Book review: Shalimar the Clown

(Written for The Indian Express; the link to the paper's website is here.)


Shalimar the Clown

Salman Rushdie

Jonathan Cape

POUNDS 17.99, 398 pages

"My memory keeps getting in the way of your history," the late Agha Shahid Ali wrote in a poem for Kashmir that was simultaneously love letter and requiem. As Salman Rushdie exports an old, old tale of star-crossed lovers to the country without a post office, it is only appropriate that Shahid should provide one of the two epigraphs for Shalimar the Clown.

Many years ago, Rushdie wrote a tale of poisoned stories darkening a lake he called Dull, in a place menaced by silence, where only pages in a constantly shuffled history formed a thin barrier against destruction. In Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Khattam-shud was conquered, the Ocean of Seas of Stories was cleaned up, and along with poets, writers and dreamers everywhere, Kashmir, too, found its voice.

Shalimar the Clown is no fable, and besides, it's set in a darker time. A happy ending is a luxury that no one who writes of Kashmir, or America, can afford any longer. Rushdie's story is a complex, tangled tale that stretches from Strasbourg during World War Two to the Resistance in France, the Kashmir Valley in a time of simmering discontent, and contemporary America paying the price for its empire-building. In order to get his arms round the story, Rushdie employs black farce, slapstick comedy and melodrama, almost defiantly. Layered with legend, snarled in the roots of history, silenced and misinterpreted, Kashmir is a parable for our times. Telling it straight is not an option.

Shalimar the Clown is an actor in a village of bhands, a man who specializes in walking tightropes ("lines of gathered air"). The love of his life, the woman who will betray him and return to accept a savage judgement, is named after the chinar trees of Kashmir—Boonyi, a dancer so talented that she can embrace Anarkali's role, and, to an extent, her fate.

In this overripe soap opera, with multiple, interlocking episodes set against Grand Guignol sets, strewn with outrageous plot twists, inevitably the village dancer seeks an escape. Boonyi's temporary passport to a wider world is Maximilian Ophuls, expert forger, flier, fighter, fornicator, larger-than-life WWII hero who survived the Holocaust in which his parents died. Now Max is an ambassador for the US, a trader in the futures market that governs the history of nations. The most visible result of his ambassadorial dalliance is a daughter, a blend between Last Action Heroine and Tarantino's Bride. In search of her past, India Ophuls hates her name: "'India' still felt wrong to her, it felt exoticist, colonial, suggesting the appropriation of a reality that was not hers to own…"

The over-the-top exaggeration and exuberance of Shalimar the Clown is trying, though much more coherent than Fury. Rushdie's characters rattle around in the cages of symbol and metaphor; his style has all the subtlety of a smalltown marching band, making this novel a devastatingly easy target for parody.

But Pachigam, the village of actors, comes into slow focus through its small disputes over weddings, the living presence of dead soothsayers, the "pot war" over the smoothest gushtabas, the finest lotus stem curries that they wage with the village nearby. The performers could have come out of Midnight's Children, as though Parvati the Witch and her band of acrobats, jugglers and players had finally found a home.

All this is ripped apart when the jaws of history snap shut on Kashmir. The Indian military is seen first as unwilling combatants in an unacknowledged war, then as bitter oppressors driven into paranoia by the weight of intolerable, ineradicable memories. And there are the iron mullahs: "The Indian army had poured military hardware of all kinds into the valley, and scrap metal junkyards sprang up everywhere, scarring the valley's pristine beauty… The men who were miraculously born from these rusting war metals, who went out into the valley to preach resistance and revenge, were saints of an entirely new kind. They were the iron mullahs. It was said that if you dared to knock on their bodies you would hear a hollow metallic ring."


Shalimar and Boonyi's story dies, as one by one, the players are slaughtered, Max Ophuls trades suavely in distant death, India finds a new identity in combat, Pachigam loses the battles against a bitter army and an even more corrosive invasion of faith. Rushdie's prose fragments under the weight of his rage, in a passage remarkable for the naked breakdown of the writer, faced with an injustice that magic realism can no longer encompass:

"Who lit that fire? Who burned that orchard? Who shot those brothers who laughed their whole lives long? Who killed the sarpanch? Who broke his hands? Who broke his arms? Who broke his ancient neck? Who shackled those men? Who made those men disappear? Who shot those boys? Who shot those girls? Who smashed that house? Who smashed that house?....
Who raped that grey-haired lazy-eyed grandmother as she screamed about snake vengeance? Who raped that woman again? Who raped that woman again? Who raped that woman again? Who raped that dead woman? Who raped that dead woman again?"

The naïve reader will see banality, in the denouement that leads Shalimar to assassinate the US ambassador: could this really explain terrorism, 9/11, this tired cliché of a cuckold seeking revenge on his wife's lover? It's an obtuse reader, though, who's got this far but cannot see beyond to the metaphor of an apparently noble nation assaulted by the people it has seduced, nurtured, discarded and betrayed.

This is not, please the God in which Rushdie has ceased to believe, the finest work of the man who has been engaged, before and after the fatwa, in the rewriting and reexamination of history. It's a deeply angry, sometimes clownish, often rough novel that marks just a return to form, not a return to the peak of that form. Shalimar the Clown is a tightrope walk by a highwire virtuoso who's not above stumbling; but it's a powerful parable, a reminder that neither East nor West can sow the seeds of intolerance, hatred and division without reaping the whirlwind.

Book review: We Need To Talk About Kevin

(Published in the Business Standard, August 2005)

[One of the things that struck me about Shriver's We Need To Talk About Kevin is just how sacred the myth of motherhood is in our times. Shriver's a wonderful writer, not afraid to combine a school shooting with a child not even his mother could love, not afraid to make that mother an unreliable narrator. But in order to even raise the subject of a woman who does not believe that motherhood is natural, and who does not enjoy being a mother, even Shriver has to create a monster child, a little alien. And introduce a second child, Celia, whose only narrative purpose seems to be to prove that Eva Khatchatourian could be a good, loving mother--if she had the right child. No disrespect to Shriver--or to mothers at large--but we've got a long way to go before we can accept that for many women, motherhood is not a natural or inevitable choice. Okay, off the soapbox now.]

We Need To Talk About Kevin

Lionel Shriver

Serpents Tail

Distributed by West Land,

POUNDS 5.75, 400 pages



Before Dr Spock, before What To Expect When You're Expecting, before our era of a thousand Joy of Parenting manuals and mommy memoirs, there was Albert Camus.

Part of what Camus did in The Outsider was to challenge the idea that the bond between parents and children, mother and son, was automatic, natural, loving. Lionel Shriver's Kevin Khatchadourian could be the outsider's legitimate son.


Ever since it won the Orange Prize, the adjective most often used to describe We Need To Talk About Kevin is "controversial". It's a reassuring label to stick on a book that takes on 21st century shibboleths and taboos: it allows readers to back off, to stay at a safe distance from a writer who unleashes her enormous talent on the exploration of the dangers and hidden traps of intimacy.


The voice that draws us in belongs to Eva Khatchadourian, successful entrepreneur, indefatigable traveller, loving wife, skeptical mother, survivor. The things she's survived are many: foreign countries, the destruction of her marriage, the festering doubts of a woman who has no "maternal heat" to see her through the tribulations of motherhood, the birth of a son who, to her, is impossibly alien. Her story unfolds through the missives—urgent, wry, introspective, devastatingly honest—that she writes to her husband Franklin, after their 15-year-old son Kevin took down seven classmates and two others in a Columbine-style massacre.


"I am never able to get the full story inside me. It's larger than I am," writes Eva in the aftermath. To tell it, she has to return to territory that she once considered absolutely familiar; like her travels for A Wing and A Prayer, the guidebook imprint she owns, she must revisit the tedium of travelling to the exotic (where everything begins to look familiar after a while) while praying that for once, the journey will be a new, astonishing exploration. Eva emerges as a forceful, bright woman whose tragedy is that she cannot soften the edges of her vision; she lacks the ability to tell herself the lies that take so many men and women through the flawed intimacy of marriage, parenting and the strange countries that lie beyond.


We Need To Talk About Kevin explodes several myths (one of them is that a book about school shootings can't be hilariously funny). For Eva, motherhood is not the natural, inevitable life journey it's made out to be by modern parenting gurus; pregnancy feels like being inhabited, as she puts it, by an alien even as it forces her to live, like a child, by the rules of other people. Kevin is not an easy child to love; and love is not an emotion that Eva can dispense with ease, either. From her perspective, Kevin is a terrifying bright child who blends anomie and apathy with an intelligence that he uses to manipulate the world. Franklin, Eva's husband, holds their increasingly strained household together with blind optimism and a belief, unfounded but poignantly deep, in the power of familial love.


Lionel Shriver's prose packs an intensity that few contemporary writers today can match. We Need To Talk About Kevin may start with the simplest of units, the family, but it's a hugely ambitious exploration of violence, love and what lies beneath the surface of America. "I seem finally to be learning what you were always trying to teach me," Eva writes to Franklin, "that my own country is as exotic and even as perilous as Algeria."


Shriver will spare the reader nothing. There are no easy answers to the question America asks itself every time there's another school shooting, another kid armed with a crossbow or a gun locking the doors of the gym before he takes out his classmates. There are no easy ways to look at parenting and motherhood with clarity in an age where these are the last shibboleths we hold on to, the last bastions of certainty in which we can deposit our faith.


We Need To Talk About Kevin explores parenting, and modern America, and motherhood, and the difference between home and away, but it's really, like all great novels, about grappling with the beauty and ineradicable strangeness of the human condition. It demands more of the reader than any other book published this year; and that's why it must be read.

The Hiroshima virtual walk

{Did this as a very rough Net tour of Hiroshima and Nagasaki sites for the Business Standard a few weeks ago. The first draft I wrote was too handwringing, too emotional: it might have worked at a longer word count, but it would also have been self-indulgent beyond belief. Instead, this is just a list of links. You fill in the emotional blanks yourself.)

This month in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, thousands of people gathered to honour the memory of the dead on the 60th anniversary of the world's first atomic-bomb attack. Little Boy, the bomb that dropped on Hiroshima from Enola Gay on August 6, 1945 killed between 100,000 and 180,000 citizens. Fat Man was dropped on Nagasaki three days later; it killed an estimated 150,000 citizens.

My virtual walk through Hiroshima and Nagasaki six decades on starts with two raspy audio files. President Truman's voice is clear and firm: "The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base…. We have used it in order to shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands and thousands of young Americans." The next clip in the list is far more tired, almost anguished, as Robert Oppenheimer, the man who's known as the father of the atom bomb says: "Now I am become death the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that one way or another."

At 'Prey from Peace City', photographs and text document the spreading mushroom cloud, an image so familiar that we no longer look on it with dread, and down below, the effects of Little Boy. The earth is scorched; the landscapes speak of absence initially, just that: missing buildings, ashes and dust where there should be people.

Among the exhibits at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum is the hair that fell from Hiroko Yamashita's head. There are pictures of twisted bridge girders; pictures of the city before and after; pictures of people desperate for elusive, hopelessly inadequate medical help. There is Shinichi Tetsutani's tricycle. The boy was a month short of four years, riding his bike when the flash came. The tricycle was buried with him and dug up forty years later by his father.

After Hiroshima, the target was Kokura, but the city was hidden under a haze. Boxcar detoured slightly to drop Fat Man on Nagasaki instead. At the Exploratorium, Yosuke Yamahata's photographs capture the devastation. "The worst was when electric wires got twisted around people's legs and they couldn't escape—they died in that position, fallen to their knees," he recalled. He shot meticulously, caught in the middle of a disaster on a scale that was too large for him to absorb.


The Atomic Bomb museum at Nagasaki has horrifying photographs; it also points to the poetry of bombing survivor Sumako Fukuda, to trees before and after the blast.


A year after the bombs had wiped out Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the New Yorker devoted an entire issue to a story that tracked six of the survivors. John Hersey's Hiroshima shook the conscience of the world; in commemoration, the Guardian carried an abridged version of the original article.

For 25 years after Hiroshima, very little footage or news photographs could be found. In an explosive investigative article at Editor & Publisher, Greg Mitchell explored the reasons why the US deliberately suppressed images of the blasts.

You might want to flip back and forth between Hersey's classic piece, Mitchell's report and Hiromi Tsuchida's Hiroshima picture gallery. One section is devoted to objects: melted sake bottles, a lunch box whose contents, rice and peas, were carbonized by the blast, a damaged contact lens, taken from the burned head of a young girl.

Or read some of the transcripts from the accounts of the "hibakusha", literally, those who returned from hell—the survivors of the blasts.

Before you log out, remember Sadako Sasaki, who was two when the bombs dropped; at eleven, she was diagnosed with leukemia, the "atom bomb disease". She'd heard an old Japanese tale to the effect that anyone who folded a thousand paper cranes would get well; she had folded more than a thousand when she died, just twelve years old. Her story was told again and again, and paper cranes began to arrive in Japan from all over the world. Folded clumsily or with perfect creases, sixty years after Hiroshima, the cranes still arrive.

The Lanka trip (Outlook Traveller)

[Did my best to write a "good" Sri Lanka story, but I was a tourist in that country. Like Nadine Gordimer's definition in The Pickup: "...The tourist who like all tourists didn't know what she was really looking at." This came out in Outlook Traveller's August issue.]


Michael Ondaatje tried to warn us, he really did, but I wasn't
listening hard enough:

"All this glory
preparing us for Anuradhapura
its night faith
A city with the lap
and spell of a river…"

he wrote in Handwriting. Now, after a four-hour drive in molasses-slow traffic from Colombo, a journey pleasantly broken by sampling halts for rambutans, mangosteens, and egg hoppers (the classic eat-the-container dish), all washed down with Elephant ginger beer and king coconut water, our neatly typed, unforgiving itinerary collides head-on with the generous sprawl of Anuradhapura.

This is where one story of Sri Lanka begins, with Pandukabhaya, a prince hunted by his uncles, befriended by yakshas and bhoots, who won his spurs in a grisly battle. The Mahavamsa recounts: "When the prince saw the pyramid of skulls, where the skulls of his uncles lay uppermost, he said: "Tis like a heap of gourds; and therefore they
named (the place) Labugamaka."' But the city he founded, that would last for over 1,500 years before the kings of Sri Lanka shifted to Polonnaruwa, was called Anuradhapura after Pandukabhaya's great-uncle, Anuradha, who was presumably too bright to fight a warrior who had yakshas at his beck and call.

The old cities of Anuradhapura blend seamlessly into the new; ruins rise from the forests, from behind new buildings, from the sidewalls of teastalls. This is tourist hell, if you're on a rigid timetable, a nightmare of signs pointing to the ancient tank decorated with rearing king cobra heads where schoolchildren splash around; the pristine dagoba, white against an eggshell blue sky, where a tired monk sleeps
against its huge silhouette, his robes fluttering in the strong wind; the famous moonstone, its carvings gleaming in the sun; the barnacle cluster of buildings at Issurumuniya where the sculpted form of The Man and His Horse compete for attention with a frieze of two lovers.

It isn't all poetry in stone. Outside the shrine to Sri Maha Bodhi, the sacred Bo tree whose seed was exported to Sri Lanka along with the teachings of the Buddha, the flow of the long line of votive lamps, black with years of grease, is broken by metal detectors. In 2002, while pilgrims were at prayer during a major festival, LTTE troops opened fire, killing 80 people.

I'm trying to make sense of all this; history, guide maps, stumbling tourists caught unprepared like us by the quiet, unobtrusive but unignorable scale on which Anuradhapura unfolds. Then I feel a gentle tug on my T-shirt and look down to see a tiny, old bird-like bhikkuni in maroon robes and ancient Reebok sneakers. Her eyes are gleaming with curiosity, but we have no language in common; she frowns, then
points to the dagoba in the distance. "Bee-yoo-tiful?" she says questioningly. "Beautiful," I agree. I offer her a Polo mint, she reciprocates with slices of raw mango, and we share this odd meal in perfect accord.

I miss her later in the evening, when we're at Mihintale, a quiet cluster of shrines populated by shy monkeys and hawkers, neither of whom have learned the art of hardsell. As my complaining bones are beginning to remember, the chief feature of
shrines, Buddhist or Hindu, seems to be the architect's desire to make pilgrims climb a lot for their glimpse of God. Here, a trail of stone steps leads down into the jungle towards a small sliver between two mammoth rocks where the first disciple of the Buddha meditated, the emerald green forests of Lanka splayed out before him. There are no memories of blood here, just graffiti confessing almost apologetically
in the curving letters of the Sinhala script to some schoolboy crush.

The rock fortress of Sigiraya is a reminder that history rarely chronicles the doings of peaceniks. King Kassyapa, the man who built this massive complex out of a 600-foot high rock, dealt with the usual father-son disagreements by bumping off his dad, King Datusena. Sigiriya was built in the shape of a crouching lion; only the paws,
the toenails long, curved and oddly manicured, survive, but to ascend the fortress you must go up through what used to be the lion's throat.

Scores of schoolchildren rampage cheerfully up and down a vertiginious staircase cut into the rock (they're everywhere, as though the school board of Sri Lanka has decided to swap monuments for classrooms). They giggle at the maidens of Sri Lanka, immortalized in vivid frescoes on a wall below the lion's paws, and giggle even harder when the guide points out a mistake where the artist added an extra nipple to an already well-endowed bosom. The palace-fortress was turned into a monastery when Kassyapa died, and the monks disapprovingly destroyed most of the frescoes. I'm not sure the artists would have been pleased to learn that of all their work, what's been preserved includes the three-nippled error. But then again, we're talking monks, not art critics.

From atop the fortress, whipped by the breeze, what comes into relief are the fortifications, the watch-points, the 360 degree view of the plains ringed by hills. That lion has long since crumbled into dust, but if it could speak, what it would say is, only the paranoid survive. Kassyapa died almost by accident: riding into battle, his elephant turned aside at a swamp. His armies assumed the king was injured or dead, and fled in terror. According to legend, the king, betrayed by a marsh, killed himself rather than be taken captive.

There's a point in any trip where, tourist or traveller, serendipity intervenes; and since Sri Lanka is the place where the word was coined by Hugh Walpole, for 'Serendip', island of peace and unexpected, fortuitous happenings, it must happen here. We begin to meet the Buddha on the road, as if He's decided to rework the itinerary. In Dambulla, a contemporary statue of the Buddha in shrieking gold, decorated with crude pink lotuses, can't detract from the majesty and harmony of the images in the five cave temples.

The first temple was carved into the rock by a refugee king, and some of his loneliness seems to have infected the quiet, sleeping figure of the Buddha enshrined in stone here, around 1 BC. In the second cave, the drip of water from the ceiling, collected and used for sacred rituals, is all that's audible as spectacular images of the Buddha and of Hindu deities dominate the huge space under a painted fresco sky,
the 19th century colours contrasting with the agelessness of stone. Outside, monkeys play with purple lotuses as a sleeping cat keeps one wary eye on them.

We meet the Buddha again at Aukana, where a magnificent standing Buddha carved out of a single piece of rock testifies to a competition between master and student. According to local legend, the master finished carving the Aukana Buddha before his student finished; the student accepted defeat, leaving the Sasseruwa image unfinished. A monk meekly greets us, his ochre robes sounding a high note of colour
against the beige stone; he meekly sweeps the red dust in front of the statue; he stands with meek patience, waiting for us to leave. It is only when Roy, our much-tried guide, bows in reverence to him that we learn he's the head monk. We bow; he blesses us, sticks the broom in a corner, and goes off to his classes.

I think of him when I see the monks at Kandy, where the Temple of the Tooth guards one of the most sacred relics of Sri Lanka, one of the Buddha's teeth apparently snatched from the funeral pyre in 543 BC. The monks here are sleek and watchful; they exude power as much as wisdom; they are shadowed by bodyguards in white shirts and dark glasses. We've seen this in a few other places, including one temple where I'm told the head monk was shot at by a fellow brother in a bid for control of the monastery some years ago. Now they're all bulletproof monks.

The Buddha's tooth was smuggled into Sri Lanka in the elaborate hairstyle of a princess, it's been in and out of Kandy, up and down the countryside, trapped by the legend that says who owns it will rule Lanka. In the 16th century, the Portuguese seized the Tooth and burned it to ashes. One version says that the Tooth miraculously
reconstructed itself; another says that the monks had the real Tooth hidden away safely, so what the Portuguese destroyed was just a replica. (Incisor, canine or molar? Blasphemy, but I can't help wondering.)

No one knows the whole truth, but everyone believes that nothing but the Tooth is ensconced in Kandy's temple. I see the devotion shining from the eyes of worshippers, the care with which even the humblest lotuses are added to the heap of flowers to form a pattern, and I realise it doesn't matter. In a few weeks, when the annual perahara (religious procession) goes out and the sacred elephant bears the casket of the tooth on his back, everyone will bow down to what they firmly believe is the real thing.

The evening in Kandy is magical, with the lights of the town softly glowing in the mist from the river; the city provides the pause, the space for reflection that even the most driven tourist needs. It's almost possible to forget the twin frescoes in the Temple. The first, ancient, beautiful, is torn to bits, spattered with bulletholes, the souvenirs of a 1998 bombing of the temple by the LTTE; the second is a perfect replica of the first, hanging defiantly beside the tattered original.

But the next day brings peace in the form of elephants, at the Pinnawela Orphanage for pachyderms. The herd splashes in the river, the mothers protecting the two youngest calves from too much roughhousing; they beg furtively for bananas when the mahout isn't looking and sulk when it's time to leave the water, their trunks swaying in complaint as they lumber up the track. One--her name is Sama--limps along on three legs; the fourth was blown away by a landmine.

Later, in Galle, the severe beauty of the Dutch Reformed Church, with its antique church organ, is undercut by the sign that refers to the "188 members" who "had their own church-chairs, carried by slaves". Galle is impatient to move on from the tsunami, though on the road from Colombo, we see the signs touting ruined trains and destroyed villages, tourists videotaping each other's offerings of chocolates
and chips to the hard-eyed children of Thalwatta who can speak English: "Hello! Help? Tsunami. Money?" Galle stadium was smashed into pieces; but the Fort next to it is intact, the "umbrella lovers" cuddling on its walls under the cover of sunshades. It is, we are informed, because of their "goings-on" and "what-all" that the Lighthouse of Galle is now closed to tourists.

Back in Colombo, a corpse has been found in Cinnamon Gardens; the mystery unravels to reveal an underworld killing worthy of Bombay. We relax that evening with the wonderful couple who runs Barefoot, a café, gallery and shop rolled into one; we watch Dominic Sansoni's stark film on war-torn Sri Lanka; we listen to old rock n'roll standards at a local nightclub.

No tourist could "do" Sri Lanka in a week; the real country is caught somewhere between the war stories and those ageless Buddhas. Perhaps it's to be found in Kelaniya, the Buddhist Maha Vihara outside Colombo where the Buddha preached 2,000 years ago, where the ceilings tell fantastical stories and the gods are shrouded in veils of the lightest gauze, where a young boy monk talks excitedly about his months of study in the UK, where rows of pilgrims pray and chant, their faces illuminated in the gathering night by flickering flames from oil lamps.

Perhaps it's lurking in Michael Ondaatje's sensuous poetry about monks who came down the rivers and the indelible scent of cinnamon, or in Carl Muller's rambunctious prose about Burgher life, or Shyam Selvadurai's thoroughly modern tales of Colombo. Or perhaps all I was looking for was an elephant with a taste for slightly raw bananas, her spine curved into a question mark with the effort of getting by on
three legs, who has to limp to get anywhere at all. But she gets around all the same.

I'll just take the leftovers, thanks

Like most relics, the Buddha's Tooth, preserved carefully in the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy, has quite a history. It was smuggled from India into Sri Lanka in a woman's elaborate hairstyle; it travelled up and down the countryside as monks, kings and invaders tried to get their hands on it; the Portuguese claimed to have destroyed the relic, but no, say believers, what they burned was not the real tooth, just a replica.
The tooth itself is only rarely on display, and what most worshippers get to see is not even the casket that contains the tooth, but the container that contains the casket, if you get my drift.
I've never quite understood the fervour that relics inspire, though I respect the devotion of true believers for whom these things--a bit of bone, a bit of shrivelled flesh, a bit of cloth--are actual conduits to the divine. I have a blunt mind, one that forces me to think about the cremation or burial of saints and religious figures, and picture the mad scramble for the mortal remains.
And the old imagination works overtime when someone mentions incorruptible saints: saints who were so much part of divinity that their physical bodies didn't decay in the normal course of things. There's a long and very gruesome tradition with particular regard to incorruptible saints, where some have been decapitated or had their hands or feet cut off after death; those relics are preserved in a separate church while the rest of the body is preserved elsewhere.
There's a part of me that marvels at the strength of faith--in any religion--that will allow believers to make the imaginative leap from the relic itself to the presence of holiness. This is the bit about relics that I find touching: that the sacredness they're supposed to contain overrides our "normal" fear of anything to do with death, our instinctive shrinking from ashes and cremains, from bone and decayed flesh, that we might see past the apparently corrupted object before us to the person whose wisdom, or goodness, or holiness we want to remember. People who shrink from death and graveyards and cremation grounds will find themselves, in the presence of a relic, not seeing the colours of rot and decay, not seeing just the skeleton implied in the bit of bone; they embrace what they would normally have feared.
Part of me, more cynically, thinks that this is just an old human reflex, the same impulse that drove warriors in one age to eat the brains or part of the body of the men they had just killed, so that some of their opponent's strength might enter them. We want what we always want, some of that power to be transferred to us: so the laying on of hands, so the scramble for rock stars' underwear (no one ever thinks that a guy who's been thumping around energetically in black leather under strong lighting isn't going to have lavender-scented lingerie, but that's another issue), so the need to kiss the hem of Caesar's robe, the desire for a writer's or film star's autograph.
And the rest of me is already tired of looking at temples built to commemorate the sites where various bits of Sati's dismembered body fell, and looking at shrivelled bits of what used to be a person, saint or not. There are many reasons why I'm not a saint: add this to the list, that I really don't want people sifting through my ashes for usable bits once I'm gone.

Speaking Volumes: Champagne supernova

(First published in Speaking Volumes, Business Standard, August 10, 2005. This column kicks off what I hope will be an occasional series--once every month or so--that turns the spotlight on new Indian writers who're below the hype decibel level, but who really do their stuff well. Is it necessary to say that I love Vandana Singh's work, or does the piece below say it loud enough?)


India shows up in classic science fiction in strange, sideways fashion. The country's often lurking in the background of SF short stories and novellas as a landscape. And given that many SF writers have a hard science background and are inquisitive about other cultures, it's not unusual to come across a Chandra or a Veena alongside the Alexes and Robertas.

But we were cameo players; scene setters; contributors to the ideas that make up the backbone of an SF plot. Then, a few years ago, an unheralded writer called Vandana Singh came out with a children's book, Younguncle Comes To Town. The book now has a sequel, Younguncle in the Himalayas, written in a completely natural voice that's unusual in Indian children's fiction.

For once, what snagged my attention was that bit of ad copy that reviewers in search of a lead sentence usually sneer at—the blurb. Younguncle had a blurb by Ursula K Le Guin.

Now, in the SF universe, Ursula K Le Guin occupies a small galaxy all by her self. Her books—the Earthsea saga, Left Hand of Darkness--are contemporary classics; she's out there on the frontier of the imagination, upending everything we think we know about gender and human societies. Blurbs by Salman Rushdie are highly prized; blurbs by V S Naipaul are rare, unless you happen to be a close personal friend who hasn't yet been asked to take it on the chin and move on; blurbs by Umberto Eco are the kind of thing young writers dream about. But a blurb by Ursula K Le Guin, for a children's book written by a young woman who hasn't been advanced, royaltied and hyped to death? That's like having Brad Pitt as your date your first time out at a formal party. And yes, I know it's advertising; but reading Vandana Singh's effortless prose, I conceded that sometimes there is truth in advertising.

Over the next few years, Vandana Singh's short stories were being published in journals well-known in the SF world, but unfortunately invisible to the mainstream litcrit universe. We flag new talent immediately when we spot it in the pages of the New Yorker; but India has little SF writing history of any note, with stray exceptions like Jayant Narlikar, Satyajit Ray and more recently, Manjula Padmanabhan and young SF/ fantasy writer Samit Basu. So it's easy to miss stories published in The 3rd Alternative and Strange Horizons. It's easy to miss the significance of what's going on here, because we've got used to having our writers flagged for us as "important" by bragging-rights-included book deals.

Vandana Singh has a background in physics, teaches at a US college, and knows Delhi—among other places, not all of them entirely of this solar system—like the back of her hand. Her blog moves eclectically between eulogies to mangoes and musings on Kaliyuga. And she has a story in the Bible of SF: The Year's Best Science Fiction, the Authorised Version of what's new, provocative and irresistible in SF, edited by the legendary Gardner Dozois.

I'm looking at 'Delhi', in an anthology where Singh's companions are the likes of Nancy Kress and Robert Reed. This is the first time that I've seen an Indian name share the spotlight in any mainstream SF anthology. What if it's no good, what if the first author of Indian origin to make the cut has, well, messed up?

I needn't have worried. Delhi is a tale of a man who can see ghosts from all of the ancient cities and who can't leave the city that's haunting him. It's good SF; and it's a truly great Delhi story. "Only for Aseem are the old cities of Delhi still alive, glimpsed like mysterious islands from a passing ship but real nevertheless. He wishes he could discuss his temporal visions with someone who would take him seriously… but ironically, the only sympathetic person he's met who shares his condition happened to live in 1100 AD or thereabouts, the time of Prithviraj Chauhan, the last Hindu ruler of Delhi."

Some day, Vandana Singh's going to write that novel, put out that story collection. There may not be dollar signs winking around the book to signify its importance, but read it anyway. Read it in homage to the first writer of Indian origin to make a serious mark in the SF world; or read it simply because she writes with such a beguiling touch of strange.

Speaking Volumes: The lost and found department

(First published in Speaking Volumes, the Business Standard, August 2, 2005)


In A Reading Diary, Alberto Manguel compiles his list of books for a "sentimental library". These include Alice Liddell's copy of Alice in Wonderland; the copy of Leaves of Grass that Walt Whitman gave to his lover, Peter Doyle; and whimsical but irresistible, Freud's copy of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.


One could construct a parallel library: a repository of lost manuscripts. It would contain the missing works of Sophocles, all of Sappho's poems, Bhasa's lost plays, the Gandhari manuscripts found in the 1830s that crumbled before they could be read, the Hemingway manuscripts that were lost on a train, and a score of other missing-in-action books.

How do you recover the past? It can happen by serendipity, as with the fragments of a poem by Sappho, lost for over 2,600 years, that was found on papyrus that had been used as part of the wrappings for an Egyptian mummy. Or it can take years of devotion, as with the lost Alexandre Dumas work, The Knight of Saint Hermaine.

One of Dumas' novels was "recovered" last year, a swashbuckling, guillotine-haunted tale of Marie Antoinette. But The Knight of Maison Rouge hadn't been lost so much as forgotten: it was the first time in a century that the book had been brought back into print. Dumas fans were happy; a novel that hadn't been read for a hundred years was just as welcome a discovery as a novel that had been truly lost.

In the 1980s, a retired lecturer called Claude Schopp found a handwritten letter by Dumas that sent him to the archives. There, after five months, he found a serial by Dumas that had run in a periodical called The Universal Monitor. The existence of the novel was known; it formed the final part of the Companions of Jehu trilogy, but was never published in book form. Dumas died before he could revise or finish The Knight of Saint Hermaine; Schopp used the author's notes to construct a suitable ending. The hero of the novel is a French sharpshooter who, in Dumas' fictional rendering of Trafalgar, is the man who shot Admiral Nelson.

In the case of most authors, a hunt for the final, unfinished novel would have been undertaken earlier; but Dumas was terrifyingly prolific, and with over 95 works to examine, The Knight of Saint Hermaine had slipped through the cracks of history. The French language edition was published this year, and is outselling even the Potter brat's chronicles in Dumas' country. It's a mammoth work, even by Dumas' standards, weighing in at over 900 pages, and unusual in that he wrote it on his own, instead of relying on his vast stable of assistants. But his penchant for collaboration has survived his death; Claude Schopp has the detailed notes that Dumas had set down the sequel and is using them to write the "last Dumas".

But one of the most ambitious and exciting attempts to recover old manuscripts is happening in India. The National Mission for Manuscripts (http://namami.nic.in) has launched a campaign to collect, preserve, protect and archive India's manuscripts. It has recruited about 30,000 footsoldiers to track down manuscripts across the country. Last year, they ran a pilot project in three states, Orissa, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, covering most of Orissa and a sampling of districts in the other two states. Over a period of five days, with 2,700 surveyors fanning out to temples, madrassas, homes, libraries and other centres, they documented over 1,00,000 manuscripts—and picked up information on a total of 6,50,000 more.

Even if you assume that many of these manuscripts would have consisted of no more than fragments, and that a great deal of what was found would have been just the waste paper of the past, that's still a lot of history. In the lost and found department of literature, a fragment of an ode by Sappho, one missing novel by Dumas—these scraps are enough to fill us with excitement. What the NMM is trying to do is to show us how much of our own past we haven't even bothered to find, because we never knew it was lost in the first place. If you have old manuscripts or information of any sort, contact them at director.namami@nic.in. It's a rare chance to be part of India's largest treasure hunt.