Archives for 2007

she had been forced into prudence in her youth – she learned romance as she grew older – the natural sequence of an unnatural beginning

- Persuasion (Jane Austen); quoted in Running in the Family (Michael Ondaatje)

I read Zulfikar Ghose’s Veronica and the Gongora Passion a few weeks ago. I can’t remember the last time I reacted to a book so viscerally. I hated the first five stories so much that they overshadowed my appreciation for the other stories in the book. It’s not that I’ve never read a book that I didn’t like, but something about Ghose’s book threw me in a way that still has me baffled.

Eventually, my dislike for the text grew so large it swallowed other concerns of mine and it became this fetid monster that took up residence in my mind and would not stop growing. I could not dislodge it and I didn’t really have the energy to try. Things came to a head when, during a conversation about the book, my professor said, “The question becomes why you aren’t in Anthropology or Sociology, why you’re in English.” Granted, my professor was posing a question that Ghose might have asked me – and it is definitely the kind of question Ghose would ask (peevishly) – but I’ve never before had to face that question so blatantly. I mean, I know: I’m in freaking English. The department is full of people hiding from the real world. It’s an ideal haven for people who think we can write in vacuums. I know this, but I knew it only abstractly, because, in the people I know and the things I read, I lead a charmed existence. But I’d never before had a professor pose that question to me so explicitly. It’s not that I think my professor is oblivious to the politics of literature. He was just posing the question as Ghose might have asked it; he was getting me to take a position, to clarify to myself where I stood.

We were sitting in a university office walled with books. It seemed to me then that that question came bearing down on me with all the crushing weight of The Academy.
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“Are you closely attached to your daughter?” asks the nurse.
“Meaning?”
“Have you read each other’s diaries?”
“What use are diaries if someone else ends up reading them?”

- “Parachute Aunty” in Seventeen Tomatoes” (Jaspreet Singh)

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.

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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)