Just a wave and a mea culpa, I know updates have been really, really slow, over here and at the other place. Too much travel, too many friends to meet--sorry!
And yes, I know I've only reached February this far (and I cheated, leaving out most of the web columns I do for Business Standard and Time Out), but we'll reach March by the weekend, and well, who knows? If we're ambitious enough, we might even update April's hack writing IN --gasp!--April itself.
Sigh. I need a clone.
Friday, April 07, 2006
Last Word: Paper promises
Ten years ago, having gone through one set of arcane rituals to prove that we wished to live together as man and wife, my husband and I performed the second part of the marriage rites at the registrar's office. The registration of the marriage was, to me, a far more exotic ritual than the ceremony, and with the waiting around at Tees Hazari thrown in, it took far longer.
This week, the Supreme Court decreed that the registration of marriages will now be compulsory, not optional as it was in our time. But a decade down the line, my husband and I face niggling doubts about the importance of the ritual we went through in the courts. We have no children whose rights need to be safeguarded; my husband is not a wife-beater, nor has he been subjected to extreme mental cruelty. We have no property issues to settle, no alimony issues to sort out, no need for the courts to step into our lives and either dissolve the marriage or tell us to behave better towards our spouse. Like many of our friends, we are, at least at this stage, the kind of people for whom both the ceremony and the registration of the marriage was actually irrelevant.
The move to have all marriages registered is based on very sensible thinking. In the absence of registration, many Indian men have ducked their responsibilities towards their wives and children by denying that a marriage ever took place. If the religious ceremony performed was a matter of a few prayers and no official witnesses, they have often got away with denial.
To make marriage an institution that is recognized primarily by the state is also a welcome step towards bringing in a uniform civil code. As activists have argued over the years, religions do not have the same interest in protecting the rights of women as the state and the courts do. And making the registration of marriages, past, present and future, compulsory underlines the absolute illegality of child marriages.
But here's the thing about registering marriages: are the people who really need the protection of the state going to benefit? And is this actually going to translate into reforms within the institute of marriage, or is this just going to be another exercise in generating paperwork?
The stage at which women really need the protection of marriage registration is the stage at which the marriage itself has broken down. Many of the women who stand in need of legal protection made bad marriages for various reasons. The social pressure to get married, as though marriage is the only possible future for women, has encouraged women to remain dependent or to make bad choices. Many of the warning signs of trouble show up before the ceremony: demands for dowry from the groom's side, the in-laws' insistence that the bride quit working or studying, evidence that one of the spouses might be cruel or unreasonable.
Making the registration of marriages compulsory will help protect those whom the institution of marriage has failed, often in very painful ways. It will do nothing for us who have relationships strong enough to have flourished without the benefit of state certification. And it will do nothing for the many men and women who stumble into bad marriages for all the wrong reasons. Until we start looking at marriage as an enriching experience optionally undertaken by two consenting adults, and not as a compulsory fence to be cleared as a kind of social and familial obligation, nothing's going to change.
(Published in the Kolkata Telegraph, February 2006)
This week, the Supreme Court decreed that the registration of marriages will now be compulsory, not optional as it was in our time. But a decade down the line, my husband and I face niggling doubts about the importance of the ritual we went through in the courts. We have no children whose rights need to be safeguarded; my husband is not a wife-beater, nor has he been subjected to extreme mental cruelty. We have no property issues to settle, no alimony issues to sort out, no need for the courts to step into our lives and either dissolve the marriage or tell us to behave better towards our spouse. Like many of our friends, we are, at least at this stage, the kind of people for whom both the ceremony and the registration of the marriage was actually irrelevant.
The move to have all marriages registered is based on very sensible thinking. In the absence of registration, many Indian men have ducked their responsibilities towards their wives and children by denying that a marriage ever took place. If the religious ceremony performed was a matter of a few prayers and no official witnesses, they have often got away with denial.
To make marriage an institution that is recognized primarily by the state is also a welcome step towards bringing in a uniform civil code. As activists have argued over the years, religions do not have the same interest in protecting the rights of women as the state and the courts do. And making the registration of marriages, past, present and future, compulsory underlines the absolute illegality of child marriages.
But here's the thing about registering marriages: are the people who really need the protection of the state going to benefit? And is this actually going to translate into reforms within the institute of marriage, or is this just going to be another exercise in generating paperwork?
The stage at which women really need the protection of marriage registration is the stage at which the marriage itself has broken down. Many of the women who stand in need of legal protection made bad marriages for various reasons. The social pressure to get married, as though marriage is the only possible future for women, has encouraged women to remain dependent or to make bad choices. Many of the warning signs of trouble show up before the ceremony: demands for dowry from the groom's side, the in-laws' insistence that the bride quit working or studying, evidence that one of the spouses might be cruel or unreasonable.
Making the registration of marriages compulsory will help protect those whom the institution of marriage has failed, often in very painful ways. It will do nothing for us who have relationships strong enough to have flourished without the benefit of state certification. And it will do nothing for the many men and women who stumble into bad marriages for all the wrong reasons. Until we start looking at marriage as an enriching experience optionally undertaken by two consenting adults, and not as a compulsory fence to be cleared as a kind of social and familial obligation, nothing's going to change.
(Published in the Kolkata Telegraph, February 2006)
The BS column: Love for sale
(Published on February 14, 2006, in the Business Standard.)
The feel of the keyboard under my fingers is smooth, hard, rippling, my word processor heaves with suppressed emotion and the newly installed UPS lets out a low, long, masculine purr….
Right, I think grimly, that'll teach me to spend a week in Calcutta raiding my grandmother's stash of romance novels. She has a remarkable collection. It covers the early phase of exotic romances—taciturn Australian cowboys, mysterious Spanish grandees, excitable Italian artists. It has the bread-and-butter girl-next-door meets boy-next-door love stories, and the hugely popular doctor-and-nurse sagas.
But as Valentine's Day 2006 socks us in the eye with hearts and flowers, the future of the romance genre seems uncertain. Optimists say that the genre identified with Messrs Mills and Boon is unlikely to ever die out. Romance Writers of America estimates that romance novels account for 49 per cent of paperback sales.
Over the last decade, though, there are signs of a shift in readership. A British library survey showed that crime fiction had become more popular than romance novels for the first time in decades. And the romance market itself seems to be moving towards specialization, with bizarre results. There are romances aimed at "people of colour"; romances for single mothers; romances that crossover into vanilla porn, ie erotica aimed specifically at women; Christian romances; romances for the senior citizen.
There are gay romances. David Levithan's Boy Meets Boy is one of the first mainstream teenage romantic novels to offer two male protagonists, 15-year-olds Paul and Noah. It has already been pilloried by some conservative Christian groups for "promoting homosexuality". The one I can't wait to read is the fourth title from Romentics— Hot Sauce , written by Scott Pomfret and Scott Whittier under the pen-name Scott & Scott (slogan: "Because gay men fall in love too.") In Japan, there are manga Mills and Boons, the standard romances rendered in comic book format, the classic man-woman covers rendered slightly weird with those anime characters with their glassed-out cartoon eyes. In India, an attempt to Indianise Mills and Boon crashed and burned, but we have our very own arranged marriage-meets-Bridget Jones sagas.
The only way I can deal with romance novels in quantity is to sub-categorise them by title , which is why I read Passionate Impostor, Night of Passion and Passionfruit Summer in one fell swoop. (I'm also haunted by the Desert sequence: Lion of the Desert, Desert Wind, Hawk of the Desert, Stallion of the Desert, Desert Song and Desert Serenade --truly, horribly unforgettable.)
But if there's one title missing from that colourful catalogue of Harlequins, M&Bs, Temptations, Sweet Valley Highs and Silhouettes, it should be called Queens of the Heaving Bosom . There is little biography of the women who spent their lives churning out passionate pulp. (Men have only occasionally proved that they can rip a bodice as well as any woman—Nicholas Sparks recently became the fifth man ever to be nominated in the 47-year history of the Romance Novel of the Year award.)
This is unfortunate, because the private lives of Queens of Romance are often worth exploring. Barbara Cartland's passion for pink was justly famous: she left behind 130 unpublished novels at the time of her death—and wrapped every bloody one in a pink ribbon. Then I stumbled across the perfect Valentine's Day present: the life and times of romance novelist Danielle Steele, whose dreary, predictable, bestselling prose has helped me find sleep on many a long flight.
If I'd only known that her life was the exact opposite of soporific. The woman who serves as inspiration for the world's lonelyhearts was married five times. Her first marriage was at the age of 18; she had a daughter with Claude-Eric Lazard. Then she married a convicted rapist; then she married a heroin addict and had a son with him; then she married John Traina and had five children with him; then she married Silicon Valley businessman Tom Perkins.
All of Steele's marriages broke up, but she seems to have had a lasting impact on Perkins. This month, the venture capitalist released his own romance novel, Sex and the Single Zillionaire , in which a wealthy widower meets the TV presenter of reality show Trophy Brides . As the action moves from private jet to private yacht to private ski slope, it's clear that Steven Hudson and Jessica James share more than just camera time. And I suppose that's what you learn from being married to one of the world's most famous romance novelists: happy endings do exist, you just have to write them yourself.
The feel of the keyboard under my fingers is smooth, hard, rippling, my word processor heaves with suppressed emotion and the newly installed UPS lets out a low, long, masculine purr….
Right, I think grimly, that'll teach me to spend a week in Calcutta raiding my grandmother's stash of romance novels. She has a remarkable collection. It covers the early phase of exotic romances—taciturn Australian cowboys, mysterious Spanish grandees, excitable Italian artists. It has the bread-and-butter girl-next-door meets boy-next-door love stories, and the hugely popular doctor-and-nurse sagas.
But as Valentine's Day 2006 socks us in the eye with hearts and flowers, the future of the romance genre seems uncertain. Optimists say that the genre identified with Messrs Mills and Boon is unlikely to ever die out. Romance Writers of America estimates that romance novels account for 49 per cent of paperback sales.
Over the last decade, though, there are signs of a shift in readership. A British library survey showed that crime fiction had become more popular than romance novels for the first time in decades. And the romance market itself seems to be moving towards specialization, with bizarre results. There are romances aimed at "people of colour"; romances for single mothers; romances that crossover into vanilla porn, ie erotica aimed specifically at women; Christian romances; romances for the senior citizen.
There are gay romances. David Levithan's Boy Meets Boy is one of the first mainstream teenage romantic novels to offer two male protagonists, 15-year-olds Paul and Noah. It has already been pilloried by some conservative Christian groups for "promoting homosexuality". The one I can't wait to read is the fourth title from Romentics— Hot Sauce , written by Scott Pomfret and Scott Whittier under the pen-name Scott & Scott (slogan: "Because gay men fall in love too.") In Japan, there are manga Mills and Boons, the standard romances rendered in comic book format, the classic man-woman covers rendered slightly weird with those anime characters with their glassed-out cartoon eyes. In India, an attempt to Indianise Mills and Boon crashed and burned, but we have our very own arranged marriage-meets-Bridget Jones sagas.
The only way I can deal with romance novels in quantity is to sub-categorise them by title , which is why I read Passionate Impostor, Night of Passion and Passionfruit Summer in one fell swoop. (I'm also haunted by the Desert sequence: Lion of the Desert, Desert Wind, Hawk of the Desert, Stallion of the Desert, Desert Song and Desert Serenade --truly, horribly unforgettable.)
But if there's one title missing from that colourful catalogue of Harlequins, M&Bs, Temptations, Sweet Valley Highs and Silhouettes, it should be called Queens of the Heaving Bosom . There is little biography of the women who spent their lives churning out passionate pulp. (Men have only occasionally proved that they can rip a bodice as well as any woman—Nicholas Sparks recently became the fifth man ever to be nominated in the 47-year history of the Romance Novel of the Year award.)
This is unfortunate, because the private lives of Queens of Romance are often worth exploring. Barbara Cartland's passion for pink was justly famous: she left behind 130 unpublished novels at the time of her death—and wrapped every bloody one in a pink ribbon. Then I stumbled across the perfect Valentine's Day present: the life and times of romance novelist Danielle Steele, whose dreary, predictable, bestselling prose has helped me find sleep on many a long flight.
If I'd only known that her life was the exact opposite of soporific. The woman who serves as inspiration for the world's lonelyhearts was married five times. Her first marriage was at the age of 18; she had a daughter with Claude-Eric Lazard. Then she married a convicted rapist; then she married a heroin addict and had a son with him; then she married John Traina and had five children with him; then she married Silicon Valley businessman Tom Perkins.
All of Steele's marriages broke up, but she seems to have had a lasting impact on Perkins. This month, the venture capitalist released his own romance novel, Sex and the Single Zillionaire , in which a wealthy widower meets the TV presenter of reality show Trophy Brides . As the action moves from private jet to private yacht to private ski slope, it's clear that Steven Hudson and Jessica James share more than just camera time. And I suppose that's what you learn from being married to one of the world's most famous romance novelists: happy endings do exist, you just have to write them yourself.
The Calcutta essay
(This was written for Seminar's Calcutta issue.)
It was when we heard about Argha the mali selling the books that we finally accepted the house in Calcutta was dying. The house was of a type once common in Calcutta, now increasingly rare, the few specimens left either already crumbling, already neglected, or looking strangely out of place, forlorn bungalows dwarfed and flanked by multistoried buildings.
But when we grew up, it was the apartment buildings that were rare, especially in South Calcutta. There, most of the families we knew lived in houses like the one on Rowland Road: gracious, sprawling, one-or-two-storeyed bungalows in red or white or cream brick, the louvred window shutters painted in green or blue.
No one in our tiny corner of Calcutta would ever be crass enough to discuss family money, but it was easy to see who had it and who didn't. The ones who still had trust funds and deposits and prosperous folders of share certificates had their houses painted every year, the silver polished every week, the red or black stone floors swept and swabbed to a high gloss, the Irish linen or Bengal Home tablecloths washed, starched and returned in pristine condition by the family dhobi. For burra khanas, the plate and china would come out from pantries, the chandeliers or the candelabra would be dusted, the old portraits would receive another coat of varnish, the latticeworked iron door and window grills repainted--even the gravel on the driveway would be shampooed.
The ones who had long since lost their trust funds still kept up appearances: it was considered polite to carefully not notice or comment on the peeling paint on the walls, the widening cracks from roof to floor, the dust on those impractical, beautiful shutters, the dirt darkening the brocade curtains that fell from ceiling, the frayed uniform of Abdul Bearer who was also now khansama and cook and masalchi and mali rolled into one, the diminishing of the silver plate in the grim old wooden cabinets as creamers and gravy boats and salvers were sold off one by one.
Back in the 1970s, the house in Calcutta was the only fixed point for us, the children of this generation. My father was a government servant; two of my uncles were in the air force; all of us cousins were used to shifting from one government colony to another, one air force base to another, one city to another. For my mother, her sisters and her brother and their assorted offspring, the red-bricked bungalow in Calcutta with the green-shuttered windows and the vast garden at the back was an unassailable point of stillness and rest in lives where everything else was in a constant state of flux.
We were just the children; we weren't supposed to know about the ups and downs of family fortunes, about the generational migration out of Calcutta, about those perennial villains of the piece, Taxes and Rates. The odd bits of gossip that came our way as the first signs of a dying state economy and the waning fortunes of a thousand apparently unassailable families took their toll on those gracious, rapidly emptying, increasingly silent houses were interpreted in our particular fashion. When we heard that the M~s family home was a perfect white elephant, we wanted to see the elephant in question: it seemed perfectly in character for a house that had hosted goats, cows and a mongoose in the past to turn now to elephant-keeping.
One by one, all those white elephants vanished, along with the wind-up gramophone players on which the strains of the Andrews sisters or Harry Lauder or Ustad Allaudin Khan or Hemanta could be heard. It was on a sweltering day in June that, walking down a road whose old-fashioned cobblestoned pavements I'd known all my life, I noticed the gap between two houses. The bungalow that used to stand in that space had seemed to be every bit as permanent as all our homes. I had played on its long, cool verandahs every year of my childhood, raided the book cupboards fitted under the stairs, had afternoon tea in the informal drawing room and dinner in the formal drawing room. The wrought-iron grills that had decorated the front porch lay like uprooted teeth in a dentist's office; the foundation stone was all that was left, and a long, snaking line of workers, sweating in that merciless heat, would soon remove that, too. The houses on either side looked exposed, vulnerable; for the first time I saw the cracks running up the façade of one, the banyan tree roots that had taken firm possession of the wall of the other, the dark patches of damp and rot like sweat stains that pockmarked both.
I must have been 12 or 13, and for the first time, it occurred to me that the uncertainties of life in Delhi or Bombay or Bhuj, where your house was a shifting point on a grid that expanded or contracted almost arbitrarily, might have infected the changeless, sealed world of Calcutta.
Decay was not frightening, or alien; we had all grown up knowing houses that had rotted from the inside out or outside in, we had seen the linen and the hangings fray at the edges just as the lives of the inhabitants unraveled, thread by thread. Pianos lost their keys, houses lost their music when there was no longer someone to place a hurricane lantern, the flame turned low, inside the Steinway to keep the strings warm in winter, dry in the monsoons. As the next generation left the city--the skeletal, graceful arc of the Howrah Bridge always behind us, never ahead--in search of better jobs, brighter opportunities, first one bedroom and then another, one wing and then an entire floor, were locked up or leased out. But the houses that I knew dwindled into shabbiness or revived temporarily under a new coat of paint, responding like terminal patients to all-too-brief injections of prosperity: they rarely disappeared.
Over the next few years, as the landscape of the Calcutta I knew and had grown up with transformed, what made the new order particularly cruel was the pace of change. The construction crews in Delhi and Bombay worked with swift, brutal precision: old houses went under the hammer, new apartment buildings came up, a neighbourhood could be built, eradicated or reconstructed in the space of months. The lassitude and lethargy of Calcutta drew out the breaking down of one of those ancient bungalows with their strong foundations and their stone pillars to impossible lengths. The new buildings came up over a space of several seasons, not overnight. The slow, crawling pace at which these transitions happened gave everyone time they didn't want and space they didn't need in which they might assimilate what had happened to houses that had been occupied by three, four, five generations before facing the wrecking ball.
We watched the houses on Rowland Road go, one after another. The new buildings towered over the few bungalows left; no garden had a hedge or a wall high enough to ward off the gazes of curious new tenants on the fourth or fifth floor. And the number of apartments that could be crammed into spaces which a previous generation had considered insufficient for a large family made any form of protest unseemly. Bungalows and mansions in a city as teeming with people as Calcutta were a luxury; just by living in them you were automatically stamped an enemy of the people.
What the houses appeared to stand for was wealth, power, security, a kind of selfishness; the real histories of these houses could be harder to read. It could lie in the dark smudge on the ochre outside wall where a plaque had hung carrying the name of a Muslim doctor whose family had to leave their homes, their possessions and their identities behind during the Partition riots. It could lie in the monetarily worthless sketch of a typical rural Bengal scene that had been done by a great-grandfather who kept this over his desk so that he might never forget, in the rushing tides of the city, the village that he had come from. It could rest silently on the bookshelves, as our family's history did to some extent.
These were floor-to-ceiling bookracks; to pull a book down from the highest shelves, you needed either a ladder or the custom-built cane like an inverted walking stick whose comma-shaped end hooked tidily around the tome you wanted. There were books that even the most intrepid grandchildren had never attempted to read, because they were written in languages that were inaccessible to us: Persian, Sanskrit, Arabic, Aramaic and Farsi, the languages a great-grandfather had learned, loved and cherished all his life. There were the legal books my grandfather, a lawyer and a judge, had amassed. These, too, we avoided. And there were the rest, the usual mishmash of volumes of Punch and The Decline and Fall jumbled in with ancient travelogues, Georgette Heyers and Gothic novels, encyclopaedias and dictionaries of every stamp, the obligatory sets of Tagore, Sharatchandra and other contemporary Bengali authors, and cookbooks that went from Bengali cuisine to Escoffier, Miss Beaton and Flora Annie Steele.
No one knew exactly when Argha had started pilfering the books, but by the time we found out, the library had been sadly diminished. Only the front rows remained, and even there, he had skillfully spread out books to hide the gaps. If all of us had been living in Calcutta, he would have found the theft impossible; his raids were testimony to the emptying out of the house, the migration of families. In typically Bengali fashion, it wasn't the theft that hit us hard—it was the fact that Argha Mali had sold the books to kabariwallahs, not to bookshops or book dealers. To lose our books to other readers, even if they were non-familial readers, was a bearable loss; to have those books converted into packing material or paper bags seemed untenable. Or so we said, and it was much easier anyway to mourn books than it was to mourn the passing of a house, or a way of life, or an era.
In Calcutta, we took the presence of books for granted: every one of my friends, whether they lived in immaculate bungalows or crumbling cubbyholes, seemed to furnish their homes in paperback and hardback. Bookcases and libraries were part of the furniture, so much so that it never occurred to me to ask why we read the books, whether everyone who owned those books actually read them at all, and why we read the particular books we did. It was only when I came back to Delhi after my school years in Calcutta were over that I began to wonder whether those venerable, mahogany bookcases hadn't become the enlightened intellectual's equivalent of the small gods in the puja rooms that seemed ubiquitous in the capital's homes.
And my reaction to some of Delhi's houses was that of a true believer confronted with evidence of appalling apostasy. There were houses that had everything from Italian marble to Belgian crystal, French furniture and Kerala sculpture, but lacked two things: books and music. There were respectable, prim middle-class homes done up in imitation Ikea that boasted the wide-screen TV set, where books had never crossed the threshold and were not missed. It didn't matter where these houses were located in Delhi's complex social hierarchy: they all seemed faintly obscene to my censorious eyes, those living rooms rendered stark and unpleasantly naked by the absence of bookcases, of rows of 78 rpm records or carefully hand-recorded cassettes.
What I was looking for seemed to be elusive in both of the cities that belonged to me, that I had claimed as my own. Calcutta enshrined its books all too often; as Amitav Ghosh noted in a memorable essay, the key to the unusual range of books on his grandfather's bookshelf was to be located in the list of Nobel literature laureates, and the worth of those books was often measured in their inaccessibility to those who might want to actually read them. And Delhi did without books, reaching instead for a vibrant, living culture whose underpinnings I wasn't equipped to even see, let alone judge.
It was a stray visit to Sham Lal's house, as a very junior cog in the wheel at a tremendously respected literary magazine, that helped me find my moorings. Stacks of new books, some still in their wrappers, waited to be read. His bookcases in the drawing room appeared to be constructed out of literature, the books so thickly layered that they took on the roles of dividers, book-ends and bricks rolled into one. The rooms breathed in a way I hadn't seen very often in either Calcutta or Delhi; the silent compact they made with their owner was that they were there not to be displayed but to be read. Their pages would not stick together because the books were there to be riffled through; they would not fall prey to silverfish because they would be taken out of those shelves, read, and put away again. They would be dusted not as a domestic chore, but because any of these volumes might be needed for reference or pleasure at any given moment in time. The books would be lent out, discussed, argued over, read with pleasure and attention: they would not be allowed to die.
Delhi's bookcases began opening up to me at the same time as I developed an obsession with charting the death of Calcutta's libraries. The readers I met in Delhi had tastes that were far wider than my own; they travelled a lot more, they were generous with their opinions, their books and their bibliographies. The conversations I began to have about books and reading and authors, in this city of ancient monuments and aggressively modern malls, took up where the conversations in Calcutta had ceased.
Part II
In my thirties, long after the house on Rowland Road had been demolished to make way for a block of flats, I have developed a habit as unbreakable and annoying as a nervous tic. For my generation, visits to Calcutta are almost ceremonial—the three-month vacations of our childhood days are just memories, it's hard enough to snatch a week or a fortnight out of our impossibly crowded schedules. Scattered across different cities and continents, we make the pilgrimage back not for the house or the city any more, but for my grandmother, a woman who makes the eighties seem like an ebullient, enviable age to be. She lives in an apartment built in the block of flats, where the old house used to stand; it's the same place, the same space, but we are now four floors up, and the view has changed. From her bedroom you could see the red-brick house that was twin to our own, now almost the last of its kind left on Rowland Road. It looks so small, so vulnerable, so exposed to the gaze of its neighbours in their five-and-eight storyed towering blocks of flats; like the head of a balding man, you can see the crowns of the trees, the bare patches of pink cement on the roof.
Now, when I'm in Calcutta, there are always two places I visit: the second-hand booksellers on College Street and Free School Street, and the auction houses on Russell Street. I go back to these places the way some of my contemporaries in Delhi subscribe to The Statesman: what we're looking for is the obituaries.
My family's books died messily. My grandfather's legal library fared the best, perhaps—his books were distributed among other lawyers and friends in the legal profession, at a time when it seemed that none of his children would follow him into the courtroom. No one had anticipated that my mother would earn her LLB at the age of 39; for years afterwards, she would open dusty volumes on the intricacies of constitutional law or the law of torts in some lawyer's office and be surprised by her father's seal and stamp on the frontispiece. Some of the children's books were donated to school libraries years before Argha did his raiding. Though my niece and nephew will never see them, it gives me pleasure to think that other children might read them, and greater pleasure to know that The Little Engine That Could and Tuntuni were not transmuted into paper bags, after all.
As for the rest of the books, the ones that survived the monsoons, the silverfish and Argha's depredations had a harder time outliving the death of the house. My sister, my aunt, my mother and I salvaged a few volumes here and there, just before the symmetry of those open verandahs and those cool inner rooms was shattered by the wrecking crews. The rest of the books were packed carefully into custom-designed crates, dusted with borax and strewn with neem leaves, layered like coddled babies in plastic; despite those precautions, they didn't survive. Histories, geographies, collections of books on Burma and the Indo-Japan war, the collection of biographies and letters put together by one of my ancestors, the first editions, the clothbound classics of Bengali literature decorated with unusually fine calligraphy, huge tomes on painting and architecture—I never read them then, I will never read them now.
In the large echoing spaces of the auction houses, I find families who share something--a look of disbelief, a sense of awkward comedy: can this really be us, selling off Dadua's charcoal drawings and Didibhai's collection of china cats and shepherdesses at a pathetic Rs 1,200 or Rs 800 to the highest bidder? There are soup cups decorated with mushrooms and hand-painted leeks; Murshidabad brass; a rash of Jamini Roys, real and fake; glass, cut-glass, blown glass; dessicated ships in dusty bottles; black-lacquered hurricane lanterns; chandeliers too large for most contemporary ceilings; ancient box cameras and pinwheel cameras that still, miraculously, work; mahogany sideboards and politically incorrect elephant's-foot umbrella stands. The whispered histories of these items are obliterated in the auctioneer's crisp prose: Lot no 12, assorted glassware and a picnic basket, Lot no 15, a dancing Nataraja, two Tagore sketches (provenance unavailable), a lady's sewing basket and three scrapbooks. Sometimes there are books, though not often; often, however, there are pianos and harmoniums, their silent ivory keys deepened to golden-yellow with age, and sheet music, brought in by the sackful, sold by the sackful.
For the books you must go elsewhere. Standing at the second-hand booksellers on a winter afternoon, I watch as a family brings in the books that haven't been donated or distributed. The mother is calm, matter-of-fact; she haggles over the final price in the same way that she haggles over vegetables and packets of camphor at the Park Circus market. An elderly gentleman—father, uncle, cousin, who knows?—cannot tear himself away; he returns to each pile, nervously sorting through them, separating the cookbooks from the travelogues, trying to alphabetize each small stack. The booksellers watch him wryly. As soon as he leaves, the books will be reorganized, not by genre and author so much as by condition, the rainspotted ones with fragile, crumbling pages tossed aside regardless of content, the ones with pristine bindings and clean pages, which were usually the ones least loved and read in their lifetime, taken to the top of the heap. But they allow him this last, fumbling farewell.
The weeks blend into months and years, and I begin to see a pattern. It seems to me that every family selling its books contains at least one collector, one eccentric, one person whose passions were allowed to dominate a small corner of the family library. Butterflies and roses, the art of soap-making and steam engines, histories of the Raj and biographies of Indian women pioneers, treatises on lovemaking or flower arrangements, miniature paintings or modern art: every human passion seems to find a final destination here, on these pavements, to be weighed, assessed and priced. One family brings in a collection of books devoted only to the Himalayas; one family brings in a library of long-forgotten hunting, shikar and wildlife tomes. They hover, they haggle, they smooth pages absently; the booksellers will perform the last rites, the truly final ones, only after they leave, in much the same way that attendants at a crematorium begin their true work only after the mourners leave.
I want to tell them what I know: that you cannot bring the house or the people you have loved back once they're gone, that every childhood must end, and that no carefully preserved collection of dolls or child's cooking utensils or books will return you to that time.
I want to tell them about the Great Eastern Hotel. A friend, a writer whose next book is set around that legendary establishment, browsed its archives and came back with photographs. Papers and diaries, letters and telegrams, dance cards and handwritten place settings line the corridors; you have to walk over the yellowing, blackening pages of history in order to locate the little that's left. Paper mildews and tears; books rot or, as with many of the manuscripts in Calcutta's National Library, desiccate until nothing is left, until a page will literally crumble at a touch. In some corridors of Calcutta's libraries, the private and the public ones, so many books have dried out that to browse the stacks is to set off small explosions of dust: you don't read the words, you inhale them.
But I stay silent. We saved the strangest things from our house. A winding, wrought-iron staircase, unmoored without anything to hold up, followed one member of our family reproachfully from one rented house to another. Somewhere, on a cassette played so often that the tape is now unspooling, is a recording of one of the last times my grandmother and my uncle played the piano in the old house. The notes sound different in that large drawing room, as they move from Take Five to Rabindrasangeet to Don't Fence Me In and the Lambeth Walk. We saved iron grilles from the windows, and huge glass Mason jars; and yes, we saved a few books.
I suppose everyone needs the small grace of hope. Everyone needs the rituals of dispossession as much as we need the rites of possession. We need to docket the china and give it away, to number the paintings and affix handwritten labels containing their history on the backs of the frame, we need to give the family books away to libraries, to friends. Even when you sell entire collections testifying to the curious passions of the past to a bookseller, what you hope is that something of these books, these passions, and the people who housed them for a time will endure.
As for me, I don't know what I hope to find here, in the booksellers' caverns that smell of dust and mould, in the auction houses that smell of despair and loss. I have turned my back on so many things: on the house I grew up in, on Howrah Bridge, on Calcutta. There is nothing to regret: all of us now have new homes, new cities, new friends, new books threatening to grow into new libraries. But somewhere in these two places, the auction house and the secondhand bookseller, in the histories of the people who come here with their possessions and leave with small but precious cheques, is something I wouldn't be able to find anywhere else. It has no name, the thing that brings me back here, and no books have been written about it. I know that it is elusive, and I know that it is necessary, and that, for the moment, is enough.
It was when we heard about Argha the mali selling the books that we finally accepted the house in Calcutta was dying. The house was of a type once common in Calcutta, now increasingly rare, the few specimens left either already crumbling, already neglected, or looking strangely out of place, forlorn bungalows dwarfed and flanked by multistoried buildings.
But when we grew up, it was the apartment buildings that were rare, especially in South Calcutta. There, most of the families we knew lived in houses like the one on Rowland Road: gracious, sprawling, one-or-two-storeyed bungalows in red or white or cream brick, the louvred window shutters painted in green or blue.
No one in our tiny corner of Calcutta would ever be crass enough to discuss family money, but it was easy to see who had it and who didn't. The ones who still had trust funds and deposits and prosperous folders of share certificates had their houses painted every year, the silver polished every week, the red or black stone floors swept and swabbed to a high gloss, the Irish linen or Bengal Home tablecloths washed, starched and returned in pristine condition by the family dhobi. For burra khanas, the plate and china would come out from pantries, the chandeliers or the candelabra would be dusted, the old portraits would receive another coat of varnish, the latticeworked iron door and window grills repainted--even the gravel on the driveway would be shampooed.
The ones who had long since lost their trust funds still kept up appearances: it was considered polite to carefully not notice or comment on the peeling paint on the walls, the widening cracks from roof to floor, the dust on those impractical, beautiful shutters, the dirt darkening the brocade curtains that fell from ceiling, the frayed uniform of Abdul Bearer who was also now khansama and cook and masalchi and mali rolled into one, the diminishing of the silver plate in the grim old wooden cabinets as creamers and gravy boats and salvers were sold off one by one.
Back in the 1970s, the house in Calcutta was the only fixed point for us, the children of this generation. My father was a government servant; two of my uncles were in the air force; all of us cousins were used to shifting from one government colony to another, one air force base to another, one city to another. For my mother, her sisters and her brother and their assorted offspring, the red-bricked bungalow in Calcutta with the green-shuttered windows and the vast garden at the back was an unassailable point of stillness and rest in lives where everything else was in a constant state of flux.
We were just the children; we weren't supposed to know about the ups and downs of family fortunes, about the generational migration out of Calcutta, about those perennial villains of the piece, Taxes and Rates. The odd bits of gossip that came our way as the first signs of a dying state economy and the waning fortunes of a thousand apparently unassailable families took their toll on those gracious, rapidly emptying, increasingly silent houses were interpreted in our particular fashion. When we heard that the M~s family home was a perfect white elephant, we wanted to see the elephant in question: it seemed perfectly in character for a house that had hosted goats, cows and a mongoose in the past to turn now to elephant-keeping.
One by one, all those white elephants vanished, along with the wind-up gramophone players on which the strains of the Andrews sisters or Harry Lauder or Ustad Allaudin Khan or Hemanta could be heard. It was on a sweltering day in June that, walking down a road whose old-fashioned cobblestoned pavements I'd known all my life, I noticed the gap between two houses. The bungalow that used to stand in that space had seemed to be every bit as permanent as all our homes. I had played on its long, cool verandahs every year of my childhood, raided the book cupboards fitted under the stairs, had afternoon tea in the informal drawing room and dinner in the formal drawing room. The wrought-iron grills that had decorated the front porch lay like uprooted teeth in a dentist's office; the foundation stone was all that was left, and a long, snaking line of workers, sweating in that merciless heat, would soon remove that, too. The houses on either side looked exposed, vulnerable; for the first time I saw the cracks running up the façade of one, the banyan tree roots that had taken firm possession of the wall of the other, the dark patches of damp and rot like sweat stains that pockmarked both.
I must have been 12 or 13, and for the first time, it occurred to me that the uncertainties of life in Delhi or Bombay or Bhuj, where your house was a shifting point on a grid that expanded or contracted almost arbitrarily, might have infected the changeless, sealed world of Calcutta.
Decay was not frightening, or alien; we had all grown up knowing houses that had rotted from the inside out or outside in, we had seen the linen and the hangings fray at the edges just as the lives of the inhabitants unraveled, thread by thread. Pianos lost their keys, houses lost their music when there was no longer someone to place a hurricane lantern, the flame turned low, inside the Steinway to keep the strings warm in winter, dry in the monsoons. As the next generation left the city--the skeletal, graceful arc of the Howrah Bridge always behind us, never ahead--in search of better jobs, brighter opportunities, first one bedroom and then another, one wing and then an entire floor, were locked up or leased out. But the houses that I knew dwindled into shabbiness or revived temporarily under a new coat of paint, responding like terminal patients to all-too-brief injections of prosperity: they rarely disappeared.
Over the next few years, as the landscape of the Calcutta I knew and had grown up with transformed, what made the new order particularly cruel was the pace of change. The construction crews in Delhi and Bombay worked with swift, brutal precision: old houses went under the hammer, new apartment buildings came up, a neighbourhood could be built, eradicated or reconstructed in the space of months. The lassitude and lethargy of Calcutta drew out the breaking down of one of those ancient bungalows with their strong foundations and their stone pillars to impossible lengths. The new buildings came up over a space of several seasons, not overnight. The slow, crawling pace at which these transitions happened gave everyone time they didn't want and space they didn't need in which they might assimilate what had happened to houses that had been occupied by three, four, five generations before facing the wrecking ball.
We watched the houses on Rowland Road go, one after another. The new buildings towered over the few bungalows left; no garden had a hedge or a wall high enough to ward off the gazes of curious new tenants on the fourth or fifth floor. And the number of apartments that could be crammed into spaces which a previous generation had considered insufficient for a large family made any form of protest unseemly. Bungalows and mansions in a city as teeming with people as Calcutta were a luxury; just by living in them you were automatically stamped an enemy of the people.
What the houses appeared to stand for was wealth, power, security, a kind of selfishness; the real histories of these houses could be harder to read. It could lie in the dark smudge on the ochre outside wall where a plaque had hung carrying the name of a Muslim doctor whose family had to leave their homes, their possessions and their identities behind during the Partition riots. It could lie in the monetarily worthless sketch of a typical rural Bengal scene that had been done by a great-grandfather who kept this over his desk so that he might never forget, in the rushing tides of the city, the village that he had come from. It could rest silently on the bookshelves, as our family's history did to some extent.
These were floor-to-ceiling bookracks; to pull a book down from the highest shelves, you needed either a ladder or the custom-built cane like an inverted walking stick whose comma-shaped end hooked tidily around the tome you wanted. There were books that even the most intrepid grandchildren had never attempted to read, because they were written in languages that were inaccessible to us: Persian, Sanskrit, Arabic, Aramaic and Farsi, the languages a great-grandfather had learned, loved and cherished all his life. There were the legal books my grandfather, a lawyer and a judge, had amassed. These, too, we avoided. And there were the rest, the usual mishmash of volumes of Punch and The Decline and Fall jumbled in with ancient travelogues, Georgette Heyers and Gothic novels, encyclopaedias and dictionaries of every stamp, the obligatory sets of Tagore, Sharatchandra and other contemporary Bengali authors, and cookbooks that went from Bengali cuisine to Escoffier, Miss Beaton and Flora Annie Steele.
No one knew exactly when Argha had started pilfering the books, but by the time we found out, the library had been sadly diminished. Only the front rows remained, and even there, he had skillfully spread out books to hide the gaps. If all of us had been living in Calcutta, he would have found the theft impossible; his raids were testimony to the emptying out of the house, the migration of families. In typically Bengali fashion, it wasn't the theft that hit us hard—it was the fact that Argha Mali had sold the books to kabariwallahs, not to bookshops or book dealers. To lose our books to other readers, even if they were non-familial readers, was a bearable loss; to have those books converted into packing material or paper bags seemed untenable. Or so we said, and it was much easier anyway to mourn books than it was to mourn the passing of a house, or a way of life, or an era.
In Calcutta, we took the presence of books for granted: every one of my friends, whether they lived in immaculate bungalows or crumbling cubbyholes, seemed to furnish their homes in paperback and hardback. Bookcases and libraries were part of the furniture, so much so that it never occurred to me to ask why we read the books, whether everyone who owned those books actually read them at all, and why we read the particular books we did. It was only when I came back to Delhi after my school years in Calcutta were over that I began to wonder whether those venerable, mahogany bookcases hadn't become the enlightened intellectual's equivalent of the small gods in the puja rooms that seemed ubiquitous in the capital's homes.
And my reaction to some of Delhi's houses was that of a true believer confronted with evidence of appalling apostasy. There were houses that had everything from Italian marble to Belgian crystal, French furniture and Kerala sculpture, but lacked two things: books and music. There were respectable, prim middle-class homes done up in imitation Ikea that boasted the wide-screen TV set, where books had never crossed the threshold and were not missed. It didn't matter where these houses were located in Delhi's complex social hierarchy: they all seemed faintly obscene to my censorious eyes, those living rooms rendered stark and unpleasantly naked by the absence of bookcases, of rows of 78 rpm records or carefully hand-recorded cassettes.
What I was looking for seemed to be elusive in both of the cities that belonged to me, that I had claimed as my own. Calcutta enshrined its books all too often; as Amitav Ghosh noted in a memorable essay, the key to the unusual range of books on his grandfather's bookshelf was to be located in the list of Nobel literature laureates, and the worth of those books was often measured in their inaccessibility to those who might want to actually read them. And Delhi did without books, reaching instead for a vibrant, living culture whose underpinnings I wasn't equipped to even see, let alone judge.
It was a stray visit to Sham Lal's house, as a very junior cog in the wheel at a tremendously respected literary magazine, that helped me find my moorings. Stacks of new books, some still in their wrappers, waited to be read. His bookcases in the drawing room appeared to be constructed out of literature, the books so thickly layered that they took on the roles of dividers, book-ends and bricks rolled into one. The rooms breathed in a way I hadn't seen very often in either Calcutta or Delhi; the silent compact they made with their owner was that they were there not to be displayed but to be read. Their pages would not stick together because the books were there to be riffled through; they would not fall prey to silverfish because they would be taken out of those shelves, read, and put away again. They would be dusted not as a domestic chore, but because any of these volumes might be needed for reference or pleasure at any given moment in time. The books would be lent out, discussed, argued over, read with pleasure and attention: they would not be allowed to die.
Delhi's bookcases began opening up to me at the same time as I developed an obsession with charting the death of Calcutta's libraries. The readers I met in Delhi had tastes that were far wider than my own; they travelled a lot more, they were generous with their opinions, their books and their bibliographies. The conversations I began to have about books and reading and authors, in this city of ancient monuments and aggressively modern malls, took up where the conversations in Calcutta had ceased.
Part II
In my thirties, long after the house on Rowland Road had been demolished to make way for a block of flats, I have developed a habit as unbreakable and annoying as a nervous tic. For my generation, visits to Calcutta are almost ceremonial—the three-month vacations of our childhood days are just memories, it's hard enough to snatch a week or a fortnight out of our impossibly crowded schedules. Scattered across different cities and continents, we make the pilgrimage back not for the house or the city any more, but for my grandmother, a woman who makes the eighties seem like an ebullient, enviable age to be. She lives in an apartment built in the block of flats, where the old house used to stand; it's the same place, the same space, but we are now four floors up, and the view has changed. From her bedroom you could see the red-brick house that was twin to our own, now almost the last of its kind left on Rowland Road. It looks so small, so vulnerable, so exposed to the gaze of its neighbours in their five-and-eight storyed towering blocks of flats; like the head of a balding man, you can see the crowns of the trees, the bare patches of pink cement on the roof.
Now, when I'm in Calcutta, there are always two places I visit: the second-hand booksellers on College Street and Free School Street, and the auction houses on Russell Street. I go back to these places the way some of my contemporaries in Delhi subscribe to The Statesman: what we're looking for is the obituaries.
My family's books died messily. My grandfather's legal library fared the best, perhaps—his books were distributed among other lawyers and friends in the legal profession, at a time when it seemed that none of his children would follow him into the courtroom. No one had anticipated that my mother would earn her LLB at the age of 39; for years afterwards, she would open dusty volumes on the intricacies of constitutional law or the law of torts in some lawyer's office and be surprised by her father's seal and stamp on the frontispiece. Some of the children's books were donated to school libraries years before Argha did his raiding. Though my niece and nephew will never see them, it gives me pleasure to think that other children might read them, and greater pleasure to know that The Little Engine That Could and Tuntuni were not transmuted into paper bags, after all.
As for the rest of the books, the ones that survived the monsoons, the silverfish and Argha's depredations had a harder time outliving the death of the house. My sister, my aunt, my mother and I salvaged a few volumes here and there, just before the symmetry of those open verandahs and those cool inner rooms was shattered by the wrecking crews. The rest of the books were packed carefully into custom-designed crates, dusted with borax and strewn with neem leaves, layered like coddled babies in plastic; despite those precautions, they didn't survive. Histories, geographies, collections of books on Burma and the Indo-Japan war, the collection of biographies and letters put together by one of my ancestors, the first editions, the clothbound classics of Bengali literature decorated with unusually fine calligraphy, huge tomes on painting and architecture—I never read them then, I will never read them now.
In the large echoing spaces of the auction houses, I find families who share something--a look of disbelief, a sense of awkward comedy: can this really be us, selling off Dadua's charcoal drawings and Didibhai's collection of china cats and shepherdesses at a pathetic Rs 1,200 or Rs 800 to the highest bidder? There are soup cups decorated with mushrooms and hand-painted leeks; Murshidabad brass; a rash of Jamini Roys, real and fake; glass, cut-glass, blown glass; dessicated ships in dusty bottles; black-lacquered hurricane lanterns; chandeliers too large for most contemporary ceilings; ancient box cameras and pinwheel cameras that still, miraculously, work; mahogany sideboards and politically incorrect elephant's-foot umbrella stands. The whispered histories of these items are obliterated in the auctioneer's crisp prose: Lot no 12, assorted glassware and a picnic basket, Lot no 15, a dancing Nataraja, two Tagore sketches (provenance unavailable), a lady's sewing basket and three scrapbooks. Sometimes there are books, though not often; often, however, there are pianos and harmoniums, their silent ivory keys deepened to golden-yellow with age, and sheet music, brought in by the sackful, sold by the sackful.
For the books you must go elsewhere. Standing at the second-hand booksellers on a winter afternoon, I watch as a family brings in the books that haven't been donated or distributed. The mother is calm, matter-of-fact; she haggles over the final price in the same way that she haggles over vegetables and packets of camphor at the Park Circus market. An elderly gentleman—father, uncle, cousin, who knows?—cannot tear himself away; he returns to each pile, nervously sorting through them, separating the cookbooks from the travelogues, trying to alphabetize each small stack. The booksellers watch him wryly. As soon as he leaves, the books will be reorganized, not by genre and author so much as by condition, the rainspotted ones with fragile, crumbling pages tossed aside regardless of content, the ones with pristine bindings and clean pages, which were usually the ones least loved and read in their lifetime, taken to the top of the heap. But they allow him this last, fumbling farewell.
The weeks blend into months and years, and I begin to see a pattern. It seems to me that every family selling its books contains at least one collector, one eccentric, one person whose passions were allowed to dominate a small corner of the family library. Butterflies and roses, the art of soap-making and steam engines, histories of the Raj and biographies of Indian women pioneers, treatises on lovemaking or flower arrangements, miniature paintings or modern art: every human passion seems to find a final destination here, on these pavements, to be weighed, assessed and priced. One family brings in a collection of books devoted only to the Himalayas; one family brings in a library of long-forgotten hunting, shikar and wildlife tomes. They hover, they haggle, they smooth pages absently; the booksellers will perform the last rites, the truly final ones, only after they leave, in much the same way that attendants at a crematorium begin their true work only after the mourners leave.
I want to tell them what I know: that you cannot bring the house or the people you have loved back once they're gone, that every childhood must end, and that no carefully preserved collection of dolls or child's cooking utensils or books will return you to that time.
I want to tell them about the Great Eastern Hotel. A friend, a writer whose next book is set around that legendary establishment, browsed its archives and came back with photographs. Papers and diaries, letters and telegrams, dance cards and handwritten place settings line the corridors; you have to walk over the yellowing, blackening pages of history in order to locate the little that's left. Paper mildews and tears; books rot or, as with many of the manuscripts in Calcutta's National Library, desiccate until nothing is left, until a page will literally crumble at a touch. In some corridors of Calcutta's libraries, the private and the public ones, so many books have dried out that to browse the stacks is to set off small explosions of dust: you don't read the words, you inhale them.
But I stay silent. We saved the strangest things from our house. A winding, wrought-iron staircase, unmoored without anything to hold up, followed one member of our family reproachfully from one rented house to another. Somewhere, on a cassette played so often that the tape is now unspooling, is a recording of one of the last times my grandmother and my uncle played the piano in the old house. The notes sound different in that large drawing room, as they move from Take Five to Rabindrasangeet to Don't Fence Me In and the Lambeth Walk. We saved iron grilles from the windows, and huge glass Mason jars; and yes, we saved a few books.
I suppose everyone needs the small grace of hope. Everyone needs the rituals of dispossession as much as we need the rites of possession. We need to docket the china and give it away, to number the paintings and affix handwritten labels containing their history on the backs of the frame, we need to give the family books away to libraries, to friends. Even when you sell entire collections testifying to the curious passions of the past to a bookseller, what you hope is that something of these books, these passions, and the people who housed them for a time will endure.
As for me, I don't know what I hope to find here, in the booksellers' caverns that smell of dust and mould, in the auction houses that smell of despair and loss. I have turned my back on so many things: on the house I grew up in, on Howrah Bridge, on Calcutta. There is nothing to regret: all of us now have new homes, new cities, new friends, new books threatening to grow into new libraries. But somewhere in these two places, the auction house and the secondhand bookseller, in the histories of the people who come here with their possessions and leave with small but precious cheques, is something I wouldn't be able to find anywhere else. It has no name, the thing that brings me back here, and no books have been written about it. I know that it is elusive, and I know that it is necessary, and that, for the moment, is enough.
Thursday, April 06, 2006
The BS column: Friedan's enduring mystique
By the time of her death on her 85th birthday this week, Betty Friedan had witnessed almost a century of the feminist movement. She had reworked her own sense of identity, declaring that she was first an American, then a person of Jewish extraction, and then, finally, a woman. In The Second Stage , she re-examined the feminist movement; in The Fountain of Ageing , she had moved on to the politics of ageing. But if there's one book that Friedan will be remembered for, it's her first work, The Feminine Mystique .
In 1957, Betty Friedan was 36 years old: married with children, her years of political radicalism as a college student at Smith apparently in the past. She was working on an article for McCalls magazine on her class reunion. The question she posed her fellow Smith graduates, all educated, chiefly middle-class women, was deceptively simple: "What do you wish you had done differently?"
The answers she received set her off on an exploration of the American dream and how it had let down the women of her generation. For over fifteen years, Friedan wrote, "women heard in voices of tradition and of Freudian sophistication that they could desire no greater destiny than to glory in their own femininity… They learned that truly feminine women do not want careers, higher education, political rights—the independence and the opportunities that the old-fashioned feminists fought for". So they'd landed the husband, the children, the dishwasher, the gadget-filled kitchen, the house, the second house: they had bought into the feminine mystique. They should have been happy: instead, Friedan discovered that the happy housewives who shored up those white picket fences suffered from "a problem with no name".
The Feminine Mystique was published in 1963 with an initial print run of 3,000 copies. (Just for perspective, Irma Rombauer's The Joy of Cooking , the quintessential American cookbook, had gone through its fourth revision and sold 109,984 copies in the same year.) No one expected it to have the kind of impact it did, least of all Friedan—the article that sparked off the book was rejected by McCalls because it argued too passionately for women to take college seriously and to use their college education for more than planning meal schedules and the kids' play dates.
But The Feminine Mystique became one of the great non-fiction classics of the 20th century, selling over 2 million copies in paperback. In today's bookshops, it's hard to find other feminist classics: Kate Millet's Sexual Politics , Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook , Andrea Dworkin's raging Pornography can all be elusive. Betty Friedan's achievement with The Feminine Mystique is shared by a handful of other feminist writers, from Simone de Beauvoir to Susan Brownmiller and Susan Faludi, Audre Lorde to Germaine Greer and Gloria Steinem: they came up with insights that remain relevant to women and men in every passing generation.
The revolutionary part of Friedan's thesis has been eroded over the years. Just as psychoanalysis once seemed an iconoclastic, strange, pathbreaking idea and has now become a commonplace of our times, Friedan's insight that women need more in their lives than modular kitchens and loving husbands now seems commonplace, almost obvious. Even in her own time, Friedan was less than revolutionary. The Feminine Mystique addresses the concerns of white, middle-class, suburban America; if you read only that book, it would be easy to forget the fierce battles that were being fought over race and class, over workplace rights and other, starker forms of inequality.
And Friedan often came across as an anachronism, much like the desperate housewives she described. Six years after she had been hailed as a feminist pioneer, years after she had helped kickstart NOW, the author of The Feminist Mystique was still married to a man who dealt with his wife's success by beating her up. In the relatively enlightened 1970s, Friedan exasperated many of her colleagues in the movement by alluding to the "lavender menace"—she feared that the new confidence of lesbians would alienate "normal" women.
Perhaps it's precisely that blend of conservatism and insight that has kept The Feminist Mystique relevant. Friedan did not speak for the radical thinkers, the pioneers on the cutting edge of feminist thought, or for the poorest, most desperate victims of inequality. Instead, Friedan gave a voice to the ordinary housewife, mother and woman who found herself trapped by the roles she had so willingly assumed. There are enough of these women in every generation and in every corner of the globe to ensure that The Feminist Mystique will continue to find its audience.
(Published in Speaking Volumes, the Business Standard, in February 2006: the week Friedan died.)
In 1957, Betty Friedan was 36 years old: married with children, her years of political radicalism as a college student at Smith apparently in the past. She was working on an article for McCalls magazine on her class reunion. The question she posed her fellow Smith graduates, all educated, chiefly middle-class women, was deceptively simple: "What do you wish you had done differently?"
The answers she received set her off on an exploration of the American dream and how it had let down the women of her generation. For over fifteen years, Friedan wrote, "women heard in voices of tradition and of Freudian sophistication that they could desire no greater destiny than to glory in their own femininity… They learned that truly feminine women do not want careers, higher education, political rights—the independence and the opportunities that the old-fashioned feminists fought for". So they'd landed the husband, the children, the dishwasher, the gadget-filled kitchen, the house, the second house: they had bought into the feminine mystique. They should have been happy: instead, Friedan discovered that the happy housewives who shored up those white picket fences suffered from "a problem with no name".
The Feminine Mystique was published in 1963 with an initial print run of 3,000 copies. (Just for perspective, Irma Rombauer's The Joy of Cooking , the quintessential American cookbook, had gone through its fourth revision and sold 109,984 copies in the same year.) No one expected it to have the kind of impact it did, least of all Friedan—the article that sparked off the book was rejected by McCalls because it argued too passionately for women to take college seriously and to use their college education for more than planning meal schedules and the kids' play dates.
But The Feminine Mystique became one of the great non-fiction classics of the 20th century, selling over 2 million copies in paperback. In today's bookshops, it's hard to find other feminist classics: Kate Millet's Sexual Politics , Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook , Andrea Dworkin's raging Pornography can all be elusive. Betty Friedan's achievement with The Feminine Mystique is shared by a handful of other feminist writers, from Simone de Beauvoir to Susan Brownmiller and Susan Faludi, Audre Lorde to Germaine Greer and Gloria Steinem: they came up with insights that remain relevant to women and men in every passing generation.
The revolutionary part of Friedan's thesis has been eroded over the years. Just as psychoanalysis once seemed an iconoclastic, strange, pathbreaking idea and has now become a commonplace of our times, Friedan's insight that women need more in their lives than modular kitchens and loving husbands now seems commonplace, almost obvious. Even in her own time, Friedan was less than revolutionary. The Feminine Mystique addresses the concerns of white, middle-class, suburban America; if you read only that book, it would be easy to forget the fierce battles that were being fought over race and class, over workplace rights and other, starker forms of inequality.
And Friedan often came across as an anachronism, much like the desperate housewives she described. Six years after she had been hailed as a feminist pioneer, years after she had helped kickstart NOW, the author of The Feminist Mystique was still married to a man who dealt with his wife's success by beating her up. In the relatively enlightened 1970s, Friedan exasperated many of her colleagues in the movement by alluding to the "lavender menace"—she feared that the new confidence of lesbians would alienate "normal" women.
Perhaps it's precisely that blend of conservatism and insight that has kept The Feminist Mystique relevant. Friedan did not speak for the radical thinkers, the pioneers on the cutting edge of feminist thought, or for the poorest, most desperate victims of inequality. Instead, Friedan gave a voice to the ordinary housewife, mother and woman who found herself trapped by the roles she had so willingly assumed. There are enough of these women in every generation and in every corner of the globe to ensure that The Feminist Mystique will continue to find its audience.
(Published in Speaking Volumes, the Business Standard, in February 2006: the week Friedan died.)
Last word: The maulana's empty writ
In the lanes near the Nizamuddin dargah, women in burkhas go about their shopping, some pushing back the veil as they haggle for added emphasis. The daughters of a local entrepreneur wave a cheerful farewell as they go off, clad in salwar-kameez but without the burkha or hijab, to their offices: one works in a call-centre, one as the receptionist in a blue-chip company.
Fatima comes in for work as always, dressed in her salwar-kameez and shawl; today she has to leave early to attend a meeting at her childrens' school, after which she must sort out a late bill at the electricity office. Her sister, Salma, has just enrolled the youngest of her three daughters in a special sports programme and is off to the market to buy sneakers and gym clothes. At the malls in Gurgaon, there is a sprinkling of women in burkhas: if you were crass enough to ask the giggling groups of teenagers their religion, you would meet a few young Muslim girls, indistinguishable in their jeans-and-T-shirt uniform from their friends.
These are the women who're giving Maulana Syed Nizamuddin nightmares by doing nothing more than going about the everyday rituals of their lives. This Wednesday, the venerable secretary of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board, a body whose edicts carry considerable weight among India's Muslims, announced a new set of guidelines for women. It was a blend of the positive—the AIMPLB ruled firmly that Sania Mirza's tennis clothes did not come under the purview of Muslim personal law—and the irrational. The Maulana asked Muslim women not to work alongside men, not to go shopping in markets or malls where they might be subject to the gaze of strange men, and said that women of the faith must avoid dressing in Western clothes, especially outfits that are too revealing.
The Maulana's pronouncements were widely reported; what was less visible was the reaction of the section of the community that might be expected to be affected. "Sania Mirza has done more for Muslim women than any of these clerics," said Abida Bibi, who runs a tea-stall in Nizamuddin. "The problem with these Maulanas, poor fellows, is that they are so easily shocked." Other women giggled: "The women of his family must have run up large shopping bills this month, that's why he's upset!"
Salma and Fatima reacted with the same contemptuous embarrassment I've felt in the past when some pious Hindu religious leader has announced that Hindu women must not cut their hair short, or must wear only saris, or must go nowhere except to the temple. "Will the Maulana come and do my shopping and run around to the municipal offices for me?" Fatima asked.
Salma was more thoughtful. "For those outside our community, it must seem like we poor Muslim women, we have so many rules to follow. But we will have trouble only when our neighbours say, this is what the Maulana has said so you must do it. But no one is saying that. We all have to work, we have to bring up our children, and we like choosing what clothes to wear—some of us wear burkha, some not, we all pray. When the Maulana tells us how to pray, we listen. When he tells us how to live, we laugh, and we carry on with our lives." And she went off to see if she could find sneakers with a good grip and a fancy design for Ayesha, burgeoning star of the slum school track team.
(Published in the Kolkata Telegraph, February 2006)
Fatima comes in for work as always, dressed in her salwar-kameez and shawl; today she has to leave early to attend a meeting at her childrens' school, after which she must sort out a late bill at the electricity office. Her sister, Salma, has just enrolled the youngest of her three daughters in a special sports programme and is off to the market to buy sneakers and gym clothes. At the malls in Gurgaon, there is a sprinkling of women in burkhas: if you were crass enough to ask the giggling groups of teenagers their religion, you would meet a few young Muslim girls, indistinguishable in their jeans-and-T-shirt uniform from their friends.
These are the women who're giving Maulana Syed Nizamuddin nightmares by doing nothing more than going about the everyday rituals of their lives. This Wednesday, the venerable secretary of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board, a body whose edicts carry considerable weight among India's Muslims, announced a new set of guidelines for women. It was a blend of the positive—the AIMPLB ruled firmly that Sania Mirza's tennis clothes did not come under the purview of Muslim personal law—and the irrational. The Maulana asked Muslim women not to work alongside men, not to go shopping in markets or malls where they might be subject to the gaze of strange men, and said that women of the faith must avoid dressing in Western clothes, especially outfits that are too revealing.
The Maulana's pronouncements were widely reported; what was less visible was the reaction of the section of the community that might be expected to be affected. "Sania Mirza has done more for Muslim women than any of these clerics," said Abida Bibi, who runs a tea-stall in Nizamuddin. "The problem with these Maulanas, poor fellows, is that they are so easily shocked." Other women giggled: "The women of his family must have run up large shopping bills this month, that's why he's upset!"
Salma and Fatima reacted with the same contemptuous embarrassment I've felt in the past when some pious Hindu religious leader has announced that Hindu women must not cut their hair short, or must wear only saris, or must go nowhere except to the temple. "Will the Maulana come and do my shopping and run around to the municipal offices for me?" Fatima asked.
Salma was more thoughtful. "For those outside our community, it must seem like we poor Muslim women, we have so many rules to follow. But we will have trouble only when our neighbours say, this is what the Maulana has said so you must do it. But no one is saying that. We all have to work, we have to bring up our children, and we like choosing what clothes to wear—some of us wear burkha, some not, we all pray. When the Maulana tells us how to pray, we listen. When he tells us how to live, we laugh, and we carry on with our lives." And she went off to see if she could find sneakers with a good grip and a fancy design for Ayesha, burgeoning star of the slum school track team.
(Published in the Kolkata Telegraph, February 2006)
Miro, Marias and mishti doi: The BS column
(This column was written on an empty stomach. I think it kind of shows.)
My guide to the Kolkata Book Fair is a man with salt-and-pepper hair whose literary taste seems to run from gory Bengali ghost stories to Javier Marias with a short detour Oshowards, judging by his book parcels.
Half the crowd is heading to the Spanish pavilion—Spain is the guest of honour at the 2006 Fair—while the other half is heading with just as much enthusiasm for the prawn pakoras at Benfish and the mishti at Balaram's. I'm stuck between both streams, behind the man with the eclectic taste and the loud voice, who's asking his friend, "So where do you want to go now? Bangla pulao?—" he indicates the stronghold of Bengali publishing, where the queues for Desh and Ananda publishers are already snaking round the block. "Or that labrar ghonto?" He points to the literary equivalent of a messy dish of odds and ends—the long trestle tables where small publishers, mostly Bengali, have spread out their offerings of poetry, biography, children's stories and deeply lurid potboilers.
This is the first time in years that I've been in Kolkata during the book fair, and it has a strange effect on me. The World Book Fair in Delhi may not, strictly speaking, live up to its optimistic title, but it has grown over the years in both scale and ambition. This year's visitors to the Delhi fair—running almost in parallel to the one in Kolkata—include several agents, editors and publishers from organisations as disparate as Bertelsmann and the Rough Guides. The Rights Corner, established for the first time at the Delhi Book Fair, is exactly the sort of trade initiative that's needed. The Delhi Book Fair may not be the Frankfurt of the East, but it has become a reasonably serious trade fair.
From the ordinary reader's point of view, though, the Delhi Book Fair isn't a great browsing experience. Most of the stalls at Pragati Maidan stock textbooks, medical and other reference works, technical tomes: this is a trader's fair, not a reader's fair. The big general publishing houses rarely showcase unusual fiction or bring in significant imports—what the Delhi Book Fair offers readers is discounts and a day's outing with the family. The growing size of the fair has, oddly enough, undermined the reader's experience even further—it can take hours to reach the four or five stalls scattered across seven pavilions that really interest you.
Over the years, both Kolkata and Delhi have invited a string of authors, from Amitav Ghosh, Gunter Grass and Taslima Nasreen to V S Naipaul and Upamanyu Chatterjee, but the accent is on selling books, not on creating a literary festival around the fair. And in Delhi, the real buzz is always about the publishing scene: who's sniffing around translation rights, who's thinking of expanding their India operations, which foreign publishers are eyeing the Indian market for the first time.
If the Delhi Book Fair is an evolving trade platform, the Kolkata Book Fair retains a local mela feel in the best possible way. As crowds line up for the Australian pavilion, built in the shape of Ayers Rock, a group of boys leaning against the Miro murals at the Spanish pavilion pull out guitars and drums in an impromptu jam session. Patachitra artists and portrait artists do brisk business; the quality of the phuchka is as loudly and knowledgeably discussed as the quality of the publications on film at one stall. At the three or four rare books stalls dotted across the fair, buyers and sellers are happy to discuss the finer points of editions and engravings, to argue over whether Dean Mohammad or Ibn Batuta was the more significant travel writer.
The flow between the Bengali-language publishing houses and the English-language stalls is seamless; this crowd has just as much appetite for Ghanada and Prafulla Ray as it does for Murakami and Stendhal. I'm told that there were far more people on Republic Day and on Sunday, but as I try to find my way out through the maze, it feels as though the grounds couldn't possibly get more crowded, or throw up more clouds of dust. In the haze of the afternoon, the smell of kathi kabab rolls and fried fish competes with the cries of the young boys hawking "softy" ice cream.
I see mashimas in tangails, young Germans and Italians in shorts; the policeman at a busy, muddy intersection is absorbed in a Paris Review collection of essays. It's a nostalgia trip, this small, busy book fair with the hand-calligraphed poems by Gregory Roberts and Jibananda decorating its stalls, to a time when a book bazaar was just a slightly larger adda for readers.
(Published in Speaking Volumes, the Business Standard, January 29, 2006)
My guide to the Kolkata Book Fair is a man with salt-and-pepper hair whose literary taste seems to run from gory Bengali ghost stories to Javier Marias with a short detour Oshowards, judging by his book parcels.
Half the crowd is heading to the Spanish pavilion—Spain is the guest of honour at the 2006 Fair—while the other half is heading with just as much enthusiasm for the prawn pakoras at Benfish and the mishti at Balaram's. I'm stuck between both streams, behind the man with the eclectic taste and the loud voice, who's asking his friend, "So where do you want to go now? Bangla pulao?—" he indicates the stronghold of Bengali publishing, where the queues for Desh and Ananda publishers are already snaking round the block. "Or that labrar ghonto?" He points to the literary equivalent of a messy dish of odds and ends—the long trestle tables where small publishers, mostly Bengali, have spread out their offerings of poetry, biography, children's stories and deeply lurid potboilers.
This is the first time in years that I've been in Kolkata during the book fair, and it has a strange effect on me. The World Book Fair in Delhi may not, strictly speaking, live up to its optimistic title, but it has grown over the years in both scale and ambition. This year's visitors to the Delhi fair—running almost in parallel to the one in Kolkata—include several agents, editors and publishers from organisations as disparate as Bertelsmann and the Rough Guides. The Rights Corner, established for the first time at the Delhi Book Fair, is exactly the sort of trade initiative that's needed. The Delhi Book Fair may not be the Frankfurt of the East, but it has become a reasonably serious trade fair.
From the ordinary reader's point of view, though, the Delhi Book Fair isn't a great browsing experience. Most of the stalls at Pragati Maidan stock textbooks, medical and other reference works, technical tomes: this is a trader's fair, not a reader's fair. The big general publishing houses rarely showcase unusual fiction or bring in significant imports—what the Delhi Book Fair offers readers is discounts and a day's outing with the family. The growing size of the fair has, oddly enough, undermined the reader's experience even further—it can take hours to reach the four or five stalls scattered across seven pavilions that really interest you.
Over the years, both Kolkata and Delhi have invited a string of authors, from Amitav Ghosh, Gunter Grass and Taslima Nasreen to V S Naipaul and Upamanyu Chatterjee, but the accent is on selling books, not on creating a literary festival around the fair. And in Delhi, the real buzz is always about the publishing scene: who's sniffing around translation rights, who's thinking of expanding their India operations, which foreign publishers are eyeing the Indian market for the first time.
If the Delhi Book Fair is an evolving trade platform, the Kolkata Book Fair retains a local mela feel in the best possible way. As crowds line up for the Australian pavilion, built in the shape of Ayers Rock, a group of boys leaning against the Miro murals at the Spanish pavilion pull out guitars and drums in an impromptu jam session. Patachitra artists and portrait artists do brisk business; the quality of the phuchka is as loudly and knowledgeably discussed as the quality of the publications on film at one stall. At the three or four rare books stalls dotted across the fair, buyers and sellers are happy to discuss the finer points of editions and engravings, to argue over whether Dean Mohammad or Ibn Batuta was the more significant travel writer.
The flow between the Bengali-language publishing houses and the English-language stalls is seamless; this crowd has just as much appetite for Ghanada and Prafulla Ray as it does for Murakami and Stendhal. I'm told that there were far more people on Republic Day and on Sunday, but as I try to find my way out through the maze, it feels as though the grounds couldn't possibly get more crowded, or throw up more clouds of dust. In the haze of the afternoon, the smell of kathi kabab rolls and fried fish competes with the cries of the young boys hawking "softy" ice cream.
I see mashimas in tangails, young Germans and Italians in shorts; the policeman at a busy, muddy intersection is absorbed in a Paris Review collection of essays. It's a nostalgia trip, this small, busy book fair with the hand-calligraphed poems by Gregory Roberts and Jibananda decorating its stalls, to a time when a book bazaar was just a slightly larger adda for readers.
(Published in Speaking Volumes, the Business Standard, January 29, 2006)
I can't, but Sandokan
(Outlook Traveller asked for a piece on fictional pirates, and since I was stuck in Calcutta with an ornery Net connection, I made them walk the plank for the damn thing. The fun part was Googling Sandokan posters online; and discovering (offline) Borges' pirate fascination.)
A mean-spirited adult put paid to our childhood games of cowboys and Indians with two succinct essays in postcolonial criticism. Watching us squabble over who would be Billy the Kid and who would be Sitting Bull, she said: "Quit fighting, you're the wrong kind of Indians to be cowboys." "So we're Indians, we'll be Sioux or Cherokee," I said. "You're the wrong kind of Indians for Indians too," she said, leaving our game in tatters.
We contemplated scalping the woman, but our hearts, minds and assegais (we were a little confused on this Red Indian business) weren't in it. It wasn't until someone switched genres and came back bursting with tales of galleons and shipwrecks, parrots and pieces o' eight, that we found revenge. We hung her—in our imaginations—from the yardarm in the focsle off the mainmast (we knew as much about pirates as we did about Red Indians). And we tipped her the black spot, though she may not have noticed because the paper wasn't very clean to start with.
I liked the pirates in Treasure Island , including Long John Silver with his deadly crutch; they drank rum, sang shanties ("Fifteen men on the dead man's chest…Drink and the devil had done for the rest"), swore, killed, broke faith for the sake of doubloons, moindores and pieces of eight, and had terrible personal hygiene. To us, subjected to moral stories that featured protagonists of alarming goodness and terrifying cleanliness, Stevenson's ruffians, with no redeeming features whatsoever, were a blessed relief. Stevenson tossed off Treasure Island as entertainment. He might have been surprised at the many imitations and ironic homages he spawned, including Arturo Perez-Reverte's elegant The Nautical Chart , featuring a hero who tips his hat to Treasure Island, Conrad and Melville in turn, and villains who're modern-day pirates thinly disguised as wreck salvage specialists.
But Perez-Reverte, respected as he is, would die for the fan following that Emilio Salgari commands. Sandokan, the Tiger of Malaysia, a figure made legendary in India by Kabir Bedi, counted Mario Vargas Llosa, Umberto Eco and Che Guevara among his admirers. Sandokan is a Malay prince, deprived of family and throne by the dastardly British—he has an especial grievance against the White Rajah, the very real James Brooke. Sandokan was the defender of small native principalities against the might of Empire, combining the talents that any self-respecting Tiger of Malaysia must have with the spirit of a true scourge of the seas.
Long before Salgari, Rafael Sabatini had switched native and white roles in unusual fashion. In The Sea Hawk , Sir Oliver Tressillian conceals a past of honourable piracy, where he ruled the high seas as 'Sakr-el-Bahr, the hawk of the sea, the scourge of the Mediterranean and the terror of Christian Spain". Sabatini makes it clear that Oliver/ Sakr-el-Bahr's conversion is not nominal: he fights against "the Spanish dogs", wields "the Moslem lash" under the flag of the green crescent, and is considered the "most valiant of all the servants of Islam".
Secretly, the pirate I wanted most to be wasn't Blackbeard or Cap'n Flint, or even Sandokan—certainly not the pirates in Marlon Brando's posthumously published Fan-Tan . (Brando's pirate adventure earned him a Bad Sex award nomination; nothing more needs to be said of the book.) My dream pirate was the manipulative, scheming, ruthless Ching Shih; she who inherited control over a pirate league that numbered over 400 ships. Ching Shih's end was diplomatic rather than bloody—she retired after gaining pardon, and she died the successful proprietor of a brothel known for its inventive exploration of sensuality and cruelty.
I have, sadly, never run either a pirate coalition or a brothel, but I am content knowing that my enthusiasm for pirates in general and Ching Shih in particular was shared by Jorge Luis Borges. He immortalized Ching Shih in 'The Widow Ching', in his Universal History of Infamy . To be written about by Borges: that's a fate worth many adventures on the high seas, many sackfuls of doubloons, and a rousing toast in grog.
A mean-spirited adult put paid to our childhood games of cowboys and Indians with two succinct essays in postcolonial criticism. Watching us squabble over who would be Billy the Kid and who would be Sitting Bull, she said: "Quit fighting, you're the wrong kind of Indians to be cowboys." "So we're Indians, we'll be Sioux or Cherokee," I said. "You're the wrong kind of Indians for Indians too," she said, leaving our game in tatters.
We contemplated scalping the woman, but our hearts, minds and assegais (we were a little confused on this Red Indian business) weren't in it. It wasn't until someone switched genres and came back bursting with tales of galleons and shipwrecks, parrots and pieces o' eight, that we found revenge. We hung her—in our imaginations—from the yardarm in the focsle off the mainmast (we knew as much about pirates as we did about Red Indians). And we tipped her the black spot, though she may not have noticed because the paper wasn't very clean to start with.
I liked the pirates in Treasure Island , including Long John Silver with his deadly crutch; they drank rum, sang shanties ("Fifteen men on the dead man's chest…Drink and the devil had done for the rest"), swore, killed, broke faith for the sake of doubloons, moindores and pieces of eight, and had terrible personal hygiene. To us, subjected to moral stories that featured protagonists of alarming goodness and terrifying cleanliness, Stevenson's ruffians, with no redeeming features whatsoever, were a blessed relief. Stevenson tossed off Treasure Island as entertainment. He might have been surprised at the many imitations and ironic homages he spawned, including Arturo Perez-Reverte's elegant The Nautical Chart , featuring a hero who tips his hat to Treasure Island, Conrad and Melville in turn, and villains who're modern-day pirates thinly disguised as wreck salvage specialists.
But Perez-Reverte, respected as he is, would die for the fan following that Emilio Salgari commands. Sandokan, the Tiger of Malaysia, a figure made legendary in India by Kabir Bedi, counted Mario Vargas Llosa, Umberto Eco and Che Guevara among his admirers. Sandokan is a Malay prince, deprived of family and throne by the dastardly British—he has an especial grievance against the White Rajah, the very real James Brooke. Sandokan was the defender of small native principalities against the might of Empire, combining the talents that any self-respecting Tiger of Malaysia must have with the spirit of a true scourge of the seas.
Long before Salgari, Rafael Sabatini had switched native and white roles in unusual fashion. In The Sea Hawk , Sir Oliver Tressillian conceals a past of honourable piracy, where he ruled the high seas as 'Sakr-el-Bahr, the hawk of the sea, the scourge of the Mediterranean and the terror of Christian Spain". Sabatini makes it clear that Oliver/ Sakr-el-Bahr's conversion is not nominal: he fights against "the Spanish dogs", wields "the Moslem lash" under the flag of the green crescent, and is considered the "most valiant of all the servants of Islam".
Secretly, the pirate I wanted most to be wasn't Blackbeard or Cap'n Flint, or even Sandokan—certainly not the pirates in Marlon Brando's posthumously published Fan-Tan . (Brando's pirate adventure earned him a Bad Sex award nomination; nothing more needs to be said of the book.) My dream pirate was the manipulative, scheming, ruthless Ching Shih; she who inherited control over a pirate league that numbered over 400 ships. Ching Shih's end was diplomatic rather than bloody—she retired after gaining pardon, and she died the successful proprietor of a brothel known for its inventive exploration of sensuality and cruelty.
I have, sadly, never run either a pirate coalition or a brothel, but I am content knowing that my enthusiasm for pirates in general and Ching Shih in particular was shared by Jorge Luis Borges. He immortalized Ching Shih in 'The Widow Ching', in his Universal History of Infamy . To be written about by Borges: that's a fate worth many adventures on the high seas, many sackfuls of doubloons, and a rousing toast in grog.
The BS Column: Speak, memory--or shut up
All this happened, more or less
—Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
Way before Oprah made his memoir, A Million Little Pieces , famous, James Frey must have taken a long, hard look at his life and decided to tell his story the Vonnegut way.
Frey's book sold over four million copies because it blended the contemporary taste for pre-packaged slices of "reality" with the peculiarly American affection for the embarrassingly confessional memoir.
A generation ago, William Burroughs shocked the world with his insider's notes on addiction and devastation, from Junk to Naked Lunch . Today, Frey's willingness to declare himself a repentant former addict, a worthless, unreliable, out-of-control abuser of a wide cocktail of substances, attracts not shock but book deals and TV spots. The most humiliating drunken episodes, the splatter patterns of his vomit, the friends he betrayed, his jail time, the car crash he was involved in, the messes he created—he left nothing out.
Then The Smoking Gun ran a lengthy and thorough investigation into James Frey's life. They concluded that Frey wasn't an out-of-control addict so much as an out-of-control liar. The car crash was embellished. Some of his low-life friends may have been imaginary; his sins, his jail terms, the infamous description of vicious surgery on his teeth without benefit of anaesthesia—all of these had been greatly exaggerated.
The TSG investigation sparked a furious debate over how truthful we should expect a memoir to be. Oprah declared that it didn't matter if James Frey hadn't been through all of the pain he had described, so long as he'd been through some of it. Slightly brighter commentators pointed out that there was a word for what Frey had written, and that word was "fiction".
Non-fiction, by definition, is supposed to be about fact: memoirists, in particular, are expected to write about what actually happened as opposed to the story that sounds better. As Frey's story shattered into a million little pieces, it became clear that it was impossible for him to understand why writing a dishonest memoir is such a swizzle. In Frey's view, TSG has proved that he wasn't as much of a bad boy as he made himself out to be in his memoir—so that means he's actually really a good person. Frey and Oprah might not understand this, but his literary career was built not on style but on sympathy, and that sympathy was offered because people believed his story. Imagine a heartrending memoir written by a cancer patient; then imagine that patient confessing she had actually had a bad attack of flu. Most intelligent readers would jib at being manipulated so cynically; but that is exactly what Frey has done.
To be fair to Frey, he's surrounded by a popular culture that insists on literary relativism. In today's world, Darwin and theories of evolution are just a story, one kind of story; "intelligent design" is another kind of story that deserves equal time. (This can drive the scientifically-minded insane; they offer proof and rigorous research in support of evolutionary theories, only to be met with calm assertions of proof-and-research free faith, and demands for equal time.) Vietnam is another kind of story, with several alternative versions; Iraq has an official story, and unfortunately, several samizdat versions with widespread appeal. You could be excused for growing up in the belief that the truth is infinitely flexible—even the truth of your own life can be adjusted, and analysed, and massaged for alternative versions, even when you know that those "versions" are, to put it more plainly, lies.
What Frey and Oprah are missing out on is, oddly enough, something that medieval storytellers knew. There's a reason why Defoe worked so hard in Robinson Crusoe to set up that elaborate structure of documents and reliable narrators who would convince his audience that this was the story of a real shipwreck, a real survivor. There's a reason why so many of the 18th century novels presented themselves as "The True and Astounding Storie of…"—the "true" was just as important as the "astounding". The reader's enjoyment would only be enhanced if he could be persuaded to believe that fiction was just as true and satisfying as the real world.
We need the appearance of truth in fiction, and that's what Frey provided in his memoirs, not realizing that in journals, biographies, autobiographies and memoirs, we need more than the appearance of truth—we need and are entitled to the solid grounding of fact. "All this happened, more or less": that's a great claim. Unfortunately, it's one only a fiction writer is entitled to make, not a memoirist.
(Published January 23 in Speaking Volumes, the Business Standard)
—Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
Way before Oprah made his memoir, A Million Little Pieces , famous, James Frey must have taken a long, hard look at his life and decided to tell his story the Vonnegut way.
Frey's book sold over four million copies because it blended the contemporary taste for pre-packaged slices of "reality" with the peculiarly American affection for the embarrassingly confessional memoir.
A generation ago, William Burroughs shocked the world with his insider's notes on addiction and devastation, from Junk to Naked Lunch . Today, Frey's willingness to declare himself a repentant former addict, a worthless, unreliable, out-of-control abuser of a wide cocktail of substances, attracts not shock but book deals and TV spots. The most humiliating drunken episodes, the splatter patterns of his vomit, the friends he betrayed, his jail time, the car crash he was involved in, the messes he created—he left nothing out.
Then The Smoking Gun ran a lengthy and thorough investigation into James Frey's life. They concluded that Frey wasn't an out-of-control addict so much as an out-of-control liar. The car crash was embellished. Some of his low-life friends may have been imaginary; his sins, his jail terms, the infamous description of vicious surgery on his teeth without benefit of anaesthesia—all of these had been greatly exaggerated.
The TSG investigation sparked a furious debate over how truthful we should expect a memoir to be. Oprah declared that it didn't matter if James Frey hadn't been through all of the pain he had described, so long as he'd been through some of it. Slightly brighter commentators pointed out that there was a word for what Frey had written, and that word was "fiction".
Non-fiction, by definition, is supposed to be about fact: memoirists, in particular, are expected to write about what actually happened as opposed to the story that sounds better. As Frey's story shattered into a million little pieces, it became clear that it was impossible for him to understand why writing a dishonest memoir is such a swizzle. In Frey's view, TSG has proved that he wasn't as much of a bad boy as he made himself out to be in his memoir—so that means he's actually really a good person. Frey and Oprah might not understand this, but his literary career was built not on style but on sympathy, and that sympathy was offered because people believed his story. Imagine a heartrending memoir written by a cancer patient; then imagine that patient confessing she had actually had a bad attack of flu. Most intelligent readers would jib at being manipulated so cynically; but that is exactly what Frey has done.
To be fair to Frey, he's surrounded by a popular culture that insists on literary relativism. In today's world, Darwin and theories of evolution are just a story, one kind of story; "intelligent design" is another kind of story that deserves equal time. (This can drive the scientifically-minded insane; they offer proof and rigorous research in support of evolutionary theories, only to be met with calm assertions of proof-and-research free faith, and demands for equal time.) Vietnam is another kind of story, with several alternative versions; Iraq has an official story, and unfortunately, several samizdat versions with widespread appeal. You could be excused for growing up in the belief that the truth is infinitely flexible—even the truth of your own life can be adjusted, and analysed, and massaged for alternative versions, even when you know that those "versions" are, to put it more plainly, lies.
What Frey and Oprah are missing out on is, oddly enough, something that medieval storytellers knew. There's a reason why Defoe worked so hard in Robinson Crusoe to set up that elaborate structure of documents and reliable narrators who would convince his audience that this was the story of a real shipwreck, a real survivor. There's a reason why so many of the 18th century novels presented themselves as "The True and Astounding Storie of…"—the "true" was just as important as the "astounding". The reader's enjoyment would only be enhanced if he could be persuaded to believe that fiction was just as true and satisfying as the real world.
We need the appearance of truth in fiction, and that's what Frey provided in his memoirs, not realizing that in journals, biographies, autobiographies and memoirs, we need more than the appearance of truth—we need and are entitled to the solid grounding of fact. "All this happened, more or less": that's a great claim. Unfortunately, it's one only a fiction writer is entitled to make, not a memoirist.
(Published January 23 in Speaking Volumes, the Business Standard)
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