The 3 am blues

Made myself a promise before I got to Bombay: "Babu," I sez, "you may do many things in Bombay. You may get onto the wrong trains (did that). You may fall out of a taxi in Bandra (ditto). You may even dance on tables (on the to-do list) singing obscene Bengali songs (did that already). But promise me you will not buy more books. Delhi has a Crossword, a Bookshop, a Bookworm, a Sunday bazaar, a... it has books, okay? What you have on the other hand is four cartons of books, unpacked, because there are no cupboards to put them into. Your last house guest left when you suggested he might want to exchange the pullout divan for a couch built on books (imagine a pillow constructed of Murakami, Joyce, Gibson, Proulx, with a little Jasper Fforde and George Macdonald Fraser added for padding). Ergo, no books. Please?"

The Babu promised. But then, and then. Crossword had books on discount. Strand, which he promised dutifully not to visit, not after his last visit there ended in those distressing Bankrupts Anonymous meetings, did the dirty on him. He still hasn't visited Strand the bookshop; but he's showed up every day, for the last three days, for the annual Strand sale, held at another venue. And let us not speak of the pavement bookstores near Flora Fountain, of Lotus in its debased, inside-the-petrol-pump avatar which yielded three great buys all the same.

What the Babu needs now is a bag. To contain all the books, ranging from Pete Singer to Rilke to Potocki to etcetera that he's bought, against his will. What's happening here has more in common with addiction than dry literary appreciation: he has joined the ranks of People Who Can't Help Buying Books. If they have money--anyone's money--and they pass a bookstore, they cannot help themselves, little Arun will have to manage without his crutches, so sad.

Some day, the Babu dreams of owning a self-editing library. This paragon of inventions would automatically sort through your books and eliminate the ones too dog-eared, too sellotaped to read any more, while saving the ones that are of deeply emotional importance, such as the first book you read alongside your first love on a football field, now fallen to bits, but each page marked with grass stains, entombed bugs, chocolate. It would tactfully send to the Graveyard of Remainders all the books that turned out to be Mistakes: the ones by authors you loved who had inexplicable periods of bad writing caused by gastric upsets, the ones gifted by well-meaning friends who had no real idea of your tastes, the ones you thought were brilliant at 17 and winced, at 40, to own up to having read at all. The self-editing library would retain copies of Ghost Books: the ones you don't read much any more, but that would materialise upon being summoned when required. It would compress the books read only seldom into a single shelf; it would expand, to giant coffee table size, the books you need to read, right now, but that you'd put aside.

Instead, what the Babu has is a new bag. And a lot of explaining to do to the partner about why we suddenly need seven new book cupboards instead of just two more.

The X-Files

The Babu was in Bombay during the Hutch Crossword Book Awards, and had a most entertaining time, even though he had to put on fancy dress for the occasion. Here's what he noted:

1) Aruna Sairam, Carnatic music diva, and Ella Fitzgerald, jazz icon, would've had a lot in common. Remember Ella's scat singing on Mack the Knife? At the ceremony, Sairam topped that with a tribute to language and the spoken word done in rap time that the audience should've got up and danced to.

2) Delhi audiences and Bombay audiences are different. In Bombay, people actually SWITCH OFF their cellphones when they know book readings and baul singers and judges' citations will be taking up mike time. In Delhi, we listen to Rushdie and Peter Carey and the like in between soundbytes: "So I said, but ji, if we do the drawing room in maroon then the new Broota painting you bought will clash ji and he said okay what about royal blue that'll go na?"

3) Delhi audiences and Bombay audiences are VERY different. Faced with a three-hour awards ceremony that includes readings from all the shortlisted books (ten, at roughly five minutes each); a great performance from Sairam (see above); and an emotional baul singer (10 minutes to sing, 5 to wipe away tears brought forth by mere memory of Lalon Foqir); not to mention the speeches; well, the Dilliwala drops in for the first half hour and then disappears to attend a farmhouse (pronounciation: foam-haarse) party. The good souls in Bombay sneak out to a nearby bar-and-restaurant but return--duly fortified--every so often to lend support and check if the damn ceremony's finished yet.

4) In the Indian context, writers who might win awards but don't know for sure stay away for fear of... Ebola contamination by the failure virus? I have no idea. The buggers just don't show up, while their publishers drop broad hints to the organisers: "You see, sir is a big-big author, it will look soooo bad if s/he comes but doesn't win, kya karey, now if you can give any indication we can organise a flight from Outer Mongolia, it is just that, what s/he will say to cameras if Prize Goes Elsewhere?"

5) One exception to that was Professor Chandrasekhar Rath, who showed up for the ceremony despite having, as he confessed, an idea that against stalwarts like Mahasweta Debi, he would have only a "20 per cent, no make that five" chance of winning. He and J P Nayak, the translator of Astride the Wheel, winnah in the Indian Fiction in Translation category, were jubilant. You have no idea, both said, how much this means. Recognition. A new audience for the book. A sense that the years both spent on the book, in writing and in transferring that writing to another language, had paid off. Please note, says the Babu sourly, that in all the debate over the Hegemony of English over Other Indian Languages, no one thinks to ask why English is the only language that has a mainstream prize for works in translation. Bangla doesn't have a prize for works translated into Bangla. Malayalam has nothing for writers whose works have been translated into that language. Likewise Marathi, Gujarati and the entire lot of Indian languages other than English. Someone remind me of this the next time I hear a rant about how English hogs all the attention, okay?

6) Amitav Ghosh, who won the English Fiction award, was duly emotional, even though he hadn't been able to come for the final night--he was in conversation with Gunter Grass in Calcutta, which is as good an excuse as anyone needs. Ghosh had been shortlisted for the Crossword once before, for The Glass Palace, but had lost out to Jamyang Norbu. One hears, however, that the only serious competition The Hungry Tide had this year was from I Allan Sealy's The Brainfever Bird. Sealy showed up for the award ceremony most sportingly. The reading from Brainfever, a virtuoso performance by Rehan Engineer (damn, misspelled the man's name first time around, and forgot to mention that the other actors who did readings--Kittu, Avantika, Ashwin--were pretty brilliant), had the audience completely transfixed. Sealy's won the Crossword earlier, for The Everest Hotel, and has a taste for Borges' poetry.

7) "The weather might be cold," we were warned. So we sallied forth with shawls, sweaters, even the traditional monkey cap. Only to discover, after Delhi's distinctly Muscovian temperatures, that Bombay is what we capitalwallahs would classify as gently pleasant. People dived for cover when there was a brief spatter of rain; people brought out the warm coats when there was the merest hint of a sharp nip. We, steeled by Delhi's fog, mist, sleet and general miserable weather in January, laughed sharply, donated the monkey cap and strode with confidence into the midst of shivering dinner guests after the awards ceremony.

8) And who did we meet? Ah, that would be telling. Let it be known that the Babu had a wonderful time. He was taken off to lunch by a kindly friend who showed him Goan and Gujarati Mumbai; he was gently praised by Shyam Benegal and Mrs Benegal, for obscure reasons; he met a film director who once worked as a chef; he hung out with Peter Griffin, who introduced him to tons of fascinating people and kept a paternal eye on him; and he ate Far Too Many Prawns. Burp.

Amitav Ghosh: the tsunami essay

Caught up with this at Amardeep's blog. Amitav Ghosh went to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands just after the devastation; he wrote a three-part article for The Hindu about what he found.
In Part One, Overlapping Faults, he makes the point that:
"Over the last two weeks, both the fault lines that underlie the islands seem suddenly to have been set in motion: it is as if the hurried history of an emergent nation had collided here with the deep time of geology."
In Part Two, No Aid Needed, he stumbled across a man whom he calls just The Director, who was looking for survivors from his family.
In Part Three, The Town By The Sea, he and the Director find nothing but rubble, the detritus of a life; no survivors, except for the Director's son, who had called him earlier to tell him of the enormity of the loss.
"I had imagined that his possessions had ended up in the same place because his house was nearby: this was an indication of how little I understood of the power of the surge. Its strength was such that it had tossed the Director's house aside, picked up his household goods, bundled them together and punched them through a kilometre-wide expanse of dense habitation...."
"...I stood amazed as he walked off towards the blazing fire, with his slides still folded in his grip: how was it possible that the only memento he had chosen to retrieve were those magnified images? As a husband, a father, a human being, it was impossible not to wonder: what would I have done? what would I have felt? what would I have chosen to keep of the past? The truth is that nobody can know, except in the extremity of that moment, and then the choice is not a choice at all, but an expression of the innermost sovereignty of the self, which decides because nothing now remains to cloud its vision."

The greatest story ever retold

Shashi Tharoor has been re-assessing the Mahabharata, which he used as the foundation for his The Great Indian Novel:
"Whenever a particular social or political message was sought to be imparted to Indians at large, it was simply inserted into a retelling of the Mahabharata."
In the next part of his column, he writes:
"Which brings me to my point: the Mahabharata is what you make of it. Its relevance to today's India is the relevance that today's Indians want to see in it. After all, the epic has, throughout the ages, been the object of adaptation, interpolation, reinterpretation and expurgation by a number of retellers, each seeking to reflect what he saw as relevant to his time. Its contemporary retellings — whether B.R. Chopra's soap operatic version on television or mine in satirical fiction — merely confirm the Mahabharata's traditional status as the repository of the national myth."

The Tiger Claw

The good thing about being offline, without a working television set and having no operational phones while shifting house is that you catch up with your reading in an atmosphere of peace and quiet, only occasionally interrupted by cats leaping gracefully out of packing cartons. (One of our cats is a kleptomaniac who took full advantage of the chaos of packing to steal the old house keys, the new house keys, masking tape, a Pat Boone cassette that some guest left behind and various unmentionables. Also a miniature bottle of Glenmorangie, which was empty when we recovered it from him. He looked sort of blissful and happy for the next 24 hours.)
Caught up with Shauna Singh Baldwin's The Tiger Claw, her attempt to recover the story of Noor Inayat Khan, who was part of British intelligence and the French resistance during World War II. "Her story is fascinating. She has been orientalized, eroticized, glorified, blamed. It’s kind of like Joan of Arc: 450 books written about her and then someone writes the 451st because the facts are so interesting," says the author in this interview. The book's received good reviews in India, but its publication history has been strangely fraught, considering that Singh Baldwin did well with her first novel, What The Body Remembers, and that The Tiger Claw was nominated for Canada's Giller Prize.
In the same interview, SEE magazine comments, "Canada is one of the few places to make Singh Baldwin’s latest work readily accessible. Publishers in the US and UK won’t touch it. She says she knows the reason why. Though it’s a true story with a WWII setting, The Tiger Claw is a criticism of imperial powers through the eyes of a Muslim heroine. Without intending to do so, she has written a commentary on our times; Singh Baldwin is candid when she laments that the issues most deserving of discussion at this time are those least likely to receive it."
The Babu was initially sceptical; The Tiger Claw's advance publicity made it sound like just another shlock historical melodrama. But Singh Baldwin goes deep into Noor Inayat Khan's story to produce an extremely subversive reading of WWII's legends. And she's resisted the temptation to go for baroque; this is a straight tale, straightforwardly told.

Gagged but not bound

I'm not sure what you think of John Sutherland, this year's chairman of the Booker panel. All I know is that he's manna from heaven to book reporters. He's "an inaccurate and impenitent leaker of panel discussions", "incredibly indiscreet", and he's been voluntarily "gagged". The muzzle slipped, though; he is now ranting about Penguin. Specifically, about Penguin not sending his bally book to Waterstones.

At last, a book award I like

The Morning News launches The Tournament of Books (inhouse slogan: "See bright young things crushed!") Some of my favourite lit bloggers are judging this one. The winner will get The Rooster, the lit world's version of the Oscar, with a twist:
"We have looked into shipping a live rooster to the winner. We are still looking."
If they want a red rooster, come to the Babu's new house. There's a horrible specimen down the road that goes Cucuru...at 5 am and delivers the final "cu" about fifteen minutes later. Exactly five minutes after he finishes his morning raga, the local tomcats strike up the band.
Wanted, by the Babu, chicken soup and sleep. Approximately in that order.

Through a mirror darkly

The Babu isn't sure he likes being written about, being a nervous, shy, wilting wallflower in real life. On the other hand, it's kinda nice being called "dashing" and learning that I offer cyberspace's equivalent of an adda (self-contained and indulgent, damn right it's both!).
Enough about me. Hung out with a few blogger friends one evening at the new abode; Samit, Jabberwock, Peter Multifaceted Griffin, Putu. The Marginalien didn't show, but since she'd trotted around before we moved house and thoughtfully brought biscuits for all (the Babu is open to biscuit bribery, also cake) she's forgiven. All of us were duly eclipsed by Ruchir Joshi who was In Form and How. But a few notes: my cats, faced with Putu the Cat and Jai Arjun The Cat Lover, indicated that both were welcome to return any time they wanted to. Jai and Samit are frighteningly Bright Young Men, so Young Turkish in their mien that they made the Babu feel like the Old Turkey he is. And they have to come back soon so that the Babu can get over the mortification of making everyone drink rum and whisky from (heavens above) plastic glasses. (Couldn't find the glass glasses. They were in a crate marked Curtains. So much for my wonderful sense of organisation.)
The Griff, meanwhile, was great to have around. He began by doing good--his response to the tsunami crisis was to set up a blog called Tsunami Help which became the central forum for disaster relief, much to his surprise, the Griff being as modest as they come. Watched him in awe as he and a bunch of really cool people went about the task of streamlining Tsunami Help, moderating angst-ridden volunteers and putting up posts endlessly. At one point, when the house was swarming with photographers and the phones were ringing off the hook with reporters from the BBC, American media and the Indian press wanting to interview Griff, I asked him whether he wasn't proud of what he and his friends had accomplished. He said he was taken aback at how fast Tsunami Help had grown and at how many people willingly put their lives on hold in order to help out. But, he added, he had never wanted to make his reputation "on the back of someone else's misery". For him, it was simple: he wanted to help. He wasn't in a position to hop on a train and do relief work on the ground, so he did what he could--and when it grew to a worldwide movement, he did his best to grow with it. And he did.
In between, he helped the Babu and partner pack up house, shift, and unpack. Now you know why we think of him as one of nature's sweethearts.
So we were delighted to hear that he'd won the Orange-Crossword SMS Poetry Competition with this SMS haiku:

"cellular creature
now part of my D.N.A.
gladden my heart: beep."

Taking the Indian setting for granted

From Githa Hariharan's tribute to the late Shama Futehally in The Kolkata Telegraph:
"Shama’s commitment to writing was made when she “felt part of the human family”. This sense of being part of a family included her sense of location in the larger family of Indian writers; Shama wanted to share what she perceived as the natural perspective of those who write in the other Indian languages. Such a perspective, she felt, would help take the Indian setting “for granted”, not explain India, either as a glossary or a well-written tourist brochure, to a hypothetical foreign reader."
In The Hindu, Shashi Deshpande writes:
"Shama came from a privileged background and both her novels reveal some of her discomfort about this. But I think she was learning to accept what she was and where she came from — the first step for a writer. I have a feeling that the next step — of breaking free — would have soon happened. She was on the cusp of change; the play and her translations of poetry from Hindi and Urdu were indications of this change. She was a "golden child", her father said, one who did nothing wrong — except dying at the age of 52. The wrong time for a wife, a mother or a daughter to die. The wrong time for a writer too, for so much, the best maybe, is still to come."

The Crossword awards...

...will be announced later this week. They're officially the Hutch Crossword Book Awards now, which The Complete Review thinks is hands down the worst name for a literary award ever. (Lit Saloon guys, you have no idea. In my misspent youth, I once won an award entitled the Good Reading and Happy Writing Urge to Upcoming Authors--a so-called friend entered a poem on my behalf, but on the positive side of things, it was worth two plates of bhelpuri.) Anyway, my Bengali brethren are being duly chauvinist about the shortlists.

The nominees for English Fiction are:
Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide
Raj Kamal Jha, If You Are Afraid of Heights
I. Allan Sealy, The Brainfever Bird
Shashi Deshpande, Moving On

The nominees for Indian Fiction in Translation are:
Chandrasekhar Rathi, Astride the Wheel
Mahasweta Devi, for two books—Bait and In the Name of the Mother
Bani Basu, Birth of the Maitreya
Sharankumar Limbale, The Outcast
Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay, Waiting for Rain

If you're an Indian writer writing in India, however, the three-lakh booty attached to the Crossword might be the only silver lining on your horizon. In a burst of candour, Doubleday's Jane Lawson told a local reporter that "the Indian novel written by Indians living in India is slightly out of fashion." Go West or perish. Oh, and exotica is out. Multiculturalism is in. The Babu is thrilled to his frickin' marrow.

Honey, I'm Home

While I was out, the blogalaxy was buzzing. Moorish Girl is with book (I'm the last to do this, but congratulations, Laila, may the force be with you etc), Ed Rants and Sepia Mutiny reported on the pathetic racist radio jockeys who abused the hell out of a call centre worker who can't talk back--and got shut down for his pains because so many people dropped in at his site. TEV, Maud and various others got into a wingding over a case of plagiarism that was or wasn't. Indian bloggers (pinched this off Jai, as usual) discovered a foul plagiarist in their midst (hey, we're worthy of being ripped off? Good on us!).
And I unpacked 54 cartons of books. There are four more to go, but there's no more space. Except in the fridge and I've been looking at those nice, wide, deep shelves and thinking this is Delhi, in the winter, who needs a fridge anyway?

Rukavat Ke Liye Khed Hai

...Kitabkhana may be back up this weekend, depending on the generosity of Delhi-s stone-hearted linesmen. Until then, this is what the Babu is doing:
1)unpacking cartons and cartons and bloody endless cartons of books that he packed up just a few weeks ago. This is a bit like carefully giftwrapping your own presents a week before Xmas and making surprised ooh-aah noises on Baby Jesus' birthday when you open them.
2) trying to figure out why he has been carting, from one rented house to another for the better part of a decade, ugly crystal swans that look like ostriches, eight casserole lids, dishes missing, and some old shoes that he thinks belonged to the owner of the first house he ever rented. (Judging by the shoes, the owner was a giant with serious fungal issues and a habit of depositing snot--we hope it was snot--on the soles of said footwear.)
3) meeting Putu the Cat, Jabberwock and the Griffin and reflecting smugly that he is technically the only Human among this gang of strange creatures.
4) reading Tokyo Cancelled with increasing admiration, and Vikas Swarup's Q&A with just the opposite.
5) and sitting in a cybercafe done up in hostel-toilet blue walls, Kali calendars and plastic hibiscuses (hibisci? someone enlighten me) wondering why he always manages to get the machine that's totally screwed because some pervert downloaded all too freely from porn sites without figuring that they dump spyware in bucketloads on creeps. Especially stupid creeps.

The Babu needs to leave now. He has just realised that the purple plastic hibiscus garlands above his computer are equipped with miniature lime green lightbulbs shaped like stamens, and that the owner of the cybercafe intends to switch them on now. He intends to not be here to see what lime-green, red and purple look like against the background of blue walls already illuminated by dubious tubelights. Until Saturday, go read Don Quixote. It's the man of La Mancha's four hundredth anniversary this week.

Good on yer!

The Denver Post pays homage to litbloggers, including some of our personal faves:
"In their energy and occasional outrageousness, the blogs recall the golden age of literary magazines in the '60s, when at least one in Madison, Wis., was printed on paper stolen from a school English Department, run off on a mimeograph machine in a garage and handed out free. Today's literary magazines, like their editors, have become in many cases middle-aged and comfortable, more taken up with fundraising than publishing cutting-edge fiction and poetry.
This could hardly be said of the blogs, which are anything but sedate."
Mimeograph machines, oh my. The Babu's partner used the official school machine to publish a scintillating chronicle of teenage angst, exuberance and need which went by the original monicker of Humphaven. It sold at a price about ten times as much as the official school magazine, and the partner can still be transported back into the joys of young lust and acne at the mere whiff of printer's ink.

The Radclyffe Hall affair

75 years after the British government made secret plans to arrest Radclyffe Hall for "corrupting the young", the documents in the case have been released. My favourite story about the lesbian author concerns the incomparable Sam Goldwyne. Told that he couldn't film The Well of Loneliness because it was about lesbianism, he found a solution: "All right, where they got lesbians, we'll put Austrians."
For obvious reasons, that's high on my list of Films Never Made That I Absolutely Must See.

And William Burroughs was inspired by Louisa May Alcott

Without comment:
"Irvine Welsh, whose portrayals of drug addiction, petty crime, hooliganism and pornography made him a cult author, has cited the genteel world of Jane Austen’s fiction as a major influence on his work."
She would have been consumed with transports of joy.

Goldie Yawn

In which publishing officially goes to the dogs. If it wasn't enough that Dean Koontz is going through a particularly productive phase (his books are to airport literature what airport food is to fine cuisine), now it's him and his little dog too. The memoirs of Trixie Koontz, golden retriever, were edited by Dean. It doesn't get more saccharine than this.