It’s 1885. Off the coast of Africa, where the slave ships ply , lies the island of Arlinda. Here a black baby boy and a white baby girl are being raised by a mute nurse, as par of an experiment in race studies. Arlinda is an interesting setting : Islands lend themselves well to powerful denouements or at the least to idyllic romances, as anyone who has read Goldings ‘The Lord of the Flies’ or seen ‘The Blue Lagoon’ will testify. Add to this the extra dimension of genetic theory , and you could with artful plot and perspective have a provocative piece of ‘Frankenstein’ meets ‘Never Let Me Go’.
Management Professor Basu has written earlier about 'The Opium Clerk' and then 'The Miniaturist' a court painter in Akbar's Court. The two warring scientists in this, his third novel, book certainly add depth to this varied repertoire. Bates , the Englishman collects skulls, in an office referred to appropriately enough as the Madhouse. According to him the White race is superior to the Black and skull measurements confirm this hypothesis. Belacroix, the Frenchman is less defined. He is subject to a basketful of weird skin conditions, but mostly he takes notes and he also engages Bates in pages and pages of pseudo scientific argument. His thesis remains that the races are different but doomed to hate each other. The Arlinda experiment is the statistically half baked consequence of this disagreement. The White girl will emerge as superior , says Bates. They will fight and one will kill the other says Belacroix. It’s a macabre menage-a-trois, Bates and his assistant Quartley, antagonist Belacroix , and the two ‘savage’ children with their dumb nurse. They circle each other , like gladiators in a ring, for most of the book, which sounds suspenseful, except that nothing happens. It’s all dependably dull. Bates, Belacroix , Norah and specially the children never come to life. The denouement isn’t overly dramatic either, but it comes as a relief all the same.
This review appeared in India Today June 2006
Monday, June 19, 2006
Mommy Lit ? Momoirs ?
Is motherhood, that most primeval of states, much maligned in today’s mommy lit? Methinks so, a Martian might be moved to venture, on reading the current crop.
With titles that run the gamut from ‘Misconceptions’ to ‘Oh Yeah Get a Life’, you don’t have to delve too deep to figure that all-effacing motherhood is not the formula for the new millennium. Motherhood maybe our biological bug bear, these books say, but the times they are a–changing and we no longer care to pretend its mere child’s play. Such books, and there are now a whole bunch, ranging from activist analysis to easy breezy ‘momoirs’, don’t shy away from displaying their diapers, poopy or otherwise. The most sensational of them all, Orange prize winning ‘We Need to Talk about Kevin’, tells the story of Eva Khatchadourian , an otherwise fulfilled career woman who can’t bring herself to like her child. That he kills seven fellow students in a high school shooting before his sixteenth birthday, is one of the questions this powerful novel asks – was Kevin innately bad or did he get twisted ? Analysing the runaway success of her book, journalist author Lionel Shriver says in an interview to the Guardian ,”I think Kevin has attracted an audience because my narrator, Eva, allows herself to say all those things that mothers are not supposed to say. She experiences pregnancy as an invasion. When her newborn son is first set on her breast, she is not overwhelmed with unconditional love; to her own horror, she feels nothing. She imputes to her perpetually screaming infant a devious intention to divide and conquer her marriage. Eva finds caring for a toddler dull”.
The metaphors of dullness , imprisonment and indeed, lack of feeling are not new ones. Betty Friedman in her 1963 cult book ‘The Feminine Mystique’ famously exploded the happy housewife mother figure. The real life women in Friedman’s book, in ‘smiling empty passivity’ or in ‘morbid depression’ tell their stories , one young mother of three even describing herself ‘ready for a padded cell’ before half the day’s work was done. But it took Erma Bombeck in the 1980’s to cleverly convert this maternal angst into daily diary humour in her bestselling ‘Motherhood : The Second Oldest Profession in the World’. It’s here she asks -"If someone was to run an ad in the New York Times which read: WANTED: Household drudge, 140 hour week, no retirement, no sick leave, no room of own, no Sundays off. Must be good with animals, kids and hamburger. Must share bath, would 42 million women still apply?" Sounds like a snappy bit of humour , and yet there’s no missing the serious satire. It would be two decades however, before another woman writer, this one an economist , would address Bombeck ‘s question with real numbers . Anne Crittenden in her ‘The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World is Still the Least Valued’, quantifies the loss of lifetime earnings of the average college educated American mother as a million dollars. In a revealing anecdote Crittenden talks about the genesis of her book , a few years after she left her job at the New York Times to be full time mother ,” I ran into someone at a party who said, "Didn’t you used to be Ann Crittenden?" That’s when I knew I had to write this book.”
Crittenden’s book joins other activist titles like ‘The Myth of Motherhood’ and ‘The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars : Who decides What makes a Good Mother’. But it’s the Bombeck tradition of mommy lit that currently rules commercial roost ( even though the phrase ‘mommy lit’ appeared later, in a sort of maternal elder sister extension to the ‘Bridget Jones Diary’ inspired ‘chick lit’.) The Divine Secrets of the Mama Sisterhood have never been more readable and the last decade has seen a proliferation of such titles. They crib and they complain – some stridently and others satirically, and yet to read them is to see that they’re also crying out for help.
Of these, the best known is undoubtedly Allison Pearson’s 2002 novel ’I don’t Know How She Does It’. It tells the story of Kate Reddy, working fund manager mother of two and the multiple juggling act that is her life. Frantically defacing perfect factory made meat pies to look as if they’re homemade Kate Reddy reflects , “I already understood the world of women was divided in two: there were the proper mothers, self sacrificing bakers of apple pies….and there were the other sort” . And as she spars , singly with the Corporation she says, “It’s possible to get sway with being late in the City. The key thing is to offer what my lawyer friend Debra calls a Man’s Excuse. Senior managers who would be frankly appalled by the story of a vomiting nocturnal baby or an AWOL nanny…are happy to accept anything to do with the internal combustion engine ’The car broke down/was broken into.’ ‘You should have seen the – fill in scene of mayhem-at the –fill in street’ Either of these will do very well.”
This appeared in The Sunday Times Bookmark on May 8th - mothers day
With titles that run the gamut from ‘Misconceptions’ to ‘Oh Yeah Get a Life’, you don’t have to delve too deep to figure that all-effacing motherhood is not the formula for the new millennium. Motherhood maybe our biological bug bear, these books say, but the times they are a–changing and we no longer care to pretend its mere child’s play. Such books, and there are now a whole bunch, ranging from activist analysis to easy breezy ‘momoirs’, don’t shy away from displaying their diapers, poopy or otherwise. The most sensational of them all, Orange prize winning ‘We Need to Talk about Kevin’, tells the story of Eva Khatchadourian , an otherwise fulfilled career woman who can’t bring herself to like her child. That he kills seven fellow students in a high school shooting before his sixteenth birthday, is one of the questions this powerful novel asks – was Kevin innately bad or did he get twisted ? Analysing the runaway success of her book, journalist author Lionel Shriver says in an interview to the Guardian ,”I think Kevin has attracted an audience because my narrator, Eva, allows herself to say all those things that mothers are not supposed to say. She experiences pregnancy as an invasion. When her newborn son is first set on her breast, she is not overwhelmed with unconditional love; to her own horror, she feels nothing. She imputes to her perpetually screaming infant a devious intention to divide and conquer her marriage. Eva finds caring for a toddler dull”.
The metaphors of dullness , imprisonment and indeed, lack of feeling are not new ones. Betty Friedman in her 1963 cult book ‘The Feminine Mystique’ famously exploded the happy housewife mother figure. The real life women in Friedman’s book, in ‘smiling empty passivity’ or in ‘morbid depression’ tell their stories , one young mother of three even describing herself ‘ready for a padded cell’ before half the day’s work was done. But it took Erma Bombeck in the 1980’s to cleverly convert this maternal angst into daily diary humour in her bestselling ‘Motherhood : The Second Oldest Profession in the World’. It’s here she asks -"If someone was to run an ad in the New York Times which read: WANTED: Household drudge, 140 hour week, no retirement, no sick leave, no room of own, no Sundays off. Must be good with animals, kids and hamburger. Must share bath, would 42 million women still apply?" Sounds like a snappy bit of humour , and yet there’s no missing the serious satire. It would be two decades however, before another woman writer, this one an economist , would address Bombeck ‘s question with real numbers . Anne Crittenden in her ‘The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World is Still the Least Valued’, quantifies the loss of lifetime earnings of the average college educated American mother as a million dollars. In a revealing anecdote Crittenden talks about the genesis of her book , a few years after she left her job at the New York Times to be full time mother ,” I ran into someone at a party who said, "Didn’t you used to be Ann Crittenden?" That’s when I knew I had to write this book.”
Crittenden’s book joins other activist titles like ‘The Myth of Motherhood’ and ‘The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars : Who decides What makes a Good Mother’. But it’s the Bombeck tradition of mommy lit that currently rules commercial roost ( even though the phrase ‘mommy lit’ appeared later, in a sort of maternal elder sister extension to the ‘Bridget Jones Diary’ inspired ‘chick lit’.) The Divine Secrets of the Mama Sisterhood have never been more readable and the last decade has seen a proliferation of such titles. They crib and they complain – some stridently and others satirically, and yet to read them is to see that they’re also crying out for help.
Of these, the best known is undoubtedly Allison Pearson’s 2002 novel ’I don’t Know How She Does It’. It tells the story of Kate Reddy, working fund manager mother of two and the multiple juggling act that is her life. Frantically defacing perfect factory made meat pies to look as if they’re homemade Kate Reddy reflects , “I already understood the world of women was divided in two: there were the proper mothers, self sacrificing bakers of apple pies….and there were the other sort” . And as she spars , singly with the Corporation she says, “It’s possible to get sway with being late in the City. The key thing is to offer what my lawyer friend Debra calls a Man’s Excuse. Senior managers who would be frankly appalled by the story of a vomiting nocturnal baby or an AWOL nanny…are happy to accept anything to do with the internal combustion engine ’The car broke down/was broken into.’ ‘You should have seen the – fill in scene of mayhem-at the –fill in street’ Either of these will do very well.”
This appeared in The Sunday Times Bookmark on May 8th - mothers day
Allan Sealy
Allan Sealy doesn’t read newspapers. He lives, like fellow writer Ruskin Bond, in the foothills of the Himalayas. The only concession this 54 year old Anglo Indian writer makes to modernity is his mouse. Also his computer and his net connection.
So even as Sealy loves his solitude, he delights little-boy like in the marvels of technology.
‘Red’, the book Sealy is here in Mumbai to promote, is about many things. It’s also the first book Sealy has written on a computer. Three threads, colour coded run through the book. The red thread tells of billionairess Aline and avant garde musician Zach, who meets in front of Matisse’s painting entitled ‘The Red Room’. The black tells of Gilgitan, earthy and energetic, a Dom who blackens his face with soot and grease, and yet wins the love of an unlikely woman. The third wire is a green one and the most obviously autobiographical. It tells of N, the Narrator, who lives in Dariya Dun, his work and his relationships with his estranged wife Olivia and his daughter, Mandalay. I ask Sealy if he has a daughter as well. ”Yes”, he says after the briefest of pauses,” But she doesn’t look anything like N’s daughter in the book.” Deepa Rose is the same age as the book’s Manda, and she lives in New Zealand (unlike Mandalay who lives in America). Sealy and his New Zealander wife, live like N does, in a little house in Dehra Dun with a walled garden. It’s a house with a newly acquired resident. One that becomes, as Sealy tells me “one of the characters”. Acquired after much frustration with having to access the net from seedy centres -“I was a prisoner of these cybercafés”, Sealy tells me “and they were filthy little places, horrible holes.” So Sealy bought himself a computer, a flat screen monitor and a wireless mouse. Like N in the novel, who encounters, besides the picture of a ‘ dripping Bipasha Basu’ , “something sticky on the floor under my shoe and it’s not chewing gum. It’s- o my god’. So N gets himself a computer too, on which he types in www.hermitagemuseum.com and then ‘Matisse’ in the search box, to watch ‘The Red Room’ download.
We talk about the book’s sense of colour. It’s easy for Sealy to engage with these themes, he’s a painter himself. “I never carry a camera. Instead I do small sketches “, he tells me. I ask him if he’s done any of Mumbai. ”The view from here”, he says gesturing to the sea and South Mumbai green outside. It’s a little pencil sketch on a small President Hotel pad. But it has point and perspective, with the morning star, the taxis and the World Trade Centre.
‘Red’, also has poetry, a quality Sealy’s earlier books have often been praised for. Right from the ‘The Trotternama’ a chronicle of Anglo Indian history, to ‘The Everest Hotel’ . In Sealy’s love story novel, ‘The Brain Fever Bird’, the city of Delhi comes alive in lyrically poetic prose. Here’s Lev, the out of work biological weapons scientist from St. Petersburg, in Delhi – “India Gate, his map says. The wide road leading to it is heroic, out of another sort of dream. Its vaunting scale is familiar : he recognizes the bullying note from his Moscow days”. And of the brain fever bird –“a shy bird, furtive in speckled fatigues, a cuckoo with a liking for babblers nests…and a call that climbs and climbs maddeningly through the hot June afternoon and the burning nights : brainfever! brainfever ! brainfever ! higher and higher till the crazed listener sits down on a stool and prepares a noose that could either be for the bird or for himself.”
We talk about his first name ‘Irwin’ – “it was my father’s name as well, so I was always called Allan. Subconsciously I must have resented it , because I decided to resurrect it, but only the initial. “ And then Sealy tired of people asking him what the ‘I’ stood for.So now ‘Red’ is the first book that features the author’s full name on the jacket - ‘Irwin Allan Sealy’.
What do Sealy’s literary awards mean to him- ‘Trotternama’ won the 1988 Commonwealth Writers prize and ‘The Everest Hotel’, The 1998 Crossword Award . Sealy’s philosophical – “ It’s nice to get a lakh or two. Prizes may probably quicken a writer’s career, but they can also deaden some impulse in him – they can interfere with the flow.” And all those hefty advances overseas writers get ? “It doesn’t touch me “, Sealy maintains. We talk about the huge advance the Harvard student author Kaavya Vishwanathan received “It’s a huge wallop on the head – she doesn’t realise it - at the moment she’s floating but she could sink “ - a prophecy that was to prove uncannily true a few days later.
Sealy himself , may travel but always goes back to his Himalayan Retreat , safely distant from the big bucks. Is money an issue ? “Not a serious issue, in other words I’m not seriously poor!”, he jokes. It’s a joke like most, with some truth. It’s N the narrator in ‘Red’ who answers it most poetically- “When I’m anxious for the future, I look up at the hornbill in the palm tree with a single areca nut in his beak, and think that’s his whole pension too, his provident fund, his retirement package, his future, and then my fears are quelled. Not answered, put at rest. You have to sit quietly on your branch and offer up your self entire, to the world, to the universe, to the next passer-by”.
This appeared in The Week April 2006
So even as Sealy loves his solitude, he delights little-boy like in the marvels of technology.
‘Red’, the book Sealy is here in Mumbai to promote, is about many things. It’s also the first book Sealy has written on a computer. Three threads, colour coded run through the book. The red thread tells of billionairess Aline and avant garde musician Zach, who meets in front of Matisse’s painting entitled ‘The Red Room’. The black tells of Gilgitan, earthy and energetic, a Dom who blackens his face with soot and grease, and yet wins the love of an unlikely woman. The third wire is a green one and the most obviously autobiographical. It tells of N, the Narrator, who lives in Dariya Dun, his work and his relationships with his estranged wife Olivia and his daughter, Mandalay. I ask Sealy if he has a daughter as well. ”Yes”, he says after the briefest of pauses,” But she doesn’t look anything like N’s daughter in the book.” Deepa Rose is the same age as the book’s Manda, and she lives in New Zealand (unlike Mandalay who lives in America). Sealy and his New Zealander wife, live like N does, in a little house in Dehra Dun with a walled garden. It’s a house with a newly acquired resident. One that becomes, as Sealy tells me “one of the characters”. Acquired after much frustration with having to access the net from seedy centres -“I was a prisoner of these cybercafés”, Sealy tells me “and they were filthy little places, horrible holes.” So Sealy bought himself a computer, a flat screen monitor and a wireless mouse. Like N in the novel, who encounters, besides the picture of a ‘ dripping Bipasha Basu’ , “something sticky on the floor under my shoe and it’s not chewing gum. It’s- o my god’. So N gets himself a computer too, on which he types in www.hermitagemuseum.com and then ‘Matisse’ in the search box, to watch ‘The Red Room’ download.
We talk about the book’s sense of colour. It’s easy for Sealy to engage with these themes, he’s a painter himself. “I never carry a camera. Instead I do small sketches “, he tells me. I ask him if he’s done any of Mumbai. ”The view from here”, he says gesturing to the sea and South Mumbai green outside. It’s a little pencil sketch on a small President Hotel pad. But it has point and perspective, with the morning star, the taxis and the World Trade Centre.
‘Red’, also has poetry, a quality Sealy’s earlier books have often been praised for. Right from the ‘The Trotternama’ a chronicle of Anglo Indian history, to ‘The Everest Hotel’ . In Sealy’s love story novel, ‘The Brain Fever Bird’, the city of Delhi comes alive in lyrically poetic prose. Here’s Lev, the out of work biological weapons scientist from St. Petersburg, in Delhi – “India Gate, his map says. The wide road leading to it is heroic, out of another sort of dream. Its vaunting scale is familiar : he recognizes the bullying note from his Moscow days”. And of the brain fever bird –“a shy bird, furtive in speckled fatigues, a cuckoo with a liking for babblers nests…and a call that climbs and climbs maddeningly through the hot June afternoon and the burning nights : brainfever! brainfever ! brainfever ! higher and higher till the crazed listener sits down on a stool and prepares a noose that could either be for the bird or for himself.”
We talk about his first name ‘Irwin’ – “it was my father’s name as well, so I was always called Allan. Subconsciously I must have resented it , because I decided to resurrect it, but only the initial. “ And then Sealy tired of people asking him what the ‘I’ stood for.So now ‘Red’ is the first book that features the author’s full name on the jacket - ‘Irwin Allan Sealy’.
What do Sealy’s literary awards mean to him- ‘Trotternama’ won the 1988 Commonwealth Writers prize and ‘The Everest Hotel’, The 1998 Crossword Award . Sealy’s philosophical – “ It’s nice to get a lakh or two. Prizes may probably quicken a writer’s career, but they can also deaden some impulse in him – they can interfere with the flow.” And all those hefty advances overseas writers get ? “It doesn’t touch me “, Sealy maintains. We talk about the huge advance the Harvard student author Kaavya Vishwanathan received “It’s a huge wallop on the head – she doesn’t realise it - at the moment she’s floating but she could sink “ - a prophecy that was to prove uncannily true a few days later.
Sealy himself , may travel but always goes back to his Himalayan Retreat , safely distant from the big bucks. Is money an issue ? “Not a serious issue, in other words I’m not seriously poor!”, he jokes. It’s a joke like most, with some truth. It’s N the narrator in ‘Red’ who answers it most poetically- “When I’m anxious for the future, I look up at the hornbill in the palm tree with a single areca nut in his beak, and think that’s his whole pension too, his provident fund, his retirement package, his future, and then my fears are quelled. Not answered, put at rest. You have to sit quietly on your branch and offer up your self entire, to the world, to the universe, to the next passer-by”.
This appeared in The Week April 2006
KIran Nagarakr
I meet Kiran Nagarkar at his beautiful Breach Candy bungalow – raintrees outside, brass urns, and mahogany tables inside. It’s a friend’s house, he tells me, he lost his own . How that happened is a story that could be an aside in any of Nagarkar’s novels. A sinister version of the ‘Water Wars’, the squabbles the chawl protagonists in his famous Bombay novel ‘Ravan and Eddie’ are subjected to. It’s an urban nightmare both sad and scatological, and the writer is upset in the retelling.
But today is a hopeful day – the 63 year old Marathi English novelist is back after a break of eight years. Like ‘Cuckold’, his historical Sahitya Akademi winning 1998 novel, this present work is another voluminous saga. It tells in 584 pages, the coming of age story of a young Indian terrorist - Zia Khan. Early reviews have been mixed. Nagarkar is back last night from a reading in Germany, and is off the following day for the books launch in Delhi. Mumbai and Calcutta follow next. So Nagarkar is all keyed up. A new book is always a tense occasion ,and must be particularly so for Nagarkar, a writer who has risen from humble beginnings through constant re invention, moving from Marathi to English, and from novel to screenplay to a play.
So we talk. About Zia, Nagarkar’s terrorist hero. About the art of the novel. A subject he’s eloquent on, and obviously impassioned about,” I keep going back to these classic tales”, he confesses, ”you can live your life by these stories, Homer has you by the collar, and Kabir has you by the throat… I mean gosh, how many times have they buried the novel?” he demands. “All this post modernist fixation of -I have to be different, I have to be original… “.
I ask him if he enjoys any contemporary writers- Amitabh Ghosh , he answers , pausing to wonder at Ghosh’s genius for unravelling fascinating nuggets ,”I mean he found out that the Burmese King actually lived in Ratnagiri”, constructing much of his ‘The Glass Palace ‘around that little fact.
And Rushdie ? In Nagarkar’s new book, his terrorist hero Zia , is obsessed with killing Rushdie. Zia, who has been sent by his family to study at Cambridge , updates Allah with Yeatsian status reports on SR/Essar’s whereabouts “The Beast has gone underground…All the heathens and disbelievers of the world have conspired to throw a smoke screen around it “. I ask him where all that graphic imagery of ‘the evil one reading from his satanic book ‘…and his ‘hooded eyes’ came from ? “Well that’s Zia’s perspective “, he clarifies. Nagarkar himself doesn’t enjoy Rushdie’s prose anymore – “he’s trapped “, he analyses . Nevertheless he fumes those who criticise at Rushdie– “these are people who have no idea of the value of life”.
Nagarkar should know. In 1977 Nagarkar wrote ‘Bedtime Stories’ a scathing retelling of four stories from the Mahabharata. The play had a chorus that was represented by a Nazi , and the perpetrators on trial were the audience themselves. The play was attacked by the RSS even as rehearsals themselves became an impossibility , to say nothing of an actual performance. But then Nagarkar’s non novelistic endeavours have always been somewhat jinxed. The famous Bombay novel ‘Ravan and Eddie’ began life as a screenplay for Dev Benegal, but was abandoned mid-way. And in this latest book Zia’s novelist brother Amanat has a run in with a couple of such fickle film producers who “keep him hanging for months on end, destroying whatever fragment of self esteem he had left”. Why does this happen , I ask him ? Maybe they are just horrid people , he replies post a thoughtful pause. Yet Nagarkar confesses he is still extremely fond of Benegal, even though the two scarcely speak.
Like Nagarkar and the Marathi establishment. Once hailed as a shining gem of Marathi literature, Nagarkar reveals how today he is persona non grata . It’s an episode that has been particularly painful for this Marathi writer. Right from 1991 when Nagarkar was in Chicago on a fellowship (“cleaning bathrooms “, he tells me in another delightful aside “the fellowship was so shoe string”). That’s when he made the decision to switch languages “For days I couldn’t get out of bed “, he confesses , “the move seemed a betrayal”. And yet Marathi readership with its abysmal numbers was slowly killing the writer in him. Nagarkar hadn’t written for 12 years. As he explains,“ Saat sakkam trechalis’ is called a milestone in Marathi lit… But what’s the use of a milestone if it sells only 1500 copies in 25 years?” .
I ask him how he spent those non writing years . “We struggled to make ends meet, he confesses. Arun ( Kolatkar, the poet) and I were partners for 20 years. We wrote ad copy but then our agency closed down,. We were out of a job. We’d go around together, and we just would not get any work – me in my kurta pajama, Arun with his long hair .God knows why, he, Arun had a reputation for unreliability. Our rejection fee used to be Rs.1500 for an assignment and Rs.3000 if our work was accepted. Somehow we got by. And now after his death Arun gets all this recognition. What damn use is it ?”
So will this new book change all of this ? ‘God’s Little Soldier’ is contemporary. It’s come after eight years of writes and rewrites. “I struggled”, Nagarkar explains “with the character of Zia.” The first draft, 800 pages plus and handwritten, was rejected when Nagarkar realised that the rigid idealistic terrorist hero he had created could take no humour. Zia was emerging as a vastly different character from the tongue in cheek chawl boys in Ravan and Eddie. Where Ravan and Eddie coped with recognizable evils like errant fathers and school bullies with zing, Zia created his own monsters. Like keeping Ramadan to please his aunt, by pretending to eat (to satisfy his liberal Muslim parents) and then throwing up post every meal. Or by flagellating himself. All of which makes ‘God’s Little Soldier’ very dramatic. Also cinematic, as locales move from Bombay to Cambridge and then worlds away to a Trappist monastery atop a ledge of the Sierra Nevada mountains. It’s been described a book which has the ideas and events for three or four different novels, and certainly as you follow Zia through his childhood , and see him moving from Cambridge dons to gay priests to arms dealing god men, you begin to see why. Colourful, kaleidoscopic and quite the dance of life, even if it is macabre.
IN the Week April 2006
But today is a hopeful day – the 63 year old Marathi English novelist is back after a break of eight years. Like ‘Cuckold’, his historical Sahitya Akademi winning 1998 novel, this present work is another voluminous saga. It tells in 584 pages, the coming of age story of a young Indian terrorist - Zia Khan. Early reviews have been mixed. Nagarkar is back last night from a reading in Germany, and is off the following day for the books launch in Delhi. Mumbai and Calcutta follow next. So Nagarkar is all keyed up. A new book is always a tense occasion ,and must be particularly so for Nagarkar, a writer who has risen from humble beginnings through constant re invention, moving from Marathi to English, and from novel to screenplay to a play.
So we talk. About Zia, Nagarkar’s terrorist hero. About the art of the novel. A subject he’s eloquent on, and obviously impassioned about,” I keep going back to these classic tales”, he confesses, ”you can live your life by these stories, Homer has you by the collar, and Kabir has you by the throat… I mean gosh, how many times have they buried the novel?” he demands. “All this post modernist fixation of -I have to be different, I have to be original… “.
I ask him if he enjoys any contemporary writers- Amitabh Ghosh , he answers , pausing to wonder at Ghosh’s genius for unravelling fascinating nuggets ,”I mean he found out that the Burmese King actually lived in Ratnagiri”, constructing much of his ‘The Glass Palace ‘around that little fact.
And Rushdie ? In Nagarkar’s new book, his terrorist hero Zia , is obsessed with killing Rushdie. Zia, who has been sent by his family to study at Cambridge , updates Allah with Yeatsian status reports on SR/Essar’s whereabouts “The Beast has gone underground…All the heathens and disbelievers of the world have conspired to throw a smoke screen around it “. I ask him where all that graphic imagery of ‘the evil one reading from his satanic book ‘…and his ‘hooded eyes’ came from ? “Well that’s Zia’s perspective “, he clarifies. Nagarkar himself doesn’t enjoy Rushdie’s prose anymore – “he’s trapped “, he analyses . Nevertheless he fumes those who criticise at Rushdie– “these are people who have no idea of the value of life”.
Nagarkar should know. In 1977 Nagarkar wrote ‘Bedtime Stories’ a scathing retelling of four stories from the Mahabharata. The play had a chorus that was represented by a Nazi , and the perpetrators on trial were the audience themselves. The play was attacked by the RSS even as rehearsals themselves became an impossibility , to say nothing of an actual performance. But then Nagarkar’s non novelistic endeavours have always been somewhat jinxed. The famous Bombay novel ‘Ravan and Eddie’ began life as a screenplay for Dev Benegal, but was abandoned mid-way. And in this latest book Zia’s novelist brother Amanat has a run in with a couple of such fickle film producers who “keep him hanging for months on end, destroying whatever fragment of self esteem he had left”. Why does this happen , I ask him ? Maybe they are just horrid people , he replies post a thoughtful pause. Yet Nagarkar confesses he is still extremely fond of Benegal, even though the two scarcely speak.
Like Nagarkar and the Marathi establishment. Once hailed as a shining gem of Marathi literature, Nagarkar reveals how today he is persona non grata . It’s an episode that has been particularly painful for this Marathi writer. Right from 1991 when Nagarkar was in Chicago on a fellowship (“cleaning bathrooms “, he tells me in another delightful aside “the fellowship was so shoe string”). That’s when he made the decision to switch languages “For days I couldn’t get out of bed “, he confesses , “the move seemed a betrayal”. And yet Marathi readership with its abysmal numbers was slowly killing the writer in him. Nagarkar hadn’t written for 12 years. As he explains,“ Saat sakkam trechalis’ is called a milestone in Marathi lit… But what’s the use of a milestone if it sells only 1500 copies in 25 years?” .
I ask him how he spent those non writing years . “We struggled to make ends meet, he confesses. Arun ( Kolatkar, the poet) and I were partners for 20 years. We wrote ad copy but then our agency closed down,. We were out of a job. We’d go around together, and we just would not get any work – me in my kurta pajama, Arun with his long hair .God knows why, he, Arun had a reputation for unreliability. Our rejection fee used to be Rs.1500 for an assignment and Rs.3000 if our work was accepted. Somehow we got by. And now after his death Arun gets all this recognition. What damn use is it ?”
So will this new book change all of this ? ‘God’s Little Soldier’ is contemporary. It’s come after eight years of writes and rewrites. “I struggled”, Nagarkar explains “with the character of Zia.” The first draft, 800 pages plus and handwritten, was rejected when Nagarkar realised that the rigid idealistic terrorist hero he had created could take no humour. Zia was emerging as a vastly different character from the tongue in cheek chawl boys in Ravan and Eddie. Where Ravan and Eddie coped with recognizable evils like errant fathers and school bullies with zing, Zia created his own monsters. Like keeping Ramadan to please his aunt, by pretending to eat (to satisfy his liberal Muslim parents) and then throwing up post every meal. Or by flagellating himself. All of which makes ‘God’s Little Soldier’ very dramatic. Also cinematic, as locales move from Bombay to Cambridge and then worlds away to a Trappist monastery atop a ledge of the Sierra Nevada mountains. It’s been described a book which has the ideas and events for three or four different novels, and certainly as you follow Zia through his childhood , and see him moving from Cambridge dons to gay priests to arms dealing god men, you begin to see why. Colourful, kaleidoscopic and quite the dance of life, even if it is macabre.
IN the Week April 2006
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