My Encounters with a Peacock by Ramu Ramanathan

For a long time, I did not imagine that poetry could be read for pleasure. It was something read or rather learnt by rote in school to be recited in a elocution. In my head, poetry was boring. The language was flowery, the sentences were crooked with the noun often succeeding the verb, more was implied than stated and there was too much to decipher. Way too much effort to make for a fun read, or so I thought.

This notion was first challenged by Vikram Seth's Golden Gate which was forced down my throat by a well-read friend. I have never been so thankful for almost being choked. Seth's Golden Gate, a novel-in-verse, is a testament to the man's genius. To tell a compelling story while maintaining rhyme, rhythm and metre is no easy task, but he manages it and how. It is quite easily amongst my top 10 reading recommendations. It opened my eyes to the idea of a different style of poetry.

Yet, I confess that poetry is not my preferred reading genre and is relegated to the middle child treatment between novels and short stories. But, recently at the charming MayDay Bookstore in Delhi, I am tempted to pick up My Encounters with a Peacock by Ramu Ramanathan. Having recently interacted with the writer briefly a few times, I have witnessed his quirky and quick wit firsthand. His plays often delve into serious topics with social and political undertones and thus the whimsical title of this book of poetry is intriguing.

The thought behind My Encounters...originates from the writer's actual interaction of feeding peanuts to a peacock in rural Maharashtra a few years ago. He imagines those few moments multiplied into many more, stretched out over months in this compilation of free verse. In the book, the protagonist narrates how a peacock wanders over to his house one day and how a chat about something commonplace grows into a friendship. Over the months they talk about their lives, complain about their wives, gossip about neighbours and friends, comment on the news and share their thoughts, both the superficial and the embedded ones. The book ends abruptly, when one day the interactions stop. Just like the peacock had one day unassumingly walked into his life, he leaves without ceremony.

For the first few pages, I try to look for the hidden meaning, the lines between the lines, a political undertone, symbolism. But, then I stop. Peppered with many laugh out loud moments, it is far too enjoyable to be riddled by over thinking. It mirrors the many interactions we have with other humans. People we take a seat next to on trains and planes, or in hospital waiting rooms or in queues at government offices. People unknown and unrelated to us, with whom we have a few minutes of interactions about the weather, politics, current affairs and maybe even our lives. People who for those few minutes or hours capture our attention but whom we never

meet again.

I am reading this at breakfast in the garden of a hotel in Jaipur. When I look up from my book and slice of toast, a peacock stands some 20 metres from my table pecking at the grass. I half expect him to look up and wink at me, like he so often does in the book. He does not.  But, I am inspired to pen down my own single interaction with a peacock...

He wanders about
To my breakfast nook
Slice of toast and jam
O.J. and an espresso too.
I offer some crumbs
And ask, To eat or to go?
I'll stay a bit, he says.

We chat of Rafale, diesel
And gossip of DeepVeer too
We share our dreams, fears
Probe life's deep meaning
Confide as only strangers do.

Tomorrow I leave, I say
Hoping my feathered friend
Will offer a tear or a sigh
Miss me? The question lurks
Unuttered deep in my throat.

Mayhap tomorrow, he says,
It'll be a meat lover here
To share some scraps
With the conversation
I'd love me some bacon
On a slice of buttered toast.

Daddy Long-Legs

I sit cross-legged in front of the piles of books. The piles of varied heights, stuck together in a single file resemble a city's skyline. My friend is clearing out her library and I have been offered to take my pick. I resist. I have moved on to digital books. Their sheer convenience has squashed the romanticism of the scent of paper and ink and the feel of paper between my fingers. But, this skyline of old books with creased jackets, fading inscriptions and browned pages cause the heartbeat to quicken and I give in. My bedside table heaves under this new pile of old books...it had got accustomed to the weightlessness of my e-books.

I start with Daddy-Long-Legs, intrigued by the said friend's shock that I had not read it as a child. Daddy-Long-Legs follows the story of Jerusha aka Judy through her college years. J is raised in an orphanage, the kind like most from early 20th century.  A place that survives on the charity of their trustees and reminds the orphans of that fact at every point. A place where the kids are expected to be satisfied with what they are granted and not aspire for more or better.

The story starts with J, at 17 years brooding over another Perfectly Awful Day - the first Wednesday of every month when the trustees would visit the orphanage. Every nook and cranny and every orphan had to be scrubbed and ready for scrutiny. Little does J know that this dreaded day would be the day her life would change. A spunky essay written by J catches the eye of a trustee. He decides to sponsor her college education as a writer and grant her a monthly allowance during her years at college. He has two conditions. One, that he would remain anonymous and two, that J would write to him every month to apprise him of the goings-on her college life.

The rest of the story is driven purely through the letters that J writes to her anonymous benefactor. She tells him of her classes, her roommates, her classmates and teachers and other activities at college. She shares her thoughts and feelings with him. At times she expresses her gratitude to him and proclaims herself the luckiest girl in the word. At other times she berates him for not disclosing himself to her. Through her letters, one sees J grow up and absorb the different experiences that college brings to her and finally lead her to her benefactor.

It is due credit to the writer's craft that she is able to move the plot through one-sided communication without falling into an over-telling mode. The letters are charming and vary in tone and mood to reflect the J's state of mind at the time of writing.

Daddy-Long-Legs reminds me why I fell in love with stories...they carried the possibility that anything, however improbable was possible. Five kids could solve mysteries and trap criminals. Cheese when toasted on a stick on an open fire in the mountains would turn golden. The naughtiest girl in school would mature to be the head girl and teacher's pet. Strange lands could float by and get stuck on the branch of really tall trees.

As I grew older my reading preferences changed, I moved to stories of the real world. The stories became a means to glimpse into lives very different from my own and they carried their own vision of possibilities. But, Daddy-Long-Legs reacquainted me with the blissfulness of inhabiting a world where it all ends well. After all, a small dose of fantasy amidst the constant barrage of reality is well deserved.

A Suitable Boy

There are some books which I pick up as soon as I hear of them and there are others which sit on the must-read shelf for a while before they graduate to the currently-reading category. Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy falls in the latter category. It had been on my radar for many years but its tome-like length had deterred me. At almost 1400 pages, it is 3-4 times the length of an average novel. Two reasons motivated me to finally pick up this book. One, considering its stature in the world of books, I felt I needed to read it to truly own the 'well-read' tag that is often attached to me. Two, in the last couple of years I have read Seth's novel-in-verse Golden Gate and fiction, An Equal Music and both of which are lodged in my books to read before you die list.

At the core of it, A Suitable Boy is the story of Lata's search for her ideal life partner. Why does Seth take 1400 pages to do this you wonder? Austen found suitable boys for all Bennett sisters in quarter the amount of time. That's because Seth delves into great detail in the back story of Lara, her mother, her siblings, their spouses, their spouses' parents and siblings, love interests of those said siblings, siblings of the said love interests...I could go on but I don't want to do a Seth.

It was a stretch of my patience to finish the book and I have to ask myself why I did not give up. Partly because while the storytelling is tiresome the story itself is engaging. But, mostly because Seth managed to harvest my interest in his protagonist and I wanted to know who Lata chooses to walk off into the sunset with. Though, I must admit I am disappointed in the author's practical, well-reasoned choice for his heroine. Practical decisions are appropriate in real life, I want the heroines of novels to leap out and grab the opportunities that my real life concerns don't allow me to. Unfortunately, Seth does not agree. He is not a romantic.

My biggest grouse about the storytelling is his need to take the reader into the head of every character including the most inconsequential ones like the Lara's brother's wife's father's assistant. Seriously? Seriously! Why? Why? Why does Seth do it I ask myself through the five months that it tales me to finish the book. I lament about it to every person who asks me about my current reading. I get the answer after I finish reading, when I go back to the start and read the dedication pages. On the page before the story starts the author has reproduced two quotes by Voltaire:

The superfluous, that very necessary thing...
And,
The secret of being a bore is to say everything.

Aah! Now it all makes sense. Lesson learnt, note to self: Read every book cover to cover...literally!

Butter Chicken in Ludhiana by Pankaj Mishra

"I can't bear to read Indian writers," she said.
I pulled my eyebrows back into position before anyone else in the group registered that they had risen to my hairline. Nobody else seemed to be perturbed by her statement, almost all of them were doing the Indian yes-no-maybe nod. They were all Indians, including her. They were all writers, or trying to be, including her. So why was nobody offended by that statement, including her? I stayed mum too I regret to say. In my defense though it was my first meeting with this group. I had just discovered that I wanted to write, the others had been pursuing writing and getting published for a few years. I did not stay in that group much longer.

Her statement had bothered me but I realised that I had not read many Indian authors myself, and would have struggled to come up with ten names. That patriotic feeling was primarily why I chose Pankaj Mishra's Butter Chicken in Ludhiana in my list of books for the year. Butter chicken... is an account of the author's travels through small Indians towns. The author does not give the dates of his trip, I wish he had, but it seems to be sometime in the early 90s. He presents the real small town India and the real small town Indian with all the blemishes as seen through a microscope. Nothing escapes. Nothing is romanticised. Including Simla, India's honeymoon destination of that decade. Mishraji does not go looking for touristic attractions to write about. His book is more a descriptive tale of things and people that come in his line of sight. It would definitely not endear India to prospective tourists, in fact quite the contrary. The narrative moves at a good pace and the author's insight and subtle humour keeps it interesting. It is not a must-read but it is an interesting read for its different take on travel writing.

I am hopeful that Karma has made a note of my nationalist effort and some day when there is a book with 'by Himali Kothari' on it, many an Indian in small towns and big will pick it up from a pile of those by Johns and Janes.      

1984 - From the future

1984 is not one of those books that grabbed me from sentence one and pulled me along. In fact, the first 4-5 pages had me trudging along and the thought of quitting often crossed my mind. But, the memory of Orwell's Animal Farm goaded me to stick on. And I am glad I did.

George Orwell wrote 1984 in 1948, which makes the novella futuristic. Unfortunately in this future, people don't drive flying cars, eat pills for food and vacation on the moon, something my school essays about the future always had. The author in his book projects a grim future. And he projects it so well that as I visualise the protagonist Winston in his home, at work, the park even, all I see is grey. Not the sharp lines of black and white. But, grey, blurry grey in its many shades. 

As the plot unfolds, and the extreme future that Orwell projects comes to light, my first thought is 'Bah! That's a bit extreme'. But as I go further and the layers under the plot become more evident I think 'Genius! This man saw the future.' Censorship, corruption of power, extreme surveillance...Orwell spoke the language that has become a part of our existence today. The story moves and the parallels between the reality of the story and the reality of today become more evident. And that scares me. 

The one thing that Orwell could not foresee was the evolution of the language. Winston's use of terms like 'deep-bosomed maidens' and 'old boy' and when he says of Julia that 'he would ravish her' don't fit into the future of 1984. They existed in Orwell's times but soon fell out of favour.

Trivia: The character of Big Brother in the story is the inspiration behind the UK-based reality show Big Brother, also known as Big Boss in India.

Indigo by Satyajit Ray

It was with some trepidation that I started this one. The ghost of my last experience with a translated book (Gulzar's Half a Rupee Stories) was still haunting me. Okay, maybe that's a slight exaggeration, but I said a little prayer anyways. It worked. Indigo is a good translation of some of Satyajit Ray's short stories. Somewhere in the first few pages, I forgot that I was reading the translated versions of Ray's original creations. The voice of the translator and author merged into one. 

Many of the short stories in Indigo revolve around the theme of the supernatural. Haunted houses, spirits, past-lives, spells, strange creatures take centre-stage. Other stories pivot on the evil that can emerge from the most commonplace appearing minds. I had always associated Ray with serious issue-oriented subjects on which his films are made. This, despite the fact that I don't remember seeing any of his films but that's the impression I held. These stories revealed a different facet of the creative genius. 

The only complaint I have is that the last few stories were a tad predictable. Maybe because they were read as a collection and so after a point if was easy to predict what way the author was likely to go. Since the stories were not written as a collection but as individual works over a stretch of a few years, they should have best been savoured like a course-by-course degustation rather than a happy meal from the drive-thru? 

Sea of Poppies

One of my favourite reads last year was Amitav Ghosh's first, Shadow Lines. In fact it made its way to my shelf of all-time favourites. What I loved about Shadow Lines was the unusual flow in the narrative. The story moved between different time periods with a nonchalance that made me envy the writer's genius. I have read one more book by the author, The Glass Palace. In this one, the author displays his prowess in placing created characters against actual events and real people. I remember wanting to visit the Burmese King's palace in Ratnagiri after I finished the book.

Sea of Poppies, thus, had a lot to live up to even before I had read the first line. Ghosh once again experiments with the narrative. The story starts off with three-four different threads which appear unconnected in the beginning but soon it is clear that at some point they are all going to intertwine. The author gives space to the back stories of all key characters so much so that as the reader I felt a bond with them and I connected with their angst. And by the end of it I was rooting for each one of them to get their desired resolution.

The irritation in the story-telling was the use of vernacular dialogue followed immediately by its translation. As a writer it is something that I fight to not do with a vengeance, however tempting it may be at times. And as a creative writing teacher, I have had many a classes run into overtime, because of a discussion on this subject. I wonder what Ghosh's reasons were to write so much of the dialogue in this manner. But, the plot was the winner, it gripped me and compelled me to push through the dialogue to reach the end.