Thirteenth Day

This is part of something much, much larger. But it sort of holds up on its own. And, I haven't written in a while and the blog feels neglected. Hence.

***

My grandfather died when I was 17. We lived in Dehradun then, and he died in Madras. My father was a bureaucrat and we lived all over the country. This meant that I met him only when I came to Madras for the holidays, once a year, sometimes twice. 

He was a journalist with the Express, and he wrote a weekly column on politics and current events. Each day, he left for work only after a leisurely lunch. On many days, he never went anywhere. So, we read all the newspapers together. And we deliberated about the news. Our discussions stemmed from what we read, but very soon, we found ourselves far, far away from where we started, debating, discussing, throwing ideas and arguments at each other. I remember refusing to eat for a whole day after a long argument we had on the ethics of begging. I was indoctrinated to never give money to a beggar -- I was encouraging begging, my mother said. But he argued (and I never found out whether he was being serious or just playing devil's advocate) that I was being inhuman. I think I told him I will earn my food, and that he need not give me anything. He let me be hungry until I asked my grandmother for food the next evening. I don't know if that exercise taught me anything else, but it sure taught me hunger. 

I wrote to him regularly when I was away, and he replied unfailingly. He rambled and went off topic in almost every letter. He was often obscure, and he assumed I knew many things. Like, he would write about something he read in the EPW, and say, 'It makes the standard utilitarian arguments.' But I was 12. I didn't know what utilitarian was. It was a wonder that he wrote such precise, clear, forceful editorials week after week. I was, perhaps, his outlet for all that went on in his head. 

One day, I heard him speak at the University of Madras. He spoke on the space where language and culture meet, and linked it to Tamil patriotism. He spoke in a language that was neither English nor Tamil, switching so seamlessly between the two that his tongue had a fully formed structure of its own. I wondered if he was making a subtle point with that exercise. 

His lectures were famous, you know. He had this New Years' Eve lecture each year on contemporary politics and what to look forward to in the coming year, and I was told that the halls would be overflowing and people stood in the aisles for two whole hours. Each political party would send its spies to find out what he lauded and what he criticised. 

It was almost cruel that after a stroke, he lost his ability to speak. He taught himself to communicate through guttural sounds and gesturing, but there was no way he could lecture. He lived like that for four years. He was healthy enough to walk around sometimes, but other times, he was wheeled around by a nurse. 

One day, four months after the stroke, my uncles who lived with him noticed that he was reading a lot of political theory and making furious notes in some old diaries. When people asked him, he revealed nothing. Just a grunt or two dismissing their questions. Then, a month or so later, he demanded that he be taken to the University of Madras library each morning for half a day. My uncles, glad that he still wanted to do something with his life, made the arrangements. 

He read all sorts of journals and essays. He started maintaining boxes and boxes of photocopies. He cut out articles from newspapers each morning and put them in folders. His poor nurse bore the brunt of his compulsive arranging and rearranging. 

He met some of his lawyer friends every other day and spent hours discussing things with them -- apparently, he would write what he wanted to say on a piece of paper, and they would respond vocally. Each night, after dinner, he would write. First, on one-sided paper. Write, edit, rewrite, tear pages, write again… Then, he would transcribe his first draft into notebooks. These were refined with a red pen and fully re-copied. After almost two years, he handed four notebooks to my uncle and asked him to get whatever was written there typed out. 

It was about two hundred pages in print, and it was a meditation on the notion of equality, from its underpinnings in philosophy and political theory to how and why it was the cornerstone of human rights. For him, everything else was negotiable. Equality wasn't. Everything stemmed from equality, he wrote, and so, if we understood the idea, we would understand the entirety of political science. It was a grandiose thought, perhaps a little too sweeping. Still, the grasp over his arguments, his cogency, and the sheer breadth of knowledge made the argument as convincing as it could be. 

He covered equality in interpersonal dealings, you know, between husband and wife, parent and son, boss and employee... "micro-equality". And he covered "macro-equality", in the way Government deals with people, in the way large corporations deal with each other, in how nations negotiated deals... His thesis was that they are all manifestations of the same idea. The prose was like one of his editorials -- sparkling, crackling with wit and wisdom. His ideas were crystal clear. His arguments were as strong as fortresses without being as imposing. It was incredible.

I remember reading it then (while I read it, his voice rang in my ear as if he were reading it out to me) and not really understanding it. My father, though, read it over and over again for months. He made copious notes while he read. He even sent my grandfather three letters about it. He never got a reply. 

My grandfather's health deteriorated almost immediately after he was done with bringing the book out. I had gotten into IIT Delhi by then, and was waiting for college to start. It was a great time to be in Dehradun. Away from the crippling summer on the plains with nothing to do and an admission in a top course in a plum college.   

Each evening, I would go out with this girl and come back really late at night. She was my father's colleague's daughter. Dehra was quite safe, and neither of our parents cared that we were out after dark. I had a motorbike, and we went on long rides to deserted places. She was smart, though she behaved like she didn't like being smart. She was moderately pretty, but behaved like she was much prettier. She had a fascination for scatological humour.

One day, in some thicket, at dusk, we kissed. I hadn't kissed a girl before, and I burst out laughing. She asked me why. I said, "It's strange, isn't it? That we express our fondness by locking lips." She said, "No. We lock lips because it feels good. I'm not fond of you or anything." 

Kissing became a regular feature, although we barely went much further. My hand went inside her shirt once, and I felt her back and worked my way up to her bra when she stopped me. She giggled about it afterwards.

One day, her parents were out of town, and she told me most nonchalantly that she wanted to try having sex. She was a year older, studying in Delhi, and some of her classmates had done it. I was nervous, but she was confident. I was also excited, of course, that some girl wanted to actually do it with me. She insisted, more than once, that she chose me only because I was "available and attractive enough". 

So, we gave it a shot. No pun intended. 

I sent our watchman to buy condoms and swore him to secrecy. I went to her house by afternoon. We kissed first, and I made nervous attempts to take her top off. She broke off suddenly and declared that we must drink a little to make the whole thing more relaxed. I had never drunk before, and I gulped the vodka like it was a glass of buttermilk. She did the same. A couple of rounds of this vodka, and we almost naturally threw ourselves at each other. After some fiddling with each other's clothes and the pack of condoms, we had awkward teen sex… Limbs getting in each other's ways, not really knowing what to grip and how, never sure what can be done and what cannot, not finding the right spots.  

I even remember her saying, "Don't look down there, you pervert!" And I wondered once, loudly, "Ok, if I don't look, how do I know if I'm hitting the right place or not." I was too nervous to even find it funny. Pressure of performance, perhaps. Of course, every now and then, we got going, and we felt that incredible rush of pleasure. But largely, we were like two people looking for treasure in a dark cave with no torches.

I asked her more than once, "Am I in?" and saying, "This condom doesn't let me feel anything, so I'm never sure."

We weren't wholly unsuccessful, although I had expected it to be a lot more fun than it eventually was. She concluded that the foreplay was more exciting than the sex itself. I insisted that it would improve with practice. She said we would practice the following day. I agreed. Still naked and tired, we threw our limbs around each other and fell asleep. 

I woke up way after midnight, much later than the time I usually got back home. For the first time, I experienced that heaviness you have behind your eyes after you've had sex. My head was pounding. I was groggy, I felt like I was under sedatives. I wore my clothes quickly, gave her some desperately breathless goodbye kisses and rushed back home. 

Outside my door, there was this little note, 'Thatha passed away. We have left for Madras. Wait here for instructions.' It was a functional note, no frills. But I could sense their anger at my disappearance. I wondered how they might have rushed to Madras. They would've taken a taxi to Delhi, and a flight from there. I was away from home for almost the entire day, and I had no idea when the note was written. There was no way of telling if they had left in the afternoon and were already in Madras, or if they left in the evening and were now in Delhi. 

I first called my father's friend in Delhi, where we usually stayed. He groggily told me hadn't heard the news, and asked me questions about it. I told him I had no clue. It was three in the morning, and I was scared to call my grandfather's house in Madras. I guessed that my parents would have gone straight to the airport, and taken a flight to Madras. I could hear my father's voice asking me what I had been up to. I decided to call in the morning.

Then, I had this brainwave. I called my brother's hostel -- he was studying management in Ahmedabad then. But someone told me that he had left a few hours ago to Madras because his grandfather had passed away.

It took me almost half an hour to register that my grandfather had died. The first emotion I had was of guilt. Guilt for being away from home when the news came in. Guilt for thinking of how to save my skin for being away, when I should have been grieving over his death. Guilt for having sex when he died… I don't know, it was a combination of all these things, I think. 

That's what made me leave for Madras immediately, without waiting for instructions. I took money from my father's cupboard, and got into the earliest bus to Delhi. Then, I went to the airport, but found the tickets too expensive. After half a day of hoping in vain for tickets on some train, I got into the unreserved compartment on the Grand Trunk Express the next evening. I didn't tell anyone how I was coming. It was the guilt, perhaps. It was also, strangely, a sense of adventure. 

My family in Madras couldn't contact me for two days. In the middle of the mourning over my Thatha's death, there were relatives and friends looking for me in Delhi and Madras. My mother's sister, who lived in Calcutta, flew to Dehra, and asked around. That girl I slept with broke down and confessed to having spent the day with me. She told my aunt that I left at only two in the morning. My aunt and her parents asked her what we were doing till then, she merely cried. This bit of news reached Madras around the same time that I did.

I was coming from two grimy, gruelling, grief-stricken days on the train. I barely spoke for those two days -- there was no one to talk to, really. Even in that crowd, I had found the space to be lonely. The world in my head was in one of two modes -- over-activeness or completely blank. There would either be too many parallel trains of thought -- memories of my grandfather, the wrath of my family, the absolute bizarreness of my instinctive travel, the fuzzy whirl of having sex for the first time, all running in tandem, coiling around each other, swirling, in my mind like a slow-boiling broth -- or absolutely nothing at all. Zilch. A whiteness. A numbness. 

I didn't have a reserved seat, of course, and that provided its own challenges. I would wait for the train to pick up enough speed so that no one could get in or out, and then go to the loo. For two nights, I caught sleep sitting up on a wooden bench between two men. I didn't brush. I barely ate. I didn't have enough money to.

In Madras, I was welcomed by my mother with a resounding slap. I didn't know which of my infractions that was for. She said, "I was mentally prepared to start a parallel funeral for you." I said, "Don't be dramatic," and walked inside. I was tired, and I thought the least I deserved was a chance to bathe and a hot meal. My uncle didn't like my tone, and started screaming at me. I turned around, and said, "You want to wake up the dead with all that shouting?"

The family was too exhausted to respond to that statement. They all stopped talking to me. The next ten days felt like that train journey -- surrounded by hordes of people who didn't want to make conversation with me. My brain, just like the train, was on those two modes, of hyper-activity or numbness. I had many variations on the dream where I was having sex with a much older woman who lived near our house in Dehradun, where she taunted me for not being inside her. Soon, I was crying and asking her to let go of me. She kept saying, "Make me come, I'll let you go." This dream woke me up many times, sweating and thirsty. 

On the sixth day, I went to my grandfather's cupboard and picked up a copy of his book on equality and read it carefully for the next week. I joined my family at meal times, conversed with them in monosyllabic grunts, like my grandfather used to do, and stayed as far away as possible. I frequently took walks around Alwarpet on hot afternoons, getting lost often, to come back hours later. No one asked me where I went or why. No one cared anymore.  

Finally, the thirteenth day came. After the big lunch to which all sorts of people -- academicians, lawyers, doctors, journalists, students, fans -- came, a cousin was asked to sing. He was a few years younger than me, and was already some sort of classical music star. He must've been only twelve or thirteen then.

The house had a large,  partly open hall and a courtyard. My cousin sat on the floor of this hall, on a mat, with an electronic tanpura and sang my grandfather's favourite classical kriti-s. He closed his eyes, cocked his head slightly upwards, and sang. There was little sentiment in his demeanour -- he was too young for that -- but the music was highly emotional. Open throated, slightly rough and loud, the voice filled the hall with great warmth. Hope emanated from that little boy's music. An aunt who hadn't smiled in two weeks, smiled. Two uncles started singing along, while another cousin accompanied them tapping on a table. Someone remarked that my cousin sang just the kind of classical music my grandfather liked. One of the uncle's who sang along imitated how my grandfather would've appreciated the music. The hall resounded with laughter. The woe of my grandfather's loss was replaced by the warmth of his memory. 

Soon, the hall was filled with people telling stories about the departed. Really embarrassing stories. His sister even described how he would fart silently and secretly in public, and how she learnt to recognise it from the expression on his face. There were stories about him and my grandmother disappearing shadily on many afternoons. One of his cousins said he once saw them walk into a nearby lodge. 

The hall was more electric than it had been even when he was around.

After the crowd cleared, my father, who hadn't said a word to me about the entire incident, put his arm around my shoulder and said, "Next time, call me. I'll put you on a flight." I looked at him incredulously, but I realised he meant it. After a long silence, I smiled. He smiled back. My brother, who was within earshot, laughed, and said, "God, you are the real pet. If I had done this, Appa would've disowned me."

For the first time since I saw that note, I laughed. 

Their silence

They sit in silence, staring at an emptying wedding hall. There is a sense of satisfaction in the air, the feeling of completeness. It is like the guests have all collectively, contentedly burped. Her new husband sends some relatives off, somewhere near the entrance to the hall, bidding them farewell, cracking a silly joke or two, promising to visit them soon in their distant towns. 

They look at around the hall, still in silence, and they turn to each other. She smiles, he smiles. They turn away and continue staring at the hall. 

She wonders what they are to each other. They are friends, she concludes. They have always been. They met, three years ago, as friends. They worked in offices that weren't far from each other, they knew common people. 

They met for lunch often. Sometimes, they planned it. Other times, they just landed up at the same little dosa place at the same time, often knowing the other was likely to be there. He always ate a rava masala dosa and followed it up with a mini coffee. She studied the menu and ordered carefully -- sometimes elaborate and sometimes minimal. They ate mostly in silence. Every now and then, one of them would say a sentence or two, and the other would nod.

One day, he declared he had a crush on a friend of hers. She nodded. The next day, her friend was with her at lunch. Conversation flowed that afternoon between him and her friend. They met a few times after that, but that died out. "It didn't work out with your friend," he told her, "She wasn't really interested." She only nodded. 

One evening, they went for a long, silent walk down the beach. For some reason, they held hands. They didn't say much about it that evening, and they never discussed its significance. 

They met more often after that. They went on long drives to nowhere in particular, they went for movies whose names they didn't register, and plays they didn't know anything about. They ate, they drank.

They spoke more than they did earlier, trading sentences that had little to do with one another, interspersed with lengthy nothings. They had little to talk to each other about. He read, she didn't. She watched sport, he didn't. Their musical tastes were vastly different. But their silences spoke the same language, their silences had common interests, their silences understood each other like their conversations never did. 

Love came and went in waves. One day, it lashed against them, throwing them off balance, goading them to hold each other for support. Then, it receded, silently, before gearing up to hit them again. They stood in the sea, soaking in the waves silently. 

Only twice did they make attempts to express their fondness for each other in words. The first time, she said, "I want to be kissed." He said, "Let's not complicate us." The second time, after a spontaneous bout of incredible kissing, he asked, "Will you marry me?" She dismissed him with, "You're drunk," before proceeding to bite his ear. 

They are friends, she concludes amidst the winding-up of the wedding. His silence indicates that he's come to the same conclusion. Their silences have decided - they can't always be with each other. The waves come, but they always go back. 

But they know that they will always share these special silences. Nothing, not her wedding, not his, can take that away.

Alleged

Are you a Hindu?
Yes.

Are you religious?
A little.

That was a trick question. You can't be both.
Eh?

There's now a judgment of the Nagpur Bench of the Income-tax Appellate Tribunal which says that a trust set up for the worship of Ganesha, Hanuman and Shiva is not "religious" in nature.
What?! 

Yeah. Because Hinduism is not a religion.
Then what is it? 

A way of life, sucker.
Just like Test Cricket is?

Yes. Did you know that "Lord shiva, Hanumanji, Goddess Durga does not represent (sic) any particular religion, they are merely regarded to be the super power of the  universe (sic)"?
That's just rubbish. Superman's ability to fly is a superpower. 

Sire, I'm talking of a "super power", not a "superpower".
Ah. Just like a "superstructure" is different from a "super structure"?

Subtle distinction, no? Get a load of this. A sentence in the judgment starts with the words, "The alleged Hindu religion..."
Well done. That's like the Times of India talking about crimes. 

Hinduism is not even a 'community', they say. "The word ‘community’ means a society of people living in the same place, under the same laws and regulations and who have common rights and privileges.  This may apply to Christianity or moslem (sic) but not to Hinduism."
Does this mean what happened twenty years ago on December 6 wasn't religious or communal? 

It wasn't. It was about people who were taking revenge for a religion pwning their "super power" hundreds of years ago.
I can understand that, yes. Five hundred years from now, I wouldn't be surprised if Spider-man fans bring down a church which stood on the spot in New York where he was allegedly born. 

There's that word again, "allegedly".
Important word, innit?

Auteur, madarchod!

When you are in bed all day, wrapped in a bedsheet in the sultriness of Madras, knocked out by a fever, wavering ever so subtly between sleep and waking until you don't know which is which, your brain starts functioning in a zone of its own. Time becomes fuzzy, even irrelevant. Fungible. Ah, yes. That's the word, fungible! I like that word, it's so cuddly, so flexible.

Your brain thinks thoughts, your brain reaches startling conclusions, and when you try retracing the steps you went through to reach there, you find the breadcrumbs eaten away by the demon-like birds in your head.

The little iPod embedded in my brain, constantly buzzing, always on shuffle, sings now in Anu Malik's voice, "She gives me fever, fever, fever." His distinctive inflection, his fake not-Bombay-not-America accent, his slight tunelessness at the end of each line, all ring clearly in my head. This hasn't happened in a while. I open my eyes, and find my neck drenched in fevered sweat, the fan groaning while it whirs unenthusiastically, and vague sounds of a Tamil serial from the adjacent room. I reach out to the bottle of water on the bedside table and drink a rather large gulp. When that water break morphs back into my febrile sleep, I hear that voice again. Anu Malik. That paragon of frivolousness. That antonym of mellifluousness. "She gives me fev-uh, fev-uh, fev-uh."

My closed palms feel warm, my feet feel cold. I shiver a little.

The song makes it way to the core of my existence, it consumes my soul, it kindles the flame within, and it unearths a curious memory that lies buried deep, deep within.

I am now in the summer of 2000. My friend and I have been packed off to Trichy to spend some time with his aunt. The mornings and evenings, we spend cycling in and around the little town. We unexpectedly run into some girls in a park. We make nervous conversation with them. The voices in this conversation seem to come from a well -- there is a slight reverberation about them. Like dream sequences in the movies. The girls ask us if we want to watch Arnold Schwarzenegger's End of Days in a theatre nearby. I hold one of the girls' hands throughout the movie and kiss it just before the climax. She blushes.

The kiss wakes me up. I am back in the present, and I realise that my brain just added its own cinematic masala to a rather monotonous holiday. I smile. I doze off again.

Now we are in my friend's aunt's house in Trichy. It is a dreary, meandering, dull, drooping, dreadful, afternoon. We are channel-flipping between vague Bollywood music channels. And we discover this song. The anthem of my fever. "She gives me fev-uh, fev-uh, fev-uh." A pre-Big Brother, pre-UP-Bihar-lootne, pre-yoga-in-extreme-tights Shilpa Shetty, looking extremely desirable, canoodling a drugged-out Sanjay Dutt on an uncomfortably shaped sofa in a dingy set. And in the background, off-key women chorus singers going "Whose that girl with the lovely, lovely smile...", soon to be joined by Anu Malik trying to sound lovelorn and horny at once.

The movie, I finally recall, is Jung.

I am not in that drawing room anymore. I am now in Kalpana Theatre, Udupi, and the moth eaten seats bring a flood of memories. Of the the jail-like ticket queue, of Rs. 18 balcony seats, of drinking local cool drink Ba-Jal during the interval, of vague art deco construction, of actually kissing a girl in the the darkened halls while watching Mission Impossible 2 in Hindi.

"She gives me fev-uh, fev-uh, fev-uh," Anu Malik continues singing, now in surround sound. Shilpa curves and cavorts around Sanjay Dutt and the sofa. I am not sure which of the two is luckier. My friend's hands are not where they should be. Our verdict, "Shilpa Shetty has come out good, man!" She scorches our senses and blanks out the rest of the movie.

(I am now reminded of Sanjay Gupta's previous outing, Khauff, which I watch in the same theatre with the same friend. Until the movie starts, I think I have come for an English movie called Cough.)

As Jung hurtles towards its laborious climax, I hear a threatening baritone from my left. I turn around to see a dark, bulky, french-bearded figure bearing down on me, asking, "You must be a fan. You seem to have seen all my movies."
It dawns on me. The new entrant is Sanjay Gupta himself. I reply, in a voice that isn't my own, "Not all. I missed Aatish: Feel the Fire. Although I must admit, of all your movies, that one has the most thrilling title."
He smiles, "You lucky bastard. Imagine how many times I must have seen it during editing."
"That explains the mindnumbing Hameshaa. I knew it couldn't have come from a straight-thinking mind," I console him. "Your expertise always lay in remaking Hollywood movies, featuring silly, overloud comedy, steamy song sequences, desperate posturing, a bored Sanjay Dutt and faux grittiness."
"Thank you for reducing my life's work to a stereotype," he says.
"Oh, come on. I'm telling you that you're an auteur," I offer, "A French word, monsieur. That must make you feel posh."
He collapses into the seat next to me, and says, "You know. It's funny you use that word -- auteur. It's become famous in India these days." There is a gleam in his eyes, as he turns around to the projection room and shouts, "Projectionist! Start from the beginning!"
I look at Sanjay in horror, "Dude, I cannot go through this movie again."
"I merely want to refresh your memory, pal," Sanjay says. The 'pal' proves he watches too much cheap Hollywood for his own good.

The titles are now on the screen. Familiar names whizz past me. Jackie Shroff, Sanjay Dutt, Raveena Tandon, Anu Malik... And at one point, he stands up and screams again, "Projectionist, pause!"

I stare at the screen in shock at the name on it. Anurag Kashyap. Yes, that very same Anurag Kashyap -- the Hindi New Wave hero, the man they call the saviour of Indian cinema, the toast of the Cannes Directors' Fortnight -- is involved in writing an embarrassing rip-off of a middling Hollywood film called Desperate Measures.
Sanjay roars with laughter, "But Anurag is an honourable man!"

I am dismayed. I ask into the void of Kalpana Theatre, "Et tu, Anurag?"

A pair of dark-rimmed spectacles appears on the screen. Soon these are filled by large, keen, black eyes. A round, stocky face forms itself around the spectacles, and an uneven beard grows. In a barely masked North Indian accent, the face speaks, "I can explain myself!"
"Admit it, Anurag!" Sanjay hollers, "You did this once more. This movie called Paisa Vasool."
I ask, utterly disappointed, "Anurag, you wrote that cinematic excreta also?"
"No, no. Wait," Anurag tries.
But Sanjay interjects again, "Anurag is an honourable man! Hahahaha. You see, young fellow, where Gangs of Wasseypur comes from? It's not him going nudge-nudge-wink-wink at masala. He's just making what he knows how to make, and people are attributing nudges and winks. Auteur, saala madarchod!"

"Order, order," I shout, my legal instincts coming to the fore, "We must allow the accused to present his case."
"Milaard," Anurag starts, "Around 1999, there was this series on TV called Darr starring Kay Kay Menon and Irrfan Khan. Neither actor was well known then -- their career defining roles still more than half a decade away."

I remember it being a fairly gripping series about a dope-head serial killer (Irrfan) called, if my memory serves me right, "Desi Jallad" engaged in a battle of wits with a policeman (Kay Kay). I wonder where the accused is going with this.

"It was directed by my brother, Abhinav Kashyap, and the two of us co-wrote it. At some point during the series, my name stopped appearing in the credits, and the series turned a little less edgy and a little more melodramatic." He pauses, catches his breath, and asks, "You want to know the truth?"
"Yes," I say.
"You can't handle the truth," he says, his voice acquiring a stentorian quality.
"Dude, too many movie references. Stick to your story."
"Sorry, milaard," he says. "The truth is, I never wrote Darr. My brother wrote it, he directed it."
Sanjay laughs. I make notes in my notebook, and say, "Yes, Mr. Accused. Go on."
"You see, Satya was out by this time, and he only wanted me to lend my name to it. You know how far a name goes in show business. And I did this only for my brother. My own brother. My own blood. Same mother. Same father also. Mere bhai ke liye main itna bhi nahin kar sakta kya? We both came from Uttar Pradesh searching for jobs. We slept on benches, footpaths, beaches. We often ate Tiger biscuits for breakfast, lunch and dinner because you got nothing more wholesome for Rs. 3. Sometimes, we didn't even have enough money for that... Is what I did wrong? My hunger did this, milaard. My desperation did this."

Sanjay wipes a tear off his cheek.

I think for a while and pronounce judgment, "In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. 'Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,' he told me, 'just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.' "

Anurag says, "Saale, milaard ke bacche, you think only you've read The Great Gatsby? Even Bachchan Amitabh has read it now."

I smile sheepishly. "Wait. You haven't explained Paisa Vasool. Your co-writer (and director) on Paisa Vasool was a man called Srinivas Bhashyam. He can't be your brother. Even if he his, he's definitely not same mother, same father."
"You must understand. Bhashyam's greatest achievements at that point were that he was Assistant Director on the hilarious Tamil classic Magalir Mattum and Second Unit Director of Mani Ratnam's blockbuster Bombay. He was making a Bollywood debut with Paisa Vasool. I was helping him out... After all, even an artist needs to eat some light Indian breads with lentil soup twice a day, no?"
"Srinivas Bhashyam sounds like he would prefer rice and mulligatawny soup."

I hear a distant voice. It is my grandmother's. Anurag, Sanjay, my friend, the theatre, all dissolve into my bedroom, now bathed in a dim yellow light from a distant bulb. My grandmother says, "Wake up, kanna. Eat some rasam saadam. It will do you good."
I say, "One minute, Paati. Coming."

I start my laptop, open Youtube, find the song, and listen to it.

Blogger

For some years now, I've been reading a blog by a woman from Japan. I don't know her name, I don't know what she looks like. I know she writes. I know she's been working on a Japanese novel. I know that she finds it weird that her novel is in Japanese, but her blog is in English. She thinks she has an identity-crisis, but, as she asks her readers in one post, 'Don't we all?' 

I don't know if she does anything else for a living. If her blog is to be believed, she does have a lot of wandering time. In both senses -- she has the time to wander, and time does wander around her. This suggests she doesn't hold a regular job - at least not the variety that requires you to swipe your smart-card in at 9 am each morning and swipe it when you leave at 6 pm in the evening.

I don't know how old she is. She talks of college in the past tense; she must be twenty at least. She once talked of going to the countryside for an older cousin's wedding. This suggests she isn't 30 yet. Her tone, her life, her world, all suggest she's in her mid-20s. I don't know if she has a boyfriend. She talks of men here and there, she talks of even sleeping with them. But she doesn't reveal more. She does ruminate on relationships, usually in the past tense, and her posts reveal she didn't like at least one. Something tells me she's single now, although if you ask me for conclusive proof, I can't give it to you.

Her writing is beautiful. More beautiful than you or I could ever dream of writing. It's taut, it's precise, it's clear. It's vivid, it's vivacious, it's whacky.

Her writing is delightful. And sad. Sometimes both at the same time. Sometimes she says nothing sad, she just chronicles what she had for breakfast, but you can sense a sadness in her tone. Sometimes, she says a lot, her posts run to pages and pages, but she says very little. I wonder, when I read those posts, if she's blocking something out of her mind with a shield of words.

I think she has no other reader. No one leaves any comment on any post. But nor do I. I just read and leave quietly.

I read each post of hers many times over. Often, she says just what I want to say. Sometimes, I have no idea what she's going on about -- either the references are too Japanese, or she deliberately hides behind a veil. Still, I read them. Still, every post lodges itself inside me. Her words come out, in conversation, like they are my own. Her ideas form the core of my own writing.

Once in a while, I tell people that the idea I just discussed with them was something I read in an odd Japanese woman's blog. They give me a strange look when I tell them this. Some people tell me I'm a stalker. That I'm unnaturally interested in another person's life. That this is a dangerous obsession. I laugh at them and tell them that I'm not really that obsessed.

But I know, somewhere, somehow, that I am. I know that I can recite some of those posts like they were poems in my fourth standard textbook. Love is too far-fetched a word, and infatuation is too complicated a word to describe what I feel towards her. A fondness. That word rings true, I think. I am fond of her. Very fond of her.

It has been three months since she last posted -- she used to post every other day until then. I waited a full month before leaving this comment: "If I say I miss you, will you come back and write more?" I go to her blog every day, hoping there's something new. There never is. I open the last post and eagerly scroll down to the comments, only to find, "Your comment is awaiting moderation." 

I guess I'll have to wait a while longer. 

The Dark Knight Rises: An Early Review

You know how in competitions you don't want to go after the best act because you fear you'll get judged harshly? That's exactly what The Dark Knight Rises must feel like, as audiences around the world queue up for it with one question lingering somewhere in the back of their minds, "Will it be as good as The Dark Knight?" If I had to answer in one word, I'd say, "No." Two words, "Nowhere close." Three words, "Oh, fuck off!" But then, coming second to The Dark Knight isn't really that sad, and TDKR does a lot of things right.

It gives the Batman a lot of time to introspect (He's been sitting in the east wing of his mansion for eight years, and still doesn't have answers when the movie begins!), it asks difficult questions of him, it pushes him even further down the rabbit-hole he jumped down in Batman Begins. He ponders, at various times, the purpose and price of his life. His parents are central to all this, as ever, but that explanation for his anger grows old -- perhaps even within him. Alfred wants him to run away; he thinks that's the only way to move on. Wayne's wounded, he's rusty, and Alfred isn't sure how battle-ready he is; but he is, on the surface, raring to go. What drives him? Is this impulse true? He isn't sure. He learns, first, that conquering all fear might not always be the best thing to do, and later, that he hadn't really conquered it in the first place. He learns that only fear can make you free, only the fear of falling can push you to make the jump. There is, of course, a lot of back and forth on relationships crucial to him -- with Alfred, with Gordon, with crime, with justice, with Gotham. In other words, it gives the Batman a lot of time to be Bruce Wayne, the eccentric millionaire.

With him on this journey, are a quirky set of characters.

There is a smooth, sizzling, scheming cat-burglar with an eye for his mother's pearls, who, strangely, steals his fingerprints. She is as planned and as deliberate as the Batman's other nemesis, the Joker, was impulsive and reckless. Even without the Batman having a vague mix of a crush and suspicion on her, she has dilemmas of her own -- an identity she's trying to get rid of, and an almost unnatural desire for self-preservation.

Then there's the bizarre man in the mask -- Bane. No surname, no first-name. Just Bane. (Clearly he's no boon) A disciple of Bruce's guru, Ra's Al Ghul, and an outcast from the League of Shadows, just like Bruce, he has the brain, the training and the brawn to pose the most serious threat in eight years to Gotham -- a threat grave enough to force Bruce out of his mansion and into his long abandoned costume. His plans are clear for us to see, but his motivations remain unclear.


There is another orphan, a too-curious-for-his-own-good, smart, tough, honest, rookie cop who has discovered Bruce's mask and is intrigued by it. He wants to understand the Batman's motivations, he almost seems like he wants to wear a mask himself. He perceives more than most others, he acts swiftly, decisively and level-headedly.


There are the people of Gotham, basking in the sunshine of the Dent Act, named in honour of the white knight, Harvey Dent -- it gave teeth to the police, the Commissioner says in a speech --  that cleansed the streets of Gotham of organised crime. The very people who believe the Batman betrayed them and murdered their saviour.


Commissioner Gordon lives that lie, repeating it each day, and hoping he will be able to get the truth off his chest soon. He thinks they should know the truth, but he doubts the people's ability to take the truth with equanimity. The lie is eating him from the inside, slowly.

There is a nuclear fusion reactor in the middle of it all -- belonging to Wayne Enterprises, controlled by the redoubtable Lucius Fox and Miranda Tate, a clean energy activist -- that Bane converts into a tick-tocking nuclear time-bomb. The scale of the plot, as you can see, is fairly large.

The gadgets are all there -- the new and improved Batpod with a sweet new wheel move, a flying machine simply called The Bat, and multiple Tumblers rumbling along the streets of Gotham. The action sequences are intense and inventive, the CGI simply breathtaking, and the cinematography broodingly beautiful.

But something doesn't fit. Somehow, the movie doesn't come together as an overwhelming meal that The Dark Knight was. The narration in the earlier movie was more sprawling, more messy. There were many sidetracks, many staircases that led nowhere. But that seemed to work in its favour. The tauter, more focussed approach in TDKR seems almost limiting. You're not plunged into a vast drama that no one seems to have total control over, and that, funnily, takes away from the movie.

For a movie where characters think so much, they seem to think too loudly, they seem to speak their thoughts too often. The movie doesn't ponder enough. In the previous two movies, Christopher Nolan found a way to not let the pace drag while still feeding us enough to think about. Here, he does neither.

Most disappointingly, TDKR's philosophy is re-hashed and superficial. Ra's Al Ghul and the Joker, even the Scarecrow (who makes a guest appearance here) and Dent, had their own set of ideologies -- political, social and economic -- and ethics. And this made them incredibly colourful. One of them was flawed, one greedy, one plainly unhinged and one wronged. They were coloured by what they saw, they reacted to what they experienced. Even the Joker, who unleashed mayhem for the fun of it, did it because he believed it was necessary for there to be someone to do it. "This city needs a better class of criminals," he said. They were all uniformly fascinating exactly because they took strong stands on the world around them.

Sadly, none of the villains on display in TDKR had any of this spunk. Seline Kyle was never really a villain, Bane's motivations were unconvincing. The third villain (shan't let the cat out of the bag!) was pushed by a need for... wait for it... revenge! No, I'm not suggesting that revenge sagas are necessarily simplistic. I'm saying that a revenge saga needs the avenger to lose something dear, and for the audience to feel that pain and that loss. Here, the whole thing is reduced to a plot twist -- now that's flimsy, that's insubstantial, that's fruitless.

And that's why TDKR is underwhelming -- because it builds a structure that is gigantically grand, achingly beautiful and painstakingly constructed, but builds it around a hollow, shallow core.

On Campus Novels, Sanskritisation and Causality: A Conversation with Satyajit Sarna

The last time I met Satyajit Sarna (unimaginatively nicknamed 'Surd'), in a few hours, and for a few hours, I forgot who, where or what I was. When I met him before that, after being in the legendary Queens Bar in T.Nagar and the highly underrated Ranjith rooftop in Nungambakkam, for some reason, I woke up in a room at the Taj Coromandel. The next day, at the Madras High Court, various people wanted their photo taken with what they thought was an alien apparition -- a six-plus-feet tall Sardar in an advocate's gown!

Here, I talk to him about his first novel, published this June by Harper Collins, The Angel's Share.
***

The author poses with mint vodka that tasted like mouthwash.

When I heard that you were writing a novel, I wasn't surprised. Somehow you seemed like the sort of guy who would want to tell a story. But I must admit that given the range of literature you read, and the sort of things you tend to talk about (in our bizarre interactions over the years), I was a little surprised when I heard you were writing a campus novel. This genre, in the context of Indian writing in English in the last decade, brings its own limitations, expectations and biases, doesn't it? What pushed you to write about Law School?

Well, to the extent I was thinking about it, I was following advice. They say you should sort-of bleed the autobiographical urge out of yourself, write it, get your own voice out of your head and onto paper and then either publish it, or print it out on a nice big sheaf of paper and lock it up in a drawer. The danger, if you don’t do that, is that the stories you need to tell start showing up in the stories you want to tell. So you get science fiction with a little campus novel in it, and your detectives have coming-of-age issues. The way I see it, if as a writer you feel a need to write a coming-of-age book, you might as well write it so your space cadets and detectives don’t end up with student angst.

So when I sat down and started typing, I decided to go with the flow and tell the stories that I did know, and they came together and grew with time to become The Angel’s Share.

What's wrong with detectives who have coming-of-age issues or a sci-fi set on a campus of some sort? Wouldn't that sort of thing set the novel apart amongst that genre? Are literary genres like ragas that have strict goalposts within which an artist’s creativity is channelled?

Ha ha, of course! That would be wonderful, and there is great work along those lines which exists. Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card is one of my favorite books that way – a sort of schoolboy story told against a background of interstellar war. What I meant was an unintentional urge to write exactly what you saw into a narrative where it would sit uneasily…

The IITs had Five Point Someone, and the IIMs got the "MBA" series (Mediocre, but Arrogant; Married, but Available and so on). (Have you read these novels?) Law schools don't have a definitive campus novel yet, although there have been attempts to write one. You think The Angel's Share fills that market void?

I read Five Point Someone in third year, and I honestly enjoyed it. It was a light read which appealed to me because I was in college and it was a college book – there was an immediate empathy. It also perversely appealed to me because I liked reading Big Books, and it was the exact opposite of a Big Book and so it felt like cheating. I read it in the back row of class, returned it to the owner and thought that it may be the last I heard of it. Boy, was I wrong!

Campus novels have fallen a long way in the perception of the reading public, which may be a fair assessment of the quality of work we’re seeing, given how many of them are mass-market clones of Five Point Someone.

Coming-of-age, the Bildungsroman, is a very evocative genre– a lot of great writing has come out of it. And as my friend Aditya Sudarshan says, This Side of Paradise is a campus novel. But the tag does make me uncomfortable still.

The Angel’s Share has a couple of settings; I’m not sure I’d have written it or tried to have it published if I had written only a campus novel. In my head it’s a story about youth and growing up. But I’d like to think that if you wanted to tell a story about law schools or law firms in India, you’d have to think about The Angel’s Share and ask yourself if someone got there first.

It's funny you should mention This Side of Paradise, because when I read it, I actually thought, "Hey, Satyajit could write a novel like this!" And in continuing with the Fitzgerald theme, there was also Zorawar who is, in some ways, Nick Carraway to Sasha's Gatsby.

I think that what you may be doing is upgrading me vastly by association. I thank you kindly, but fear that you are far too generous. The Great Gatsby remains my favourite book of all time, and I reread it every year or so. Every time, I see more than I saw the last time, which is incredible given that it’s an even shorter book than The Angel’s Share.

 I see where you’re going when you contrast Nick-Gatsby with Zorawar-Sasha, but there is a little difference in the dynamic, even while Zoju plays the straight man to the inspirational personality of Sasha. If Zoju wasn’t so callow and insecure, Sasha wouldn’t shine so bright, and if Nick wasn’t a non-judgmental Midwesterner, than the East Coast opulence of Gatsby wouldn’t seem so mythical, and Nick’s judgment in the end wouldn’t be so damning.

But, in Gatsby, Jay Gatsby is squarely at the centre of the book. The big question is how big Nick is  - does he tell the truth fairly? How much does he grow and change independently of Gatsby? Zorawar is a lot more active than Nick and his growth and story is more central by comparison.

If I may refer to another one of my favourite books, I could venture that maybe, in Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, the relationship between Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty is a better example. Dean appears and disappears and changes Sal’s life, but the story is about Sal. Dean is more the idea of Dean, and less the person of Dean. And so Sasha.

However if you had to point to a hero in these three books, I feel that you could without hesitation point to Jay Gatsby, Dean Moriarty and Sasha Kapur.

Your novel is intensely personal. It is about people you've known intimately, and spaces you've inhabited for a considerable period of time. Did the familiarity make writing it easier or tougher?

Some of the characters are based on traits I saw in real people, and on events that I saw or heard about. But when you sit down to write fiction, it’s impossible to tell it like it happened. The rules of fiction are different from the rules of life. Events happen in a very diluted non-causal fashion. People are a lot more alike than they are different. You blur lines, mix and match, exaggerate – do the verbal photoshopping you have to make an interesting picture.  What familiarity does help with is description. When I need to describe a setting, I can just tell it like I saw it.

There are things you take for granted when writing about National Law School. For instance, you mention the "Five Buck Shop" and "Amma" without really explaining who or what they are.  Would that put off outsiders? Or are these things not really central to the plot anyway?

Hopefully, neither ‘Five Buck Shop’ nor ‘Amma’ would put off readers. I tested some of these terms on ‘outsiders’ before publishing it, and it appears that anybody who went to college had a Five Buck Shop AND an Amma. There’s an institutional logic to these elements, and its bound to be common to most colleges. If, however, you have ever been to Nagarbhavi and stared into the deep and knowing gaze of Amma, then the reading experience may be so much more the deeper for you.

I’m now trying valiantly to recall whether I still owe any money at Five Buck Shop or to Amma. I think I cleared my tabs at Convocation, but the details are hazy…

There was a moment in the novel when I thought I must launch into a diatribe about Sanskritisation and Westernisation. When you mentioned that for our generation of Indians, cricket was no longer the number one sport, I wanted to jump into the pages of the novel and talk about how Westernising city kids have shifted to football, but for the Sanskritising small-towners (like myself), cricket (which used to be the upper class, elite, city-game) was still number one. This is not a question. I feel like faffing, and I faffed. You may comment, however.

I see your point. Of course I meant this in the context of urban India, where the rise of football is self evident and is definitely influenced by televised international sport and focused marketing by the English Premier League and companies like Nike and Adidas. You are right in that this rise of football is not even across India and that for the vast majority of children in India, cricket is their one true love.

That said, the way I hear it from my granddad, the sports he used to play as a child, and even past independence, the sports that really held the Indian imagination were football and hockey. If you look at the past of Indian football, the Durand Cup predates all but two tournaments and clubs like Mohun Bagan and Mohammedan Sporting have very old and storied pedigrees. Maybe the history of subcontinental sport would have been different if FIFA had allowed India to play the 1950 World Cup barefoot…

I’m no expert but the rise of Indian cricket in the sixties probably has a lot to do with decolonization and the scars it left on the Indian psyche – a need to ape our colonial masters, perhaps. It’s not an obvious fit for our conditions – the equipment is expensive, a proper pitch and grounds are very hard to maintain – but cricket-like games happen everywhere.

I could go on, but so could you. That’s how faffing works.

That’s one skill Law School really taught us, didn’t it? I wouldn’t be half the man I am without it.

Some would say that’s an improvement.

In a report somewhere, it was written that your novel exposes "hard-hitting truths" about National Law School. It made me smile slimily. Your reaction to that (not to my slimy smile, but to the phrase)?

I smiled slimily. I did not intend to write a comforting and sweet paean to NLS. I love the institution and had a fantastic time of it myself, and telling the truth should take nothing away from it. NLS is an amazing college with great alumni, a unique culture and the remarkable achievement of having changed the face of legal practice in India by example. But every institution requires honest assessment, and nothing is perfect.

While The Angel’s Share isn’t a report on the functioning of NLS, it does shine a light on the life of the college that outsiders probably don’t see. The biggest problem with NLS in the years we were there is probably that nobody wanted to tell the truth about anything – infrastructure, safety and security, quality of teaching, lack of effort from students, parochialism, discipline, drug abuse – and nobody wanted to hear it. If the institution and its stakeholders (including us) had been more honest and forthcoming, and more willing to listen to each other, I think we’d have learnt more, done better and a lot of people wouldn’t have graduated with such a bitter taste in their mouths. The courage to talk about things is something that I wish we had possessed as an academic community in those years.

I hear that these things have gotten a lot better, and that’s great to hear. I hear exam papers don’t have roll numbers on them, and that there is an actual functioning ‘open-door policy’. I hear that extracurricular activities get more support from administration. Fewer people lose years now and thankfully, the suicide rate is dropping.

You talk of lack of effort from students, drug abuse, discipline – and these were issues that our professors often cribbed about… Remember the time when a professor said he wouldn’t send his daughter to NLS because he saw a guy and a girl make out on the tennis court? Isn’t this (and the consequential lack of student-teacher dialogue) a symptom of a problem that is fairly central to the incident that led to Sasha’s death in The Angel’s Share – of a cultural disconnect between Law School students and the people around them?

Law School was a bubble. Maybe it still is. The world within was culturally, politically, linguistically different from the ‘Portugal’ outside. I would hesitate to draw that link so explicitly because the saddest part about Sasha Kapur’s death is that it dealt to him by unknowns as random act of unthinking violence. When you attribute causality, you reduce the world to a simpler thing than it is.

If you had to dedicate this novel to three storytellers (novelists, film directors, playwrights -- storytellers), who would they be? And why?

The first would be Jack Kerouac, the patron saint of youth in search of itself. The second would be Bob Dylan, who signals to me that at no point in your life need you run out of stories to tell or avatars to slip into. I think they should hurry up and give him the Nobel Prize for Literature already; it’s embarrassing that they haven’t. The third would be Nick Hornby, because more than anything else I have read, High Fidelity and Fever Pitch spoke to me and my passions and whispered that fiction is a mask we wear so we can speak the language of empathy.

What about sympathy and genuiness?

:)

Your father is a novelist, and a fairly well-known one at that (I must admit that when I first saw We Weren't Lovers Like That on the shelf of a bookstore, I thought it would be vaguely erotic).

That’s because you have a filthy mind.

Guilty as charged. Please tell him that I loved The Exile?

Will do.

Did having him around help you write this novel? Say, in understanding what it takes to write one -- schedules, deadlines, self-discipline and things like that? Did you pick up these things osmotically? Or how to approach publishers with a manuscript? How to deal with editors? Anything?

I only wish I had the discipline of my father, who wakes up early and works at a steady pace, and makes a certain amount of progress on his projects every day. The writing process is something that differs vastly for different people and you just have to find the key that works for you.

It was helpful to have a published author tell you to keep at it, keep your expectations in check and not to give up when the rejections come in, or worse, with the interminable waiting for the rejections to come in.

More than any tangible assistance, I would say that it’s a tremendous boost psychologically. Writers are booklovers first, and I grew up in a house of books. My paternal grandparents are both famous writers in Punjabi. To have books and writing in the family means that writing is not alien or terrifying. After this many years of reading, of hearing one side of a conversation, you just want to open your mouth and say something yourself. Writing makes the world of books a dialogue and not just a monologue.

***

The Angel's Share can be bought online -- this link will tell you the options you have in India. And Amazon has it here. But keep those brick-and-mortar bookstores alive; look there first?