Food: Table for one

(Published in the Business Standard, November 2009)

“In the same way that you should get massages and take naps or meditate, you should, everyone should, make a point to eat out by yourself from time to time,” wrote Amanda Hesser in her wonderful Cooking for Mr Latte. “You should be kind enough to yourself to lavish your appetite with good food without the interruptions of company.”

And yet, most of the frequent flyers, conference junkies and global nomads I know would rather don mime makeup for a day than eat alone. One friend admits that a long-anticipated trip to Italy was ruined by her disinclination for the solitary table: she ordered room service, only daring once to eat a slice of pizza on the street, eschewing the baroque delights of the Roman table through shyness.

Another frequent traveller, otherwise a man-of-the-world, suffers mild anxiety attacks every time he has to eat alone; another will buy sandwiches and eat them in his room rather than go through what he sees as the admission of social failure involved in asking for a table for one. One friend has solved the problem at considerable cost to his liver; he finds it less threatening to nibble on bar snacks than to eat in a restaurant when on his own, but since he feels obliged to order drinks alongside, he says this is not always the best solution.

I feel for them; I, too, used to be a reluctant solitary eater. Travelling around India, often on my own, there seemed to be too much risk involved in seeking out the table for one, especially in North India where a woman on her own is automatically assumed to be in need of the attentions of (usually) hirsute, burping, half-drunk men. And eating out in fancy restaurants can be ordeal, starting with the maître d’s thinly veiled pity as he escorts the lone diner to a table, tucked behind a pillar, viewless, where s/he is destined to be bumped into by harried waiters and ignored by the busboys. If you’re at all self-conscious, it is hard to overcome the sense that the rest of the restaurant’s patrons are wondering why you have no friends—and it is often hard for a lone diner to get anything like good service.

The essence of the single diner experience, though, is a kind of enjoyment that you can’t have when you’re with a group. Lose the crutches: the book, carried along, the iPod in the ears. The problem with these accessories is that while they allow you to block out the world, they also detract from the meal—it’s fine to comfort yourself with Ruth Reichl at a Gurgaon food court or a McAnywhere, but at a truly excellent restaurant, it would be like draping tussore curtains over a Kandinsky.

For many of us, it can take just one experimental trip to change your habits. I began to love eating out on separate trips to Malaysia and in Edinburgh—I was free to choose my preferred cuisine, to eat deep-fried Mars bars or order three helpings of tom yam soup without embarrassment, and to ask idiot questions: “What is that exotic, rare herb you’re sprinkling over the laksa?” “That would be mint, ma’am.”

Buy Patrick McFarlin and Deborah Madison’s What We Eat When We Eat Alone, or read MFK Fisher on the private joys of solitary eating. Madison has recipes for those who cook alone—they range from the elaborate to the simplicity of tomatoes-and-cheese on toast, but the bottomline is simple: treat yourself the way you would treat a guest. Fisher speaks of the “peace and nostalgia” of eating on your own; Hesser sees a kind of liberation in the ability to pay full attention not just to your meal, but to your palate and your appetites.

A few small details can go a long way towards the creation of a great, solitary meal. At restaurants, be polite, but insist on a good table—point out one by the window or in a comfortable space where you can see the other diners—and book ahead if necessary. If your waiter isn’t harried, and s/he shouldn’t be at a good restaurant, give him or her a sense of your tastes and ask for recommendations.

Eat well; eat with pleasure; pay attention to your plate and your senses; eat without worrying about butter on your chin or whether it’s polite to take a second helping. For those of us who spend much time in the company of other foodies and friends, eating alone can be a blessed reminder of the pleasures of your own company, and of the secret, childish joy of satisfying your own appetites.

Book review: Summertime by J M Coetzee

(Published in the Business Standard, October 2009)Summertime: Scenes From Provincial Life
J M Coetzee
Harvill/ Secker
Rs 799, 266 pages


That this is a book by J M Coetzee about a dead and not entirely successful writer called John Coetzee will surprise no one who knows the work of the real Coetzee. Perhaps the only defence left to a writer as highly regarded and relentlessly pursued as the (real, not fictional) J M Coetzee, and as insistently reticent, is to offer himself up in sacrificial fiction.

The work for which J M Coetzee is best known comes from his early and middle period: The Life and Times of Michael K, Waiting for the Barbarians, Disgrace. In these and other works, Coetzee revealed himself as a chronicler of history—including but not limited to the history of South Africa—who was willing to deal in history’s ambiguities as well as its certainties. Each of these novels was an exploration of the human history of pain, broken by moments of compassion but rarely optimistic of redemption.

Some years ago, Coetzee, pursued by fame, began to create a different kind of fiction. His Nobel speech, built around the character and voice of a modern-day Crusoe, remains one of the strangest acceptance speeches ever in the history of the prize, written in the dispassionate third-person. He turned a fictionalized lecture on 'The Lives of the Animals' into a book about a fictional writer called Elizabeth Costello, and wrote two fictionalized memoirs: Boyhood and Youth.

Summertime is a companion volume to these two, the last in a trilogy of strange and unsettling works, where the novelist becomes his own subject. There is a biographer of John Coetzee, unnamed and largely unidentified except through the medium of his questions, and his silences. He seeks to understand the life of the fictional Coetzee through the writer’s encounters with women, and what we are offered is a series of interviews and reflections on relationships that run the gamut from affair to misunderstood encounter to close friendship.

“He was not what most people would call attractive. He was scrawny, he had a beard, he wore horn-rimmed glasses and sandals. He looked out of place, like a bird, one of those flightless birds; or like an abstracted scientist who had wandered by mistake out of his laboratory.”

This is the voice of the married woman who has an affair, ambiguous and not entirely satisfactory, with John Coetzee; she sees him as a loner living with his father, both stumbling with ineptitude around the empty spaces of their lives. She is startled to hear that Coetzee has written a book; it is not a usual accomplishment in her circles. Her marriage breaks up, and to her, it’s the story of her life, her independence, that is central, with the writer an appendix, not the main chapters.

The women offer different perspectives, all remarking on the writer Coetzee’s essential strangeness, his talent and need for distance. A cousin, Margot, remembers his brilliance but also his remoteness from family: “John sitting on the stoep of that dreary little house making up poems!” A Brazilian woman who meets him as a teacher is unimpressed, by his teaching and by his letters to her: “That is what I ask: how can you be a great writer if you are just an ordinary little man?”

It would be a mistake to read too much into Summertime’s presentation of John Coetzee, poet, writer, possibly a failed man and perhaps even a mediocre practitioner of his work. But in these critiques—and the women in John Coetzee’s life are his reviewers, more than his biographers—the writer emerges as dry, reserved. The central question, as one woman asks, is whether a writer who cannot connect as a human being can truly write something that demands intimacy—the novel being perhaps the most intimate of all ways to examine the human life.

Summertime is an uneasy read, intensely rewarding but also deeply disturbing. Coetzee offers, through the fictional Coetzee, a more intimate look at his own life and passage through the world than a standard biography might reveal. But this intimacy is fictional, about an alter ego to whom intimacy is alien and uncomfortable, and it is hard to draw a line between Coetzee the writer, and his creation, Coetzee the writer.

It’s when he appears to be most open, in his fictionalized biographies, that Coetzee is also trying to tell us to trust nothing. Memoirs and biographies are compelling, but the truth of a life is elusive; and by opening up his own life in fictional form, he keeps it firmly hidden from any would-be seeker after that truth.

The BS Column: Stet: Nabokov's last work

(Published in the Business Standard, October 27, 2009)

In a few weeks, Knopf will publish The Original of Laura: Fragments. The “fragments” is key. The design chosen for the final, unpublished manuscript that the late Vladimir Nabokov wanted destroyed is appropriate to the way he wrote it. The book includes reproductions of the 138 index cards on which the author, suffering from his last illness, wrote the unfinished version of the book he hoped would stand comparison with Lolita and Pale Fire.

Before his death, Vladimir Nabokov told his wife, Vera, to destroy the manuscript. He knew that the book version of Laura was incomplete, and he forbade the release of the book in this form. After the death of Vera Nabokov, it became the task of Vladimir’s son, Dmitri, to wrestle with this grievously burdensome inheritance. An author’s final wishes, especially when stated as clearly as Nabokov had, should be binding, a father’s even more so.

But there were reasons why Vera Nabokov couldn’t bring herself to carry out Vladimir’s wishes: this was his last work, however unfinished, and it would take great ruthlessness to destroy the final remnant of the writer’s legacy. The same questions must have haunted Dmitri Nabokov: did he have a duty to destroy Laura? Did he have the right to preserve Laura, for future generations of readers and Nabokov scholars?

Vera Nabokov had some precedent for her inability to comply with her husband’s last wishes: in 1950, he had attempted to destroy the index cards on which he had written Lolita, by thrusting them into a backyard incinerator, and she had been the rescuer on that occasion. Perhaps this is what stayed in Dmitri’s mind, or perhaps with the passage of time it became easier for him to contemplate bringing to light what his father had wanted erased.

The Original of Laura, as a novel, is bound to disappoint those who expect another Lolita or even an Ada. Nabokov’s later works—Transparent Things, Look at The Harlequins!—were the products of a master stylist’s imagination, but they have never made the impact of the works he is best remembered for. And Nabokov was something of a collage artist, as many of the greatest novelists are, working over a period of years, overlaying an original and apparently complete draft with images and questions of increasing depth and density.

He ran out of time before he could do this with Laura, which he wrote as his illness progressed. “In my diurnal delirium kept reading it aloud to a small dream audience in a walled garden. My audience consisted of peacocks, pigeons, my long dead parents, two cypresses, several young nurses crouching around, and a family doctor so old as to be almost invisible,” Nabokov wrote. The novel was complete “in his mind”, but he wasn’t granted the time to transfer that completed version onto the page.

The number of index cards—a mere 138--for Laura is a giveaway. Nabokov wrote most of his works on index cards, as he records of the writing of Lolita: “I would spend another four-hour span in a lawn chair, among the roses and mockingbirds, using lined index cards and a Blackwing pencil, for copying and recopying, rubbing out and writing anew, the scenes I had imagined in the morning.” He used 2,000-odd index cards for Ada, which gives us a sense of just how fragmentary this version of Laura is likely to be.

Beyond the worlds of book collectors and the narrower reaches of academia, we have lost the space for marginalia, first drafts and other literary artifacts. Laura is fascinating in its own right-which is to say, not as Nabokov’s last unpublished novel, or even as his last unfinished novel, but as a study of a writer’s working methods in the early draft phase. For many of today’s writers, even if they keep working copies of their outtakes and early manuscript versions, the backspace and delete keys work against the curious literary scholar ever seeing a true “first draft”. Much of the early mistakes, the shifts in tone of a manuscript-in-progress are automatically, unthinkingly deleted by the screen generation of writers.

And Laura could also be fascinating to this generation of hypertext-friendly readers. Nabokov often took his finished stack of index cards and shuffled them, “dealing himself a novel”, as though the shoeboxes in which he kept his cards offered more possibilities of order and structure than anything the novelist might impose. He sifted, corrected and added to this final dealing, but that image of random and yet meaningful connections is closer to our wired age than it is to Nabokov’s pre-Mac times.


Perhaps some day Laura will be up in the form that might be most suited to it, as an endlessly changing and randomized collection of clickable index cards in a permanent online exhibition. Until someone designs that, we’re left with Nabokov’s final legacy—a novel that is, tantalisingly, not quite a book.

The BS Column: Writing faith: alternative histories

(Published in the Business Standard, October 20, 2009. Dalrymple wrote in to tell me about the link between his book and Doniger's: "I was the moderator at the infamous SOAS lecture at which the saffron egg was thrown at Wendy, and that it was my clumsy version of Kevin Costner's Bodyguard routine, attempting to protect Wendy from the yoke-- which in the event landed behind us both, splattering on the screen where images of Sita were being projected-- that led her to dedicate the book to me as 'comrade in the good fight'.")

The launch of Nine Lives, William Dalrymple’s search for the sacred in modern India, was the kind of spectacle that gladdens even a publisher’s withered heart. The Char Bagh in Delhi was packed, and between Baul singers and a dancing Dalrymple (he joined in when the theyyam dancers took stage), we were much entertained.

Missing from the audience were egg-throwers, the kind who prevented the Sanskrit scholar and writer Wendy Doniger from being in India for the launch of her book, The Hindus.

Dalrymple’s Nine Lives is very much a travel writer’s book, an exploration of nine practitioners of different faiths in modern-day India where the writer remains an offstage presence, the silent holder of the tape recorder.

Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History asks how many versions of Hinduism we might have. The perspective shifts as she examines the sacred scriptures through the lens of Dalit history, through the silenced, edited but often surprisingly explicit voices of women and through explorations of the role of animals in Hinduism.

Personally speaking, I’m glad that no eggs were sent sailing in the direction of Dalrymple at his book launch, but there’s an interesting question here: why would Doniger’s brand of scholarship hit a visceral vein of resistance, while Dalrymple’s travelogues fall into the category of the acceptable?

Nine Lives is a fast-paced book, moving swiftly from the perspective of a Jain nun contemplating the slow and voluntary relinquishing of her life to the dilemma of the Dalit theyyam dancer, Hari Das, who shuttles between his job as a prison warden to his life as a man in the grip of religious ecstasy. Today’s devadasis are haunted by the fear of an HIV-positive report; a Tantric in Tarapith reveals a place where “even the most damaged and marginal can find intimacy and community”; the Sufis of Sehwan battle the demands of neo-Wahabbis that they stop preaching their brand of ishq. These are compelling contemporary stories, and at times Dalrymple seems to be channelling a modern-day avatar of Kipling, who was so fascinated by India’s multiplicity of faiths.

Nine Lives is written simply, perhaps too simply — the author’s withdrawal into the background gives these stories the feel of journalistic snapshots, and more of Dalrymple’s insights might have given the book more rigour and staying power. But embedded in each individual’s stories are disturbing questions about faith and the way it’s practiced in 21st century India. “I have tried… to keep the narrator firmly in the shadows,” Dalrymple writes. “By rooting many of the stories in the darker and less romantic sides of modern Indian life, with each of the characters telling his or her own story, I hope to have avoided many of the cliches about ‘Mystic India’ that blight so much Western writing on Indian religion.” He has succeeded in both aims, perhaps all too well with the first.

Why is Dalrymple’s book, with all its questions about the continuing exploitation of the devadasis and the struggles of a devout Dalit, not seen as offensive? Perhaps because he presents himself as that age-old figure, the old India hand who is privileged to be a traveller, who can witness “our” traditions from a different vantage point.

Doniger’s work has been challenged for years by the Hindu rightwing, whose essential point is that her reading of the scriptures is sexualised and sacrilegious. Perhaps what really disconcerts and offends those who throw literal or metaphorical eggs at the professor is that she lays claim to a far wider corpus of knowledge than is commonly found to be acceptable.

Whether it’s her re-interpretation of Sita, or her calm unbundling of the many different versions of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, or her questioning of the rites listed in the Vedas, Doniger is threatening because of her immense scholarship. She’s the “outsider” who knows as much, and in many cases, more, about the Hindu scriptures and traditions than her most fierce opponents. I find it more than a little saddening that she would be advised to stay away from India at this point, or that she evokes a knee-jerk reaction from the egg-throwing brigade. (Shouldn’t egg-throwing be condemned as a ritual unsanctioned by our holy traditions, incidentally, since it’s a rite that we’re importing from foreign, Western shores?)

“This is a history, not the history, of the Hindus,” Doniger emphasises; and this is perhaps why she is seen in some Indian circles as so dangerous. By its very title, The Hindus: An Alternative History suggests that Hinduism has several competing histories rather than one sanctioned version. For today’s religious fundamentalists, this is a terrifying idea that threatens the authorised version of history they would prefer to preach, uphold and impose.

Book review: Wolf Hall

(Published in the Business Standard, October 14, 2009)

Wolf Hall
Hilary Mantel
Fourth Estate
POUNDS 7.99, 653 pages

On June 30, 1540, a blacksmith’s son risen to power wrote in desperation to his king, Henry VIII of England: “I crye for mercye, mercye, mercye.” A month later, as Henry hastened to marry Catherine Howard, the fourth of his six wives, Thomas Cromwell, once chief minister and the most powerful man in the land, was executed. In a gruesome touch, Cromwell’s head was boiled and set on a spike in the Tower of London; and an inexpert butcher swung the axe for the blacksmith’s son.

This part of Thomas Cromwell’s tale is not told in Hilary Mantel’s Booker-winning, acute, Wolf Hall, set in the turbulent court of Henry VIII. Historical novels don’t need to set down the ending, since we know that part of the story already. Anne Boleyn with her catlike-yawn and beguiling tempestuousness will be beheaded; Henry VIII chose an executioner with a sharp sword, for he loved her so much he wished her to suffer little pain. Jane Seymour will be—briefly—the next Queen of England. And Cromwell, having risen further and faster than most men of his time could dream of, will be killed by his king.

What interests Mantel, one of the most ambitious and technically brilliant novelists of the day, is larger than the story, however fascinating, of long-dead kings, queens and courtiers. Wolf Hall is a study in power, acquisition and lust—always fine themes for those interested in self-improvement—with Cromwell as an alpha among the pack. “The saying comes to him, homo homini lupus, man is wolf to man.”

Cromwell’s father may have been an innkeeper or a blacksmith; Mantel chooses blacksmith for the purposes of this novel. Our first glimpse of the young Thomas is of a boy “felled, dazed, silent”, thrashed by Walter Cromwell, a commonplace occurrence in the Cromwell family. From this passage of physical violence, it’s an easy movement to the more sophisticated violence of the court, as young Cromwell climbs higher and higher. Mantel’s character list runs to five pages, and yet we feel we know them all, their entrances and exits are so well-managed.

This is familiar ground for a historical novel, but Mantel raises Wolf Hall well above the level of her competitors. If Anya Seton offered blood, guts and romance in the melodramatic Katherine and Philippa Gregory took a sideways look at the price of ambition in The Other Boleyn Girl, Mantel’s subject is the remorselessness pace of history.

Cardinal Wolsey appears by page 18, a man at the peak of his powers, a successful summitteer on the slopes of ambition, easy in his skin “like a leopard settling into a warm spot”. Less than forty pages later, Wolsey is deposed, his riches scattered, humbled enough to cry as an impassive Cromwell looks on, learning the lessons of power, and the loss of it. Over the next six hundred pages, Anne Boleyn’s ambition and control over the king will flash into vivid life. Mantel exercises supreme control over her material, letting the reader know what lies ahead with brutal clarity rather than appealing to our sense of pathos.

Here is Anne, three hundred pages before she rests her slender neck on the chopping block, contemptuously holding up a piece of paper found in the bed where she makes just enough love to Henry to drive the king insane in his quest for more: “The central figure is the king. .. On either side of him is a woman; the one on the left has no head. ‘That’s the queen,’ she says. ‘Katherine. And that’s me.’ She laughs. ‘Anne sans tete.’”

Mantel is unusual among historical novelists for her understanding of the past—which is to say that she understands that for the Tudors, their times were modern, contemporary. The courts of the Tudors, with their rich tapestries; the oaths of the day; the casual brutality with which a crowd will attend the burning of an old woman, a Loller, and then stove her burned skull and bones in with an iron bar for entertainment; all of these are described with the eyes of a traveller of the period, not from the perspective of a novelist looking back at the past.

Wolf Hall itself, the home of Jane Seymour and her family, is never visited, often evoked, but it is just the right brooding, forbidding presence for this book. In her previous work, Mantel has examined history with a merciless clarity—whether it’s through a memoir like Giving Up The Ghost, or through the story of a turn-of-the-millennium medium with her own posse of ghosts in Beyond Black. Wolf Hall shows the same pitiless curiosity, married to Mantel’s vivid imagination. It’s a great place to start for those who haven’t encountered her work. If man is wolf to man, Mantel’s the silent presence recording everything, loping alongside the pack.

The BS Column: The unbearable heaviness of the Nobel

(Published in the Business Standard, 12 October 2009)

Herta Müller, the new Nobel laureate in literature, has been a fierce critic of Ceauşescu's regime in Romania. She is highly regarded in Europe's academic circles. She had received over 20 literary awards, including the IMPAC, before winning the Nobel this year. And I must confess an unliterary complaint: having read only two of her books, The Land of Green Plums and The Appointment, I have about as much enthusiasm for reading her as I do for swimming through a pool of cold porridge.

The Nobel Prize in literature is administered by the Swedish Academy, the process of selection is rigorous, and the shortlist of candidates will usually begin at about 25 names and then be whittled down to roughly five, before a winner is chosen. In a recent interview, Per Wästberg, chairman of the Nobel Prize Literature Committee, revealed that an author's name will often come up for consideration for several years before a nomination finally finds acceptance. All of this is imbued with gravitas; but none of this explains why the Prize should be taken as seriously as it is, except for the fact of its longevity.

The Prize's track record over the first thirty years of its inception, from 1901 to 1930, was dubious at best, with a smattering of the Yeatses, Kiplings and Shaws making up for a score of now-forgotten writers (Mommsen, Hamsun, Spitteler—names no longer read, even in their home countries). It redeemed itself somewhat between the 1940s and the 1980s, yielding at least a reasonable reading list of authors whose works have endured the passage of time. In the last two decades, the Prize seems determined to make political points and to shine a light on the obscure.

An uncharitable critic might detect the undertow of an anxiety that Europe might be losing its influence, that the great writers who are undiscovered by the British, the Americans (and a handful of Indians) will sink into obscurity, taking part of the history of Europe with them. What else might explain recent awards to Imre Kertesz, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, Elfriede Jelinek and now Herta Müller? And there's a sense of drift with some other choices: Dario Fo and Doris Lessing, for instance, may have deserved their Nobel nods, but both received the laurel long after their respective works had ceased to exert a once-powerful influence.

It is not that these are writers of no merit: truly bad writers don't make it to the shortlist. In different ways, Le Clezio, Jelinek, Kertesz and Müller have made their contributions to literature and literary history. Consider this, perhaps, evidence of this critic's poor taste and judgement, when I say that reading their works has not convinced me that these are writers who will last, or whose works I am astonished and pleased to discover. Perhaps pleasure is a frivolous thing to want from the Nobel Prize; perhaps its august list of writers is prescriptive, a judgement handed down from a great height to us lesser mortals, an injunction to go forth and have our minds improved. It is frivolous to complain, as I do having read two of Müller's books and all that is available of Le Clezio, Jelinek and Kertesz in translation, that they bring me no enjoyment as a reader. And yet I find that enjoyment is important to me, personally, as a reader, and that in the last two decades, I have had little of that from the Nobel.


The Nobel in literature has now been awarded for over a century; the Man Booker International has made just three awards since 2005. The Nobel is administered by the venerable academicians of the Swedish Academy, a committee that rarely changes the composition of its members. The Man Booker International has a shifting list of judges, chosen from among contemporary writers every award season: it is peer-driven, with all the benefits and faults this entails. The first of its three awards went to Ismail Kadare, whose works found a new and newly loyal readership; the second to Chinua Achebe, opening up his work to readers who were beginning to forget him, and the culture he came from; and the third to Alice Munro, establishing the worth of the short story as a literary genre in its own right.

If the Man Booker continues in this vein, it will outstrip an increasingly insular Nobel literature award in the next decade as the prize to watch. Until we get there, though, I have to locate and find the remaining works of Herta Müller. Perhaps reading her will be a voyage of discovery and wonder, but I suspect this will be more like trying to read the Wodehouse-created authoress so admired by Bertie Wooster, Lady Florence Craye, author of Spindrift. That book, says Wooster, went down “like ham and eggs with the boys with the bulging foreheads round Bloomsbury way”, but he, like this critic, had a plebeian soul and remained unmoved by her craft.

Because I'm not Eve, and because this isn't teasing

Here's a simple grammatical exercise. Replace the term "eve-teasing" with a more accurate word, and this is what you might get:

"The eve-teasing incident which further sparked of to tensions between the two communities has forced the authorities to increase the police presence in the area. Reportedly, few unidentified youths passed some lewd remarks on women passing through the area."

"The sexual harassment incident which further sparked tensions between the two communities has forced the authorities to increase the police presence in the area. Reportedly, few unidentified youths verbally abused some women passing through the area in sexually explicit terms."

Instead of the chatty 'Eve Teasing with Bipasha Basu' (so reminiscent of Koffee with Karan), how about 'Bipasha Basu physically assaulted'? And "groping" is another convenient euphemism to describe an unwanted and unwelcome act of sexual aggression.

And "teased her" sounds mild, compared to the reaction of the "tribals" in this story. The problem with this school of reporting is that it leaves you with absolutely no idea of what happened. Was the woman in this case verbally harassed, hit, abused, threatened? Was her physical space invaded, was she touched against her will, was she actually attacked?

And here's Bhaskar Ghose complaining that "eve-teasing has become a fine art", in a story that outlines many familiar issues about violence against women. It also illustrates why I hate the term eve-teasing: because it's such a mild, obfuscatory term for the acts of sexual aggression and intimidation it's supposed to describe. And it's blinding in its mildness. A woman being eve-teased--yeah, we all know what that means. But do we really, when even the language we use doesn't allow you to see what is really happening in each case?

There are subtle differences between the man who wolf-whistles at you from across the road, and then pays no further attention; and a ten-minute barrage of sexually explicit, demeaning suggestions and threats of violence unleashed at you by men who will follow you all the way down the road, until you reach a "safe" area. Being "groped" is an unpleasant, and for young women especially, a frightening, violation of physical space; being grabbed, pinched or held so hard that the act leaves bruises is not something that can be described as being "fondled", "caressed" or even the relatively more accurate "groped". If a man or a group of men--there seems to be little need for the term adam-teasing--surrounds, follows, threatens and then attacks you in such a way as to cause hurt, pain and shock, that would be assault. If they punch hard enough, then that would be battery. And further down the road, there's always the old standby, rape: we don't yet use eve-teasing as a euphemism for being raped, though we have useful euphemisms in most Indian languages, usually containing the terms "honour" and "looted" in conjunction.

It may seem that there are more important battles to be fought on the violence-against-women front than a linguistic war. But I would also argue that language shapes the way we think. Eve-teasing is a word that reminds me of a chador, or a blanket; a word designed to conceal far more than it reveals. It's telling that the second most frequently used euphemism, in the language used to describe assaults against women in India, is "molestation", defined as "unwanted and/ or improper sexual advances". It's another mild word that should be used to describe relatively mild acts, but I see it often used to describe acts of actual violence, aggression and sexual assault.

Molestation, harassment, verbal abuse, unwanted sexual advances, physical aggression, attacks, assault, battery, sexual violence, attempted rape, rape: that is a more accurate, if incomplete, range of terms that might begin to describe the violence that many women face, far too often. Would you, perhaps, think harder about what happens to a girl or a woman when she's attacked, if it was described as an attack, rather than another incident of eve-teasing? I would. I do. And in all the years I've been living in Delhi, I've seen women who have survived everything from simple harassment to severe battery to rape to post-rape attempted murder. None of them have ever used the term "eve-teasing" to describe what they have experienced. It's been fifty years since we first started using that euphemism; it's time we stopped. End of rant.