My Bookish Woes(3): Of Literature Festivals and Book Launches

My Bookish Woes(1)

My Bookish Woes (2)

It’s the time of the year when there are literature festivals galore. These festivals bring writers face-to-face with their readers or, sometimes, just readers. You have your favourite writer sitting right before you, reading out his/her own work or talking about it. Not only their own work, writers could also be asked to pontificate about a wide range of literary issues (say, the future of novel) and non-literary issues (say, the rise of ISIS). We expect them to have an opinion about all these matters, and all that matters.  How well a book does now does not necessarily depend on how well-written the book is, but on how well-marketed it is. The publishing industry is not any longer untouched by (the much aggressively) rising consumerism. 

Books, too, like movies, are now released and launched with much fanfare. There is a great deal of emphasis on visibility. The writers have to be visible to be able to sell. To sell well, at any rate. The writers are now accessible through Twitter, Facebook, their own websites—which could be run by the writers themselves if they are not well established or by a professional if they can afford to hire one—and the literary events too. They write articles on popular web-platforms, and in return their latest or upcoming work gets a precious mention.   

But there was a time when writers thrived behind the veil of obscurity. Readers rarely had direct access to writers. Historically, we have never really known much about the writers and their world-view. How much do we know about Vyas, Homer, Kalidas, Virgil, Sapho? Very little. And most of it is speculative. Despite the humongous research and scholarship that Shakespeare has invited over the centuries, there are huge gaps in his life story as we know it; and we certainly don’t know what Shakespeare’s views on the subjects he wrote about were or what his politics was. One can venture to make inferences based on the works of these greats, but such an exercise is highly vulnerable to inaccuracies. Not always do the views of the writer and those expressed in a text match. The work produced may not always be an extension of the writer, as we generally tend to believe. T.S. Eliot famously called upon his fellow and future writers to shed the burden of personality in their works and thereby only propagated the cult of impersonal. In the Regency and Victorian era, many women writers took to writing under fictitious names, adding another layer of obscurity.  Even much after trend of using pseudonyms phased out, we had writers who were notorious for being reticent and unapproachable.

Samuel Beckett, for instance, never gave the kind of lengthy interviews that we see/read today. He was always the most evasive about his most evasive character: Godot. He never cared to freely explain away or comment on significance of Godot. Yet the popularity of his work has endured even after half a century. Take another example, the literary sensation, the voice of his age, J. D. Salinger. In his most loved work, The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger ascribes the following lines to Holden: ”What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.” However, Salinger himself remained quite an inaccessible recluse all his life. He himself would never entertain the kind of phone-call Holden might want to make to his favourite writer.

  I attended the book launch of Amit Chaudhuri’s Odysseys Abroad last to last year. After the presenter was done asking her set of questions, the audience were given a chance to shoot questions, as is the custom in such events. When a lady asked Amit what books does he read, she was scandalised to hear the answer. Amit very nonchalantly said that he doesn’t read. After a moment or two of surveying the audience which sat aghast in utter silence, he smiled and said that he meant he doesn’t read fiction anymore, just poetry. Order was restored in the universe. Everybody started breathing normally again.

Whenever I attend such an event I have two major fears in my mind.

First, what if I end up asking the same cliché questions that the writer must be tired of answering? All the other questions that don’t pertain directly to the book being discussed, are attempts to understand the mind of the writer. We want to know how it is done. What books has the writer read? (Could I also read them and write as well?) What do they think of a particular book? (Do their views match mine?) Where did you grow up? (From where does he get his characters?) What was your childhood like? (Did he have a miserable childhood?) Does your spouse read your book? (Is their marital life blissful?) Most of these questions, perhaps unwittingly, aim at undoing the mojo of the writer at one level, and establishing a correspondence between the curious reader and the revered writer, at another level. We believe that the writer is endowed with a kind of insight that we are not, and that they have the remarkable quality of distilling that insight in from of words.

Second, what if there is a huge gap between the person I see on the stage and the image of the writer I have built in my head based on his/her book(s)? Perhaps, the writers too have this fear. J.D Salinger may have known that he could never talk in the same gullible and disarmingly amusing manner as Holden Caulfield.  The phenomenal Chimamanda Adichie confesses that it’s unfair for people to expect that she would fully be able to explain the motives of her much loved character Ifemelu, because her own life hasn’t been half as interesting as Ifemelu’s. In fact, she admits to discovering similarities between herself and Obinze. Perhaps, Beckett did not know any more about Godot than we do. This would mean that writers also can not know. And this thought makes me uneasy.

P S. Around writers, I behave like a gushing fourteen year old—too excited to be around them, and too dumbfounded to ask anything. All I can do is asking for an autograph.

 

My Bookish Woes (2)

I often tell myself that one day, when I grow up, I will read non-fiction too. But for now I am content with my world of fiction. Such a confession often invites judgemental looks. ‘So you don’t want to broaden the scope of your reading? You don’t want to be informed? Don’t you want to grow (and sound) wiser?’ These are the implied questions that are raised along with the eyebrows. The underlying assumption being: fiction is not brain-nourishing, to put it mildly, or that it is juvenile, to put it bluntly.

In the last post I talked about how while growing up I was never introduced to classics. So I was untouched by the art of the Tolstoys, Austens, Brontes, Prousts or Twains. By the time I came to realise the importance and necessity of reading classics, it had been too late. After a point you just have too much on your plate. It becomes difficult, if not impossible, to take time out for such pastimes or to make up for what you had missed out in your childhood. And thus you want to make the most out of whatever little you get of this precious reading time. However, for a reader like me this situation presents a new dilemma. Should one read things that one would like to read or one ought to have read by now? Or should one read stuff that’s supposed to make one wiser and more informed (or at least make one sound wiser and more informed)? Of course, I mean non-fiction. 

Whenever I sit to read fiction something in me feels a bit uneasy. Or perhaps guilty. Guilty of not devoting this time to sharpen my wits by reading non-fiction. Does reading Pride and Prejudice not befit me, for it could be written off as nothing more than glorified chic-let romance from the Victorian era? Does reading Madam Bovary (or Lady Chatterley’s Lover) not become me, for it can be scoffed at as nothing but litany of woes of an ingénue who asked for all the trouble? And, of course, won’t my reading Harry Potter, at this age, make no-one want to take me seriously? (Yes, I haven’t read that either; don’t abandon me now please!)

Although people like me would want to believe that reading fiction makes you smarter, there’s not enough credible and concrete proof to suggest so. Thus we still can’t conclusively say that fiction indeed makes us smarter and nicer. 

One may argue that reading fiction comes with its own benefits. The staple ones being: facility with the language, enriched vocabulary, development of the organ of empathy, escape from grim reality, awareness of and exposure to other cultures than your own etc. But are these enough? 

Firstly, it must be stated that fiction is not entirely untruth. It’s not falsified reality; but it is reality ordered and arranged in a certain fashion so as to make it more lucid and tangible. There are indeed additions and subtractions done by a writer to dramatise and to intensify the reality, but the base is, mostly, the lived experience (of the writer’s or of the people they’ve known). Not even wildest of fantastic fiction is without modicum of reality. 

Good fiction can go beyond the aforesaid perks, I feel. It could help you crystallise sentiments that are otherwise amorphous. It breaks down, in words, what you may be feeling at any given point in time, or that you may have felt at a certain point in time in the past. The joy of stumbling upon sentences that capture ever so precisely what you’re feeling is incredible; it makes you want to thank the writer heartily. It could also make you wonder if the writer was snooping upon you, or if the writer is endowed with uncanny prescience. Emerson had once remarked that, “in work of a writer of genius we rediscover our own neglected thoughts”. That’s the beauty of art: it helps you find yourself by losing yourself in it.

  Good fiction can even induce new epiphanies. It holds your hand and leads your way to the threshold of the sanctum of realisation; and then it withdraws its steps as you enter the sanctum, while it stands at the threshold with its arms crossed, smiling, contented in the knowledge that within you’re revelling in the glow of that realisation. Thus in a way good fiction has the potential of not only informing your outlook (‘inlook’ too), but also rendering it anew. Like any other form of art, good fiction could be both informative and transformative.

Another thing that draws me to fiction is that it gives you an impression, even if false, that you can control time. Of all things that are disobedient, time is most annoyingly so. But when you immerse yourself in a good book, time does slow down. You get to observe and dissect those micro-expressions, micro-thoughts, micro-moments that elude us in our high-paced lives. The consciousness of a (good) writer can push itself betwixt two closely overlapping, infinitesimal moments, and then wring out the very essence of all that is felt by us in those fleeting moments, such that the consciousness of the reader can then soak up that distilled essence.

“We can learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology,” Noam Chomsky had once said.

Even if not brain-nourishing, fiction could very well be soul-nourishing. Then, how could a reader, who has already missed out a lot of these wonderful gems in his growing up years, not feel compelled chose fiction over non-fiction? And even while I choose to read fiction, I am torn between the urge to read those classics and the stunning works of contemporary literature. As I read one book I feel tempted to pick another, echoing the perpetual complain of every reader: so many books; so little time! So apparently, my bookish woes aren’t coming to an end anytime soon.

Dilemma

Of the many things that were common between the mothers of Gautam and Anjana, the most prominent one had to be their fervent desire to see their children settled. Both the mothers were equally worried about the advancing age of their children. Gautam and Anjana had both entered the fourth decade of their lives. At 34, Gautam had spent a year more than Anjana in the said decade and had thus grown slightly more reconciled with it. Neither of the two mothers had spent even a single night when they would go the bed without reflecting, with some degree of concern, on the marital prospects of their respective children. Joined by similar worries, separated by geographic distance, and oblivious to each other’s existence, they resided in different places. Anjana’s mother lived in the small town called Firozabad, located about 250 Km away from Delhi (Anjana had moved to Delhi 10 years ago).

 Every morning as Anjana’s mother would stand in her balcony sipping tea with her husband, she saw hawkers moving in the by-lanes selling bangles. The bangles would be heaped up on their carts like vegetables. Red, pink, green, orange...all colours and sizes. Anjana’s mother would long for a day when she would buy them in dozens for Anjana’s wedding.

Anjana’s mother, with the help of her husband, had made a profile for Anjana on a popular matrimonial website. While Anjana would, in words of her mother, fritter away her life on work in Delhi, her mother would religiously check all the proposals that came her way on the said site, back in Firozabad. Most of the proposals that would appeal to the mother would be mercilessly snubbed by Anjana.

Anjana had always been her own person. She had left Firozabad right after her XII board exams and never looked back. Firozabad was now nothing more than an annual affair that would happen only on Diwali when she visited her parents. She was working as the Chief Communication Officer with a Telecom giant in Delhi. She had built a life of her own in the city of Delhi. Survival was a daily struggle for a single woman like her living all by herself in the city that was notorious for being unsympathetic, brutal even, to women. Delhi’s vastness was overpowering yet comforting for her. She would any day prefer to lose herself in Delhi rather than being found in Firozabad for all her life. The bubbles of anxiety and fear that would rise in her head every now and then would be crushed by the prospect of her living the life her mother and her sister led in Firozabad.

The last time she and her mother had a conversation, her mother had talked about this new candidate that she and her father had thought fit for Anjana. She knew this time, too, her mother would invariably insist on her giving this man a chance. “Ek baar mil toh le. Milne me kya jaata hai? 33 ki ho gayi hai...kab settle down hogi, bhagwaan jaane!” the mother would say adamantly. Anjana was not averse to the idea of marriage or, as her mother says, settling down. She thought the chosen procedure to be farcical. She believed that she would run into her life partner someday, somewhere;  she believed that she would strike up a conversation with someone reading the same book as hers on a metro and be amazed at how their taste in books and music is alike; that someday someone would stop by to appreciate the roses and gardenias that she had painstakingly cultivated in one end of the small porch of her Vasant Kunj flat; that she would thank this someone for his appreciation and invite him for a glass of lemonade; that they will have the most delightful conversation over the lemonade; that this rather plain looking chap will actually turn out to be the CEO of a large corporate; that they will meet frequently over some more lemonade, fall in love, and get married thereafter.

Though her clasp over such fanciful notions was growing feebler and feebler year by year. She had now begun to take coach reserved for ladies on the metro. She would not grub out the weeds from her plants on the same day she spotted them and with as much aggression. She would now not mind waiting for the weekend to do the pruning. And now she had begun to relent with a lesser resistance to her mother’s persuasion. The idea of humouring her mother did not seem completely bizarre any more. The declivity that joins fancy to reality is dangerously slippery—one nudge, in form of little persuasion or ticking time, is all it takes to trigger the descent.

Thus she decided to meet this man her mother had shortlisted for her. It was a Saturday anyway. She could not have used work as an excuse to avoid it. He seems like an affable man, her mother had told her. And that, precisely, was the major cause of her worry. This was not the first such meeting she would be participating in. None of the meetings had been fruitful so far. In most cases the other party would express their disapproval either by making demands that she and her family could never fulfil or by stating that she should not stop looking for other possibilities—after having spent two years on the Shadi.com she had developed a keen ear for such cues and a thick skin for rejections.

However, the real problem would arise when she would not approve of the prospect. Anjana suffered from an affliction that many a woman suffer from:  inability to say ‘no’ in so many words. And her discomfiture only rose sharply if the man in question happened to be affable. Affability is not as essential an ingredient for the marital bliss as compatibility, Anjana believed. Nice is nice, but then nothing great has ever come out of nice.

Anjana’s phone rang. She knew it was her mother calling to confirm if she’s meeting the boy today.

“Haan, mummy Namaste...haan aaj jaaungi...theek hai  green wala suit pehenungi...haan okay...nahi mazak nahi karungi. Accha papa ko phone do.”

“Hello Anju. How are you, beta? So you’re going then?” said a firm and distant voice.

“Haan papa, I’ll go. Achha, tell me does he smoke?”

“No...so far as we know he doesn’t. That’s what the profile says. Rama spoke to his mother; she too said he doesn’t smoke. We had told them that smoking is a strict no-no for you. You’ve seen the profile, nahi? Gautam naam hai uska.”

“Yes, I have. Not that I remember much though. Theek hai, so I will call you later to tell you how did it go.”

“Okay, beta. All the best!”

Anjana texted Gautam to check if he’s comfortable meeting over lunch.

“Hi, I am Anjana Dutt from Shadi.Com. Shall we meet at CP in, say, Sarvana Bhawan for lunch? That is if you don’t have any other plans for the day?”

“Hi Anjana. Sure let’s meet. I’ll be there at 1? Okay?”

“Sure. See you then. :)”
 *********************************************************************************************************************

It was a bit too warm for a February afternoon. Winter was retreating. Summer was knocking at Delhi’s door like a hapless waif waiting to be let in; Taking undue advantage of the mercy shown to it, even before you could realise, this helpless waif would turn into a marauder, and soon scoff at the city’s helplessness and misery.

Gautam nearly stumbled in the restaurant. He was late by 15 minutes. He brushed his hair with his fingers. The realisation that his hair had thinned and a lot of his scalp shone through them made him only more conscious. He wiped the thin film of sweat that glazed his forehead from all the rushing and brushing (he could have dropped the sweater). His eyes searched for the face he had examined many times over on his phone before he set out out.  (Click to view photo, zoom in, zoom out, back...click to view photo, zoom in, zoom out...)

There she was. She waved her hand delicately and smiled. Gautam also smiled— more so because he was supposed to than he wanted to.

She rose, held out her hand and said with a smile, “Anjana! I hope I did not spoil your Saturday?”

“Arey...not at all! I am sorry for being late. The metro got stuck before the last station. There was just such rush today. Did you notice?”

“I drove myself here...so I wouldn’t know. But I can imagine,” Anjana said, observing Gautam’s lanky frame and prominent forehead.

“Oh, you drive? That’s great!”

“Yes I do. I take the metro too. But occasionally.  Only when I have to go to Gurgaon for work. I just can’t drive in that crazy traffic,” Anjana said shrugging.

Gautam could not help noticing the sparkling eyes and well formed lips that Anjana possessed as much as he could not help noticing some extra flesh on her face which formed something of a double-chin.

“So should we place the order? Or do you want some more time?” Anjana’s questions distracted him and forced him to deliberate over the menu.

Over the course of the meal Anjana and Gautam both discovered things about one and other that gave them what they were fumbling for—reasons to like or dislike each other. Anjana got to know that Gautam worked as a freelance trainer with a BPO, and that he lived with his aunt upon insistence of his mother, and that his parents lived in Amritsar, Punjab, where they possessed acres of land. Anjana now realised why her mother had been so keen on this proposal. To her mother land meant prosperity and stability. To crown it he had no sibling which meant that Anjana would get to be undisputed heiress. (Neither of these two prospects impressed Anjana half as much as they impressed her mother.)  Gautam discovered Anjana’s wit was as sparkling as her eyes; and that she was extremely fond of books, and that she was fiercely independent; and that she had strong opinions on matters as diverse as spices, nuclear warfare and people who smoke; and that her mannerisms were dainty in spite of her voluptuousness.

“But that’s a, um, shifty job, isn’t it?” Anjana said a bit hesitantly.

“Well, it is. Some months I have a lot of work and sometimes none at all. I won’t call it a stable job, no. Actually that’s one reason I’ve been putting off marriage, but you know how mothers are. Mine insists that I get married before I lose whatever little hair I have left on my head. She thinks that I’ll become more disciplined post marriage,” Gautam said with a note of jest in his voice.

“That’s what all mothers think, I guess. All Indian mothers do at any rate,” Anjana retorted. The next second she realised that she could have avoided saying so. In a bid to cover up for her cheek she added, “so what do you do when you’re not working? I mean, in the months when you don’t have projects?”

“Oh, I watch movies. Lots of them! Movie marathons are my thing,” Gautam said, without looking up and gathering the remnant of rice scattered on his plate with his spoon. “I am sorry to disappoint you but I am not a book-person. I read, but not as much.”

Anjana smiled thinking how Gautam found his lack of interest in books (of all things) worth apologising for. Yet there was something endearing about his confessions. The air of ingenuous with which he spoke and acted made it difficult for Anjana to write him off completely. She observed that if seen independent of the context in which they were meeting, Gautam could well turn out to be interesting company. She was quick to notice that he was a man who was very well aware of his insufficiencies and made no attempts to cover them up falsely.

“The last one I read was by Paulo Cohelo. What was it called...err—“

“Alchemist?” Anjana interjected.

“O yes! That one. Have you read it?”

“I have.” Anjana nodded.

“Aaand how did you like it?” Gautam asked timidly.

“Honestly, I found it an absolute bore. So much for all the hype about it. Such a drag!”

“Thank God! I was scared to say it in as many words. But the book sucks. You’re the first book-sy person I’ve met who dislikes Cohelo.”

“Any siblings?”

“Yes, a sister. Sanjana. So we’re called Anju and Sanju back home. I don’t understand this craze that our parents have for rhyming names.”

“If this goes through then I could be the Ganju.” Gautam chortled. And before Anjana could make up her mind about this remark, he shot another question: “So you’re from Firozabad? Where have I heard that name before? Um...isn’t that the place which is famous for its glassware production?”

“Yes, it is. That and X-Ray!”

“How do you mean?”

“So if you take a stroll in the Firozabad market you’ll see an array of shops for X-Ray. They’ll showcase copies of X-Ray in their shops as photographers showcase their most celebrated photographs. And they do it at dirt cheap prices. You can just walk in and get an X-Ray of any part of your body for, say, 40 bucks. Or maybe less. It’s been quite a while I did that, you see. But it’s funny,” Anjana said as if taking pride in not visiting Firozabad for a very long time.

“Wow. That’s...interesting. Glassware and X-Ray. So Firozabad is all about transparency, eh!”

Anjana giggled. “I never looked at it like that. Good observation.” (She looked pretty when she giggled, bowing her head ever so slightly.)

The meal and the interview came to an end. (Anjana insisted that the sum be split. Gautam did not object.)  This was the most awkward moment usually. What note should such a meeting end on? Should one sound too hopeful to meet again—won’t that make one sound too desperate? Or should one just say a solid bye—won’t that sound too curt? Should one be blatantly honest and leave a very bad aftertaste of the meeting with the other person? Or should one feign nascent affection though there is none whatsoever? Anyone who’s been through such an exercise many times over, like Gautam and Anjana, will reckon these to be some of the most pressing questions that arise in a person’s head in the final moments.

Grappling with such questions and more, Gautam and Anjana made an exit from the restaurant.

“So, I’ll get in touch with you soon. It was great meeting you,” Anjana said taking the lead.

“Sure. I had a great time too.”

“Do you want me to drop you somewhere? I have a car.”

“Oh, no. Thanks. I’ll manage. I have a few errands to run. You carry on,” Gautam said.

“Bye!”

Both of them headed in opposite directions. Both of them were replaying the meeting in their heads, and trying to extract concrete reasons for their decisions. Yes, both of them had made up their minds about one and other.
 ********************************************************************************************************************



Anjana’s phone rang as soon as she sat in the driver’s seat.

“Haan Ma, Namaste...haan mili...bas abhi car me hi baithi hun. Um...nahi ma...ab wajah kya bataun. Aap papa ko phone do.”

“Anju beta, pasand nahi aaya kya? Your mother looks upset,” Anjana heard her father say.

“Nahi papa. I don’t think it will work out...nahi it’s not that...it’s just...no he’s not a bad guy, he’s good...I don’t know...don’t make things difficult for me...I can’t explain everything right now. I am about to drive. But it won’t work out. I’ll call you when I reach home.” She clicked the phone off.

She recalled that because both the Shaheed Bhagat Singh Marg and Panchkuinya Road have turned one-way streets, she’d have to drive past half the circumference of the outer circle to find her way out. She started. (What reason should she give her parents when they’ll call her again at night? He wasn’t a bad guy after all. How she hated this dilemma!)

Gautam walked with a leisurely gait, with his gaze fixed on the road mostly. He took out his phone from his pocket, looked at it, clicked it on to dial a number, and clicked it off again. He took a few more steps and paused near a small stall.

“Ek ultra mild.” He lit the cigarette and took a deep drag. The sensation of the smoke going in brought him the relief that had become so immensely desirable after all the smiling and pretending of the past one hour. As he exhaled a puff of smoke things began to seem clearer to him, the air began to seem more pleasant.  He again reached for his phone from his pocket and rang up his mother.

“Hello, mummy. Kithey? Haan, I met her...kudi toh changi si...nahi...I don’t think so...she’s good, but a bit...umm... chubby...I mean, healthy hai thodi....nahi...won’t work out... Nahi mummy maine soch liya...haan I’m sure, I’ve decided...what do you mean you won’t say no?...arey! how will I say no? You could speak to her mother...and say what? Come on, ma just say something about kundlis, I am sure they follow kundli stuff...O God! Ma we’ll talk about this later....haan changa...theek hai...bye.”

He clicked the phone and ticked the cigarette. The ash came off and spread like pollen, dancing in the air a little before hitting the ground. (How should he turn her down? She was such a lovely woman after all. He wasn't sure if the reason he gave his mother was what he actually felt. How he hated this dilemma!)

As he placed the cigarette-but between his lips to take the last drag, he saw a car halt right across the road. The glass of the window rolled down and from behind the window Anjana peered at him. Her face contorted and, though he could not hear, Gautam was sure, she mouthed an expletive as she drove on.

It’s been a year since that episode, but Gautam still has the vivid image of the face she made the last time he saw her. Neither of them thanked the cigarette though for resolving their dilemma without having to utter even a word. (Discounting that one expletive maybe.)

Blankness

And the cursor on the screen blinked. And blinked. He stared at the blank page. And stared some more.

 Angai had thought it would be one of those nights when words would just ooze out of him, but nothing did. For the last week or so, he had been sensing something swash and gurgle inside of him, but utterly defiant to take shape. Vaporous and violent, it continued to swash. There was something wanting to come out. In a form...more cohesive and tangible. In form of words. What was it?

Then there were these list-your-ten-favourite book posts that kept appearing every ten minutes. These people! It was like making your love life public. It was like making a list of ten people you have bedded and then pasting it all over the city. Of course, he was being too uncharitable and testy. He did not have any lists, grossly under-read person that he was.

Samar had phoned. It had been five days—no, last Saturday it was—since. They’d spoken after nearly four months. Yet there was so much warmth in his voice when he spoke with Samar. What was the best thing about this equation? The fact that it could never fructify in to anything, perhaps. That brought immense pain and relief at once. Neither of them expected anything out of one and other. Not even a meeting. Samar talked nonsense, as usual, while he drove back home. He hadn’t found a girl to marry yet. It just doesn’t work out somehow, he had said. Angai had made fun of Samar’s advancing age. “You are way past your marriageable age—what other choice you have than marrying me!”

They had both laughed. No, he thought, that was the best thing about them. They did not take each other or themselves seriously. There was always an air of irreverence that wreathed them whenever they interacted with each other. Yet there was something so genuine about...

There had been a few others who had been uncommonly kind to him. They were ready to him indulge in all manners possible. But he felt it would be betrayal of sorts if he were to let them on. There was something that did not click. What was it, he wondered. There were many, yet there was none. Nothing. Blankness as blank as the page he kept staring at.

He had come to realise that he had a weakness for a peculiar combination of grace and gravitas. It was not physical beauty per se that he desired singularly. It was this odd mixture of elegance and gravitas that he kept trying to seek in one being after another.

Was that Shubh’s new display picture? Oh, yes it was he. Such cuteness! Did Angai just giggle? Or sigh? Shubh walked in Angai’s life three years late. Had Angai discovered Shubh three years ago, they would have been married by now, Angai was positive. He was everything Angai could have ever asked for. Everything and maybe more, but three years ago. The last three years stood between them as if three lifetimes. These three years made a radically new person out of Angai, so much so that Angai of three years ago would not recognise that of present, never mind like him. Why would then, Shubh, the pious and pristine vaishnav soul that he was, ever like Angai? Impulsively, Angai shared Shubh’s picture with a friend on whatsapp and appended tags such as #TheVaishnavGuy  #ThePerfectMatchThatCouldNeverBe

Some people have their favourite words. Words, too, have favourite people. Angai was Irony’s favourite person. What stood between Angai and happiness, if ever there was such a thing, was Angai himself. But he could not part with himself, now, could he? Of course not. How could he lie? Lie to his own soul...

Yet another my-top-ten-books post. Books had become something he had been obsessing over of late. That’s how it has always been. He has always had to have something to cling to; something to pin hopes to; something to make a show of; something to romanticise. Always! Different things over all these years—but the same tendency. He still did not have a top ten list...ironically.

Maybe writing about it would help, he thought. But when he sat to write, the cursor blinked. And blinked. He stared at the blank page. And then stared some more.

Catharsis

To understand (and appreciate?) why Angai decided to take as grave a step as killing her brother, one has to know a little about Angai in a way that very few people do.

Angai had turned rather aloof and stoic of late—even more so than was usual for her. She realised as much the other morning when a woman came begging as Angai’s auto halted at a traffic signal, and she did not even turn her face toward the poor woman—so absorbed was she in her musings. Her usual self would have sympathised and pitied the plight of the woman. But that morning she did not feel even a smidgen of sympathy as she saw the hapless woman walk away as soon as she figured out that nothing was going to come out of this exercise.

 Angai had become peevish too. Anything and everything would excite her temper: sweepers sweeping the roads just early in the morning when she went to gym (why do they have to sweep exactly when I pass by? Why is the whole world sweeping? Isn’t there a more sophisticated way of doing this? This is insane; they just displace the mound of dust from one place to another!); people littering the roads (why can’t they be taught BASIC civic sense!); the tropical climate of the country; people parking their cars on the roads thereby blocking traffic and causing inconvenience (shouldn’t they be fined!); the infamous load shedding of Delhi; people spitting all about on the roads (God! It’s like they have hyperactive salivary glands or something!).

Angai tried to contain it all within her. And let nothing seep out. But seep out, it did. The pressure. The pressure to look good; to weigh a certain pounds; to reach work on time; to work and work well; to ace the psychology course that she had undertaken after many arguments with her family; to know things from past that she must know (why did the world-wars happen?); to know things happening at the moment she must be aware of (what's the bone of contention between Israel and Palestine?) ; to save money for a future she could not seem to know (how to save tax?); to keep unwanted hair from growing all over her body; to keep hair on the head intact as they’d been showing a tendency to behave otherwise; to find herself a suitable match despite her growing weight and age; to write, for she held the art of writing in great reverence, but then, again, there was the pressure to write well!

She was doing everything right, and yet nothing seemed so.

 Time was rushing past. She could see her youth wither ever so gradually yet perceptibly. There were expectations. By now, she should have charted a path for herself—a path to what they call success. Everything should have been sorted by now. The execution was allowed to be pending, but the roadmap, nevertheless, should have been drawn by now. And here she was, clueless about the future. Still groping. Still hoping.

Her biological clock was ticking. She was past her “marriageable age”. She kept wondering if she could ever get to have a family of her own. And even if she did, she wondered, after having seen all that she had since such a young age, would it be worth the pain and effort that goes into sustaining one. 

As it is the wont of thoughts to hit you when you least want to be bothered by them, this thought hit Angai as she sat reading in the bus on her way to work. The reading had to pause. Uneasily, she put her book in her lap, using her thumb sandwiched between the leaves of the book to serve as a bookmark. She realised that her demeanour as a teacher had changed. What was the change exactly was difficult to point, but it could not be denied, she concluded. Her patience had dipped maybe. She would get visibly irked by an inane query made by a student. She was more patient and generous with them earlier. And more secure, which was surprising for she was quite a novice then. She did not even know her subject matter well, and yet there was certain kind of effervescence in her teaching and her presence in a class. She would breeze into a class and take it over like an actor who is extremely confident of her lines and role. She knew that the students would be as enthralled as an audience who have just witnessed prestidigitation of very fine kind. That had been missing of late. She would not take kindly to students who were tried getting into circuitous arguments only to prove a point or to test her wits.

In times such as these we look for villains—people who could be held responsible for all the mishaps of our lives. If we don’t find them, we create them to feel better about ourselves. There’s a certain kind of intoxication in victimhood; once you get used to it, it becomes impossible to part with it. She’d found her villain too. Her elder brother, Manik.

Manik had lost his right hand in a car accident while returning from a New Year party six years ago. They had lost their father at a very young age. “You were hardly two and your Manik da was ten, when baba passed away,” her mother would tell Angai in a tone infused with an uncanny sense of pride. After Manik’s handicap the entire responsibility of running the household had fallen on Angai and her mother.  From a very young age, Angai had seen her mother struggle without any help. She had begun to look too old for her age. The wrinkles on her face were imprints of all the adversities she had to bear to bring up her children. When Manik had landed up a job with a construction company, all the struggle that went into making him a civil engineer seemed to have paid off. But that state of the felicity of the Ghosh household was short-lived. On that chilly December night, Angai and Manik had gotten into a nasty squabble, for their mother disallowed Angai to attend a New Year’s bash while allowing Manik to do so. All her rhetorical plea championing gender equality had fallen on deaf ears. “Have you gone crazy, Angai? Dada’s case is different. You’re a girl. Who would be accountable, (God forbid) should something go wrong? Na baba! I can’t take such a risk. Now bother me no more, Angai, I am telling you!.”

The look that Angai shot at Manik was more chilling than that rimy, fateful night. For a moment, Manik’s face grew pale as he watched Angai slip quietly into her bed and turn in to a mound of blankets and quilts. The mound stirred in joggled and sobbed. The sobs grew fainter and fainter and finally dissolved into the darkness and quiet. 

The chilly silence that had encrusted the Ghosh household, like the frost that had adamantly settled on the glass windows, was broken by a ringing telephone at around five in the morning. The sound of the ringing telephone pierced through the darkness, alarming both the Ghosh women and forcing them to quit the comforting warmth of their respective beds. Mrs. Ghosh was the first one to make it to the phone. Angai studied her mother’s face intently; groggy as she was, she tried to gather as much as she could. She did not remember much about how her mother had reacted to the news of her brother’s accident that night, except for the yelp she had issued as she leaned on Angai for support. Next thing she remembers was waking up Mehrotra uncle from next door and rushing to the hospital in his car.

“A bunch of intoxicated youth, New Year’s eve, papaji’s car! What else could you expect, madamji?” said the policeman in a rehearsed and indifferent voice. “You must thank God your son is alive. Have you even seen the state of the car? Don’t even dare to, if you take my advice. Just thank God.”

 “The right hand needs to be severed if we want the infection to stop from spreading,” the doctor had said. “Or there may be risk to his life,” he added. His tone, though, had a touch of sympathy and concern.

 From that day onward, Manik’s life was never the same. The shock was to take another two months to sink in. He had to relinquish his job, and live the life of a dependant all over again, only in more than one sense of that word. The tragedy had reorganised the roles and positions of the Ghosh household. Although circumstances had forced him to assume a more a subservient role to the women in the household, his ego precluded him from acting as such.  The women, on the other hand, could not afford to make any such choices. They were forced to take charge and step out to keep the house running.  Following the footsteps of her mother, Angai, too, had taken up teaching as her profession along with pursuing a master’s degree. Having majored in Economics as an undergrad, she could tutor 11^th and 12^th grade students.

    

After coming home after a tiring day of work when Angai would sit down to watch T.V., she would fret over the film of dust that sat on the T.V. set. A bathroom fixture that has come off would remain as such unless she or her mother would act upon it. The fruit basket that she forgot to replenish would lie as such for days at end. An empty cup of tea would continue to sit on her table, because she forgot to put it in the sink as she was running late for work. Every morning when she and her mother would be rushing through their morning routines, she would see Manik sitting in the veranda with a morning daily splayed out in front of him and a cup of tea lying next to him, served dutifully by their mother. The sight would evoke a strange revulsion in her heart.

More than the lack of his contribution in discharging the duties of the household, Angai begrudged her brother’s sense of entitlement and lack of compunction. Quite to the contrary, Manik would create nuisance every now and then by bickering with neighbours or by demanding money which he would want to “invest” in stock market or with which he could buy his daily quota of cigarettes. Because taking of care of minor household chores would make him seem less of a man in his social circle, he would not care for such activities; and because he was physically incapable of taking up the responsibilities that were traditionally considered masculine, he was exempt from them.

Seeing her mother get up so early to prepare meals and rush to work day after day would tear her heart. Yet she knew that her own salary alone would not suffice to meet the needs and demands of the family. “If only Manik da was earning. We could have asked Ma to retire and just cook us delicious food,” she would frequently say to herself.

Mrs Ghosh was a plain woman with an equally plain understanding of the world. She would read the stoicism of Angai, but could not divine the cause of it. She could not be blamed.  She was not majoring in psychology after all. But she would, very often, find herself to be at the receiving end of Angai’s conniptions.  Angai could not communicate her anxieties to her mother, even if she wanted to, for she felt that Mrs Ghosh lacked the idiom in which such problems could be expressed or explained.

Though Angai held Manik culpable in her eyes for most of their woes, if not all, she never uttered a word to that effect to Manik. She would never speak to him about any other subjects than which could not be dispensed with. She would try to maintain both a virtual and physical remoteness from him, mostly, inadvertently. She could not use words as barbed as her mother sometimes uttered in a fit of fury, lest Manik da would feel hurt. She could not be confrontational even if she wanted to. Was this awe or traces of affinity or the proverbial “pull of the blood”? she was reluctant to admit.

The grudges she held against him seemed to sting her almost every other day, nevertheless. The resentment kept simmering beneath her stoic exterior;  informed by the thick tomes on human psychology, she deeply feared that the resentment might just erupt on some unfortunate day, and that, she anticipated, would be a wretched sight.

She had picked up this fancy word from one of her Psychology classes: ‘catharsis’.

“Catharsis is what I require. It’s a must!” she resolved one night. “I will have to kill him. Yes, that is what I will have to do. I want out of this mess. I will have to kill him.”

Saying these words to herself over and over, she rose from the bed and headed to procure the weapon to be used in this ghastly scheme. She reached her desk, and, with a smoothness which the gravest of criminals are naturally endowed with, opened the drawer. She put her hand inside to search for the weapon. There, ah! There it was! A fine steel gray Pierre Cardin pen.

Yes, Angai firmly believed in the cathartic power of art.

“I must write a story with a character modelled on Manik da, and then have that character killed!”

                                                                              

Happy Valentine's day, honey!

With her XII board exams about to start from about two weeks from now, Preeti could not have cared less about the Valentine’s day. Not that she was a nerd, but she knew her priorities well. Every night at around 11 pm, she would slip into the kitchen quietly to brew some tea for herself.  This would give her a break from her strenuous revision schedule, and would also help her flex her muscles a bit so that she could sit through an another four hour session. The hot cuppa was a reward too in the cold nights of February.

The weather had been quite erratic of late, though.

 Now warm, now cold. February was infamous for its mood swings— not very surprising for a month that celebrates Love, she thought as she entered the kitchen tonight. It was a soggy night. The drizzling hadn’t stopped since 9 pm.

Like every other night tonight, too, she would meticulously follow the same routine: one cup water, half-a-cup milk, two teaspoons of tea, three teaspoons of sugar, a dash of ginger, and a few Tulsi leaves if her mother hadn’t forgotten to pluck them for her before sunset. Adding all the ingredients at once to the pot, and placing the pot on mild flame, she would wait for the concoction to boil. As the concoction would brew, so would her thoughts. She would embark on a train of thoughts in those precious few minutes between the boils. The crest and trough of her thought-waves would rise and fall harmoniously with the rising and ebbing concoction.

The stove was placed right below the kitchen-window. The window was big and opened to a lane. From her kitchen she could easily see Naagar uncle’s flat in the building right across the lane. Oh, but Naagar uncle had passed away last year at around the same time. Now it was only his wife and daughter, Baani, who resided there.

She was a sweet girl, Baani. She would smile at Preeti whenever they would meet at the bus stop. She looked the studious types. But she’d been looking a little troubled lately. Preeti wondered why. Boyfriend issues? Could be. Last Valentine’s day Preeti was in a relationship too. It was sweet till it lasted, she smiled as she reminisced. Aakash was great. The image of his goofy smile brought a twinkle to Preeti’s eyes even now.  He smelled great too. He would text the lyrics of Preeti’s favourite songs to her every night before wishing her good night. How endearing she had found it then, and how silly she finds it now. No, but it was cute. Silly chap! She giggled in her head. He must be in Banglore now...

And the tea came to its first boil. Preeti lowered the flame.

Masi was supposed to go to Banglore for her treatment, too. When? This month, or the next? When will these elders start listening. If only Masi had followed her advice of abstaining from sugar for another month. But what did all the Preeti’s thick Biology books meant to Masi. Zilch!

 “I would have made my daughter a lawyer, Yogyata. With a family like ours, we could need one any time,” she would say every time she spoke with Preeti’s mother in her presence. “Doctery bhi theek hai, chalo!” she would add, shrugging her shoulders. She loved Preeti, though. And Preeti knew it. She was so close to Masi in her growing up years. She wished she could spend more time with her, but the problem...

Another boil.

This would be the last one, she decided.

The tiny granules of dried tea leaves danced fervently in the pot, and had lent a brilliant hue to the concoction by then. The aroma of ginger and Tulsi was energizing.

She again looked out of the window. The street light had gone out of commission. Must be another rain-induced short-circuit, she thought. The night was foggy and soggy. The darkness was dense enough to absorb all her nocturnal musings. The cold draft, that somehow managed to seep through the fine crevices of the window panes, accompanied by thunder made her want to go back to the warm comfort of her quilt. She looked into the pot expectantly, waiting for that final boil. It suddenly occurred to her that nobody had wished her-- not even her friends-- on Valentine’s day that year.

Yet.

She was anyway only 45 minutes away from the next day. Soon the clock would strike 12.

The realisation hit her sharply, and made her feel a little insecure.

Gosh...when did she start behaving like the other girls in her class, she thought as she shook her head dismissively.

She froze as she raised her head. With a wide grin on his pale and scarred face, Naagar uncle peered through the window from outside.

“You deserve to be wished too, Preeti. Happy Valentine’s day, honey!”

And the tea came to final boil...

Desiccated

It had been two years since He left Vrindavan. Diwali was two days away. She decides to write a letter to him. A monthly ritual.

 She begins writing thus:

Dearest,

The town is adorned like a bride.

I miss your presence by my side.

Why doesn’t the festivity animate me anymore?

Is this stoicism a fallout of betrayal?

Whose? Yours or Mine?

Or is it just a part of evolution?

The luminosity that drenches the houses and streets evades my heart.

Not even a jot of it can I feel touching me.

An uncanny darkness has settled in the heart. And it refuses to diffuse.

Every day is the same. So is every night.

Nothing seems to make sense without you.

How meaningless and dry it all is.

Such a powerful desiccant reason is.

You were my end and the means—the pivot of my very existence.

Everything seems disarrayed now. Vague and bland.

For whom do I preen?

Whom do I sing for?

They look at me with a cynical eye. Not their fault entirely.

I fail to understand their gaiety. They fail to understand mine.

She folds the letter neatly and steps out of the house, careful not to be seen. This letter, too, was to meet with the fate of every other she had been writing for the past two years.

Upon reaching the banks of Yamuna, with moist eyes, she kisses the letter and sets it adrift.