articulate those concerns, and slowly the journey moved from within to outside – they joined movements and collectives. And as they proceeded, it again became a journey within – how does this sustain, how can change be possible – what are deeper issues? It was like this constant dialogue between within and outside.

That first step, awareness, can happen online. Even a product that is enmeshed in an objectifying and consumerist culture can be used for social activism, which is about changing that culture. Subversions happen all the time. But what happens then? How ‘effective’ is activism online. Here’s an article from 2009, and when I revisited it now, a lot of it seems still valid:

https://cis-india.org/news/measuring-the-effectiveness-of-online-activism

For starters, getting more people to talk about an issue does generate traction. It also is about acting in solidarity with the people affected by it – though you may not be in the same location, you can still signal solidarity. And that done at a global scale can have an effect. The link between online and offline is critical – people on the ground, risking lives, bodies – that shakes the powers that be. If it becomes either-or, or even skewed to the online space, there is a danger that the signals remain just that – a signal. It attenuates, and loses meaning.

On fear

A few days ago, I spotted a snake. I sensed a movement in the corner of my eye, turned, and caught few inches of a tail slithering out of sight behind a pink bucket. (Yes, yes, I raised an alarm, and some folks who know how to handle snakes came, cajoled the snake to get into a cloth bag, and then released it.)

What I was surprised by was that split-second in which I registered a movement and was propelled to turn and look. I wondered what that was about. Someone told me that they had just heard a psychologist talk about how we as a species are tuned to be scared of snakes because of evolutionary reasons. What was surprising was that they were listening to the psychologist for other reasons, and then this came up, tying into my questions about both my terror and response.

Curious to know more, I searched, and I found a paper – https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00691/full

Where they say, “As snakes were probably the first predators of primates, snakes will phylogenetically be more fear-relevant to humans than other reptiles.” Phylogenetically means that it relates to the evolutionary development of a species; humans, in this case. And goes on to say, “According to the snake-detection hypothesis (Isbell, 2006, 2009), snakes may have been important agents of evolutionary changes in the primate visual system allowing rapid visual detection of fearful stimuli. It is well established that in humans the visual detection of snakes is faster than of other, less life-threatening stimuli (Öhman and Mineka, 2001; Öhman et al., 2001). An evolved and specialized visual monitoring system for the detection of animals posing deadly threat would be highly adaptive from an evolutionary perspective. Such a fear module is activated automatically by fear-relevant stimuli, and is largely independent of conscious cognition.” It explains what had happened – for I am curious, whether I would have turned if say, the corner of my eye had noticed the swish of a cat’s tail.

 This part of the brain that triggers anxiety, fear, what happens if it doesn’t work in someone? Apparently, they become fearless. Here’s a story of someone like that:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2010/12/16/meet-the-woman-without-fear/

One sentence, rather paragraph, struck me:

In a similar trip to an exotic pet store, her levels of fear never climbed over a score of 2 out of 10. Even though she claimed to “hate” snakes and spiders, she was drawn to the snake enclosure, was excited about holding a serpent (“This is so cool!”) and had to be told not to touch or poke the bigger, more dangerous snakes (and a nearby tarantula). Why? She was overcome with “curiosity”.

In every story talking about fears, they speak of how understanding something calms you down. The first step to that understanding is curiosity, and what if fear doesn’t let you be curious?

(Some voice in the back of my head is saying that I am connecting dots across a bizarre landscape from evolutionary traits to an experiment of one to storybooks. Another voice chips in, why not.)

On learning to crochet

I like watching people’s hands. The way they grasp a cup, fingers pinching a piece of paper, wielding a knife, steadying a ladle, with the folded cloth moulded on the other hand to stave off the heat of the vessel – I watch it all. Some people seem to know what’s the precise newtons per square centimeter they need to exert such that the piece of paper stays, and does not either crease or fly away, sort of like a lesson on how to clasp a delicate relationship. When a dancer I know soothed a dog’s mane with some salve as it had these rashes, I understood that the act of healing has an aesthetic to it – the sweep of her palm soothed like a prayer whispered.

My fingers are troublesome creatures. The tearing of paper across a crease – oh, how I struggle with it. Invariably, there’s a squiggle and not a straight line. It is as if my subconscious prods my finger tips with tiny shocks of impatience – jaldi, jaldi! I know that my fingers have a muscled strength. As they massage certain pressure points and ease knots out, they coax the fascia to respond. But for other activities that require more finesse, I prefer to wield a tool, like say, a knife. I can chop anything into teeny-weeny bits.

Late last year, I was home for a few days, ill. I hadn’t gone out, met anyone. As the lungs recovered, a neighbour asked me to snap out from a self-imposed vigil, and attend her crochet session. I had vague notions of sticks and clicks and lots of yarn, shuddered thinking SUPW, and immediately said no. She persisted, and she is an adept; know what’s that exact force my inertia needed, more prod, less push.

A kind woman taught me how to hold the crochet needle and make a chain. What intrigued me about crochet is that how it can all unravel, unless you knot it.

–

I came home that evening and while watching a show kept practising the chain. This is that chain.

I saw a video about making an octopus. I like octopuses and her slightly grating North American voice notwithstanding, she didn’t assume the viewer knew anything about crochet. And of course, I didn’t follow the instructions, and something else happened. I wanted to give him wings (why him, don’t ask), but then decided not to.

My mom used to call me a ‘bondhu‘ – someone who is beku (as they say in Tamil). And these are bandhus, companions, dost, confidantes for such bondhus. Slowly, more bandhus entered this world.

And then there was a village of Bondhu Bandhus.

That red wool was so furry. And somehow the ball of yarn was a challenge – what will you do with me, it seemed to ask. And so, every evening after work, I used to start, wondering what to make, whether I’ll make that perfect octopus, but then I would make another addition to the Bondhu Bandhu family.

Of course, the Octopuses came. I sat and wrote down the instructions; I had watched the video so many times by then.

As I had completed the red yarn ball, I gave myself permission to go get yarn. I had a cloth bag full of different colours; I think I got six colours. And I got tiny scissors, a needle, and crochet needles.

The coaster was for my Ma. It was a bit wobbly, but she didn’t mind. Now that I had all this yarn, I started making one bandhu for my friends. The idea suggested itself, as I thought of a friend, something about them, what they evoke in me, all of this took shape, and these different ideas started to take shape.

I never found crochet calming – it would fire up my brain. How could I make different levels? What are these new knots? If it is 3D can I make an algorithm to generate new patterns?

Sometimes, the photo shoot went a little overboard.

For a friend’s 50th birthday, I crocheted a wrist band for everyone who came – almost 65 bands. I pulled a muscle in my shoulder after that, and for awhile, stopped crocheting.

Now, the yarn beckons again.

‘Dearth and purring rain

Clouds hang heavy, and my head is full of strange words bustling and jostling – so need to let a few out to play.

—

At times, if I breathe deep into my palm, I can smell them. Epidermal promises redeem themselves, in shy, uncertain ways, and vanish, and suddenly the separation sears again. Loss is fluid cupped in a blister.

Bodies, I wager, have scented routes. You track across the expanse of skin, keen, hungry, and vigilant. It is an animal pursuit, the unyielding rationale of a pig sniffling out truffles. Every individual landscape has its unique runes of engagement. Try what you will, musk always evades capture, and you return again and again, maybe, this time, knowing you will want, knowing you will fail. Knowing that this trail too shall seep into your palms, altering lines seen and bereft.

Perfumes, I suppose then, are bottled wiles. They fog sensory signposts. Skin, be it perfumed or airbrushed, is flattened to a film of chemical homogeneity.

My palms, and these fingers remember. Folds releasing a cellular burst when parted, the aroma of dermatological honesty.

Clawing me softly

Alice in Wonderland is a whacko tale – it has layers. The meanings are slanted, and so there are hints and nothing is fixed. Ambiguous is perhaps the word I seek. And given literary theory’s love for what lies beneath, folks have read it as a trippy tale of drugs or illicit sexual desire. Alice by Christina Henry is about a darker tale of Alice, one where she has memories of a rabbit, blood, and is now in an asylum.

The cover was what drew my attention. It was in a bookstore in a land faraway, and this cover, and that of others in the series had such a singular look, a saturnine appeal.

I was intrigued, for there was always this potential in Alice – wonderland can quickly twist in to a dark hole of terrors. A stranger luring a child into a dark warren where treats await – it is meant to be a scary beginning. Perhaps, most children’s tales have that potential for darkness. Children’s rhymes in English have the most morbid subjects – beginning with the plague in ring-o roses (right, the pandemic is never off one’s mind). Twisting markers of innocence and happy, shiny, childhood – a fun fair, a doll, a rhyme – these are not new territories in literature.

China Mieville’s short story of horror, ‘The ball room’ in his collection ‘Looking for Jake and other stories’ is set in a children’s play area. One of Agatha Christie’s books confounds you because you never expect that a child could be the killer. I realised just now that many of Christie’s books of murder and evil have children’s rhymes as their titles and woven into the plot. One I cannot forget, though I don’t remember which story it is. I think the cruelty of that act – locking someone up inside a box wedged itself inside my teenage head –

“A-hunting we will go.

A-hunting we will go.

We’ll catch a fox, and put him in a box, and never let him go.”

Sometimes I am tempted to think that this ‘innocence of children’ is a necessary fiction for adults.

So, coming back to Alice, it seemed like such an intriguing premise that despite my aversion to horror I wanted to read it. And it was underwhelming. For starters, the book has what I would call the ‘Signs’ problem – the movie made by Manoj Shyamalan. In the movie, they keep referring to aliens and are terrorised by it. I too was, till they actually showed the aliens – it then became a bit funny. I think your head is capable of conjuring much more terror than reality, and so hints of possibilities fuels that imagination more than a material referent.

In Alice, every character Alice meets, be it the Walrus, the Caterpillar, or the Cheshire Cat all are evil, with a capital E and they do Bad things. If things had been kept in the realm of hints and whispers – then the tension could have been sustained. But the author chooses to show, and what then I realised is how inured I am to such fictitious imagined horrors, for reality has proven to be worse, much worse.

Newspapers have scared me more than what the author tries to show. Perhaps, some of it has also to do with Tamil cinema. Now, Tamil cinema has a villain entry scene – and each movie competes with the other to show how much more evil their villain is. I wait for that scene with some sort of twisted anticipation – what will he do? Would he chop off someone’s little finger with a rusty saw, or drill into someone’s eye and splatter lots of blood on white veshti? As Tamil cinema takes its torture porn seriously (I still remember this scene where this guy fights with a piece of glass wedged in his foot – excruciating it is to watch), and so Alice’s Evil villains seem more like middling henchmen on their way to retirement

Why Daevabad feels like Delaware

I am being uncharitable – it has been one of those days. At the same time, that’s exactly why I pick up books so that they can pick me up, make me fly. But instead of feeling the whoosh while zooming on a flying carpet, I feel, I am in a car manufacturing facility – everything has been assembled according to Mr. Ford and even molten sapphire comes in black.

The book ‘City of Brass’ is set in a world of djinns. The djinn tribes resonate with Persian, Arabic, Chinese, and ‘Indian’ (I want to say North Indian) ethos (oh, what I wouldn’t give for a book of fantasy set in the Sangam era). Now, if you take away that setting, the book’s characters feel like those you have met in Western books and that’s where I think the book doesn’t do its job well – who are these people, why are these people, what are their motivations, and why aren’t they stuffed with more substance than hot air?

Take Nahri – she reminded me of Kareena Kapoor from Agent Vinod. Bear with me. In Agent Vinod, Kareena Kapoor is a sheltered doctor in Pakistan, who is caught in a bombing incident and suspected to be terrorist, now on the run. Suddenly Agent Vinod tells her, go seduce evil Russian spy guy. And she pours herself into a red dress and offers temptation to the Russian spy guy. I sputtered. Look, if you are sheltered and shy, and haven’t had romantic entanglements, batting eyelids and pouting will look like Jamie Lee Curtis doing the dance in True Lies – you know she is trying to recall all the bedroom ‘moves’ in countless movies and aping it. You will laugh, no one will swoon.

And this is what the character development asks you to swallow in the first book – Nahri has grown up alone, and is now stuck with a brooding guy with a mysterious and dark past, and as they have adventures, there’s heat low in the belly (yes, that is the description), and then – go read ok?

The trilogy is a great example of getting the landscape right, but the humans a bit off. Everyone sounds like they are a character you met before – the wastrel heir, the serious second son, the evil King.

What was a relief is that the second (or is it the third) mocks the first book’s simplicity and conveniently pegs it in Nahri’s naivette – it feels more like the author’s. The author finds her voice a bit in the second book, and in the third, it is much better. Yet, there’s something missing overall.

And I think that’s a certain ethos. When I read a book of Sri Lankan short stories edited by Shyam Selvadurai, the voices, the stories, and the description felt organic – I have peeked at that uncle over his paunch, and I could strangle this aunty types.

I do understand that no one knows has had chai with djinns and discussed critical theory with ifrits – so they could speak American-ese (they say ‘fuck’. I thought at least curse differently, but no). But just using words such as fazr or ulema doesn’t feel complete.

Perhaps it is about whom this book is meant for. A character called Subhashini Sen is introduced and the other characters assume it is a guy. I rolled my eyes. And I think that’s revealing – it is slightly in the samosa is a savoury puffed pastry with potatoes genre (I can’t believe I did that to samosa).

What the book does well is plot – there’s a lot of how will she do that, secrets from the past, twists and turns, and enough suspense to make the predictable exciting. It felt like watching a movie – somehow I could even see the fade-out shot in the end. And that’s a skill – to paint pictures and imagery, especially with fantasy, as you have no real world markers, the metaphors and the descriptions are much needed.

Perhaps, as I said, perhaps I am being uncharitable. I don’t mean to dismiss the book by harping on the ‘oh the characters want to say Misr but sputter Missisipi’, but I guess, it mattered – there is a frustration – why couldn’t you get this right?