This review appeared in the Sept 22 issue of Time Out Mumbai
Booker long list contender , Tash Aw’s debut novel, is a fractured and complex tale. Set exotically enough in the jungles of Malaya, it tells the story of the “infamous Chinaman Johnny Lim” ‘s rise from illiterate peasanthood to power in Malaysia’s Kinta Valley.
The book, Rashomon- like has three narratives. Which do we believe ? Is Lim the ‘liar , a cheat, a traitor’ his embittered son Jasper tells us about ? Was his meteoric rise, a ladder littered with a litany of horrific crimes ? Or is he the blandly inscrutable, distantly adoring husband , his reluctant aristocratic bride Snow Soong describes ? In an extract from her private journal , she tells of the couple’s bizarre honeymoon in Malaysia’s Seven Maidens islands .Or do we believe the third narrative ? This from Johnny’s friend Peter Wormwood’s geriatric days in an Oriental people’s old age home. Wormwood describes a simple and likeable Johnny, in chapters that shift between landscaping the old age home and his memories of the strange honeymoon trip, an almost Conradian journey in to the ‘Heart of Darkness’ ?
‘The Harmony Silk Factory’ has received critical acclaim and it’s easy to see why – the novel has all the right elements - plenty of local color in the story of the rise of Johnny from his days as a brilliant mechanic in the tin mines of Malaya ,as well as the strange tale of a bizarre jungle honeymoon shared with an odd set of characters. There’s suave Japanese military man in disguise, Kunichika , also titled ‘Butcher of Kampar’, English tin mine owner Honey Fredrick , Peter Wormwood and of course Johnny and Snow . Add to that the novel’s narrative complexity of multiple points of view, its themes of appearance and reality and the heart of darkness where the jungle takes over (‘Broken branches littered the place I worked so hard to cleanse, and above us the canopy of leaves suddenly seemed more opaque than ever’). All very promising, but the multiple points of view disperse in different directions, minus any shades of Rashomon-like brilliance, and the story remains rather unraveled despite the dramatic denouement. It does however leave you looking out for more from Tash Aw.
Sunday, October 02, 2005
Life in the Bombay Chawls - Ravan and Eddie
This appeared in the Times of India Sunday edition 11th September
Ravan and Eddie, Kiran Nagarkar’s scathingly funny novel of two young boys in the Bombay chawls, began as a screenplay for a Bollywood film. The film (to be directed by Dev Benegal) was never made, instead Ravan and Eddie made their debut in the beginnings of a Marathi novel. Years later, Marathi writer Nagarkar, still grappling with the iniquities of language , rewrote this growing up story in English, a language he describes in the book as a “maha-mantra….an ‘ open sesame’ that doesn’t open mere doors, it opens new worlds and allows you to cross over from one universe to another”.
Ravan and Eddie are both occupants of Central Works Department (CWD) Chawl no 17. ”The Hindus and Catholics in Bombay’s CWD chawls (and perhaps almost anywhere in India) may as well have lived on different planets”, but Ravan and Eddie are connected in a bizarre, almost Rushdie-an way. Nagarkar’s narrative style, however, is anything but . It is casual and conversational and very slice-of-life, lit up occasionally by bitingly ironic authorial insights. The best known of these ( among the delightful asides on Snow the fairness cream , Shammi Kapoor and the Poverty Line ) is of course Nagarkar’s digression on ‘The Great Water Wars’ in the chawl- “ They should have killed for water, the men and women of the CWD chawls. People have been known to kill for less: religion; language; the flag; the colour of a person’s skin or his caste; breaking the queue at a petrol pump...”
For the rest, you follow Ravan and Eddie’s struggle for survival in the packed and proliferating world of the Bombay chawl .It’s a world where babies are space and energy consuming burdens and husbands almost vestigial. Ravan and Eddie’s families survive , like many in India due to the undefeated energies of the woman. Eddie’s father dies Pandu-like in a moment of lust. Ravan’s father Shankar bestirs himself from his bed only to bring in a mistress, leading his mother Parvatibai to obsessive temple visiting anxiety - ”The woman was a drain on the limited finances of the house…What would she do if instead of one intruder, there were two. All that hyperactivity on the bed was bound to bear fruit.” Meanwhile, Eddie’s widowed mother Violet is considering re-marriage and Eddie is tortured by grim imaginings, ”babies would start rolling in…whatever extra the new man earned would be wiped out by the new mouths that would have to be fed…So much for his mothers life becoming easier.” And so it goes on. The boys separate struggles and their growing up stories are comic, but also achingly sad. Eddie is inducted into the Hindu Mahasabha, hopelessly won over by his bribe of a Wilson pen and stories from the Mahabharata. Predictably all hell breaks loose when Violet finds out and Eddie is rushed to the Church to save his soul. Ravan, in the meantime, is in trouble with the more liberal Hindus over his earnest drive to recruit new members to the Sabha. Subject to such proxy battles, the two little boys also have to contend with life’s other tribulations – sexually predatory bully Prakash for one, besides poverty and prejudice. Yet there’s joy too – the thrill of a good story, the hit movie ‘Dil Deke Dekho’ and ‘Rock Around the Clock’, biryani in a Irani Café and kite flying on Sankranti. Nagarkar’s world maybe a poor one , but its not despairingly and hopelessly so. Wit and irony save his characters from becoming relentlessly miserable Rohington Mistry protagonists, many of whom are similarly boxed into tiny spaces, in a Bombay gone to seed.
Ravan and Eddie, Kiran Nagarkar’s scathingly funny novel of two young boys in the Bombay chawls, began as a screenplay for a Bollywood film. The film (to be directed by Dev Benegal) was never made, instead Ravan and Eddie made their debut in the beginnings of a Marathi novel. Years later, Marathi writer Nagarkar, still grappling with the iniquities of language , rewrote this growing up story in English, a language he describes in the book as a “maha-mantra….an ‘ open sesame’ that doesn’t open mere doors, it opens new worlds and allows you to cross over from one universe to another”.
Ravan and Eddie are both occupants of Central Works Department (CWD) Chawl no 17. ”The Hindus and Catholics in Bombay’s CWD chawls (and perhaps almost anywhere in India) may as well have lived on different planets”, but Ravan and Eddie are connected in a bizarre, almost Rushdie-an way. Nagarkar’s narrative style, however, is anything but . It is casual and conversational and very slice-of-life, lit up occasionally by bitingly ironic authorial insights. The best known of these ( among the delightful asides on Snow the fairness cream , Shammi Kapoor and the Poverty Line ) is of course Nagarkar’s digression on ‘The Great Water Wars’ in the chawl- “ They should have killed for water, the men and women of the CWD chawls. People have been known to kill for less: religion; language; the flag; the colour of a person’s skin or his caste; breaking the queue at a petrol pump...”
For the rest, you follow Ravan and Eddie’s struggle for survival in the packed and proliferating world of the Bombay chawl .It’s a world where babies are space and energy consuming burdens and husbands almost vestigial. Ravan and Eddie’s families survive , like many in India due to the undefeated energies of the woman. Eddie’s father dies Pandu-like in a moment of lust. Ravan’s father Shankar bestirs himself from his bed only to bring in a mistress, leading his mother Parvatibai to obsessive temple visiting anxiety - ”The woman was a drain on the limited finances of the house…What would she do if instead of one intruder, there were two. All that hyperactivity on the bed was bound to bear fruit.” Meanwhile, Eddie’s widowed mother Violet is considering re-marriage and Eddie is tortured by grim imaginings, ”babies would start rolling in…whatever extra the new man earned would be wiped out by the new mouths that would have to be fed…So much for his mothers life becoming easier.” And so it goes on. The boys separate struggles and their growing up stories are comic, but also achingly sad. Eddie is inducted into the Hindu Mahasabha, hopelessly won over by his bribe of a Wilson pen and stories from the Mahabharata. Predictably all hell breaks loose when Violet finds out and Eddie is rushed to the Church to save his soul. Ravan, in the meantime, is in trouble with the more liberal Hindus over his earnest drive to recruit new members to the Sabha. Subject to such proxy battles, the two little boys also have to contend with life’s other tribulations – sexually predatory bully Prakash for one, besides poverty and prejudice. Yet there’s joy too – the thrill of a good story, the hit movie ‘Dil Deke Dekho’ and ‘Rock Around the Clock’, biryani in a Irani Café and kite flying on Sankranti. Nagarkar’s world maybe a poor one , but its not despairingly and hopelessly so. Wit and irony save his characters from becoming relentlessly miserable Rohington Mistry protagonists, many of whom are similarly boxed into tiny spaces, in a Bombay gone to seed.
Multilplex madness
This appeared in the Mumbai Mirror September
You don’t expect to see fluorescent yellow and pink palm trees on the industrial stretch of the Andheri Malad Link Road. But they’re there – little beacons of festivity in a road crammed with one room garages, industrial parts shops and other unaesthetic nuts and bolts of our smoothly mechanized lives.
I like the trees. They make showy promises of glitz and glamour, never mind that they’re window dressing for ‘Neelam Bar and Restaurant’ type of joints. Like their larger and more showy avatars halfway across the globe – those myriads of flashing figures that light up Las Vegas. It’s always lights and showtime in that man made fantasy fairyland though its set in the unlikeliest of spaces, surrounded by barren stretches of the Nevada desert.
And its showtime here too, off the fume filled and pot holed Andheri Malad Road. More pink palm trees, and steps up to the greatest American temple of all – the Mall Multiplex. Yes, its glittering glass and chrome – No, it doesn’t have the art deco of Metro or the history of Eros. And sue me – but I love it – the go carting on the ground floor, the book and music shop on the first floor, the Coffee Shop downstairs and the smell of Caramel pop corn in the air...
Here’s where I brought my five year old daughter Aleya to attend her first school friend’s birthday party – the class enthralled by a little orange clownfish scouring the seas in search of his father. Later, after cake and burgers in the food court on the second floor, each child trooped home with a return gift of a little gold fish in a bag full of water.
And here’s the Café Coffee Day I hung out at for almost a fortnight. Perfecting near impossible jugglery of children’s school pick ups and playtimes, in between watching Francois Ozon’s compelling drama of creativity,’ The Swimming Pool’. Or the Croatian ‘The Horseman’ where tribesman war with each other as the Ottoman Empire collapses and a Muslim Romeo falls in love with a Christian Juliet. Another day it was Walter Salles touching tale ‘Central Station’ where a lonely middle aged woman and a little boy traverse miles of Brazilian highways in a Quixotean quest. Peter’s Greenaway’s intriguingly titled ‘The Cook, The Thief, his wife and her Lover’, a viscerally revolting tableaux of gourmand excess set in a Parisian restaurant, love and rebellion in Argentina’s coal mines , Shwaas, Black Friday and Amu… All at 60 rupees a film and best of all ,no traffic traumatized long and winding roads to YB Chavan auditorium in town.
Did anybody say anything about the cultural constraints of suburbia? I’m not listening - for this is definitely home delivered heaven .
You don’t expect to see fluorescent yellow and pink palm trees on the industrial stretch of the Andheri Malad Link Road. But they’re there – little beacons of festivity in a road crammed with one room garages, industrial parts shops and other unaesthetic nuts and bolts of our smoothly mechanized lives.
I like the trees. They make showy promises of glitz and glamour, never mind that they’re window dressing for ‘Neelam Bar and Restaurant’ type of joints. Like their larger and more showy avatars halfway across the globe – those myriads of flashing figures that light up Las Vegas. It’s always lights and showtime in that man made fantasy fairyland though its set in the unlikeliest of spaces, surrounded by barren stretches of the Nevada desert.
And its showtime here too, off the fume filled and pot holed Andheri Malad Road. More pink palm trees, and steps up to the greatest American temple of all – the Mall Multiplex. Yes, its glittering glass and chrome – No, it doesn’t have the art deco of Metro or the history of Eros. And sue me – but I love it – the go carting on the ground floor, the book and music shop on the first floor, the Coffee Shop downstairs and the smell of Caramel pop corn in the air...
Here’s where I brought my five year old daughter Aleya to attend her first school friend’s birthday party – the class enthralled by a little orange clownfish scouring the seas in search of his father. Later, after cake and burgers in the food court on the second floor, each child trooped home with a return gift of a little gold fish in a bag full of water.
And here’s the Café Coffee Day I hung out at for almost a fortnight. Perfecting near impossible jugglery of children’s school pick ups and playtimes, in between watching Francois Ozon’s compelling drama of creativity,’ The Swimming Pool’. Or the Croatian ‘The Horseman’ where tribesman war with each other as the Ottoman Empire collapses and a Muslim Romeo falls in love with a Christian Juliet. Another day it was Walter Salles touching tale ‘Central Station’ where a lonely middle aged woman and a little boy traverse miles of Brazilian highways in a Quixotean quest. Peter’s Greenaway’s intriguingly titled ‘The Cook, The Thief, his wife and her Lover’, a viscerally revolting tableaux of gourmand excess set in a Parisian restaurant, love and rebellion in Argentina’s coal mines , Shwaas, Black Friday and Amu… All at 60 rupees a film and best of all ,no traffic traumatized long and winding roads to YB Chavan auditorium in town.
Did anybody say anything about the cultural constraints of suburbia? I’m not listening - for this is definitely home delivered heaven .
Book Review - The Quiet of the Birds
This review appeared in the September 4th Hindu Sunday Magazine
The Quiet of the Birds, Nisha da Cunha, Penguin, Rs.295.
SAD may have been sweet so far as Shelley's skylark goes. Unfortunately the same doesn't hold good for Nisha da Cunha's collection of sad stories. They tell of illness, abandonment, and death in little country cottages with cypress trees, on "a lonely stretch of beach and sea and a bit of lane", in the hills, and on holiday in Goa or Greece.
Relentless tragedy
Tragedy — gentle, relentless and inexorable — comes calling, in story after story. All of which sounds sweetly sorrowful but in effect tends towards dreary morbidity. The recurring deaths and desertions, sans any of the passion and high drama of classical tragedy, make this collection tediously sad.
In "Old Cypress" the middle-aged female protagonist is abandoned by her husband of many years. "Allegra" is series of letters, most written by a young, tragically paralysed and bedridden protagonist to her mama. They tell of how tragedy struck the happily pregnant Allegra as she returned from a picnic in the sunny English countryside in a motor accident where her husband was at the wheel. Later, inevitably (for the story) he abandons her.
The title story, "The Quiet of the Birds" is another tragedy — that of Safia, a motherless innocent child of the woods. A strange obsessive father brings her up. With her father's death, Safia is thrust into an everyday urban reality she is catastrophically unprepared to handle. "The Permanence of Grief' takes us to another disturbing story where a strange brother-sister duo live together, under the shadow of their beloved dead pet, a dog (somewhat mysteriously) named Judas.
And so it goes on... Most of the stories are deeply disquieting. The protagonists inhabit an uneasy twilight world of reflective loneliness, a melancholic Neverland. Sometimes they have traitor-like names like Mordred or Judas, or Mukta, but most often they are "she" or "he" or "I". Dreadful things happen to them — El in "African Bird" loses a leg, the protagonist in "Down and Out, Washing up with Gladys" witnesses a self administered abortion and Allegra is permanently paralysed. Conversations tend to be lengthy monologues, often staccato and peppered with pedantic literary allusions.
Not gripping
Still, some stories have a haunting bittersweet feel. In "Autumn on a Summer's Day", a middle-aged couple grapple with the grim reality of the wife's terminal illness. So, also "There are no Brownies in St. Anthony", an acute and upsetting story of a just bereaved middle-aged woman. "Wedding" is touching and ends hopefully, as the young mother who ran away from an oppressive marriage leaving her five little children behind, now meets her youngest son on his wedding day. One of the few other non-illness/abandonment/death stories in this collection, "Teachers Day" with its tongue-in-cheek look at the ennui of the education system could have been effective too, if it weren't so long winded.
Indeed one couldn't use "crisp" or "crackling" to describe any of the stories here. Reading these is like walking into a melancholy maze. I struggled through the stories, many of them not particularly short. Also, perhaps unfairly, I compare them to the masters. Maybe this is because of their dreamlike timeless quality — for they have none of the gripping grittiness of everyday contemporary reality, the kind you find in Jhumpa Lahiri's portrait of Mrs. Sen in The Interpreter of Maladies or Lavanya Sankaran's "Mysore Coffee" in the recently published The Red Carpet.
So I long for the energetic verve of a Saki, the narrative vigour and cultural cameos of a Maugham, the imaginative bizarreness of a Roald Dahl or the feminine insights of a Doris Lessing. All of which seem so much more comforting on a grey monsoon day with the wind storming outside and the Mumbai streets in flood.
The Quiet of the Birds, Nisha da Cunha, Penguin, Rs.295.
SAD may have been sweet so far as Shelley's skylark goes. Unfortunately the same doesn't hold good for Nisha da Cunha's collection of sad stories. They tell of illness, abandonment, and death in little country cottages with cypress trees, on "a lonely stretch of beach and sea and a bit of lane", in the hills, and on holiday in Goa or Greece.
Relentless tragedy
Tragedy — gentle, relentless and inexorable — comes calling, in story after story. All of which sounds sweetly sorrowful but in effect tends towards dreary morbidity. The recurring deaths and desertions, sans any of the passion and high drama of classical tragedy, make this collection tediously sad.
In "Old Cypress" the middle-aged female protagonist is abandoned by her husband of many years. "Allegra" is series of letters, most written by a young, tragically paralysed and bedridden protagonist to her mama. They tell of how tragedy struck the happily pregnant Allegra as she returned from a picnic in the sunny English countryside in a motor accident where her husband was at the wheel. Later, inevitably (for the story) he abandons her.
The title story, "The Quiet of the Birds" is another tragedy — that of Safia, a motherless innocent child of the woods. A strange obsessive father brings her up. With her father's death, Safia is thrust into an everyday urban reality she is catastrophically unprepared to handle. "The Permanence of Grief' takes us to another disturbing story where a strange brother-sister duo live together, under the shadow of their beloved dead pet, a dog (somewhat mysteriously) named Judas.
And so it goes on... Most of the stories are deeply disquieting. The protagonists inhabit an uneasy twilight world of reflective loneliness, a melancholic Neverland. Sometimes they have traitor-like names like Mordred or Judas, or Mukta, but most often they are "she" or "he" or "I". Dreadful things happen to them — El in "African Bird" loses a leg, the protagonist in "Down and Out, Washing up with Gladys" witnesses a self administered abortion and Allegra is permanently paralysed. Conversations tend to be lengthy monologues, often staccato and peppered with pedantic literary allusions.
Not gripping
Still, some stories have a haunting bittersweet feel. In "Autumn on a Summer's Day", a middle-aged couple grapple with the grim reality of the wife's terminal illness. So, also "There are no Brownies in St. Anthony", an acute and upsetting story of a just bereaved middle-aged woman. "Wedding" is touching and ends hopefully, as the young mother who ran away from an oppressive marriage leaving her five little children behind, now meets her youngest son on his wedding day. One of the few other non-illness/abandonment/death stories in this collection, "Teachers Day" with its tongue-in-cheek look at the ennui of the education system could have been effective too, if it weren't so long winded.
Indeed one couldn't use "crisp" or "crackling" to describe any of the stories here. Reading these is like walking into a melancholy maze. I struggled through the stories, many of them not particularly short. Also, perhaps unfairly, I compare them to the masters. Maybe this is because of their dreamlike timeless quality — for they have none of the gripping grittiness of everyday contemporary reality, the kind you find in Jhumpa Lahiri's portrait of Mrs. Sen in The Interpreter of Maladies or Lavanya Sankaran's "Mysore Coffee" in the recently published The Red Carpet.
So I long for the energetic verve of a Saki, the narrative vigour and cultural cameos of a Maugham, the imaginative bizarreness of a Roald Dahl or the feminine insights of a Doris Lessing. All of which seem so much more comforting on a grey monsoon day with the wind storming outside and the Mumbai streets in flood.
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