Some Indian Writing

Grown up on diet of Enid Blytons, Nancy Drews and Hardy Boys with an occasional Chandamama and Twinkle thrown in, I am not exactly proud of my awareness regarding Indian literature contemprory or otherwise. Yeah I have read Rushdie and Ms Roy but then somehow have the feeling that it does not count.

So these days I am on a mission, if u can call it that to read Indian authors. I bought two books by Vikram Chandra; his novel "Red Earth and Pouring Rain" (reviewed in the previous post) and a collection of short stories titled "Love and longing in Bombay".As the name implies, all the stories are set in Bombay. I was not too impressed with the collection somehow except the story "Kama".The protaganist in this story is a gay who is working for a two-member software company that has just sold its first product and is facing a critical issue on it. The characters are realistic and the story touches upon a lot of issues. It is about gay love, about the longings for one's own house in mumbai, communalism in mumbai(can Indian writers' ever escape the hindu-muslim aspect in any of their writings) and about the shadow of the underworld. I liked the way the realtionship between the protaganist and his boss is handled. His boss is a workaholic, smart, beautiful, divorced mother of a child who has let out one room in her house to a bohemian painter.Though her relationship with the painter is not the focus of the story but the writer gives us enuf glimpses into it and makes it seem very real. The protaganist makes fun of the artsy world of painters but is also aware of the strange hold "beauty" has on all of us.Though the writer does not dwell too much into the communalism and the underworld theme but just makes you aware about these two hovering over the story and impacting it in an important way. There was another story I found interesting in parts. It was about a inspector in mumbai(of course) who is trying to solve a murder case. The other stories did not impress much. So, in case you find this book lying somewhere, read the story "kama". Thatz my reco for the day!

Yesterday

Yesterday I decided to clean my bedside drawer. It had been a long time I cleaned it and it was becoming nearly impossible to find anything in that. It was the usual stuff I find everytime I clean my purse (fortunately on a monthly basis). ATM slips which I always save and never look at again; movie tickets; bills; medicines never consumed and so on. And I also found one of my scribbling books there; the one I had forgotten about. I scribble a lot; a few lines which might later develop into a poem or some phrase that springs up in my mind. I write a lot of letters; the kind of letters that are never given to the concerned person. I also make a lot of to-do lists and jot down reminders for myself. And I ususally have two three books lying around my house for this purpose. I started fipping through the one I found; and there it was.

There it was; your name and just your name on a clean sheet of paper. I instantly remembered the moment I had written that. It had been a few months back on a long rainy evening. The rain had depressed me and overwhelmed me that day. The restlessness had been too overpowering and I had decided to write a letter for you. I wrote your name and then I could write no more. How do I start a letter addressed to you? And what do I possibly fill up those pages with? And what words can I use? So I had just let it be; your name on a blank sheet of paper...

And yesterday I tore that page.

Red Earth and Pouring Rain - A kinda review

This really sucks, sucks BIG time. I am not able to post the entire thing in one go and so I had to break it in three parts but this is hopefully the last in the series and it is a Book Review kind of blog.

Back to the title of the post, the book “Red Earth and Pouring Rain" is a celebration of the art of story telling. It has multiple stories interweaved among themselves; multiple people telling their stories and stories within other stories. A monkey, two teachers and Abhay (whoz just returned from his studies in US) are narrating their stories to ward off Yama, the God of death who has come to take the monkey's soul. Yes, it is an implausible premise but leads to some rather good stories. The stories vary from the high school American romance to the experiences of a desi to the story of a Rajput princess to Ramayana to the story of English subjugation of India and to the life of a porn actress. Abhay's stories were my favorite though they dealt with the experiences of a desi in US; a subject that has been done to death and lends itself to a lot of stereotyping. But I liked them because I could relate to them in some way and maybe because they were set in the present time. Dr. Sarthey's story was dark, morbid and good while Tom's(Abhay's American friend) was like one of those "Wonder Year" kind of shows; a not-so-rich geeky/nerdy guy falls for the rich and beautiful temptress and it leads to the inevitable heartbreak and then self-realization but it was a good read nevertheless. I think I need to read the book again because I read it in a hurry, anxious to know where the story leads to and I actually did not stop and savor the reading experience but I would recommend this book to anyone who likes stories.

Red Earth and Pouring Rain (contd.)

Continued from last post as I was having problems in posting the rest of the blog.

Anyways coming back to what I started with; I picked up Vikram Chandra's "Red Earth and Pouring Rain" along with a collection of his short stories titled "Love and Longing in Mumbai" at a 50% sale at "Odyssey". I was congratulating myself on getting a good bargain but the joy was short lived. All the pages of "REPR" have come out and the book is in tatters. I am reading the book by holding one page at a time though I must say it much easier on my hands this way. Talking about bargains reminds me of this really funny list I read yesterday in the latest edition of Readers' Digest (Sep, 05). It lists that should be but are not a part of the English language. The funniest word in the list, in my opinion was "Boastbuster - a person who when asked to guess how cheaply you bought something or the size of your salary jump gives a figure so extreme that your story falls completely flat". Man, such agony!! I am sure that this has happened to everyone some time or other. Another favorite was "Veriflycation" (Can you guess what it is?).