(Written for India Today, April 2006)
Red
Irwin Allan Sealy
Picador India
Rs 495, 344 pages
Byline: Nilanjana S Roy
Black and white should never have been allowed into a book called Red , but there it is: a black-and-white reproduction of Matisse's The Painter's Family , serving as introduction to Irwin Allan Sealy's dazzling new novel.
It is not a happy painting. The painter is absent, represented only by a bust of himself ("Serf"); the wife, in a corner, and the boys are in the background. The central figure is of Matisse's daughter—her mother was his mistress, not his wife—who exudes a nervous, violent energy. Families are complicated, hydra-headed creatures, Matisse seems to be saying; do you really want to look deeply into the nature of the beast?
All this information, naturally, is cribbed directly from Red , and it serves as an indication of the strengths and weaknesses of this formidable and thoroughly entertaining book.
Red is an abecedary: a book arranged in the form of an alphabet. You start with Aline—a woman so in love with Matisse that she will rip his canvases apart (only she knows if it's a genuine Matisse or a clever reproduction that's being dismembered) in order to see how he reached his colours—and move to Zach, a musician for whom the world in all its colours, is audible, a shifting soundscape. Almost exactly in between is the Narrator, who lives in a town called—this will sound familiar—Dariya Dun: "In the middle station of life, middle class, middling build… A foothills man, neither plainsman nor Montagnard."
Aline and Zach meet at The Hermitage, one worshipping at the feet of Matisse—bourgeois painter, but a revolutionary in a tie all the same; one ready to genuflect at the altar of Aline. The chance encounter leads them to Dariya Dun, where N is a friend of Zach's. Here, like live wires finally corralled in the same space, they make connections, shoot off sparks, create electricity and danger.
The Dun is in transition, the quiet valley transformed by better electricity connections, cybercafes that now allow the wonder of paintings downloaded pixel by pixel, in sleazy, worn-out booths where the previous occupant has been surfing porn. Zach and Aline are not the only art-lovers in town: there is a gang of Blackshorts, small-time thieves who worship a snake goddess and take the rites of crime every bit as seriously as art connoisseurs take line and colour. They're led by Gilgitan, an artist twice over—a master criminal, and an amateur but instinctively talented painter of trucks, signs and tiles.
The Narrator grapples with his own problems—a meeting with a daughter he hasn't seen for years, who brings the same energy and disruption into his life as Matisse's illegitimate daughter must have brought into his. Zach moves in steady rhythm between the music that absorbs him to the exclusion of all else and the women who capture him completely, if only for a brief moment in between compositions. Aline, foreigner to the Dun, to the unspoken barriers of caste and class, is the one who makes the most direct connections. She sees little difference in essence between the sophisticated musician who travels the world and Gilgitan, the raw, untaught painter who romances a pig-girl (in one of the few unconvincing sections of Red ) and falls in love with a paintbox.
Sealy tackles huge questions here: how do you recognize good art from bad, what makes us canonize Art with a capital A and dismiss other kinds of art in lower case, can an artist, a dealer in visions from elsewhere, inhabit the real world? Red may seem daunting, but it is also one of Sealy's richest, most comfortably experimental books yet.
He romps through the alphabet, never forgetting the other meaning of abecedary—a primer, the first principle or rudiment of anything—but allowing himself the freedom to include the following: his own poems, a brief explication of the uses of spray paint in lovemaking, imaginary books (The Nagatarangini, the Annals of the Black Codpiece Society), elaborate games with fonts, misleading definitions.
Red may frighten off readers unwilling to follow the labyrinth that leads from Matisse to the deadly repercussions of the Blackshorts' thefts, but for those willing to stay the course, this might be Sealy's finest novel yet. It's a pity Red is available only in old-fashioned book form: in an ideal, hypertext-friendly world, this is the kind of book you'd want only two keyboard commands for: Press Enter, Play Game.
Thursday, May 25, 2006
The BS column: Sherlocks of the Third World
(Carried in Speaking Volumes, the Business Standard, April 3, 2006)
They make an odd assortment, the first fictional detectives to emerge at the turn of the nineteenth century. There was Edgar Allan Poe's C Auguste Dupin, an intuitive thinker with a highly mathematical mind, who made his bones in Murder in the Rue Morgue in 1841.
Twenty years later, Mary Elizabeth Braddon introduced a villainous orphan, a helpless heiress and a mute detective in Trail of the Serpent . Mr Peters, her detective, was the world's first disabled sleuth—he communicated through sign language. Braddon's early but melodramatic detective novel was overshadowed by Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone , which came out seven years after Trail of the Serpent . By 1887, a violinist and cocaine addict had solved his first case in A Study in Scarlet . Over two decades later, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's detective stories starring Sherlock Holmes were world-famous when G K Chesterton introduced a small, dumpy, intellectual priest called Father Brown.
Today's detectives are just as quirky; but the location has shifted, with interesting consequences. Kalpana Swaminathan delivered excellent Goan Gothic last year with an atmospheric murder mystery called Bougainvillea House . This year, she's back with the first of a new crime series.
The Page 3 Murders stars a 63-year-old woman who reads Hans Gross' Criminal Psychology by way of light entertainment, and is called L R—Last Resort—Lalli by the police. When we meet her, Lalli's fresh from tracing a missing wife—"she was found in a truckload of fruit, evenly distributed in convenient bits between layers of alphonso mangoes, ripening on her way to export". The Page 3 Murders mixes a Cluedo-style whodunit delightfully with Page 3 gossip, set at a house party in a seaside villa near Bombay. Lalli's next appearance, according to Roli Books, will be in The Gardener's Song , due out in 2007, and I'm seriously considering junking my Inspector Ghotes to make way for Last Resort Lalli.
Swaminathan's detective, like Andrea Camilleri's Inspector Montalbano, rings clever changes on old stereotypes. If Lalli is India's answer to Miss Marple and the once captivating, now increasingly tedious Precious Ramotswe, Camilleri's cynical Italian inspector borrows from a venerable ancestry of police detectives up against the system. Montalbano appeared most memorably in Camilleri's The Terracotta Dog ; in Excursion to Tindari , he is up against the frustrating bureaucracy of Italy's police department (one of the few countries in the world that can match India red tape for red tape) and, more perilously, against Sicily's rising New Mafia.
Both Lalli and Montalbano provide a refreshing break from the First World forensic specialists and hardbitten cops who make up the backbone of crime fiction today. But perhaps the most interesting detectives emerging today come out of the intersection of history, geography and crime fiction.
The star of Jason Goodwin's The Janissary Tree is Yashim, eunuch in the court of the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire in 1830s Istanbul. He serves as historical guide, deconstructing the meaning of the harem and uncovering the bloody history of the Janissary corps who were once the military backbone of the Empire. He also stumbles across a corpse in a cauldron, discovers a deeply unpleasant use for steam baths, and for those curious about the exact nature of eunuch sexuality, offers an instructive glimpse at the difference between the completely castrated and the merely freelance.
His contemporary counterparts are many, but the two who made the most impact on me come from nearby countries. Two years ago, Colin Cotterill introduced an elderly Laotian sleuth in Dr Siri Paiboun ("reluctant national coroner, confused psychic, disheartened communist") in The Coroner's Lunch . In Thirty-Three Teeth , Paiboun deals with the death of the wife of a party leader and the discovery of the tortured corpses of Vietnamese soldiers, not to mention the intricate complications of party politics played Laos style.
Like Cotterill, Eliot Pattison uses the framework of the detective novel to bring the politics of another region into focus—his Skull Mantra is set in Tibet, and his sleuth is a senior Chinese official called Shan Tao Yun who was imprisoned as a traitor to the Chinese state. Shan Tao Yun, who spends his days breaking rocks alongside Buddhist monks and other local dissidents as part of the People's 404th Construction Crew, is called in by the head of the prison camp to help solve the murder of a Chinese official.
The early detectives saw murder as a crime against god, a breach in the sanctity of the world. For their contemporary counterparts, murder and other crimes are an excuse to speak about the forgotten histories and neglected places of the world. You might call it the rise of the subaltern sleuth.
They make an odd assortment, the first fictional detectives to emerge at the turn of the nineteenth century. There was Edgar Allan Poe's C Auguste Dupin, an intuitive thinker with a highly mathematical mind, who made his bones in Murder in the Rue Morgue in 1841.
Twenty years later, Mary Elizabeth Braddon introduced a villainous orphan, a helpless heiress and a mute detective in Trail of the Serpent . Mr Peters, her detective, was the world's first disabled sleuth—he communicated through sign language. Braddon's early but melodramatic detective novel was overshadowed by Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone , which came out seven years after Trail of the Serpent . By 1887, a violinist and cocaine addict had solved his first case in A Study in Scarlet . Over two decades later, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's detective stories starring Sherlock Holmes were world-famous when G K Chesterton introduced a small, dumpy, intellectual priest called Father Brown.
Today's detectives are just as quirky; but the location has shifted, with interesting consequences. Kalpana Swaminathan delivered excellent Goan Gothic last year with an atmospheric murder mystery called Bougainvillea House . This year, she's back with the first of a new crime series.
The Page 3 Murders stars a 63-year-old woman who reads Hans Gross' Criminal Psychology by way of light entertainment, and is called L R—Last Resort—Lalli by the police. When we meet her, Lalli's fresh from tracing a missing wife—"she was found in a truckload of fruit, evenly distributed in convenient bits between layers of alphonso mangoes, ripening on her way to export". The Page 3 Murders mixes a Cluedo-style whodunit delightfully with Page 3 gossip, set at a house party in a seaside villa near Bombay. Lalli's next appearance, according to Roli Books, will be in The Gardener's Song , due out in 2007, and I'm seriously considering junking my Inspector Ghotes to make way for Last Resort Lalli.
Swaminathan's detective, like Andrea Camilleri's Inspector Montalbano, rings clever changes on old stereotypes. If Lalli is India's answer to Miss Marple and the once captivating, now increasingly tedious Precious Ramotswe, Camilleri's cynical Italian inspector borrows from a venerable ancestry of police detectives up against the system. Montalbano appeared most memorably in Camilleri's The Terracotta Dog ; in Excursion to Tindari , he is up against the frustrating bureaucracy of Italy's police department (one of the few countries in the world that can match India red tape for red tape) and, more perilously, against Sicily's rising New Mafia.
Both Lalli and Montalbano provide a refreshing break from the First World forensic specialists and hardbitten cops who make up the backbone of crime fiction today. But perhaps the most interesting detectives emerging today come out of the intersection of history, geography and crime fiction.
The star of Jason Goodwin's The Janissary Tree is Yashim, eunuch in the court of the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire in 1830s Istanbul. He serves as historical guide, deconstructing the meaning of the harem and uncovering the bloody history of the Janissary corps who were once the military backbone of the Empire. He also stumbles across a corpse in a cauldron, discovers a deeply unpleasant use for steam baths, and for those curious about the exact nature of eunuch sexuality, offers an instructive glimpse at the difference between the completely castrated and the merely freelance.
His contemporary counterparts are many, but the two who made the most impact on me come from nearby countries. Two years ago, Colin Cotterill introduced an elderly Laotian sleuth in Dr Siri Paiboun ("reluctant national coroner, confused psychic, disheartened communist") in The Coroner's Lunch . In Thirty-Three Teeth , Paiboun deals with the death of the wife of a party leader and the discovery of the tortured corpses of Vietnamese soldiers, not to mention the intricate complications of party politics played Laos style.
Like Cotterill, Eliot Pattison uses the framework of the detective novel to bring the politics of another region into focus—his Skull Mantra is set in Tibet, and his sleuth is a senior Chinese official called Shan Tao Yun who was imprisoned as a traitor to the Chinese state. Shan Tao Yun, who spends his days breaking rocks alongside Buddhist monks and other local dissidents as part of the People's 404th Construction Crew, is called in by the head of the prison camp to help solve the murder of a Chinese official.
The early detectives saw murder as a crime against god, a breach in the sanctity of the world. For their contemporary counterparts, murder and other crimes are an excuse to speak about the forgotten histories and neglected places of the world. You might call it the rise of the subaltern sleuth.
The BS column: Indian writing
(Carried in Speaking Volumes, the Business Standard, March 28, 2006)
Just before the Hutch Crosswords award ceremony began, Krishna Sobti nudged me. "See how the conversations are going?" she asked.
Urvashi Butalia, a judge for the English Non-Fiction prize, was immersed in a discussion with two of the translators. Ira Pande, whose Diddi was a non-fiction nominee, had just finished talking to Sobti, both of them comfortably switching between Hindi and English. Suketu Mehta (whose Maximum City won the non-fiction prize) was in the centre of a group that also included Rana Dasgupta, with Cyrus Mistry a step away. Just behind them was Kiran Nagarkar, whose fictional versions of Bombay were being discussed elsewhere by a group of Marathi and Hindi writers.
"This is the way it should be among writers," Sobti told me, "with no division among the languages, no pitting of English against the rest, or Gujarati versus Bengali, or Hindi versus Marathi. We have so few common platforms." Then the ceremony started, and welistened to Salman Rushdie make his acceptance speech for Shalimar the Clown (winner of the English fiction prize this year) over a crackly cellphone connection. He was in Italy; "I walked into a plate-glass door when I heard the news," he said, sounding pleased with himself.
This year, I was a judge in the English fiction category—our nominees were V S Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Siddhartha Deb, Rana Dasgupta, Cyrus Mistry and Shauna Singh Baldwin. Rana now lives in Delhi, after spending his life in other places; Rushdie and Naipaul often return to India but live elsewhere; Deb, who grew up in Calcutta and the North-East, now lives in New York; Baldwin, who grew up in Delhi, now lives in Canada; Mistry, who studied in Bombay, lives elsewhere too.
I arrived at this list of places only now; when we were judging the actual books themselves, where each writer lived was so irrelevant that it was never discussed. But as the Hutch Crossword prize grows up, it will need to address the Kim> problem.
The Kim problem is simple: is Kipling's book an Indian novel? It's set in India; the lama and Hurree Babu are uncompromisingly Indian characters, the language shifts from British English to Babu English (which Kipling often lampoons) to philosophical dialectic (which he doesn't); and Kimball O'Hara is caught halfway between the East and West. Kipling shouldn't be defined as an Indian writer; but Kim might qualify as an "Indian" book. Given that the Hutch Crossword is there to honour the best of Indian writing, in English fiction and non-fiction and in translation from other Indian languages, what puts the "Indian" in "Indian writing"?
Last year, the Crossword rules stipulated that the author must be an Indian passport-holder. This ruled out Hari Kunzru and Jhumpa Lahiri—fair enough, one defines himself as British, one as American—but it also, unfortunately, ruled out Anita Desai. The rules would disqualify a book like Gregory Roberts' Shantaram --no one disagrees that this is a classic Bombay book, but its author is indisputably Australian, not Indian.
When the rules are relaxed to allow authors who would define themselves as Indian, regardless of what passport they hold, to be eligible for a prize like the Crossword, the complaint is that this unfairly benefits "diaspora authors", or authors from "elsewhere". But "elsewhere" is a tricky place. Amitav Ghosh lives half his life in New York, Suketu Mehta increasingly lives all his life out of a suitcase. They're still Indian writers to me, as are writers like Baldwin or Dasgupta, Rushdie or Deb or Mistry, regardless of where they happen to live. I don't think these writers should be penalized because of where their work has taken them.
"You're going to have to define this clearly," Rana Dasgupta said when we discussed the matter privately. He brought up the example of William Dalrymple: would Dalrymple be eligible for an "Indian" prize? Technically, no: William doesn't see himself as "Indian", nor does he hold an Indian passport.
But if you look at Dalrymple's life and work, I would find it impossible to sustain the argument against him. He lives in India for the most part of the year. We may argue about whether or not he's "Indian"—or even wants to be--but he is, beyond argument, a Dilliwala. His last book and his forthcoming set of novels about the Mughal Empire all explore the history of this country. I'm sure the Crossword will eventually work its way through the tricky maze of definitions; but I'm very glad not to be the one, on next year's panel, who has to explain to all our Almost-Indian writers why they don't qualify!
Just before the Hutch Crosswords award ceremony began, Krishna Sobti nudged me. "See how the conversations are going?" she asked.
Urvashi Butalia, a judge for the English Non-Fiction prize, was immersed in a discussion with two of the translators. Ira Pande, whose Diddi was a non-fiction nominee, had just finished talking to Sobti, both of them comfortably switching between Hindi and English. Suketu Mehta (whose Maximum City won the non-fiction prize) was in the centre of a group that also included Rana Dasgupta, with Cyrus Mistry a step away. Just behind them was Kiran Nagarkar, whose fictional versions of Bombay were being discussed elsewhere by a group of Marathi and Hindi writers.
"This is the way it should be among writers," Sobti told me, "with no division among the languages, no pitting of English against the rest, or Gujarati versus Bengali, or Hindi versus Marathi. We have so few common platforms." Then the ceremony started, and welistened to Salman Rushdie make his acceptance speech for Shalimar the Clown (winner of the English fiction prize this year) over a crackly cellphone connection. He was in Italy; "I walked into a plate-glass door when I heard the news," he said, sounding pleased with himself.
This year, I was a judge in the English fiction category—our nominees were V S Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Siddhartha Deb, Rana Dasgupta, Cyrus Mistry and Shauna Singh Baldwin. Rana now lives in Delhi, after spending his life in other places; Rushdie and Naipaul often return to India but live elsewhere; Deb, who grew up in Calcutta and the North-East, now lives in New York; Baldwin, who grew up in Delhi, now lives in Canada; Mistry, who studied in Bombay, lives elsewhere too.
I arrived at this list of places only now; when we were judging the actual books themselves, where each writer lived was so irrelevant that it was never discussed. But as the Hutch Crossword prize grows up, it will need to address the Kim> problem.
The Kim problem is simple: is Kipling's book an Indian novel? It's set in India; the lama and Hurree Babu are uncompromisingly Indian characters, the language shifts from British English to Babu English (which Kipling often lampoons) to philosophical dialectic (which he doesn't); and Kimball O'Hara is caught halfway between the East and West. Kipling shouldn't be defined as an Indian writer; but Kim might qualify as an "Indian" book. Given that the Hutch Crossword is there to honour the best of Indian writing, in English fiction and non-fiction and in translation from other Indian languages, what puts the "Indian" in "Indian writing"?
Last year, the Crossword rules stipulated that the author must be an Indian passport-holder. This ruled out Hari Kunzru and Jhumpa Lahiri—fair enough, one defines himself as British, one as American—but it also, unfortunately, ruled out Anita Desai. The rules would disqualify a book like Gregory Roberts' Shantaram --no one disagrees that this is a classic Bombay book, but its author is indisputably Australian, not Indian.
When the rules are relaxed to allow authors who would define themselves as Indian, regardless of what passport they hold, to be eligible for a prize like the Crossword, the complaint is that this unfairly benefits "diaspora authors", or authors from "elsewhere". But "elsewhere" is a tricky place. Amitav Ghosh lives half his life in New York, Suketu Mehta increasingly lives all his life out of a suitcase. They're still Indian writers to me, as are writers like Baldwin or Dasgupta, Rushdie or Deb or Mistry, regardless of where they happen to live. I don't think these writers should be penalized because of where their work has taken them.
"You're going to have to define this clearly," Rana Dasgupta said when we discussed the matter privately. He brought up the example of William Dalrymple: would Dalrymple be eligible for an "Indian" prize? Technically, no: William doesn't see himself as "Indian", nor does he hold an Indian passport.
But if you look at Dalrymple's life and work, I would find it impossible to sustain the argument against him. He lives in India for the most part of the year. We may argue about whether or not he's "Indian"—or even wants to be--but he is, beyond argument, a Dilliwala. His last book and his forthcoming set of novels about the Mughal Empire all explore the history of this country. I'm sure the Crossword will eventually work its way through the tricky maze of definitions; but I'm very glad not to be the one, on next year's panel, who has to explain to all our Almost-Indian writers why they don't qualify!
The Backspace Boys: Outlook City
(This was just a squibble for Outlook City.)
Except for the fact that I often find myself at the receiving end of it, I wouldn't waste my time with the whole Bombay-versus-Delhi argument.
Nude Elly has the publishers, a Gulab Jamun says sweetly. Yes, but Bumbay has all the poets, a Vada-Pau retorts. William Dalrymple suggested that Delhi might be the City of Djinns (not to mention tonics); Bombay was the Maximum City, Suketu Mehta returned. Bombay, courtesy Vikram Chandra, got Love and Longing; Delhi, courtesy Nayantara Sahgal's acute eye for its drawing room politics, merely had a Situation in it.
Any suggestion that Delhi might have a sprinkling of talented writers is promptly scotched by references to the Great Bombay novel, written by everyone from Salman Rushdie to Vikram Chandra, Mistrys Rohinton and Cyrus, Kiran Nagarkar, even Ashok Banker and Jaideep Verma. Delhi, despite one-off attempts (Khushwant Singh, Sahgal, Krishna Sobti), still has some catching up to do. The Bombay novel has been thoroughly explored; the Delhi navel only cursorily gazed at.
So, down in Bombay for the Hutch Crossword awards, I was throwing in the towel. I would genuflect before Bombay's writers, listen respectfully to Bombay conversations, relearn Bombay's streets courtesy Saleem Sinai and Gustad Noble and Ravan and Eddie.
At first it went according to plan. I revisited bookshops that a Bombay writer, Jerry Pinto, had spent an entire day taking me round many years ago. Kiran Nagarkar and Naresh Fernandes demonstrated, at a concert of Algerian music, that tough guys do dance.
Then Suketu Mehta took a bunch of us to the Janata Bar. Suketu had just won the first Crossword non-fiction prize for Maximum City. He wanted to celebrate at the small permit room in Bandra with its rabbit warren of rooms that was emblematic of all the bars and bar girls who had starred in a key section of the book.
As Suketu and his entourage left the awards dinner, there was a slight sense of déjà vu. The writers we were saying our farewells to included Krishna Sobti, Ira Pande, Mishi Saran—Delhi imports; the gorgeous young thing whom the boys were trying to persuade to join us was a Delhi import, and half the author population at the Janata Bar were Delhi imports. I gave up on trying to do the Bombay scene—what was the point when it was so, well, Delhi?
But there is one way to get Bombay and Delhi to bury their differences. On a similar evening at a bar in Delhi, we came up with the perfect marketing plan for Indian Writers Inc. There, before us, was the surrealist of the keyboard, musical and computer (he was pretty good), the Stones-meets-Bangla-rock vocalist (ditto), the gravel-and-cigarette voiced streetfighting man whose prose was as syncopated as his sense of rhythm, the moody poet of the bass guitar.
Add Uncle Salman, who must have picked up something from his good friends U2, and Nagarkar, with maybe Suketu on the maracas, and we've got a Bombay-Delhi combo that would rock any joint in town. Call them the Backspace Boys, organise a bunch of groupies (would the Booker Hookers be too extreme, the Cross Birds too demure?) and step back from the mike.
Except for the fact that I often find myself at the receiving end of it, I wouldn't waste my time with the whole Bombay-versus-Delhi argument.
Nude Elly has the publishers, a Gulab Jamun says sweetly. Yes, but Bumbay has all the poets, a Vada-Pau retorts. William Dalrymple suggested that Delhi might be the City of Djinns (not to mention tonics); Bombay was the Maximum City, Suketu Mehta returned. Bombay, courtesy Vikram Chandra, got Love and Longing; Delhi, courtesy Nayantara Sahgal's acute eye for its drawing room politics, merely had a Situation in it.
Any suggestion that Delhi might have a sprinkling of talented writers is promptly scotched by references to the Great Bombay novel, written by everyone from Salman Rushdie to Vikram Chandra, Mistrys Rohinton and Cyrus, Kiran Nagarkar, even Ashok Banker and Jaideep Verma. Delhi, despite one-off attempts (Khushwant Singh, Sahgal, Krishna Sobti), still has some catching up to do. The Bombay novel has been thoroughly explored; the Delhi navel only cursorily gazed at.
So, down in Bombay for the Hutch Crossword awards, I was throwing in the towel. I would genuflect before Bombay's writers, listen respectfully to Bombay conversations, relearn Bombay's streets courtesy Saleem Sinai and Gustad Noble and Ravan and Eddie.
At first it went according to plan. I revisited bookshops that a Bombay writer, Jerry Pinto, had spent an entire day taking me round many years ago. Kiran Nagarkar and Naresh Fernandes demonstrated, at a concert of Algerian music, that tough guys do dance.
Then Suketu Mehta took a bunch of us to the Janata Bar. Suketu had just won the first Crossword non-fiction prize for Maximum City. He wanted to celebrate at the small permit room in Bandra with its rabbit warren of rooms that was emblematic of all the bars and bar girls who had starred in a key section of the book.
As Suketu and his entourage left the awards dinner, there was a slight sense of déjà vu. The writers we were saying our farewells to included Krishna Sobti, Ira Pande, Mishi Saran—Delhi imports; the gorgeous young thing whom the boys were trying to persuade to join us was a Delhi import, and half the author population at the Janata Bar were Delhi imports. I gave up on trying to do the Bombay scene—what was the point when it was so, well, Delhi?
But there is one way to get Bombay and Delhi to bury their differences. On a similar evening at a bar in Delhi, we came up with the perfect marketing plan for Indian Writers Inc. There, before us, was the surrealist of the keyboard, musical and computer (he was pretty good), the Stones-meets-Bangla-rock vocalist (ditto), the gravel-and-cigarette voiced streetfighting man whose prose was as syncopated as his sense of rhythm, the moody poet of the bass guitar.
Add Uncle Salman, who must have picked up something from his good friends U2, and Nagarkar, with maybe Suketu on the maracas, and we've got a Bombay-Delhi combo that would rock any joint in town. Call them the Backspace Boys, organise a bunch of groupies (would the Booker Hookers be too extreme, the Cross Birds too demure?) and step back from the mike.
Profile: I Allan Sealy
(Carried in The Hindu, April 2006; I loved driving down to Dehradun for the day to do this interview, and perhaps some of that comes through.)
Like most fans of his work, I assume I know Allan Sealy: through the five previous books, through the readings he's done over the years, the occasional journalistic writings that my generation of students used to discuss late into the night, from the interviews and book signings. Allan has his fair share of the usual paraphernalia of a writer's life, especially when that writer comes from a generation so often analysed and written about: the same generation as Amitav Ghosh, Rukun Advani, Mukul Kesavan, Shashi Tharoor and company.
It's only now, breathing in the crisp air of this afternoon in Dehradun, standing in the garden of his house—"look for blue gates and trees, lots of trees"—that it strikes me: I have never seen Allan Sealy in his own element. This man moves with exuberance around the garden as he shows off the trees he planted ten years ago. ("Brazilian coral bean (scarlet), Mexican silk cotton (pink and yellow), Chinese golden shower (dread dominatrix)", as his narrator names them slyly in Red , Sealy's most recent book).
He talks of broadband connections—will they deliver him from the agony of crawling speeds on the Net, the tyranny of Dilawar Singh, the local linesman? And of his hatred of phones: we spend six serene minutes eating an excellent lunch cooked by Allan and his wife—steamed vegetables, a fish bake, strawberries and jaggery and cream—ignoring the shrill summons of the baleful instrument on the side table.
We exchange poetry, a Borges collection for Craig Raine, and Allan discusses his early infatuation with painting, his wary infatuation with Delhi ("a good lover but a bad wife"), his lasting love for Dehradun, which appears in Red lightly camouflaged as Dariya Dun. The difference between the quiet man I've seen in Delhi, the one who says he would like to return to Doon because his garden is coming up and that's much more important than longwinded seminar questions, and this confident, open writer is startling.
His other books are explained in chronological order as a journey ( From Yukon to Yucatan ), a chronicle (the vast and capacious Trotter-Nama ), a fable ( Hero ), a calendar ( Everest Hotel ) and an illusion ( The Brainfever Bird ).
But Red carries no colon, no explanation. It starts with Aline, a woman we meet in a museum who sees the world through colour, and ends with Zach, a musician who understands the world as sound. Their stories are connected by N, the narrator, a writer who lives in the foothills of the Himalayas. Presiding over their lives is Matisse ("he's the patron saint of my book"), whose The Red Room and The Painter's Family tower over the novel. The alphabet offers the reader a kind of guide, taking us from A for A line (see also Appendix) to Z, for Zaccheus, Zeebytes.com, Zipphone, Z-zzz and Zom. Artists rule the book: Aline paints, Zach serves his music, N writes, and a gang of Blackshorts in the Dariya Dun valley, unable to enter the world of museums or music ateliers, make a fine art of thieving and creating truck paintings.
"In The Brainfever Bird , I tried to do something that probably doesn't come naturally to me: narrative! It's a terrible confession, in a conventional sense, because a novelist is supposed to tell stories," says Allan. "But I don't think that's a novelist's sole or even primary duty. With Red , I just gave in to my notion that you should go off: I've always done that, from The Trotter-nama onwards." Each chapter of Red plays on a different letter of the alphabet. "It keeps you on the straight and narrow, but it also allows you to branch off. You should be able to jump in at any point. I love that bitty approach."
The inspiration for Red is right behind me, in the glorious, singing, bright red paint that covers the shelves of a tiny pantry. Allan explains how the drawing room used to open into a doorless bathroom: his mother had intended to use the space as a schoolroom for small children, and the absence of the door was deliberate. The bathroom gained a door, the kitchen a small pantry, and we acquired a new Allan Sealy novel—all through happenstance.
"I was painting this—the shelves, the alcove," says Allan, reaching for his copy of Red to explain. "It's in the poem, it's in the poem, that's where it is." And he reads from the poem on page 248: "Red came to me this way, no lie/ With the astounding rightness of a black swan's beak…" He went off to Hurla hardware, the shop I had passed earlier on the road, and found a litre of Signal Red. "One red they carried in acrylic and only one/ not my dodgy haemoglobin red mercurochrome or port/ not scarlet crimson not poppy not opticalmouse red not glorypea/ nothing on the fancy shade card but/ stopgo red."
It turned out to be a close cousin of the red Matisse was famous for. At the time he wrote Red , Sealy had visited The Hermitage, spending hours in front of The Red Room and The Painter's Family , carrying back as a souvenir the cups in Petersburg blue from which we're drinking fresh-brewed coffee. "There are more Matisses probably under that roof than in the rest of the world put together," he says.
Sealy saw a parallel between what had happened in Matisse's family life and his own—the surface peace interrupted by quiet schisms, the family dealing with the artist's disappearance into a world where no one else can follow. He was fascinated by Matisse's apparent conformity, the turbulence lurking under the beauty of those colours. "He's such a revolutionary painter; he wears a tie, he's bourgeois, and he's a revolutionary, and then you begin to wonder: maybe revolutionaries do wear ties."
"I love colour," says Allan. It's the only superfluous statement he'll make; that love shows all through the house, in the aqua of his study, the monkish yellow of the tiles in the kitchen, the red cafetiere on the table, the weatherworn brick of the garden wall complemented by the brilliant green of the creepers. "If you write about what you love, you're likely to be able to pull it off, providing you have certain basic skills."
The conversation turns to practical matters. Like book sales: "If you're a writer who doesn't sell, the smallest blip of a sale makes you ecstatic." Sealy is uncompromising: "Part of me thinks, what's the point of writing if you're only going to write for twelve bright readers. But with every book, maybe one per cent you think of the reader, ninety nine you're thinking of yourself, what you want to say." Of the publishing industry today: "Thank god for the way it's set up, successful writers bail out the unsuccessful ones who're willing to do what they want even if they lose their readers. A hundred years ago, there would have been no room for someone like me." And the name on the cover of Red : Irwin Allan Sealy, the full name instead of the initial 'I' for the first time. "I've been told it's not Indian enough, that the kind of English reader who would look for 'Indian writing' would put my books down. So this is my response. Fuck you. This is who I am, it's also my father's name, it's also a tribute to him."
"It took me till my thirties to give myself permission to see myself as a writer. You're measuring yourself against the best; it takes time to be able to say to yourself, I could do that—I could do better than that. Even in your twenties, you know that life is short, you know that you're never going to read everything you want to read. So you're always sifting. You're trying to get at the very best from the very beginning. If you're actually looking at yourself as a writer, you're looking at all the possible books you could ever write, even if you don't live to write them."
I ask about his characters, the way they have of popping up from one book to another. Eugene Trotter from The Trotter-nama makes a brief appearance in Red ; so does Bisht from The Everest Hotel . He grins. "It's nice to keep in touch with the guys—or girls—from the past. When they look at you, it's an accusing look: it says, you have abandoned me. Bringing them back is a way of saying, I have not."
I can almost see them; Trotter, and his father, serving nimbu-pani at a Daryaganj hotel in Brainfever Bird , Bisht, now at home in the thana of Dehradun, other ghosts from Sealy's pages. In this house, where Sealy is so very clearly at home, they've taken possession of quiet nooks and corners. "I'm very happy," he says. "I don't know why. It's a kind of lunacy." He has plans for the house; more colours to be brought in, walls to be bashed in to make room for windows. More trees planned, to hide his neighbours' houses from view: "It's nice to just blot out that house, THAT house, that one: Tree! Tree! Tree!" He has taken possession: "In a way, what you're taking possession of is not the place but yourself, and that's a source of strength."
The sadness that usually descends on him once a book is finished is in abeyance; he's been thinking of other projects. A novel about a family of engineers, some sane, some crazy. A serious history of Dehradun and the Valley, perhaps a travelogue. A long poem, marking a shift towards poetry, towards condensation. Red is the first book he's written on the computer, instead of in longhand, and Sealy thinks that perhaps the medium encourages compression, just as the pen encourages longwinded, Trollope-length narratives, Dickensian digressions.
"The process of writing a book gets you to a higher, greater intensity than almost anything I can think of," he had said earlier. "Your world for the duration of that book, the writing of it, is truly other. There's no way of describing it to anybody who, even anybody you live with. It's a good feeling, the equivalent of the chemical high. Writers are addicted to that other world in the way that a drunk is to his booze."
Now, as we say our farewells, I ask if he's moved beyond the need to question himself. Irwin Allan Sealy laughs. "A writer has constant self-doubt. There is only that interplay between total despair and complete self-confidence. There's nothing else. Really. There's nothing else. Probably both at the same time." And then he goes back to more important things: the trees need pruning, watering, the civet cats are illegally occupying the verandah chairs, his garden needs attention.
Like most fans of his work, I assume I know Allan Sealy: through the five previous books, through the readings he's done over the years, the occasional journalistic writings that my generation of students used to discuss late into the night, from the interviews and book signings. Allan has his fair share of the usual paraphernalia of a writer's life, especially when that writer comes from a generation so often analysed and written about: the same generation as Amitav Ghosh, Rukun Advani, Mukul Kesavan, Shashi Tharoor and company.
It's only now, breathing in the crisp air of this afternoon in Dehradun, standing in the garden of his house—"look for blue gates and trees, lots of trees"—that it strikes me: I have never seen Allan Sealy in his own element. This man moves with exuberance around the garden as he shows off the trees he planted ten years ago. ("Brazilian coral bean (scarlet), Mexican silk cotton (pink and yellow), Chinese golden shower (dread dominatrix)", as his narrator names them slyly in Red , Sealy's most recent book).
He talks of broadband connections—will they deliver him from the agony of crawling speeds on the Net, the tyranny of Dilawar Singh, the local linesman? And of his hatred of phones: we spend six serene minutes eating an excellent lunch cooked by Allan and his wife—steamed vegetables, a fish bake, strawberries and jaggery and cream—ignoring the shrill summons of the baleful instrument on the side table.
We exchange poetry, a Borges collection for Craig Raine, and Allan discusses his early infatuation with painting, his wary infatuation with Delhi ("a good lover but a bad wife"), his lasting love for Dehradun, which appears in Red lightly camouflaged as Dariya Dun. The difference between the quiet man I've seen in Delhi, the one who says he would like to return to Doon because his garden is coming up and that's much more important than longwinded seminar questions, and this confident, open writer is startling.
His other books are explained in chronological order as a journey ( From Yukon to Yucatan ), a chronicle (the vast and capacious Trotter-Nama ), a fable ( Hero ), a calendar ( Everest Hotel ) and an illusion ( The Brainfever Bird ).
But Red carries no colon, no explanation. It starts with Aline, a woman we meet in a museum who sees the world through colour, and ends with Zach, a musician who understands the world as sound. Their stories are connected by N, the narrator, a writer who lives in the foothills of the Himalayas. Presiding over their lives is Matisse ("he's the patron saint of my book"), whose The Red Room and The Painter's Family tower over the novel. The alphabet offers the reader a kind of guide, taking us from A for A line (see also Appendix) to Z, for Zaccheus, Zeebytes.com, Zipphone, Z-zzz and Zom. Artists rule the book: Aline paints, Zach serves his music, N writes, and a gang of Blackshorts in the Dariya Dun valley, unable to enter the world of museums or music ateliers, make a fine art of thieving and creating truck paintings.
"In The Brainfever Bird , I tried to do something that probably doesn't come naturally to me: narrative! It's a terrible confession, in a conventional sense, because a novelist is supposed to tell stories," says Allan. "But I don't think that's a novelist's sole or even primary duty. With Red , I just gave in to my notion that you should go off: I've always done that, from The Trotter-nama onwards." Each chapter of Red plays on a different letter of the alphabet. "It keeps you on the straight and narrow, but it also allows you to branch off. You should be able to jump in at any point. I love that bitty approach."
The inspiration for Red is right behind me, in the glorious, singing, bright red paint that covers the shelves of a tiny pantry. Allan explains how the drawing room used to open into a doorless bathroom: his mother had intended to use the space as a schoolroom for small children, and the absence of the door was deliberate. The bathroom gained a door, the kitchen a small pantry, and we acquired a new Allan Sealy novel—all through happenstance.
"I was painting this—the shelves, the alcove," says Allan, reaching for his copy of Red to explain. "It's in the poem, it's in the poem, that's where it is." And he reads from the poem on page 248: "Red came to me this way, no lie/ With the astounding rightness of a black swan's beak…" He went off to Hurla hardware, the shop I had passed earlier on the road, and found a litre of Signal Red. "One red they carried in acrylic and only one/ not my dodgy haemoglobin red mercurochrome or port/ not scarlet crimson not poppy not opticalmouse red not glorypea/ nothing on the fancy shade card but/ stopgo red."
It turned out to be a close cousin of the red Matisse was famous for. At the time he wrote Red , Sealy had visited The Hermitage, spending hours in front of The Red Room and The Painter's Family , carrying back as a souvenir the cups in Petersburg blue from which we're drinking fresh-brewed coffee. "There are more Matisses probably under that roof than in the rest of the world put together," he says.
Sealy saw a parallel between what had happened in Matisse's family life and his own—the surface peace interrupted by quiet schisms, the family dealing with the artist's disappearance into a world where no one else can follow. He was fascinated by Matisse's apparent conformity, the turbulence lurking under the beauty of those colours. "He's such a revolutionary painter; he wears a tie, he's bourgeois, and he's a revolutionary, and then you begin to wonder: maybe revolutionaries do wear ties."
"I love colour," says Allan. It's the only superfluous statement he'll make; that love shows all through the house, in the aqua of his study, the monkish yellow of the tiles in the kitchen, the red cafetiere on the table, the weatherworn brick of the garden wall complemented by the brilliant green of the creepers. "If you write about what you love, you're likely to be able to pull it off, providing you have certain basic skills."
The conversation turns to practical matters. Like book sales: "If you're a writer who doesn't sell, the smallest blip of a sale makes you ecstatic." Sealy is uncompromising: "Part of me thinks, what's the point of writing if you're only going to write for twelve bright readers. But with every book, maybe one per cent you think of the reader, ninety nine you're thinking of yourself, what you want to say." Of the publishing industry today: "Thank god for the way it's set up, successful writers bail out the unsuccessful ones who're willing to do what they want even if they lose their readers. A hundred years ago, there would have been no room for someone like me." And the name on the cover of Red : Irwin Allan Sealy, the full name instead of the initial 'I' for the first time. "I've been told it's not Indian enough, that the kind of English reader who would look for 'Indian writing' would put my books down. So this is my response. Fuck you. This is who I am, it's also my father's name, it's also a tribute to him."
"It took me till my thirties to give myself permission to see myself as a writer. You're measuring yourself against the best; it takes time to be able to say to yourself, I could do that—I could do better than that. Even in your twenties, you know that life is short, you know that you're never going to read everything you want to read. So you're always sifting. You're trying to get at the very best from the very beginning. If you're actually looking at yourself as a writer, you're looking at all the possible books you could ever write, even if you don't live to write them."
I ask about his characters, the way they have of popping up from one book to another. Eugene Trotter from The Trotter-nama makes a brief appearance in Red ; so does Bisht from The Everest Hotel . He grins. "It's nice to keep in touch with the guys—or girls—from the past. When they look at you, it's an accusing look: it says, you have abandoned me. Bringing them back is a way of saying, I have not."
I can almost see them; Trotter, and his father, serving nimbu-pani at a Daryaganj hotel in Brainfever Bird , Bisht, now at home in the thana of Dehradun, other ghosts from Sealy's pages. In this house, where Sealy is so very clearly at home, they've taken possession of quiet nooks and corners. "I'm very happy," he says. "I don't know why. It's a kind of lunacy." He has plans for the house; more colours to be brought in, walls to be bashed in to make room for windows. More trees planned, to hide his neighbours' houses from view: "It's nice to just blot out that house, THAT house, that one: Tree! Tree! Tree!" He has taken possession: "In a way, what you're taking possession of is not the place but yourself, and that's a source of strength."
The sadness that usually descends on him once a book is finished is in abeyance; he's been thinking of other projects. A novel about a family of engineers, some sane, some crazy. A serious history of Dehradun and the Valley, perhaps a travelogue. A long poem, marking a shift towards poetry, towards condensation. Red is the first book he's written on the computer, instead of in longhand, and Sealy thinks that perhaps the medium encourages compression, just as the pen encourages longwinded, Trollope-length narratives, Dickensian digressions.
"The process of writing a book gets you to a higher, greater intensity than almost anything I can think of," he had said earlier. "Your world for the duration of that book, the writing of it, is truly other. There's no way of describing it to anybody who, even anybody you live with. It's a good feeling, the equivalent of the chemical high. Writers are addicted to that other world in the way that a drunk is to his booze."
Now, as we say our farewells, I ask if he's moved beyond the need to question himself. Irwin Allan Sealy laughs. "A writer has constant self-doubt. There is only that interplay between total despair and complete self-confidence. There's nothing else. Really. There's nothing else. Probably both at the same time." And then he goes back to more important things: the trees need pruning, watering, the civet cats are illegally occupying the verandah chairs, his garden needs attention.
Brunchtime
(Carried in The Indian Express, March 2006)
Brunch skeptics belong to the Bourdain faction or the Seinfeld faction. The first will quote chef Anthony Bourdain's essay at you with grim satisfaction: "[It's] a dumping ground for the odd bits left over from Friday and Saturday nights or for the scraps generated in the normal course of business."
I belong to the second group--like Jeannie in Seinfeld , we're puzzled by the only portmanteau meal on the menu: "So what's the deal with brunch…i f it's a combination of breakfast and lunch, how come there's no lupper or no linner?"
Never mind if no one understands it, everyone's doing it anyway. And while it's marketed as the most decadent meal of the day (obligatory jazz band, sparkling wine, caviare sprinkled like dhania over everything), what it's become is the most fiercely competitive meal of the moment.
In Delhi , The Taipan's venerable dimsum brunch trolley has been challenged by the exotic offerings at threesixty (also at The Oberoi) and The Hotel Nikko's mystic east-meets New Orleans spread on Sundays. The Claridges has a fabulous Sunday spread; Tonino in Gurgaon makes sure that the punters in the suburbs get their pasta fix and sparkling wine; and Olive in Mehrauli just pulled out a brand new brunch menu that plays around with the baguette-and-cheese routine. (Most of these charge between Rs 900 and Rs 2,000 per head, but places like Q'ba and Vasant Continental's Eggspectations offer cheaper variations.)
In Bombay , Zenzi and Basilico offer serious competition to Indigo's signature Sunday brunch, while the Taj and the Hyatt do their best to keep up. And while coffee and idlis haven't been forsaken in Madras, I'm told by a foodie friend that places like The Cedars and restaurants at The Park and The Taj have successfully introduced decadence to the city.
With the distinction between brunch and lunch becoming thinner than Mallika Sherawat's spaghetti straps, a writer friend, let's call him the Dillitante, and I head off to Olive one Sunday to see if they still do brunch the New Orleans way. And they do, if you're willing to overlook the absence of crullers, mimosas and heavily hungover musicians.
I like the Taipan's selection of dimsums and threesixty's premier coffees, but brunch should feel like a picnic. It's the one meal you should eat outdoors if you can. This is probably where places like Claridges, Tonino and Olive score over the equally fine food at the Nikko or the Oberoi.
The Dillitante and I are both veterans of brunch in friends' homes and brunch as the dismal meal it was circa Delhi in the 1980s. (Salads wilting in shrill marinades, limp shrimp, indigestible mousses that were, back then, often spelt mouse and tasted the same way, warm juice and wine which offered menace instead of sparkle.) But we arrive at Olive just as brunch is kicking off; the white gravel in the courtyard looks shampooed; the jazz band is warming up with Stardust, These Foolish Things and other standards. The waiters are the attentive-not-adhesive kind, there's fresh-baked baguettes and fresh fruit, and the Dillitante looks around with surprised approval. This might be because of the size of the wine glasses into which generous quantities of Chilean red and Californian white are now being poured, but it's also the ambience.
Olive turns out to be the perfect place for ambience for the most basic of reasons: you do brunch for the atmosphere more than the food. We've arrived the week after a restaurant review that trashed Olive's menu brought Olive loyalists out with banners of support, but my previous experiences with the place have lined me up alongside the food critic rather than the True Believers.
Given that, both the Dillitante and I concede that Olive's done itself proud. The spread includes the usual mousses, dips, salads and starters (do not go near the parma ham wrapped around banana or the broccoli-and-cashew pate, but the babaghanoush, a clever salmon seviche and a very fresh prawn salad compensate). Then there's the live pasta station, which seems to be replacing the eggs-to-order counter at brunches everywhere. And the live grill, with fabulous jumbo prawns in a simple lemon-parsley-butter marinade and good tenderloin; and the fresh oysters.
Three hours later, we've wiped the cheese board clean, given the food a curt nod of approval and the all-important Ambience an enthusiastic thumbs-up. The jazz and the wine were equally smooth, the Dillitante pronounces. Yesh, I say, having overdone both ever so slightly. We exit stage left, having contemplated stealing the baguettes at the next table, conscious of leaving finer, better human beings than we were before. I'm willing to concede that brunch rules, for the moment; now the next thing is going to be locating the meal Homer Simpson claimed to have invented—the meal between breakfast and brunch.
Brunch skeptics belong to the Bourdain faction or the Seinfeld faction. The first will quote chef Anthony Bourdain's essay at you with grim satisfaction: "[It's] a dumping ground for the odd bits left over from Friday and Saturday nights or for the scraps generated in the normal course of business."
I belong to the second group--like Jeannie in Seinfeld , we're puzzled by the only portmanteau meal on the menu: "So what's the deal with brunch…i f it's a combination of breakfast and lunch, how come there's no lupper or no linner?"
Never mind if no one understands it, everyone's doing it anyway. And while it's marketed as the most decadent meal of the day (obligatory jazz band, sparkling wine, caviare sprinkled like dhania over everything), what it's become is the most fiercely competitive meal of the moment.
In Delhi , The Taipan's venerable dimsum brunch trolley has been challenged by the exotic offerings at threesixty (also at The Oberoi) and The Hotel Nikko's mystic east-meets New Orleans spread on Sundays. The Claridges has a fabulous Sunday spread; Tonino in Gurgaon makes sure that the punters in the suburbs get their pasta fix and sparkling wine; and Olive in Mehrauli just pulled out a brand new brunch menu that plays around with the baguette-and-cheese routine. (Most of these charge between Rs 900 and Rs 2,000 per head, but places like Q'ba and Vasant Continental's Eggspectations offer cheaper variations.)
In Bombay , Zenzi and Basilico offer serious competition to Indigo's signature Sunday brunch, while the Taj and the Hyatt do their best to keep up. And while coffee and idlis haven't been forsaken in Madras, I'm told by a foodie friend that places like The Cedars and restaurants at The Park and The Taj have successfully introduced decadence to the city.
With the distinction between brunch and lunch becoming thinner than Mallika Sherawat's spaghetti straps, a writer friend, let's call him the Dillitante, and I head off to Olive one Sunday to see if they still do brunch the New Orleans way. And they do, if you're willing to overlook the absence of crullers, mimosas and heavily hungover musicians.
I like the Taipan's selection of dimsums and threesixty's premier coffees, but brunch should feel like a picnic. It's the one meal you should eat outdoors if you can. This is probably where places like Claridges, Tonino and Olive score over the equally fine food at the Nikko or the Oberoi.
The Dillitante and I are both veterans of brunch in friends' homes and brunch as the dismal meal it was circa Delhi in the 1980s. (Salads wilting in shrill marinades, limp shrimp, indigestible mousses that were, back then, often spelt mouse and tasted the same way, warm juice and wine which offered menace instead of sparkle.) But we arrive at Olive just as brunch is kicking off; the white gravel in the courtyard looks shampooed; the jazz band is warming up with Stardust, These Foolish Things and other standards. The waiters are the attentive-not-adhesive kind, there's fresh-baked baguettes and fresh fruit, and the Dillitante looks around with surprised approval. This might be because of the size of the wine glasses into which generous quantities of Chilean red and Californian white are now being poured, but it's also the ambience.
Olive turns out to be the perfect place for ambience for the most basic of reasons: you do brunch for the atmosphere more than the food. We've arrived the week after a restaurant review that trashed Olive's menu brought Olive loyalists out with banners of support, but my previous experiences with the place have lined me up alongside the food critic rather than the True Believers.
Given that, both the Dillitante and I concede that Olive's done itself proud. The spread includes the usual mousses, dips, salads and starters (do not go near the parma ham wrapped around banana or the broccoli-and-cashew pate, but the babaghanoush, a clever salmon seviche and a very fresh prawn salad compensate). Then there's the live pasta station, which seems to be replacing the eggs-to-order counter at brunches everywhere. And the live grill, with fabulous jumbo prawns in a simple lemon-parsley-butter marinade and good tenderloin; and the fresh oysters.
Three hours later, we've wiped the cheese board clean, given the food a curt nod of approval and the all-important Ambience an enthusiastic thumbs-up. The jazz and the wine were equally smooth, the Dillitante pronounces. Yesh, I say, having overdone both ever so slightly. We exit stage left, having contemplated stealing the baguettes at the next table, conscious of leaving finer, better human beings than we were before. I'm willing to concede that brunch rules, for the moment; now the next thing is going to be locating the meal Homer Simpson claimed to have invented—the meal between breakfast and brunch.
The BS column: Kiran Nagarkar
(Carried in Speaking Volumes, the Business Standard, March 14, 2006)
For years before I met Kiran Nagarkar, I'd been hearing about him from other Indian writers. They spoke of him with deep pride and affection; his books were discussed with every shade of emotion from envy and disapproval to passionate, almost devout fervour. There is no such thing as a neutral position on Kiran Nagarkar; something in the man and his writing demands a reaction.
I knew of Kiran Nagarkar's long friendship with the poet Arun Kolatkar, of his battles with the Marathi establishment, his terrifying bursts of ill health, his refusal to compromise with his critics, whether they came from the censor board, the Shiv Sena, society's moral guardians or the literary establishment.
I was expecting arrogance, perhaps even brashness; not the tall, slightly stooping man who spoke in a soft, clear voice and seemed oddly fragile, until his underlying (and wonderfully warped) sense of humour broke through. There was tremendous confidence; Nagarkar knew just how powerful his work was, but there was little room for arrogance.
He spoke of the chawl in Bombay where he had grown up, not to establish his credentials as one of the urban poor, but to establish the validity of the background he had used in books like Seven Sixes are Forty Three and Ravan and Eddie . He spoke, as he had before and as he would be asked to do almost endlessly, of the narrow minds of the language police. He didn't see why Marathi should be his only mother tongue, or why choosing to write in another language should be seen as a betrayal instead of an expansion of a writer's horizons. In a country like India, with its multiplicity of tongues, he didn't see why every writer shouldn't have two, three, four languages to play around with.
This was in the late nineties, a time when it seemed that Nagarkar might be entering one of the more productive phases of a writer's life. Cuckold had been anointed; Ravan and Eddie was doing well; Nagarkar would fulfil an old ambition to be an actor by essaying the role of a paedophile priest on film; and even Bedtime Story , his long-beleagured play, was emerging from the shadows of censorship. Bedtime Story had a Nazi war criminal retelling four stories from the Mahabharata and demanded more of its audience than most Indian plays had, asking them for accountability, asking them to recognize that "whatever happens, wherever in the world, someone has to pay". Several groups had tried and failed to stage the play; the Shiv Sena had picketed rehearsals and forced a ban on Bedtime Story ; the censor board demanded cuts that would have eviscerated the guts and heart of the play. The first performance of Bedtime Story finally happened 17 years after it had been written.
It seemed like a good decade for him. But over the next nine years, Nagarkar wrote nothing, to the dismay of his legions of readers. Cuckold went in and out of print; some of us experienced a kind of secondhand bitterness when we realized that this writer, one of India's most original and unapologetic voices, was barely recognized outside his country.
Nagarkar's silence will finally lift this month with the publication of God's Little Soldier (HarperCollins). This is ostensibly a novel about terrorism; its protagonist is a man called Zia Khan who becomes one of "God's little guerrillas", a man driven by a complex set of beliefs into acts of violence. Some of his massacres are successful, some, like an attempted assassination of Salman Rushdie, fail. His brother, Amanat, is rescued by doubt, but nothing about either man's life is black-and-white. And as usual, Nagarkar's skill lies in the details; the gun Zia means to use for one of his jobs is hidden under books-- The Heart of the Matter and Don Quixote .
If this was all God's Little Soldier had to offer—an unflinching exploration of the psyche of a man engaged in the cold, profitable business of terror—it would be enough. But Nagarkar also offers a vision of the writer as the ultimate assassin, the ultimate fundamentalist. Or perhaps, he suggests, the writer is the only saviour in a world that has abused and twisted language, and that is engaged in cutting off its own tongue; perhaps what the terrorist wants to protest is the silence that he has been forced to inhabit.
After that nine-year-long absence, it's better than I could have imagined to see Kiran Nagarkar back where he belongs: centrestage, relishing the controversies and the arguments that will rise in the wake of this uncomfortably sharp novel.
For years before I met Kiran Nagarkar, I'd been hearing about him from other Indian writers. They spoke of him with deep pride and affection; his books were discussed with every shade of emotion from envy and disapproval to passionate, almost devout fervour. There is no such thing as a neutral position on Kiran Nagarkar; something in the man and his writing demands a reaction.
I knew of Kiran Nagarkar's long friendship with the poet Arun Kolatkar, of his battles with the Marathi establishment, his terrifying bursts of ill health, his refusal to compromise with his critics, whether they came from the censor board, the Shiv Sena, society's moral guardians or the literary establishment.
I was expecting arrogance, perhaps even brashness; not the tall, slightly stooping man who spoke in a soft, clear voice and seemed oddly fragile, until his underlying (and wonderfully warped) sense of humour broke through. There was tremendous confidence; Nagarkar knew just how powerful his work was, but there was little room for arrogance.
He spoke of the chawl in Bombay where he had grown up, not to establish his credentials as one of the urban poor, but to establish the validity of the background he had used in books like Seven Sixes are Forty Three and Ravan and Eddie . He spoke, as he had before and as he would be asked to do almost endlessly, of the narrow minds of the language police. He didn't see why Marathi should be his only mother tongue, or why choosing to write in another language should be seen as a betrayal instead of an expansion of a writer's horizons. In a country like India, with its multiplicity of tongues, he didn't see why every writer shouldn't have two, three, four languages to play around with.
This was in the late nineties, a time when it seemed that Nagarkar might be entering one of the more productive phases of a writer's life. Cuckold had been anointed; Ravan and Eddie was doing well; Nagarkar would fulfil an old ambition to be an actor by essaying the role of a paedophile priest on film; and even Bedtime Story , his long-beleagured play, was emerging from the shadows of censorship. Bedtime Story had a Nazi war criminal retelling four stories from the Mahabharata and demanded more of its audience than most Indian plays had, asking them for accountability, asking them to recognize that "whatever happens, wherever in the world, someone has to pay". Several groups had tried and failed to stage the play; the Shiv Sena had picketed rehearsals and forced a ban on Bedtime Story ; the censor board demanded cuts that would have eviscerated the guts and heart of the play. The first performance of Bedtime Story finally happened 17 years after it had been written.
It seemed like a good decade for him. But over the next nine years, Nagarkar wrote nothing, to the dismay of his legions of readers. Cuckold went in and out of print; some of us experienced a kind of secondhand bitterness when we realized that this writer, one of India's most original and unapologetic voices, was barely recognized outside his country.
Nagarkar's silence will finally lift this month with the publication of God's Little Soldier (HarperCollins). This is ostensibly a novel about terrorism; its protagonist is a man called Zia Khan who becomes one of "God's little guerrillas", a man driven by a complex set of beliefs into acts of violence. Some of his massacres are successful, some, like an attempted assassination of Salman Rushdie, fail. His brother, Amanat, is rescued by doubt, but nothing about either man's life is black-and-white. And as usual, Nagarkar's skill lies in the details; the gun Zia means to use for one of his jobs is hidden under books-- The Heart of the Matter and Don Quixote .
If this was all God's Little Soldier had to offer—an unflinching exploration of the psyche of a man engaged in the cold, profitable business of terror—it would be enough. But Nagarkar also offers a vision of the writer as the ultimate assassin, the ultimate fundamentalist. Or perhaps, he suggests, the writer is the only saviour in a world that has abused and twisted language, and that is engaged in cutting off its own tongue; perhaps what the terrorist wants to protest is the silence that he has been forced to inhabit.
After that nine-year-long absence, it's better than I could have imagined to see Kiran Nagarkar back where he belongs: centrestage, relishing the controversies and the arguments that will rise in the wake of this uncomfortably sharp novel.
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