Beatrice and Virgil

By Yann Martel

I remember Martel’s Life of Pi as warm and whimsical. Beatrice and Virgil, his next novel is different – serious and allegorical, sometimes heavy and ponderous, very rarely touching.

Henry is a writer, much like Martel himself. He has written a fairly successful book but his next concept novel has run into trouble. Writing about the holocaust (because so few writers have actually tackled this epochal event) in a new way – with a novel and an essay bound in the same book, his publishers reject it as too radical, strange and unwieldy. Disillusioned, Henry moves to a new city with his wife, gives up writing for the time being, acts in a local theatre, takes music lessons and works in a chocolate shop. His life moves along on an even keel, with a dog, a cat and an upcoming baby. Until he meets up with a taxidermist who wants to share a play he has written with him. The play is called Beatrice and Virgil and is the heart of the novel. It is a Waiting for Godot with the lead characters being a donkey and a monkey, talking about the extermination of animals. The taxidermist shares the play with him chapter by chapter, and it takes little time for the reader to realize the extermination is actually a metaphor, something Beatrice and Virgil call ‘The Horrors’ and that this is not meant to be a straight forward story at all.

Beatrice and Virgil is interesting in a strange, unmoving way. It is obviously a writer’s Orwell-ian attempt at a powerful allegory. But this is not Animal Farm or 1984. There is little subtlety and very little finesse. Yet the attempt at the allegory itself evokes curiosity and carries the reader forward, stumbling through the chapters of the play, staying a bit more through Henry’s life and thoughts. The end of the book however is inexplicable. I have no idea why it was needed except to make clear that the allegory indeed was about the holocaust, if anyone had not got it by then.

All in all, I have to be less than enthusiastic about Martel’s new work.

In Search Of Guiding Principles

The Arundhati Roy article ‘Walking with the Comrades’ in Outlook and the subsequent rants against and for it online make for interesting reading. Roy goes into Dandakaranya as the personal guest of the Maoists and comes back with what is ostensibly an inside view of the rebels who constitute according to Manmohan Singh, ‘the gravest internal security threat’ to India. What it of course turns out to be is a nice piece of writing that is unabashedly one-sided in its view – definitely not good journalism by any stretch of the imagination. We know Arundhati Roy believes the country needs a revolution and here was an opportunity to show and tell the world the romance of the on-the-run, gun-toting, Che-like revolutionary. There is no questioning of the Maoist approach (terrifying in my view), no thinking through if Gandhian ways wouldn’t be better for the tribals and for the world at large. If I was not such a fan of Roy’s writing, I would have not bothered to go beyond the first page of the 10 page article, rubbishing it as leftist propaganda.

But this is not a critique of the article. Reading it gave me pause. It was obvious which way Roy’s sympathies lay. She has in the past been critical of Indian democracy, the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, corporate greed. She sees herself, to paraphrase her brilliant and only piece of fiction, as the god of small things – fighting for the little, unknown, defenseless people, against powerful governments and big companies. Vedanta and Chidambaram are evil; out to strip and cheat the tribals of everything they value. Just as America is an imperialistic power out to establish its hegemony in the world. And there are no two ways about it.

What does it take for someone to completely believe? In a political theory or an economic one, in god, in an after-life, in the supremacy of a race or gender. To believe that something is absolutely right and the opposite is plain wrong. Like Arundhati Roy and her anti-big dam stance…or Gandhi and his non-violence…or Bush and his war on terror…or my cousin and his ‘the free market is the answer to everything’ theory…

I think that to truly believe in something, you need to be blind to a lot else. To believe in the Maoists, you need to be blind to the historical inhumanity that political theory has engendered in the twentieth century (and possibly in Dandakaranya itself, among the children forced to become soldiers). To believe in capitalism and Adam Smith, you need to be blind to its consequences on Roy’s ‘small things’. To believe in god, you need to blind yourself to everything that disproves its existence (Dawkins excellent book, for example). To believe in the absolute rightness and strength of non-violence, you need to be blind to the existence of pure evil (wonder if satyagraha could have been a weapon against Hitler).

Because there will always be individual circumstances that can put paid to belief. Is America’s free market system conducive to India’s growth challenges? Can Dawkin’s certainty about the non-existence of god explain the solace religion can bring to desperation?

I struggle with forming strong points of view – about religion, politics, economics, even about people. And I am sometimes repulsed by others who form them easily and with such certitude. There are some personal absolutes I can live by – truth and honesty, positivity and hope, an equal world for all, compassion, an absence of hatred, a respect for life, any life. But beyond that, what could be the absolutes? Theories – political, economic, social, religious – are just thought through opinions. Not a one-size fits all answer, but frameworks which will need to be moulded to individual circumstances.

If there is one belief I think the world would be better off living with, it is this: an acknowledgement that there could be different ways to reach the same goal, and that yours is a choice you make without ever being blinded to the others on the table; that while you give your all to that choice, there is always a recognition that a course correction or a modification might be required, that your choice might prove to be the wrong one and that you should learn as you go along. And along the way, the only absolutes you adhere to are a commitment to humanity and human rights, a hatred of any kind of hatred, and a lack of cynicism.

Is it too middle-of-the-road to be interesting? Is the lack of sharp edges smacking too much of compromise? Maybe. But do I believe the world will be a better place without the kind of polarization and uncompromising stances taken today? I do. Strongly and firmly. The Arundhati Roys have a place in this world. They paint one side of the picture. An extremely important side; yet it is but one side. There has to be a recognition of the other – a choice of democracy and peaceful resistance; of activism within the boundaries of law. It is a choice we made as a nation 60 odd years back. And we keep at it, while hearing and taking into account what Roy is saying…acknowledging that there are a lot of things that need to be corrected, understanding that what we call progress might not translate well to the people most affected, that a few cannot be sacrificed for the good of the many. There are always two sides to a story.

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle

By Hariko Murakami

Murakami continues to fascinate. His style of straight forward telling of stories that border on the absolute bizarre is addictive. Yet even for someone used to Murakami’s strange mix of fantasy and realism, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle is an exercise in eccentricity.

Toru Okada is the hero and as most of Murakami’s heroes tend to be, he is blandly normal and quite a loser as the book starts out. Out of work, Toru Okada sits at home, cooking pasta and listening to music while waiting for his editor-wife to come home. Then strange things begin to happen, disturbing this idyll. First his cat Noboru Wataya, named after his wife’s brother, whom they dislike, disappears (disappearing cats seem to be a big thing with Murakami – there are so many scattered across his various books). Then the parade of strange women starts. Malta Kano and her sister Creta Kano appear in his life; Malta, a woman with some kind of psychic abilities is sent by his wife to find their cat; she in turn introduces him to her sister Creta Kano. Toru ends up having sex with Creta in his head (don’t ask me how, but they do!) and later in real life too. But then his wife disappears…ostensibly with another man, but he has no way of knowing if it is really true. If disappearing cats and wives weren’t enough, there is a teenage neighbor May Kasahara, a school drop-out who earns pocket money by doing a part time job counting bald men in the city for a wig company. May gets close to Toru, calling him the Wind-up man (a reference to a bird whose cry foretells doom), takes him bald-men-counting with her and by the middle of the book she has disappeared from the neighbourhood too. But we know where she goes – to the wig company’s factory in the hills where she is making wigs in an assembly line. We know her story through the letters she writes to Toru from there (letters that the reader gets to read but not Toru himself). In the meantime, there is a neighbourhood house that is lying vacant because bad things happen to its owners. There is a dry well there into whose depths Toru climbs down to think. And in one of those well sorties, he has a strange dream or out of body experience from which he emerges with a bluish mark on his cheek and a power to heal troubled people. Which leads him to Nutmeg and her son Cinnamon (their real names are never revealed to him). The Nutmeg and Cinnamon story is yet another adventure in this surreal Toru world.

For the first time in a Murakami, I find Japan and Japanese history. Normally the only things Japanese in his books are the names of the characters and places and the weirdness of the situations (that somehow feels Japanese!). Japan’s aggressive adventures in Manchuria and Mongolia in WW II form a backdrop to two sub-plots within the book. These sub-plots with Lt. Mamiya in one and Nutmeg’s vet father in another are real war stories, horrific and wrenching; where a man is skinned alive and all the wild animals in a zoo are killed. The juxtaposition of these anguished tales with the fantastical journeys of Toru can be quite ‘messing with your mind’ variety. The connections of these sub plots with Toru’s main story are quite tenuous and it is possible to read these as quite separate from the main one.

At 600 and more pages, this is a massive and ambitious book. And there is no tidy tying of the different threads of the story. Noboru Wataya is the unscrupulous politician and the villain of the piece, messing with Creta and his own sisters… but the full nature of his evil is never explained. We know where Toru’s wife ends up finally, the cat does come back…but Malta and Creta disappear without explanation and we still are no closer to understanding why all these different threads were brought together in the story.

But if you like Murakami and his brand of surreal and fairy-tale like stories, this is a great way to spend a long weekend. In the mundane everydayness, you sometimes need to get into your own personal well to create that strange imaginary world all your own.

Six Sentences

The body is giving way rapidly. That kilo does not disappear with a couple of missed meals and stress. Half an hour on the treadmill is a marathon. Sleeveless needs careful consideration. The grey is definitely more than the black. Death is the next stop.

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Remember the feeling. The very first thought as you wake up. And the last one before your mind shuts down for the day. The reason you drag yourself to places you don’t want to go. The near-constant presence in your head through the day. Obsession.

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Do you care for a short walk on the wild side? A wee touch of bohemia? Some unexpected spontaneity? A little less restraint? A bit more cleavage or leg perhaps? Or a line of cocaine?

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You feel yourself getting harder. More impatient with random foolishness. Less inclined to give anyone the benefit of doubt. Uncomfortable with anything out of sync. Every moment needs to be counted and there is no time to sit and waffle. Even if the time deserves a little waffling.

Love and Longing

As I grow older, it’s interesting to see how my little-girl fascination for enduring love stories has shown little signs of fading. Some of my favourite movies and books are still about love – unrequited passion, can’t stay away from each other obsessions, illicit love.

Here are some love stories I have come to love over the years – they are the ones I remember at this point in time and are in no particular order.

• Heathcliff and Catherine in Wuthering Heights: Heathcliff’s obsession with his Catherine proves detrimental to all around him. Yet there is something that is primal and raw and fundamental about his ardour. Bad Love.

• Elizabeth and Darcy in Pride and Prejudice: I like all of Jane Austen, but Darcy and Elizabeth are special and enduring. It is a classic rich guy, not-so-rich girl plot… but Elizabeth is so feisty and Darcy so vulnerable, you cannot help falling in love with them.

• Yuri and Lara in Dr. Zhivago: The novel has other merits – telling a personal story of idealism and courage in a time of great historic change, bringing alive the Russian revolution, capturing the beauty of Russia in a way I have not seen before. But for me the lasting impression is of Yuri and his Lara – doomed love in the time of revolution. Poetry adds that extra bit (so do Omar Sharif and Julie Christie in the movie)

• Vicomte de Valmont and Madame de Tourvel in Dangerous Liaisons: Here I am talking of the movie, not the 18th century epistolary novel on which it is based (and which I have not read). Malkovitch was brilliant as the wolf set to seduce Michelle Pfeiffer, the innocent lamb, and losing his heart and his life in the process. Cruel Intentions, the adaptation set in New York with Ryan Philippe and Reese Witherspoon was not bad as far as adaptations go.

• Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind: Rhett’s famous last words to Scarlett were a heart breaker – ‘Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn’. Not when Scarlett had just about realized after 600 or so pages that she had feelings for him.

• Cecilia and Robbie in Atonement: Beautiful, tragic, utterly magical.

• Jesse and Celine in Before Sunrise/ Before Sunset: A perfect example of interesting conversations leading to crackling sexual tension. There comes a time when you want them to just shut up and kiss or make love. In those beautiful European cities.

• Arvind Swamy’s Shekhar and Manisha Koirala’s Shaila Bano in Mani Ratnam’s Bombay: Forbidden, inter-religious, impossible love. Mani Ratnam has a special knack for creating achingly beautiful and unusual love stories – Dil Se, Yuva, Mouna Ragam… the list is long.

• Harry and Sally in When Harry met Sally: Another of those postponed love stories; when everyone, but them, knows they are meant for each other.

• Jennifer and Oliver in Erich Segal’s Love Story: After all these years, it can tug at my heartstrings (and make me cry) in a way few books can. ‘What can you say about a 25 year old girl who died? That she loved Mozart and Bach. And the Beatles. And me.’ I can still remember those first few lines!

• Karen and Denys in Out of Africa: The beauty of Africa offsets this outsized romance – love out in the wild. Redford and Streep had a chemistry that felt tangibly real.

Each of them has a searingly aching magical quality to it. Some end well, most do not. Which is why, in the case of love stories, I believe the best ones are ones where ‘all is not well’.

2010

More books, more movies, more travel, more writing, more cooking, more learning, more listening, more exercising, more smiling, more reaching out, more generosity, more abundance, more inner life, more new, more family, more calm.

Curfewed Night

Basharat Peer

In many ways, this is a disconcerting book. Kashmir is never an easy subject for us Indians. All nations have events in their history they are never proud of. We have a sneaking suspicion Kashmir is one such issue for us. Basharat Peer takes us right to the heart of it and suddenly we feel like we have nowhere to hide.

Peer is a journalist, born and brought up in Kashmir, growing up at the height of the insurgency. He moves out of his native land to study in Aligarh Muslim University and later study and work in Delhi. Yet he can never forget his roots. Kashmir draws him back to tell its story that surprisingly has never been told before.

Peer describes a land of incomparable beauty – lakes and mountains and fields that have drawn invaders and tourists alike for centuries. A land that has been torn apart by two nations fighting over it, both not wanting to give up its magic to each other or to the Kashmiris themselves. He writes of resentment against the Indian army and its paramilitary forces, a stern, scary presence that has become part of everyday Kashmiri life; of antipathy towards India who is never more than an external force; of bitterness against a fight that has sucked away the best young men of an entire generation. There are events described that are hard to digest for any liberal minded Indian – the rape of a young bride by Indian paramilitary forces, the terrible torture chamber of Papa 2, the genocide at Gawkadal Bridge. And there is the other side; of a militancy that has moved from being a home-grown freedom struggle to something more akin to the global Islamic jihad; of an Islam that has changed form from a tolerant Sufi version to a far more radical one; from a population now as afraid of the freedom fighters as the Indian forces.

Curfewed Night provides quite a stunning viewpoint of a local Kashmiri caught in the crossfire. As a liberal minded Indian I was horrified at the harsh reality of Indian forces in Kashmir; of being seen as an occupying force; of the futility of trying to hold on to a land that never really wanted to be part of you. Yet there was anger too… at Peer and his friends cheering for Miandad’s last ball six off Chetan Sharma (arguably the most humiliating defeat India ever suffered), at Peer’s cool acceptance of Indian hospitality at Aligarh and Delhi universities and yet never acknowledging India as his nation too, at making the Pandits’ exodus from Kashmir just a footnote in the valley’s trauma. But Peer is persuasive enough to make the horror of the military cruelty far outweigh the anger against the anti-Indian sentiment.

One only wishes Peer was a better writer. His obvious subjectivity and experiential narrative is imbued with heightened emotion. Yet he never manages what Arundhati Roy so effortlessly does – intensify the passion with the magic of her language. Curfewed Night is worth reading because it is a story that deserves telling, and because it has not been told before. Read it as a good piece of subjective journalism. If you are looking for literature on the same subject, you are better off reading Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown. The Kashmir experience definitely needs a better storyteller.