Archives for November, 2007

From today I will grow older faster.

- “Student of Gardens” in Seventeen Tomatoes” (Jaspreet Singh)

If I were to write a novel in Marathi, I would not be called an Indian writer in Marathi, but simply a Marathi novelist, the epithet Marathi referring only to the culture, tradition, and civilization. No one would write a doctoral dissertation on the Indianness of my Marathi novel. But when it comes to English fiction originating in our country, not only does the issue of Indianness become a favourite essentializing obsession in academic writings and the book-review circuit, the writers themselves do not seem unaffected by it, the complicating factor being that English is not just any language – it was the language of our colonial rulers and continues even now to be the language of power and privilege. It is not a language that permeates all social levels or is used in subaltern contexts. Our discourse on Indian novels in English tends to get congealed into fairly rigid and opposed positions …
The unspoken premise in this war is that writing in English and writing in other Indian languages … are antithetical enterprises marked by a commitment to, or betrayal of, certain undefinable cultural values. To me the issues are far more complex, entangled with questions of class, mobility, and readership.

- The Perishable Empire (Meenakshi Mukherjee)

intractability

My shoes have holes in them. I’ve just finished cleaning my room, where for a week I haven’t hung up or put away a single piece of clothing. I hung up and put away all those clothes just now. I cleared my table, emptied the trash, closed the window, switched off the light. I put away the stiff and crinkly plastic shopping bags, packed the smug cardboard boxes one into the other and stacked them at the side of my table. I plugged my cell phone, with its voicemail now a week full of messages I haven’t listened to, into the wall socket to recharge itself.
I did all those things and then I came here, to the dining room, where I set up my workstation last week. An ever almost-toppling stack of books on my right. Papers, pencil case, notebook on my left. A bookmark, scattered foil chocolate wrappers. Miscellaneous wires, my neighbour’s markers, The Zucchini Warriors.

My shoes had holes in them. A matter of fascination: that I owned long enough and wore vigorously enough a pair of shoes that they eventually wore holes through their thick plastic soles.
Today it rained and walking the two minute walk from St George Station to the Larkin Building, my right foot got drenched. I couldn’t think why, until someone asked if my shoes had holes them.
And my shoe did. A flap of plastic come undone at the heel, revealing a hole right through to their barren insides.

The dining room floor is clear. My shoes stand upright, with unravelling laces always untied. The tongues would always slide to the sides of my ankles after any length of walking. The straps would come undone.
I watch them for a while. A still, sleeping house and I’m looking at my shoes, which I’m going to have to pick up and throw away.
That seems mindbogglingly strange – that you can put shoes in garbage. I can’t remember the last time I did.

Continue reading this entry »

We could not write in English without changing mentally. We could not merely pay the tithe of mint and anise and cumin to the language and omit the weightier matter of revising our attitudes towards our wives and husbands.

- The Eye of the Beholder (Nirad C. Chaudhuri); qtd in The Perishable Empire (Meenakshi Mukherjee)

[Zulfikar Ghose] calls himself Indo-Pakistani, which is an expression more of a dilemma than of an identity.

- Structures of Negation: The Writings of Zulfikar Ghose (Chelva Kanaganayakam)

Hello darkness, my old friend,
I’ve come to talk with you again,
Because a vision softly creeping,
Left its seeds while I was sleeping,
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence.

- “The Sound of Silence” (Simon & Garfunkel)

We evolve deviously. Gamini grew up not knowing half the things he thought he was supposed to know – he was to make and discover unusual connections because he had not known the usual routes. He was for most of his life a boy spinning in a chair. And just as things had been kept away from him, he too became a container of secrets.

- Anil’s Ghost (Michael Ondaatje)

I was in high school when I first picked up Michael Ondaaje’s Anil’s Ghost. By then, largely as a result of the way the books in my high school library were physically arranged — now, over five years later, I can pinpoint the exact coincidence that has led to my currently being enrolled in a course on South Asian literature; it shouldn’t have taken this long to realise this; but what would I have lost if it hadn’t taken exactly this long — I had already read a lot of post-colonial literature. I didn’t know then that that was the specific genre I was immersed in. All that mattered to me in grade ten was that I enjoyed reading books by brown writers. Invariably, these were all books that took place in South Asia, but I didn’t notice that discrepancy then.

So that was when I first read Anil’s Ghost, except I never really got past the first few pages. I’d known the book took place in Sri Lanka, which was why I’d checked it out, but I’d been expecting something more immediately lush – and this should indicate how problematic my adolescent readings were. Instead, I decided that in its lack of botanical and cultural detail, the book paled against the likes of The God of Small Things and A Fine Balance. I returned the book unread and mostly forgot about it.

It was required reading for Wednesday’s class in South Asian lit. I didn’t do it. Continue reading this entry »

I just remembered last Eid. Or the morning of it, anyway. The rest of it doesn’t matter. I remembered a newspaper article, front page news slid through our mail slot.

Past Eids I would invariably wake up enraged. I would go to sleep the last night of Ramadan whenever it was I went to sleep, sometimes stuffy and heavy-headed at 9, sometimes scattered and restless at 2. And then I’d wake up and it would be a pre-dawn Eid morning, with the shower fast running out of hot water, the rooms cold in an unwelcome sort of way and I would be angry, snarling at everyone, stalking my way through the parking lot to the car, to the mosque, back through the parking lot, to lie in my room in my unwanted new clothes, enraged and absolutely clueless as to why.

But the last Eid – this has been how many weeks ago now? what happened in between? – I woke up and, miraculously, I wasn’t furious. Not being angry was enough for me to be happy, that morning. Continue reading this entry »