The BS Column: Kamala Das, Madhavikutty, Suraiya (1934-2009)

(Published in the Business Standard, June 2, 2009)
“Belong, cried the categorizers. Don’t sit
On walls or peep in through our lace-draped windows.
Be Amy, or be Kamala. Or better
Still, be Madhavikutty. It is time to
Choose a name, a role. “
('An Introduction', Kamala Das)

A name, a role, a religion, a language: all her life, Kamala Das questioned and rejected belonging even as she longed for it. By the time of her death this weekend, 75 and still settling into an identity, Kamala Das stood for certain things in the public imagination: she was the short story writer, the woman who wrote of sexuality with a freedom unthinkable for the times, and then retreated into purdah, an apostate turned convert who rejected Krishna for Islam.

(* A reader, Fr.Vayalil Joseph Joy, writes in to clarify that Kamala Das never rejected Krishna for Islam: "Love for Krishna, I feel, was always a part of her life., though we donot know how or whether she could reconcile this with her new faith.")

Few of this generation’s women writers know her as more than a name—sometimes a caricature—and to some extent, Kamala Das left behind a mixed legacy, too much rubbish thrown in with the good stuff. Those who read in English knew her chiefly as a poet, and she could be a very acute one; but she was also overly prolific, and many of her poems suffer from a lack of revision. She was far more interested in capturing the perfect emotion than the perfect line.

Those who read in Malayalam knew her as a short story writer whose work reflected the frustrations of a generation of women who were just beginning to question marriage and the domestic life, just beginning to embrace their own sexuality and need for freedom. Many knew her only by her autobiography, published as My Story, which was an often intense, often rambling account of her loves, her writing, her need for something larger than the world of tradition and the hearth.

'....No, not for me the beguiling promise of
domestic bliss, the goodnight kiss, the weekly
letter that begins with the word dearest,
Not for me the hollowness of marital vows and
the loneliness of a double bed, where someone
lies dreaming of another mate, a woman perhaps
lustier than his own....'
('Annamalai Poems', Kamala Das)

Kamala Das grew up in a house where literature and writing was the order of the day—her great-uncle was a writer, her mother, Nalapatt Balamani Amma, was a respected poet, and her father was the managing editor of Matrubhumi. She wrote as a child, but only began to write professionally after marriage and motherhood. Her views were shocking in that time, her frankness about female desire revelatory and unsettling.

'....Gift him all,
Gift him what makes you woman, the scent of
Long hair, the musk of sweat between the breasts,
The warm shock of menstrual blood, and all your
Endless female hungers....'
('The Looking Glass', Kamala Das)

Today, it’s hard to see the impact that lines of these would have had for a previous generation. Writers like Catherine Millet (The Sexual Life of Catherine M) and Charlotte Roche (Wetlands) now examine their sexual history in detailed laundry lists that leave nothing, from haemorrhoids to orgies as meticulously planned as a 19th century tea party, to the imagination. But for women—and men—trapped in a multitude of roles that stressed the centrality of the family, Kamala Das’ passionate evocation of desire, her demand that women be given lives, and rooms, of their own, was revolutionary.

'....Purdah is a kind of safety.
The body finds a place to hide.
The cloth fans out against the skin
Much like the earth that falls
on coffins after they put the dead men in....'
('Purdah I', Imtiaz Dharker)

In her sixties, Kamala Das, who had once written with deep feeling about the Radha-Krishna relationship, discovered a need for subjugation, a turning away from the freedom she had so often longed for and fought for.* Her conversion to Islam created yet another identity for her; as Suraiyya, she abjured many of the things that had defined her as a writer. Hindus, especially the liberal fold, were shocked at this late-life change of faith. Nor did it please those who had studied Islam in depth and felt that Kamala Das/ Suraiyya had woefully misunderstood the faith.

Kamala Das had become, she said in an interview, a “puritan in all senses”; but the purdah she embraced so eagerly was deconstructed by another poet, Imtiaz Dharker, in the lines quoted above. Dharker was writing in general terms, but in many ways, she captured what Kamala Das was seeking—a place to hide, a kind of safety after the years of rebellion. In the process, Kamala Das lost the ability to define herself, except in the most fluid terms—she would remain, to the end, a seeker who never quite knew what she was looking for.

(P.S. That's a drawing by Imtiaz Dharker at the top of the post. I like her work a lot, and hope she doesn't mind my using it.)

Book review: Eat My Globe

Eat My Globe
One Man’s Search for the Best Food in the World
Simon Majumdar
Hachette, Rs 295, 278 pages

“I may not be the first person to have eaten rat in China, elk in Finland, barbecue in Texas, crickets in Manila or cod sperm sushi in Kyoto, but there are not too many people out there who can claim to have done so in little over a year.”

As he turned forty, Simon Majumdar dealt with the obligatory midlife crisis with flair. Instead of buying a sports car, shagging a fading starlet or discovering his inner navel in the outer Himalayas, this half-Welsh, half-Indian, wholly insane man chucked up his job and decided to eat his way across the globe.

Majumdar would be the first to admit that he has boldly gone where no one but Anthony Bourdain and a score of globetrotting chefs-turned-TV stars have gone before. But taking the trip vicariously in his company turns out to be an unexpected pleasure. Majumdar represents the best of the breed of the amateur foodie—not the food tourist, wearily moving from one Michelin-starred experience to another, but the genuine food-lover, armed with a curiosity about the world and a desire to taste everything, no matter how unusual.

That might be, even in this jaded age, very odd indeed. Majumdar’s “I ate it so you don’t have to” list includes rotten shark meat in Iceland and deep-fried banana in Ireland, in addition to the stir-fried rat and braised dog previously mentioned. What makes this book work, though, are his opinions—freely offered and stubbornly defended, as in his description of pizza (even the best available in Chicago and Rome) as “snot on toast”.

The list of things the “Great Majumdar” loved eating as he made his way across 90 countries on a budget slimmer than a bulimic model’s waist is vast and endearing. Instead of an endless list of fabulous gourmet meals that few of us would be able to afford, he proffers comforting classics: roti canai in Malaysia, Mrs King’s pork pie from Melton Mowbray in England, pho in Vietnam, breakfast ribs in Kansas. In India, he visits Delhi, Mumbai, Calcutta and Goa, and instead of rating restaurants, offers a more nuanced overview of the local specialties.

Eat My Globe may lack the inimitable style of MFK Fisher’s writings, or the unique experiences at the heart of Bill Buford’s Heat, but Majumdar’s energy and enthusiasm are contagious. He romps across the world not just for himself, but for all those of us who harbour a similar desire to eat our way across the globe and who will probably stop at twenty or less countries. We don’t have to, because the Great Majumdar made the journey for us.

(For Outlook Traveller, June 2009)

If It Is Sweet--a personal note

Reading Mridula Koshy's stories for the first time, almost a year-and-a-half ago, fresh into the publishing job I left this January, I had two distinct thoughts. The first was that these were the Delhi stories I'd been looking for; the second was that if all I managed to do was publish another three books like this, I'd have justified my time in publishing.

If you live in Bombay and write, the city looms behind your work, inevitably and naturally. But Delhi seems to elude writers, especially those who work in English--the great Delhi novels I can think of were written by Krishna Sobti and Ahmed Ali, with a few exceptions. (I Allan Sealy and Karan Mahajan have both used Delhi as an interesting backdrop, but the author who's probably captured Delhi best was Vandana Singh, in an SF short story.) Most writers see Delhi through the lens of history--it's a wonderful place to set a certain kind of tourist historical novel--or through the lens of a camera--the picture postcard view.

Mridula's stories in the collection that became If It Is Sweet (Tranquebar) captured the many levels at which Delhi works, her curiosity and her open-mindedness as a writer allowing her to examine the lives of people too invisible, too ordinary to be considered worth writing about. Perhaps it's her background--she used to be a trade union organiser--that makes her such an acute observer, perhaps it's the many places that she travelled between as a young child that gave her an ability to imagine the lives of strangers in richness and detail.

A large girl who is simultaneously lover and liar, a teenager fruitlessly hawking discount coupons for covetable, unaffordable jeans, the koodawallah's intricate romance, a carpenter uncovering his Delhi world through the mysteries of plaster of Paris, a child of the footpath making an unexpected connection at the traffic lights, mothers, tourists, drifters--all of them captured in Mridula's compassionate but unflinching vision. The Good Mother, for instance, isn't about Delhi--it's about tragedy and the harsh, inescapable fact that life will continue to go on even after the worst you can imagine has happened. But here's a tiny aside that reveals a slice of Delhi, the architecture echoing the lives of the people:

She had not noticed from the outside, but the houses are built with no space between them, just the superfluity of two sets of walls in a tight kiss, so that they are suctioned, one to the other. But neither do the two balconies, nor do the houses themselves, bear any relationship of symmetry or accord any thought to each other.

This is what Rana Dasgupta had to say about the book:

In brooding, otherworldly prose, Mridula Koshy tells us the stories other writers overlook, or do not wish to tell: the household thoughts that must always remain silent, the disavowed dramas of the city, the heartbreaking proximity of opposite emotions.

There'll be other books from Mridula Koshy; she's here for the long haul, and I look forward to reading them. But I'll always have a soft spot for this collection of short stories, so intense, so rewarding, so revealing of the inner life of this city I've known all my life, loved and hated, and never seen captured quite like this before.

Gluttony-II: Mocambo

Mocambo,
25-B Park Street, Kolkata, 700016
033 22172934


Chateaubriand steak for two. Sizzlers. Baked Alaska. Grilled Bekti. Prawn cocktail. Devils on horseback. What I love about Mocambo is that you can enjoy its impossibly recherche menu with no sense of irony: it's days of the Raj with a vengeance, from the smudgy paintings to the red leather couches in those trademark booths. You still find an odd assortment of characters here, from dedicated gluttons' clubs to jazz musicians who still sport the Dylan look.

Here are a few things to order at Mocambo's, just because you can.

1) Hors d'oeuvres for two: Though some of what's on offer comes perilously close to MFK Fisher's "disgusting vision... of soggy vegetables glued together with cheap mayonnaise", ask for this anyway. The asparagus--tinned, limp, a dubious shade of green, served with ersatz Edam--is dispiriting. But the Russian salad, tuna salad and prawn cocktail are grandly old-world, and very good--if heavy on the cream. And the slices of ham with hard boiled eggs and pickles are simple but excellent--there's enough here to make a filling meal on its own.

2) The steaks: If these were good enough for my late grandmother, who liked her beef but was picky about the quality of her steak, they're good enough for me. The waiter looks dourly at those who order their steaks well-done, and fetches off with the air of a man who will now ask the chef to pick out and broil a suitable shoe. Order yours medium-rare, though, and he will make sure you get a good bit of meat. The mushroom/ black pepper sauces are splendidly old-world, and in our beef-and-pork starved country, the ham steaks are suitably juicy, though I wish Mocambo's would run to an onion marmalade or a sharp mustard sauce instead of the tiresome Hawaiian sludge on offer.

3) The baked, devilled crab: Cholesterol unfriendly, but gloriously redolent of the days when pukka sahibs sacrificed their arteries in a good cause. Mocambo's has been known to eke out the crab with a pasty white sauce on days when they're full up, but arrive and order early, and you should get the real thing--heavy with cheese and cream, but generous with the crabmeat, and utterly irresistible.

4) The orange crepes/ the Baked Alaska: Like ghosts from the past, these two dishes come straight from nursery memories, and Raj-era cookbooks. Mocambo's Baked Alaska is huge, satisfyingly cold and not oversweet; the orange crepes have an uncompromising slice of generic vanilla ice cream fattening the middle, but offer a sharp, delectable sauce with classic pancakes.

One of these days, I fear that the Mocambos and Olympias of venerable Calcutta will have given way to new-wave restaurants with less gloom and more sharply contemporary menus. Before that dark day arrives, I hope to eat my way through the Mocambo menu, savouring each bite of nostalgia. The accompanying vegetables may be boiled to within an inch of their lives, the sizzlers might cremate whatever's on the platter, but stick to the old-fashioned stuff and you can't go wrong. Besides, where else would a four-course meal for six, drinks included, run to the risible sum of Rs 3,000?

Gluttony-I: Varq

Varq, Taj Mahal Hotel
1 Mansingh Road
Tel: 91-2302-6162
Category: Expensive

Having suffered too many bad renditions of Indian nouvelle cuisine--a rose petal and marigold salad with paneer tikka chunks stands out as a particularly horrifying experience--my husband and I approach Varq with some nervousness. To my mind, too many bad meals--Scrooge-like portions, pretentious service and no real understanding of the culinary tradition--have been passed off as fine dining under the nouvelle-fusion banner.

But Varq drew rave reviews when it opened a while back, and I like Chef Hemant Oberoi's reputation. He's the wizard behind The Bombay Brasserie, and his work sounds intelligent--a corn soup poured over turmeric-flavoured popcorn, a reinvented crab that uses classic Indian spices, cleverly layered on thin filo leaves. And besides, this is impulse dining--I refuse to order home delivery any more, on the grounds that I can cook better, cheaper and faster in my kitchen, and that allows me more space for the occasional indulgence.

Neither of us is suitably dressed, unless you count black T-shirts as high style, and we don't have a reservation, but that doesn't prevent Varq's staff from treating us with great courtesy. We're early and good tables are available--we get one with a view of the refurbished Anjolie Ela Menon murals on one hand, and the quiet garden on the other. The decor's contemporary, with beaded chandeliers, and restful without being extraordinary--it signals comfortable rather than quirky.

Our waiter is ready to explain the concept of Varq, and we sense he's had to do this several times before for the benefit of baffled Indians wanting to know where the kabab platter went. Varq offers a Western rather than Eastern way of dining--you order separate appetisers and main courses instead of shared dishes and thali-style meals--and has sensibly included a selection of vegetable dishes and daals, priced differently if ordered as accompaniments and if ordered as main courses.

The amuse-bouche arrives at high speed and for a second, I wonder whether we've made a mistake. It's a nice idea--a tiny bonda lifted from the chaat trolley, with a smear of chutney--but the bonda is cold and slightly soggy, the chutney too sharp. My husband grimly orders a pepper vodka, and I take comfort in the excellent date-tamarind sherbet.

Our fears were unfounded. The first appetizer to arrive is the Varqi crab--South Indian spices, generous helpings, and the combination of the silky, spicy crab with the melt-in-your-mouth filo pastry leaf (studded with black mustard seeds) is incredible--rich, textured and light. The prawn on top is big enough to be shared by two, which we do, forgetting our manners, and--this is always a good sign--I see the staff beaming at our obvious delight. The second appetizer, liver three ways, is a clever concept, but I'm not so sure it works for me. The mutton liver is mildly over-cooked; the chicken liver in a potato wafer basket, drizzled with an orange juice reduction, is not mind-blowing, and the foie gras with a mango salsa is good, but nowhere as brilliant as it could be. Good, but not great, I think, idly admiring the silver varq-inspired etchings on the ceiling, and I realise that Varq has already raised my expectations--in most of Delhi's Indian restaurants, this dish would have been a spectacular success, not a "show me more".

At a table near us, I hear gasps of happy surprise as the diners try their main course, the brilliantly presented Lobster Hawa Mahal, and elsewhere, there's a lady spooning up her dessert, a Hot Chandni Varqi Jalebi, with an expression of absolute ecstasy on her face. And there it is again; from where I'm sitting, I can see how the waiters watch each table anxiously, how their faces brighten when a course goes down well and sink a little when diners seem baffled.

A tamarind sorbet, insistently sharp, clears our palate for the main course. The Martabaan ki Meat arrives in a miniature pickle jar--the gravy at the bottom of the jar is spectacularly rich, by the way, so dig in--and is delicately good. I like the tenderness of the meat, the texture and the contrast between the red achaari pickle, but it's been toned down a bit--a classic Martabaan ki Meat can be far more spicy. This is a riff on the original rather than a faithful rendering--but it's an awesome riff, and once again, we forget our manners, dipping pizza-style Tomato-Olive Naans into the sauce. The baby potatoes are forgettable, and I wish I'd ordered the "bharta three ways" instead--baingan, tomato and pumpkin purees that look incredibly tempting. But the lasuni spinach is awesome, all the more so for being so simple: it's just spinach cooked with pearls of garlic, salt and pepper, and it manages to extract something of the flavour of a good aioli from ordinary lasun.

The real star of the show is the Calicut prawns, done with asparagus in a delicate, aromatic coconut sauce--this is really how to take classic spices and sauces and rework them ever so slightly. We've overdone it; there's no room for the desserts, and I need to come back some day to redress this. I also wish I'd ordered the Vedic tisanes along with the meal, rather than the sherbet--which is immensely tasty, but perhaps too rich as an accompaniment. And I want to try the khurmani kababs, the seafood soup--okay, fine, pretty much everything on the menu.

Too often, with an old school Indian meal, you leave with a sense of too much richness and the dismal awareness that Digene will be your aperitif of choice the next day. But Varq left us replete, not overstuffed. It's definitely expensive, even by Delhi's now exorbitant standards, but I'd argue that it's worth it--sometimes. (A meal for two, with tisanes/ drinks, could easily run from Rs 8,000 upwards.)

Part of the magic is Chef Hemant Oberoi's deep love for Indian food--he really knows his ingredients, and Varq, like Bombay Brasserie, reinvents without going over the top. Is it as good, or better than, Devi in the US? I'd like to know--Suvir and Hemant sound as though they bring a similar intelligence to their interpretations of Indian food. What made Varq work for me went beyond the menu, though. It was the sense of well-being we were wrapped in, and the staff's open pleasure when they saw that their diners were, indeed, having a good time.

The BS Column: The Orange, juiced

(Published in the Business Standard, May 19, 2009)

Hiroshima, Alzheimer’s, a racist 1931 rape trial, an inventor on the verge of a love affair, a pastor on the verge of death. Nothing in these themes or these characters indicates the gender of the author of the novels in which they appear, and this is where the conundrum of the Orange Prize lies.

The winner of the “Bessie” will be announced in a few weeks time, marking the 13th year of the world’s only major prize for women. In its first few years, the Orange Prize generated more heat than light, with many arguing that a prize exclusively for women writers was discriminatory at worst, unnecessary at the very least, in this century.

Over time, the Orange proved its worth to thousands of readers, though, not by creating space for women’s writing as much by redressing the invisibility of women writers. A S Byatt called it a “sexist” prize, refusing to allow her publishers to enter her books for the Orange; other women writers, from Chimamanda Adichie to Ann Patchett, had a more nuanced view, celebrating the fact that the prize gave them a virtual room of their own.

If you go through the shortlists for every year, it becomes harder to argue that the Orange doesn’t serve a purpose. A certain kind of writer—talented, but not glamorous, intensely engaged, but not always fashionable—shows up in these shortlists, writers who would have been lost or overlooked without the Orange. And over its 13-year life span, the Orange may actually have begun redefining what we think of as “women’s writing”.

It’s a shift that publishers like Urvashi Butalia know well, as women’s publishing houses witness and encourage writing by women to grow beyond the fascinating but narrow confines of writing on gender. The more popular view of women’s writing is far more of a ghetto: yesterday’s Mills & Boons, today’s chicklit and arranged marriage bestsellers.

This year’s shortlist includes: Burnt Shadows (Kamila Shamsie), Scottsboro (Ellen Feldman), The Wilderness (Samantha Harvey), The Invention of Everything Else (Samantha Hunt), Molly Fox’s Birthday (Deirdre Madden) and Home (Marilynne Robinson). The range of themes, and the historical periods, explored in these novels is broad—and it is this breadth that really defines writing by women today.

Burnt Shadows finds a narrative arc between Hiroshima and Guantanamo Bay, and among its principal characters are a Japanese woman who survives Hiroshima, and a young Pakistani whose path leads him to prison in the US. Scottsboro examines the infamous 1931 rape trial in the Deep South, where the testimony of two white women put nine black men behind bars for several years on rape charges.

The Wilderness explores the confounding, unmoored, intense world of Alzheimer’s from the perspective of a male protagonist struggling to understand his life from a few scattered clues. The Invention of Everything Else is about the growing (and imagined) friendship between the exuberant scientist Nikola Tesla and a chambermaid at the Hotel New Yorker. Marilynne Robinson’s eloquent, moving Home follows the stories of those we met in her previous novel, Gilead. Glory Boughton returns to look after her father, the pastor; the return of her brother Jack forces many questions for the two as they face the imminent death of their father. I haven’t read Molly Fox’s Birthday, but the blurb indicates that it’s about an Irish actress, as seen by the Shakespearean actor who borrows her house briefly.

If you read only these descriptions, you would have no way of knowing whether the authors of these books were male or female, and that is a tribute to the broader, limitless world of women’s writing today. Some critics of the Orange take this further, arguing that if the books are relatively genderless, there should be no need of a special prize for women.

The raison d’etre of the Orange Prize, however, was not to address an inequity of voice—from the earliest, most pioneering women writers onwards, women have often demanded the right to write about what pleases them. The founders of the Prize saw and addressed an essential inequity in the space that women writers were allocated—fewer column inches, fewer reviews, fewer soundbytes on TV shows, and most crucially, less space in the public memory.

Each year, the shortlist does what it did for me this year, and what it has for 13 years running—underlines the presence of one or two well-known women writers, and introduces us to several more who would otherwise have slipped through the cracks. Take women’s writing from the margins to the centre, says the Orange, and until women find themselves at the centre without need for special pleading, there will always, sadly, be a need for the prize.

On keeping a journal

From William Boyd's Bamboo (2005), a collection of his critical writing, this lovely riff on Keeping a Journal:

For the journal - relating as it does a life-story, or part of a life-story - does so in a manifestly different manner than the other forms available, whether biography, memoir or autobiography. All these last three are fashioned by the view backwards, informed by the 20/20 vision of hindsight. Only the journal truly reflects, in its dogged chronology, the day-by-day, week-by-week progress of a life. Events have not yet acquired their retrospective gloss and significance; meetings and people, projects and schemes have not matured or developed.
The impenetrable judgments of the future more often than not undermine the honest analysis of the present. That job you were so excited about has not yet turned tedious; that thriving dot-com company you sunk your savings into has still to go belly-up; that pretty woman/good-looking man you met at the party last night has not become your wife/husband - and so on. The journal has to have the same random shape as a human life: governed by chance and the haphazard, by that aggregate of good luck and bad luck that everybody receives. Biography and autobiography dilute this inexorable fact, shaped as they are by the wisdom of hindsight and the manipulations of ego, and are literary forms that are, in many ways, as artificial and contrived as fiction. But, by definition, a journal cannot do this: it's written as the future unspools into the present.