The week that was #1

Autumn doesn’t show up where I stay. It is just a mild summer. No browns, reds or oranges. I am mostly in bed these days, exhausted, because my body is making a tiny human. I try to invoke an autumnal aura by pulling down the window shades to filter in a soft honey light. And by vegetating in front of a Gilmore Girls binge watch. And daydream about talking to my child.

I read Janice Pariat’s book of short stories, ‘Boats on Land’. It was a real pleasure. It offers up an engaging mix of hills, sprawling tea-estates, mists, folklore, incessant rain, lives of people in places where nothing much happens, displacement, forbidden feelings, wistfulness, fragile hopes, and so much more. I read it this weekend, and have finally broken the reading slump I found myself in the past few weeks.

An assamese lunch has become a ritual every Sunday, a welcome break for me in a week of paneer, dosa, sambar, pasta etc. I take out the brass metal plates and bowls my parents gave me the last time I was home. My husband buys fish the evening before. We fry the Rohu pieces and later dunk them in a mustard gravy. The green chillies are from the garden. There is masoor dal with a generous sprinkling of squeezed lemon juice (unfortunately one-third the size of the ones found in Assam). Mashed or fried potatoes. With mustard oil. An unhealthy indulgence, but a loved one. There will be round slices of brinjal dunked in besan gravy and fried. Maybe an egg. Greens are in the form of a soup. Mango pickle. A slice of lime. And I am transported back to my childhood, and my mother feeding us the same food. The comfort of knowing it will be the same every day when we come home. Every single day. Its recreation is the comfort now.

List #1: Books I Read in May 2020

Books I read in May:

My Father’s Book – Urs Widmer

1. ‘My Father’s Book’ by Urs Widmer: A son describes his father ‘s life, growing up in Switzerland in the early 1900s-going through two wars, his painter and architect friends, a brief spell of being a communist, following a woman to Paris and living the life of poverty yet voraciously reading, setting up an enviable life with his wife, nonchalantly digging into her inheritance to buy records and books and wine, a career in translation and publishing, battling with chronic pain, but above all a glimpse into rural/ small town Switzerland and making me aware of its vibrant culture. I had always tagged Switzerland as ‘neutral’ (read bland), and known only for its cheese, banks and scenic vistas. But this book gave me a glimpse of its early and mid century politics, response to war, art scene, literature. What stood out: character quirks, the idea of documenting everyday of one’s life in a fat blank book gifted to them on their twelfth birthday (a tradition in the village of the author’s father), the practice of keeping open coffins outside the village homes for each of the family members (a daily morbid reminder of life’s brevity). This book meant more to me because I visited Switzerland for the first time last year, and was highly impressed by its beauty and efficiency. And this book offered me a view of the rough, uncertain and slow evolution of this wonderful country.

Close Company-Virago New Fiction

2. Close Company – A Virago New Fiction collection of short stories depicting lives of mothers and daughters throughout the century. It highlights the (often very, very) subtle inequalities and prejudices faced by women at home, work and society at large; the largely invisible chores assigned to and demands made of them ; the guilt and subtle shaming still being the price of their seeking independence; relationship power dynamics and mostly their dreams or its graveyard. The stories range from a couple of pages to longer ones, and includes a variety of authors from Alice Munro to Fay Weldon to Margaret Atwood. I was struck by the palpable helplessness I felt on reading Fay Weldon’s ‘ Weekend’

Atomic Habits – James Clear

3. Currently reading : Atomic Habits. Lesson imbibed in the first few chapters. Strive for 1% betterment in all spheres of life and goals. Gradually accumulate the benefit of these consistent mini-improvements.

Saving The Day

The nights are damp and cold and windy. A vague reminder of the hills. It rains and stops and rains again. I love it. Cold autumn weather. Sweatpants and flannel shirts and scarves weather. Soft blue quilt weather. Hot cocoa weather. Curl up in bed delving into stories or weaving new ones weather. Petrichor weather.

There was a light drizzle when I walked back from work yesterday. The road was wet and shiny, reflecting the old oak trees that lined it on either sides. I stepped into occasional, unavoidable puddles; and my bag bore the brunt of the slanting rain. But the wind that whooshed through the trees was so cold and magical, I didn’t want the walk to end and be cooped up in a dark, cramped hostel room. So I decided to head off towards the centre of the college campus, nearly four kilometres away. The evening light and overcast skies threw beautiful shadows on the grand buildings and brought out every shade of green in the foliage.  The impending rain was a thrill, waiting to see how far can I make it before it pours down.

The collage centre has landscaped gardens,  a temple, large green fields, numerous tiny eateries and a central library housed in a grand, opulent ochre building with brick red domed roof and balconies. Of course, I went to the library.

It was already past the hours to issue new books, but I liked to walk through the huge circular hall lined by tall, never-ending wooden shelves stacked with several thousand  books. And the narrow corridors that led off the hall into various sections of rare books and manuscripts, the linguistics section, the book stack housing novels old and new, the arts and sciences sections, research sections, and journals section. It was my own personal heaven. I stayed browsing books till the sun set and tall, yellow lamps were lit in the garden outside.

I took a rickshaw back to the hostel, the magical wind still howling around me. I missed something sorely then. Or maybe someone. But soon I was back in my warm room, munching  banana chips, sitting crosslegged on the bed and studying about paragangliomas while “Rocks On The Road” played on my phone. My room-mate came from back from (supposedly) “evening” shift at the hospital well beyond midnight and after an hour of giggles and conversation, she created our routine ‘ambience’ to bring about sleep, that is switch on the air cooler. Even when it is biting cold outside because we could no longer fall asleep without the pleasant hum of the air cooler.

In the morning,  she left for work at eight.  And I found myself unable to get out of bed. Head exploded with pain and fever burned every inch off my skin. I called up a friend who readily agreed to replace my duty at the department till I felt better. I spent a couple of hours gathering the strength to walk the few steps to the medicine cabinet!

The day was spent in my darkened room, buried under two blankets, sleeping fitfully and aching for home. I longed for company, someone to just sit by me for a few minutes. For reasons unknown to me, I dreamt of you. Got teary-eyed and went back to sleep.  It was only towards three in the evening that my fever broke.

The feeling of utter loneliness and crying continued. I wondered if it had anything to do with the pent up worry about my mother’s recent cancer scare. Or was it just hormones? Or maybe it was an embarrassing pining for lost love? I hadn’t ate anything since the past twenty hours.

Just then my phone rang to inform me that the books I had ordered online would be delivered in five minutes. I had no choice but to walk downstairs to collect them. Holding the neatly wrapped package of books in my hand brought about an instant change in my mood.  I suddenly craved food and went into the dining hall and quietly had a hot meal of rice and rajma.

Feeling strengthened, I returned to my room and set about cleaning it up and opening the door to the balcony to let in fresh air and some pale sunshine. Then with eager fingers I unwrapped the package to unravel the books.

Maus- Art Spiegelman (A graphic novel that is one of the most personal retelling of the Holocaust)

Mr Penumbra’s 24-hour bookstore-by Robin Sloan (The title is enough to intrigue me. Books about books and bookstores. Porn for me.)

Delta of Venus- Anais Nin (I have thoroughly enjoyed reading the sexual escapades of Henry Miller to even Khushwant Singh. But I had never read erotica written by a female author. This book would be a welcome start)

So in the bleak mess of damp weather,  high grade fever and loneliness,  the books and the stories that awaited therein managed to salvage my day, and reinstate my autumnal love. Books always save me.

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Sputnik Sweetheart

I read Haruki Murakami’s ‘Sputnik Sweetheart’ a couple of weeks ago and found it a surreal and captivating tale of longing. Sumire, the protagonist, has a shaggy mane, reads voraciously, writes until the wee hours of morning, and lives in a tiny apartment crammed with piles of books. She is also obsessively in love with a woman, Miu, who is seventeen years older than her. Miu, harbouring crushed ambitions and a loveless marriage, is equally fond of Sumire’s company but doesn’t desire her. And there is K, the narrator, who has been in love with Sumire for long years but her aloofness in matters of love and longing, had curbed all his initiatives to reach her. They talk though, they talk a lot. She likes the way he explains things to her and doesn’t hesitate to call him up at 3am from a darkened phone booth and talk for hours, with a cigarette dangling from her mouth. They read books together, he is the only one allowed to go through the first drafts of her novels that she had abandoned midway; and he listens to her with such an endearing attention that is reflective of how much he values her presence in his life. Books, chaotic minds full of innumerable questions, a latent ennui, repressed love and longing bind them together. And then a series of bizarre events lead to Sumire’s disappearance. Each character is sketched haphazardly, but it is the gaps in their stories, the details beyond the veil, that makes them intriguing. Loose ends abound and the disjointed narrative might put off a major section of readers, but I simply couldn’t put it down. Miu crosses their lives, but K and Sumire slowly discovers the unnamed, subtle, unhurried, and unquestionably devoted love, that they had searched for years in the wrong places, in each other. Or was it all just an illusion? This book is more of an acquired taste for the thin line between the surreal and the real, but I loved it.

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Books: Reviews, Recommendations and Reading Lists

Last night I read Herman Koch’s novel ‘The Dinner‘. Waves of satire and mystery leads to a dark whirlpool; and it all occurs under the perfectly placid cover of harmonious domesticity, husbands who love their wives, wives who find their husbands charming even after two decades of marriage, children who never get into trouble at school and never did drugs, families with massive wealth, power and a clockwork happiness. The events unfold over a dinner at a ridiculously expensive restaurant where the manager points his little finger to painstakingly describe each little portion of food set amidst the vast emptiness of the plates. Two brothers, one of them famous, and their wives gets together to discuss and find a way to undo the damages their children had caused. Violence springs up as memories are fetched from the not too distant past, and the reader is forced to review and rearrange their perspectives frequently. How well can you know a person? How far can you go to protect the ones you love? How thin is the line between self-righteousness and the sinister, and how easily can one jump to and fro over it? Obvious violence and gore can disgust, yet it never reaches the proportion of those that are veiled and implied and wholly unexpected. And this novel in its cold and tangential handling of threats and veiled crimes is both disturbing and funny, and hence highly addictive.

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I had upped my reading pace recently and read twenty books in the past two months. I highly recommend the following:

a) ‘How to be a Woman’ by Caitlin Moran: A contemporary take on feminism, part-memoir and one of the most hilarious books I have read in quite some time. From menstruation to masturbation, muffin tops to jutting cheekbones, workplace politics to strip clubs, Scarlett Johansson’s breasts to Germaine Greer’s books, dealing with siblings to awesome gay friends, disastrous love affairs to stable marriages, pregnancy to abortions, weddings to remaining childless by choice, appallingly long labour to handling toddlers, the book deals with them all. It is sharp, witty, agitating and raises up the right questions.

b) ‘tiny, beautiful things’ by Cheryl Strayed: It is a compilation of the ‘Dear Sugar‘ advice columns and offers astoundingly empathic and deeply personal insights into love, everyday life, grief, unexpected setbacks, shaky friendships, self-doubts and more. Each letter of advice is a literary nugget.

c) ‘Bossypants’ by Tina Fey: You see the trend here, don’t you? Strong, career-minded, family-oriented, hilarious and bad ass feminist authors. Fey is no different.

d) ‘Incognito’ by David Eagleman: I wrote about it here.
e) ‘Anthology of Contemporary American Short Fiction‘ selected by Joyce Carol Oates and Christopher R. Beha: You can find it here.
f) ‘Big Questions from Little People’ by Gemma Elwin Harris: It has experts in various fields of physics, space exploration, philosophy, literature and many more answering the questions of children that includes the profound enquiries about love and what good comprises of, and even questions about farting cows! The questions are answered in all seriousness and to the best of the understanding of the children. The simplicity and fun trivia that the book provides makes it a delightful, easy read.

g) ‘The Dinner’ by Herman Koch: scroll to the top of this post.

h) ‘Before She Met Me’ by Julian Barnes: This is a novella about a man’s insecurity and disproportionate jealousy about his second wife’s sexual past as a struggling actress in films of questionable taste, and how a seemingly harmless obsession of a perfectly ‘normal’ person can spiral out of control into dark and menacing consequences. It reminded me of ‘The Dinner‘ in its sinister subject yet irrepressible humour.

 And here are the books on my reading list for the coming month:

1. ‘The Conqueror of the Seas: The Story of Magellan’ by Stefan Zweig

2. ‘Drive’ by Daniel H. Pink

3. Collected Poems (1947-1997) by Allen Ginsberg

4. ‘Staying On‘ by Paul Scott

5. ‘Humboldt’s Gift‘ by Saul Bellow

I would love to hear about your reading lists and book recommendations. Do share them in the comments section. Go read.

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The Week

Book: Anthology of Contemporary American Short Fiction, selected by Joyce Carol Oates and Christopher R. Beha. Out of the forty-eight stories in the anthology, I have read 1-900 by Richard Bausch, Lavande by Ann Beattie, Off by Aimee Bender, The Love of My Life by T.C.Boyle, The Identity Club by Richard Burgin, Aurora by Junot Diaz, Reunion by Richard Ford, The Girl on The Plane by Mary Gaitskill, ‘Adina, Astrid, Chipewee, Jasmine‘ by Matthew Klam, Once in A Lifetime by Jhumpa Lahiri and Incarnations of Burned Children by David Foster Wallace. Each story is a revelation in how words can be stringed together in myriad ways to hurl the reader into a space rife with characters so well-sketched that it takes only a couple of pages before an involuntary familiarity is fostered. The plots vary from being elaborate and including multiple time leaps to ordinary encounters. What keeps the pages turning is the versatility of the content and style of these accomplished writers. Little nuggets of pure bliss.

Film: Often they are larger-than-life, crude and garish, but no one can deny how Hindi films have marked us with its invisible stamp of magnanimous dreams, instilled an inevitable sense of drama, bound us with shared memories of favourite moments from the screen, and made us unabashed (or closet) romantics. And yes, there is a song for every emotion and situation. I watched Bombay Talkies last weekend. I won’t judge how true the four stories were to the common theme because each one of them brought in a new wave of delight. Each one told a story in twenty-five minutes, and told it well.

Karan Johar‘s story is about the angst of a man who has veiled his sexuality under the institution of marriage, the longing of a woman to be desired by the man she married, the overwhelming attraction of a gay man towards the husband of a close friend; and the confused, tender, passionate and brief entanglement of these three lives that changes them forever. Till date the only poignant film that I had watched about two men in love, devoid of stereotypes and caricatures, is Brokeback Mountain. And now in this film even though the moments were fleeting, Randeep Hooda brings in a passion, sensuality, repressed desire and tenderness that is incomparable. Rani Mukherjee had never looked more beautiful and real. Dibakar Banerjee‘s story is run by the genius of two men, Banarjee himself and the lead actor, Nawazuddin’s flawless performance of a common man with big dreams that loses steam after the first few steps on the road to realize them. He craves glorious destinations without the ordeals of the journey, and wants it all without questioning his own potential and calibre. And he has a pet Emu (‘ooi-ma’ to his neighbours :P) named Anjali! Zoya Akhtar questions if our dreams and ambitions should be tailored to meet the approval of society and be within the rigid constraints of conventionality. A little boy is torn between his uncontrollable urge to be a dancer and gyrate like the on-screen ‘Sheila‘, and his father’s desire of seeing him ace the football games at school. When his father hits him for dressing up in his sister’s clothes and applying lipstick, self-realization dawns that certain dreams are best indulged in secrecy till the right time arrives. His relationship with his sister is quite adorable too. Anurag Kashyap‘s story is witty, hugely entertaining and yet sad in the very premise of how the masses deify their screen idols, putting lives on hold for a mere glimpse or word from them. The delight of watching this particular story was comparable to that of reading a short story by Saki.

Food: Given that my mother harbours the delusion that someday I would consider getting married to one of the potential suitors whose names get dropped not so subtly in her conversations with me, the few strands of prematurely grey hair on her head is partly attributed to her long standing worry that my (future) in-laws and husband would use my complete apathy towards cooking to judge her  parenting skills. Last weekend to appease her, I tuned into the Nigella Lawson show and diligently noted down few recipes. On Sunday morning, after a short struggle with the blender that involved the batter flying in all directions, I ended up baking a delicious chocolate cake…all on my own! And my mother’s frown lines were miraculously wiped off as she ate the first piece of the cake.

Everything else: I am relieved and somewhat surprised at the abrupt lightness of being brought on by the fading of a face into the darkest and deepest recesses of memory, because I wasn’t even aware how a quiet yearning had weighed me down for years. I watched a documentary on the quaint town of Omori in Japan.The Gulmohar tree outside my window is covered in blazing red blossoms. I no longer follow the IPL matches. I painted my nails coral pink. And the heart beats wildly in anticipation of a long awaited change.

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Solitude

It is a humid night and I am on page ninety-one of Pablo Neruda’s Memoirs reading about how in certain cases solitude is something as hard as a prison wall, “…you could smash your head against the wall and nobody came; no matter how you screamed and wept”.

My solitude is different; voluntarily sought, treasured and not centred on any void. My solitude is an escape. My solitude is essential; and I cling to it like the last drops of water at the bottom of the flask while stranded in a desert. My solitude is permeable, selectively by a selective few. My solitude creeps into little nooks of the day; discrete, pulsating nodes of life that puts together what existence undoes. My solitude is layered.

The first and obvious layer: There is reading in bed at dawn and just before midnight, a half hour each, that scrapes off otiose and rusted ideas, causes agitations and reverberations that accompanies the new, occasionally sparks off nostalgia and brings in the pleasant exhaustion of a working imagination. It is a sacred hour of lucent solitude. There is the quarter of an hour of leaning on the parapet of the roof, gazing at the flurry of activity on the streets and the quietude of the distant rolling hills that encircles the city. It refreshes perspectives. It is in the few minutes of coffee and crossword every morning. It is in the occasional driving around without predetermined destinations and secretly banking on serendipity and the delight of the unknown. It is also in the monotonous and meditative laps in the pool. There it is in the endless compiling, weeding out and re-arranging of ideas and memories during commute, fleeting between complete detachment and eager observation of the crowd around. It is in the quiet contemplation of the blur of trees, buildings, people, lives moving outside the car window. These habitual moments of solitude rejuvenates me.

The second and temperamental layer: I owe this to being an introvert, to an inherent preference for solitude. In the course of a busy day, in the midst of a bustling crowd, in the centre of activity or while meeting the unwavering gaze of certain eyes, I need a moment of my own to recharge, to regain composure, to think, to not think. It could be getting back to my room, sitting on my bed, eating a sandwich alone, leafing through a book or listening to my favourite music for a while before rushing back out into the world that “can’t stop talking” (from Susan Cain’s Quiet).

The third and concealed layer: It echoes Neruda’s words. Invisible hands loses no time in throwing a cover on the dormant thoughts that terrifyingly resonates into life at the sound of those words. It is rarely admitted or explored, but the awareness of an well-concealed void gets palpable at times.  It stems from an obscure mix of unmet expectations, sudden and unwelcome detours, phases of purposelessness, apathetic days, dead ends, long waits and saudade. I dread this particular solitude that creeps up only in the darkness of closed eyelids during bouts of insomnia.

Then there all-pervading solitude that comes with individuality and the unique realm of thoughts of which only a fraction gets visible at a given moment. I am a different person in different memories. In the quest of knowing self in its entirety, and being who we are in all the thoughts and quirks and memories that make us, we are alone. This solitude is very different.

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The One About Skinned Knees, Distractions and Absent Lovers

Two decades ago I barged into a class and under the scrutiny of fifty pairs of eyes that had turned towards the door, I tripped and fell. I didn’t pause for a single second on the ground, and dashed towards my desk, trying to overlook the classmates who sniggered. And it was only when the teacher shrieked ‘Your socks are soaked with blood!’ I looked down at my bloodied knees. The wounds gaped wide enough to require sutures but I was too preoccupied with my embarrassment to feel even the slightest stab of pain. As everyone fussed over my injury, caressing my head, and offering me a glass of water, I felt the pain in my legs explode. That’s what I remember from that day. If you don’t dwell on it, the hurt is negligible. I took to suppression as a coping mechanism against injuries and setbacks; I don’t conceal or run away from hurt, but face it with an essential detachment, like events unfolding in the life of a close acquaintance where I have a ringside view of everything but I am spared the pain. I don’t dwell on the ground to look at my bleeding knees.

February was tough. I lost a sister, an important plan fell through, a close friend disintegrated into depression, and I witnessed (and still witnessing) a career-related legal drama. If I allow myself to take it in all, the chaos would choke me. But over the years, my mind had adapted to detach and distract itself from the dreams that crumble, the people I lose or the ennui of everyday existence, filing them away in neat little cabinets. Life is too short to mourn about what happened and what didn’t. I am yet to be loved; I am yet to achieve my goals. There are so many places I haven’t visited yet; there are so many books I haven’t read yet. I go from one day to the next, concentrating on what is and what would be. The past can’t be crammed into my life.

I extrude the unpleasant by replacing it with small moments of pleasure. A day after my elder sister died, I felt guilty about the happiness that bubbled up in my chest on seeing the new and vivid bougainvillea blossoms near my home. On the days when love disheartens me, I write about love. I read wherever and whenever possible. The calming monotony of laps in the pool or feet pacing on a long walk is something else that I look forward to. My ambition had blunted in the recent years, and I am trying to revive it; but all the while reminding myself that it is just a job. I am not one of those revoltingly joyous and perky individuals brimming with optimism, but I refuse to drown in despair too. Life is just normal; sometimes I create my own happiness, and sometimes it creeps in unexpected.

 

I take solace in the unusual; even the absent lover has a peculiar charm. It can sometimes morph into a constant and subtle longing for him to witness the world with me, to witness me, to let me witness him. These are the moments when I walk about interposing minutiae of my idea of him into the world around me, blending the two seamlessly. Today I drove to IITG and spent few delightful hours walking the large green grounds and catching up with old friends. All throughout I carried him around to hear that song on the car radio, to see that lone black bird on a tree with red blossoms, to be enthralled by that sunset over the vast river, to hear the conversations I had, or to laugh over my hair fanning out weirdly in the wind. Sometimes an intangible absence makes me feel more alive to the world than the tangible objects that crowd it.

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Where is a good crow when you want to follow one?

A bowl of crisps, rain outside my window, a soft bed and the cinematic pursuit of five nights.

The Color of Paradise (Iranian): A blind boy gifts his grandmother a green hair clip and she lovingly pins it onto her dress, the sisters accept a necklace made out of tin bottle caps and a comb; treasuring the gifts of love thoughtfully selected by one who couldn’t see them. Traipsing around the Iranian countryside, Mohammed’s life is colored by the same joys that occupy the lives of ten year olds. He wonders what lay beyond the forest he couldn’t see but knows is near. He is exasperated by the questionable reading skills of the boys of the local school. His fingers move fast across the notebook in Braille as a curious teacher looks on, and the same fingers study the rhythms of nature. He wonders what the birds talk about, and the call of the woodpecker fascinates him. He touches his sister’s face and is amazed at how much she has grown up in the past year. He adores his grandmother and craves his father’s acceptance and love. He has his moments of grief, breaking down the wall of joy and self-reliance he has created so painstakingly. He doesn’t expect much from this world, but his father does from him. The man’s insistence on a ‘normal’ life free of responsibilities of taking care of a blind child, and hopes of getting re-married bring about a slew of personal tragedies abruptly overthrowing the veiled paradise he inhabited but failed to recognize. It’s a cornerstone of cinematic excellence, yet the end left me in dismay.

My Neighbours, the Yamadas (Japanese): Pimple-faced, overtly self-conscious and perpetually lazy teenager, Noboru, receives a phone call from a girl. Now, that’s a first in his life and also in the family’s collective set of events. Grandmother, mother and sister lives up to their uncontrollable levels of curiosity and eavesdrop shamelessly on the phone conversation.

Grandmother: “Does he have a girlfriend? With his looks?”

Mother: “A real girlfriend?”

Sister: “His face is red!”

Boy tackles the huddle of curious women with a few menacing glances, they cower away. He rushes back to his room.

Mother: “You insulted him, Mother!”

Grandmother: “And you are the paragon of motherhood!!”

 The movie is filled with vignettes of the life of a middle-class family in Japan but rings true for families across the world. The panic of losing their little daughter in a crowded shopping mall, confronting hooligan bikers in their neighborhood, finding the black hole that shelters lost socks, the politics of deciding dinner menu, the fight over the television remote that can shame any Kung Fu enthusiast, the frisky and headstrong grandmother with a disposition for cooking unpronounceable dishes, the ever-frazzled and clumsy mother, the aimless and all knowing teenager, the smart sister, the dynamics of a ‘real’ marriage of a tough and harmonious couple; the movie chronicles what it is like to be a family, cruising on the same boat of Life, and not always steering in the same direction. Witty and endearing, this movie is a delight.

A Separation (Iranian): Sometimes it’s nobody’s fault, but circumstances need only a tiny shove to spiral into the bounds of no return. A dutiful son taking care of his Alzheimer-afflicted father, a wife who needs some fresh air out of a monotonous life, a precocious eleven year old daughter anxious about her parents imminent separation. And then there is the family of the caretaker who is hired to take care of the Alzheimer patient. There is a lapse of duty, a fit of anger, a scuffle and loss of the caretaker’s unborn child. There is anger, legal complications follow, love is tested, distrust ensues and facades fall as each person struggle to hold on to what they dearly love. And just when things settle down to an amiable decision, befitting all involved, mere words destroy it all,  unraveling what binds them together. It’s a slice of life movie with achingly real characters. Sometimes despite every effort, things fall apart. And we wish life wasn’t so complicated. And we wish communication was easy. And even compromise.

How to Make an American Quilt: She followed a crow’s flight at the wake of dawn, wrapped in a quilt to shield against the autumn chill, and true love awaited her at the end of it. Was the crow a symbol? I’m still working on that. Finn is flighty when it comes to completing her Masters thesis, and her boyfriend has just proposed. She accepts because it isn’t an unreasonable age to get married. She goes to live with her grandmother and grandaunt to work on her thesis, and encounters a motley bunch of quilt-makers who are all set to make her wedding quilt. And while Finn struggles with her ideas of the impermanence of marriage, monogamy and the charms of a local boy, the quilt-makers each bring their distinctive pattern into the quilt and the stories behind these quilt patches help Finn course her way through indecisiveness, infidelity and finding love. Six stories of love, loss, passion, tolerance, togetherness, trust and hope. It’s a pleasure to watch the lovely Winona Ryder, and Maya Angelou too (bibliophile hangover). I am always on the lookout for crows now, but where is a good crow when you want to follow one?

 

 

Where is the Friend’s Home? (Iranian): This movie is about a eight year old boy, Ahmed, who accidentally slips in his bench-mate’s copy in his bag and is traumatized by the thought of his bench-mate’s expulsion from school on failing to hand over the homework the next day. The film chronicles his search for his friend’s home in a nearby district and the people he encounters in his search. It is a simple story, nothing superfluous. And this lack of a crowded plot and interesting deviations can be a killjoy for a certain section of audience, but it’s a delight for my heart overflowing with the love for Iranian movies. One gets the feeling of running alongside Ahmed in his quest for his friend’s home. A lovely watch.

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The Dirty Word

I visited the Sunday Book Bazaar at Daryaganj recently, and I felt faint with excitement at the awe-inspiring treasures in front of me, rows and rows of books scattered in the pavement, waiting to be picked up by readers for less than the price of a cup of coffee. I did what any self-respecting book lover would do, ignored the mortified glare of the people who accompanied me, and sat down at the pavement next to a huge pile of books that included New York Times best-sellers, rare editions with yellowed, well-thumbed pages, translated works from all over the world. I looked sadly at the size of the two totes my sister and I carried; and considered dialling a taxi to take a greater haul home. I added twenty new books to my library that day. And one of them was Joyce Carol Oates’s ‘We Were the Mulvaneys‘.

It’s the saga about a perfect American family; a Dad with a flourishing roofing business, a cheerful Mom who was more of a friend to her children, three talented sons, an angelic daughter, a quaint farmhouse, adorable pets, a bustling social life, devout God-fearing hearts and the happiness of making a perfect little world for themselves, the perfect world of the Mulvaneys. Then ‘it’ happened. The incident. That dirty word. And the world sided with the ‘rapist’. The Mulvaneys fell apart, the family disintegrating gradually, time playing a cruel trick of engraving the hurt deeper each day, the knife turning in their hearts a little more each day. Each individual of the family, Mom, Dad, the three brothers and Marianne Mulvaney herself, the angelic girl to whom ‘it’ happened; were a ‘casualty’ of the incident. They didn’t crumble immediately, but the helplessness and the frustration of justice denied, falling prey to social stigma, disappointment at each other’s reaction to ‘it’; the failure to protect the lovely Marianne, their world, ‘The Mulvaneys’. How it breaks your heart! Knowing the Mulvaneys at such close quarters, having been handed such an intimate view of their lives, their goodness, their love, their perfect life; and the slow destruction of everything they treasured, the love fading behind uneasiness and their misery. Oates’s is at her finest, describing the trauma of this family, turning to obscurity. But time heals the scars, or at least makes them strong enough to endure it.  There is reconciliation, triumph of hope and compassion at the end. But, why? At what cost? Why them? Why anyone at all? It’s fiction, yet it can be anyone. It can be about me, about you. I couldn’t help the tears brimming in my eyes, as I leafed through the final pages of this remarkable book, this moving account of human emotions, flaws and redemption.

And in the evening, I watched Barkha Duttinterview a rape victim of the 2002 Gujrat riots and sat listening to the trials of her family. It’s a ten year old trial of her family fighting for justice, fighting for survival, fighting to bring up two daughters unscathed. The husband’s eyes gleaming with tears as he talked about the troubles they had to face, the threats they had to endure and how they kept it all aside for what is right, what is just.

I remembered the various accounts of sexual abuse I’ve heard through the years. A friend’s sister, who had a problem of bed-wetting till the age of 23, was a victim of incest at the age of 3 years. A neighbour was a victim of marital rape every time she had an argument with her husband. A classmate was groped by few men during a Durga Puja crowd.

Many women. Many stories. A dirty word in their lives; Abuse, Incest or Rape.

It had been coming for a while. I couldn’t see it outright, but the signs were there; creeping along the subconscious, an occasional peek now and then; the dirty word glaring at me from the front page of the newspaper as I nervously flip it over to the light-hearted page 3 gossips, a scene from a TV show-the girl running, thinking ‘will she escape?’ and the helplessness of knowing she won’t; the muted paranoia of letting my sisters go out into the world where unknown dangers lurk at every corner and I’m not there to watch over them every moment; the constant efforts to ‘blend in’, worried of being singled out, of sending any wrong signals, not ‘too quiet, too shy’ any more, as I try being social, to blend in. My mind tries to remind me of ‘it’. There had been too many signs recently; a newspaper headline, TV shows, this book. And I unconsciously shut out these triggers, not dwelling on them out of habit. My memory is remarkable, not in retaining, but in ‘forgetting’, in ‘undoing’, in convincing myself ‘It never happened’, congratulating myself on moving on so effortlessly, dreams and hopes in life still intact, nothing ravaged. My memory saved me, burying unpleasant details, hushing out any voices from the past, those words in the newspaper, that helplessness of the girl running, that muted paranoia.

I too had been through it. I was led to believe I had been lucky. I was ‘only‘ molested. Once that tricky portal of thoughts open, the sentences from my past escape and crowd in, vying for my attention. “Only molested”. “Not raped”. “It could have been worse”. “It happens to every woman at some point of her life”. “Girls get molested in crowded buses every day: a pinch, a rub”. “If you don’t dwell on it, it’s like it never happened”. There are rare times when I wonder how I got so close to being another Marianne Mulvaney, but I didn’t. I escaped; from the bad things that a man can do to a woman. But I had a narrow escape. Was I lucky? Hell, yes. I thank God for sparing me the trauma, and my life. But the questions like “Why did it even have to happen?”, “What could have been?”, “How can my parents not protect me?” still haunts me when I lessen my guard over my subconscious.  Family support and therapy can go a long way, I have heard. I can’t imagine what rape victims must go through; their feelings towards self, towards family and friends, towards society at large, and towards the unfairness of being singled out, disrupting their life’s course; the life that wasn’t supposed to include ‘it’.

My family had supported me through my jittery nervous existence, through the bouts of depression that followed, but I was disappointed that nothing could be done to punish the guilty. I consulted a psychiatrist and all she said was, “so, the lesson is to be cautious. And never to use a shared auto.” And nervous laughter. As if it was a joke. As if we are discussing a trivial matter, as if it was a moral science class in school with a ‘Lesson’ at the end. I knew she couldn’t help me, only I can heal myself and move on. Only I can trick my memory, bring my life back on track, and make up for lost time. I have done it, I don’t think about it anymore. I can write about it now, even though I don’t bring it up in conversations. I can watch the scene of a girl being molested on TV without wincing. I can watch my reflection in the mirror and not feel self-disgust. I can talk to people, chat with friends, fall in love, and enjoy life every moment. Sometimes I am aware of it being a little forced, this determination of mine for an untainted memory. Few aspects will take time to get used to; like to trust someone.

 

It’s still taboo in our society. Sex in movies, live-in relationships, homosexuality etc is being accepted gradually. But the uneasiness of society when dealing with sexual abuse is still prevalent. My heart goes out to those women who have suffered ‘it‘. Not just the street hooligans, there can be a beast lurking in that friendly neighbour, that teacher you idolize, that man sitting next to you on a flight. Who knows? Who can say? Where can a woman be safe? In homes where incest is “not seen”, wife swapping among brothers still prevalent in certain communities, and maintaining family relations triumphs over moral justice? In offices where lewd remarks, sexual harassment-outright or suggested, uncomfortable male gazes prevail and again “not seen”? In a society where news of ‘a woman raped at 1am after a party’ gets out and all one hears is the contempt for the careless woman staying out so late at night and questions about her character? On the streets where a young school girl returning from school is stared down from head to toe by road-side loafers who comment on her breasts and thighs?

  

Who has given men right to abuse a women at whatever time of the day it might be, at however lonely a place it might be, and however skimpy her clothes may be? How can one say ‘she had it coming for her’? How can one violate another person in such a brutal way just because she’s a woman, correction, she has a vagina? Who defines these moral codes? I know I am being too hopeful in wanting a society where a woman’s dignity is never unduly violated just because she’s there, within reach of groping hands.

The best we can hope for now is looking after ourselves and being cautious, fighting for justice, and support victims of such crimes-be it incest, sexual harassment of any sort, molestation or rape.

I pray for a world when this dirty word vanishes from the surface of the earth.

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