“I found Bombay and opium, the drug and the city, the city of opium and the drug Bombay”

Having covered a dozen picks on my A Year in Books post earlier this week, a #13, my favourite book of the year, was promised.

Narcopolis, Jeet Thayil’s debut novel was magical, moving and provocative. and I can’t rave enough about how much I loved this novel.

“Then there are the addicts, the hunger addicts and rage addicts and poverty addicts and power addicts, and the pure addicts who are addicted not to substances but to the oblivion and tenderness that substances engender. An addict, if you don’t mind me saying so, is like a saint. What is a saint but someone who has cut himself off, voluntarily, voluntarily, from the world’s traffic and currency? The saint talks to flowers, a daffodil, say, and he sees the yellow of it. He receives its scent through his eyes. Yes, he thinks, you are my muse, I take heart from your stubbornness, a drop of water, a dab of sunshine, and there you are with your gorgeous blooms. He enjoys flowers but he worships trees. He wants to be the banyan’s slave. He wants to think of time the way a tree does, a decade as nothing more than some slight addition to his girth. He connives with birds, and gets his daily news from the sound the wind makes in the leaves. When he’s hungry he stands in the forest waiting for the fall of a mango. His ambition is the opposite of ambition. Most of all, like all addicts, he wants to obliterate time. He wants to die, or, at the very least, to not live”

The story opens in the 1970s, in Rashid’s Opium House on Shuklaji Street Mumbai. It reads like a gritty yet languorous hallucination that charts a darkly exotic world suspended in a series of enthralling vignettes. Thayil delves into the existence of his cast of antagonists contemplating life in a grey underground of smokey opium dens and makeshift brothels in a transitioning Mumbai, as heroin and a serial killer begin to entice and haunt the city’s depraved.

The narrator Dom,  a returnee from New York traces his opium-addled poet’s fingers along Mumbai’s free fall into chaos and  his own, into a drug habit. Dimple, a beautiful and inquiring hijra, who readies the pipes. Grappling with her past, her addiction, the virtue and vice of her sex, life as a prostitute and her relationships to those who inhabit these worlds, Dimple is a graceful and contemplative presence. Rashid, the owner of the khana- a husband, father, and friend to his hijrasi mistress. Francis Xavier the devilish painter. Mr. Ching (whose interlude in the novel takes the reader on an intriguing adventure to Communist China), the owner of the magic pipes.

Thayil dexterously weaves together Mumbai, the lives, insights and addictions of this cast of miscreants. 

The artfully disjointed, lyrical narrative is truly literary juju.

Read this.

Thuppaki (The Gun) : Why You Shouldn’t Mess with India

In an effort to be less predictable and acquire a bit of street cred, the name of social anthropology, I found myself in Cinecity, Maradana (call me a newbie and make what you will of this, but a cinema atmosphere unlike anything I’ve previously encountered. We’re talking whoops, whistles, claps and cheers after every and I mean every scene of arguable significance- including a close-up of the hero’s biceps- i.e. every few minutes).

I am a relative stranger to Tamil cinema, its gloriously-kitsch-frolicking-on-Swiss-mountainsides-dishoom-dishoom-aesthetic occupying an entirely ignored periphery of my cinematic interests.

Thuppaki (The Gun) is essentially an action flick centered on a terror plot to destroy Mumbai, with a sub-plot of modern Indian romance and marriage (aptly summarised in the most inventive lyrics I have encountered: ‘(Girl) are you an Apple product?’ and the sage advice: looks fade, so marry a guy who makes 200,000 a month, even if he looks like a toad).

A young Tamil, Indian army officer named Jagdish (emphasis on Indian Army in all it’s multi-coloured, multi-ethnic, multi-religious badass, song and dance glory) returns to his family in Mumbai on vacation, where his parents and sisters take him straight from the train station to the home of a potential bride, Nisha. Jagdish discards Nisha assuming that she is an old-fashioned girl (meaning demure, sari-clad and neck tattoo concealed by chaste braid). He later finds out that she’s a father-slapping, short skirt wearing, red-wine drinking experimental smoker who plays every sport imaginable aside from being a pro boxer, which inevitably ends up in an irrational and comedic arranged marriage  triangle (cue song: ‘Why does my heart slide on Antarctic ice? Are you a penguin? Are you a dolphin?’) and ultimately undying love, as is usually the case. Easy peasy.

The main storyline revolves around a terrorist plot, by an Islamist terrorist group (trendy) with vague (completely unexplained) motivations to blow things up and create chaos in Mumbai.

Fabulously outlandish plot. Gloriously-kitsch-frolicking-on-Swiss-mountainsides (More progressive song lyrics: ‘I ran a search on google and found no one crazier than him’)-dishoom-dishoom-with Matrix-style slow-mo fight scenes, expert assassinations and explosions at sea. A ‘cold-blooded murderer’ of a hero who ‘extensively tortures’ the baddies (chopped off fingers, forced suicides- the works) and can single-handedly take out an entire armed terrorist cell and rescue five girls (one of them on the knife’s edge of a Youtube execution) with the help of a retired police dog and one gun.

What’s not to like, right? Right.

Contrived Portrayal of Diversity:

Representing ethnic, racial, linguistic, cultural diversity hand in hand with sexuality, stereotyping, typecasting are hot topics within the entertainment industry, where films and largely (American) television shows are being actively analysed and critiqued for their mono-everything casts.

I’m all for diversity, but Thuppaki is so consciously (and consequently unnaturally) diverse.

The Indian army, a central symbol of strongman virtue (including apparently a no-strings-attached license to torture and kill at the whimsy of individual operatives) is composed of all varieties of Indians imaginable, to the point of laboured. The last scene of the film, where the hero’s army train departs to Kashmir, the Muslims (identifiable by skullcaps, beards, covered heads- all typical expectations fulfilled) stand out on the platform (token, human white flags to all the Muslims they offended in the first 2 hours and 20 minutes of the film by saying, HEY the Indian Army adores Muslims, they are our loyal cold-blooded, torturing highly-trained assassins, and they are fighting for our consciously-portrayed-as-diverse-and-united-India against extremist Muslims with Jihadist tendencies. Yes.)  A major plot point in the film also revolves around a wardrobe revelation, the coat and tie attire typical to the Christian wedding (diversity for the win?) that helps the terrorists identify the Indian army assassins, who cannot be identified but the fact that they were in suits is common knowledge and where do people wear suits to? Naturally, Christian weddings- get me a list of all the Christian weddings in Mumbai (population a gazillion) so that I can identify and avenge with speedy success.

Extensive Torture? No big deal:

I may have been appalled by the casual and sometimes comedic tone the representation of torture was dealt with in Thuppaki. Jagdish apprehends Terrorist #1, beats him up, chops off his fingers, locks him up in his closet (yes, right behind those dress shirts) and shoots him?  Apparently this is completely unacceptable behaviour from a highly-trained Indian Army intelligence type, who will have to answer to no one about his public killing spree. This and the assassination of people in malls, cinemas, boats etc., more torture, using one’s sister as bait to annihilate terrorist cell, etc. You know, the usual.

It is true that films sometimes cast things in black and white, the existential questions and metaphysics puzzles of the grey an irksome inconvenience to the whooping-clapping-whistling masses. But how okay is such light-hearted portrayal of torture? Are we saying we will die and kill for our countries, the greater good of an artificial filmic celebration of diversity?

Perhaps it is a warning of geopolitical significance, You Shouldn’t Mess with New India. Especially not the Indian Army- they will shoot you right between the eyes, if they’re not locking you up in a closet and torturing you first.

Have you seen Thuppaaki? Thoughts?

Of Protests and Introspection

Tuesday.

Protests. I am hesitant to weave through the crowds at Town Hall after work, but I am curious. Patriotic music echoes. Head aches. Black and white corporates assembled. Signage in English, a language that a fraction of the population speaks. Who are these signs intended for?

No War Crimes in Sri Lanka, Look Elsewhere

Don’t Be Mislead by Terrorists, Listen to the People

All Sri Lankans Hate Violence.

Help Sri Lankans Live As One Nation

They are mostly young. Women in sunglasses fan themselves, shading their faces from the evening sun. Men in ties tote corporate banners photographing. They link arms and grin for photo after photo. Amateur photographers armed with camera phones click. Pose. Click. Pose. Click. New profile pictures are buzzed off into cyberspace. Such amusement, it could have been a cricket match.  A confusion of slogans and Sri Lankan flags wrapped on their heads or shoulders as a sign of respect, perhaps?

A mockery of the three decades of life that was lost to the island unfolds. Its suffering reduced down to an ideological pissing contest between geopolitical overlords and Third World underlings. These puppets revel, they cry ‘NO to war crimes and NO to Western Conspiracies’. I wish I could ask them to define both.

Estimates of the war’s casualties range from 80,000-100,000. The numbers from its later phase remain hotly contested. Ranging from 40,000 as suggested by international observers to the government’s ever-fluctuating numbers between 0 – 1,400 – 3,500 – 5000. Perhaps, we will never know save for those of us who knew real loss then, of family or friends. Real people with names and faces, who were loved and mourned for.

In May 2009, when the government confirmed its military victory over the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) following months of intense fighting, it also left an estimated 300,000 civilians displaced. Housed in welfare camps, Sri Lanka‟s internally displaced population faced a devastating humanitarian crisis riddled with critical predicaments of nutrition and sanitation. According to the United Nations’ Joint Humanitarian and Early Recovery Update as late as September 2011 (well over 2 years after the end of the armed conflict), 7534 internally displaced persons remained in camps waiting to return to their areas of origin, while 384, 401 people returned to the Northern Province (UNOCHA, 2011). A few thousand still remain suspended in the limbo of internal displacement. A bloodied past, a purgatorial present and an uncertain future.

They protest in vehement denial, so unabashed about their heritage, their pride, their arrogant patriotism. Sri Lankans, they roar! Yet I wonder what they have done to earn this glory besides hold up a placard, wrapping a flag around their heads and choosing sides in a game they have not even bothered to understand.

By denying the realities of the war they deny the existence, the humanity of those victims whose lives will forever be shaken in ways they cannot ever comprehend. They forget or ignore the uphill battle left in revising policy and discriminatory practices so deeply engrained in Sri Lanka’s social fabric. They deny thousands of fellow Sri Lankans equality of citizenship by decrying their tenuous present and horrific experiences are fictions concocted by the international humanitarian apparatus.

I wonder why such public gusto, such concern has not been channelled towards pressuring an internal mechanism for fostering reconciliation, to push through necessary policy documents that still stutter between ministries and attitudes towards inclusion, integration and the sustainable peace we as a nation owe to those civilians who fought and survived three decades of war.Not just those of us who were touched by a history of bleak news reports and the lurking fear of a bomb blast in the city, but those who have lost far too much for words or tears.

The LLRC even with its apologist contradictory wording and repetitive lip-service calls for changes that need speedy implementation. In the very words of the polemic resolution there exists,

‘.. The need to credibly investigate widespread allegations of extra-judicial killings and enforced disappearances, demilitarize the north of Sri Lanka, implement impartial land dispute resolution mechanisms, re-evaluate detention policies, strengthen formerly independent civil institutions, reach a political settlement on the devolution of power to the provinces, promote and protect the right of freedom of expression for all and enact rule of law reforms..’

Are these protestors denying the existence of these realities and the interlinked need for changes? How many of them even bothered read the LLRC, or even this resolution they are so opposed to?

—

Thursday

The resolution passes and the sentiments pendulum between unapologetic apathy and ignorant rage. I am disgusted, as hate is spewed towards the United States and India. A cricketing rivalry with the latter turned vitriolic against its supportive stance on the resolution. India raised the LTTE, someone announces to cyberspace. Or perhaps it was such anger and ignorance directed at a section of our own people.

Implementation with technical assistance, the resolution calls. Sri Lanka is indignant, bitter, even. Its pissing contest against the galactic empire lost, even with the support of China’s rebel force.

The rage, the ignorance the horrific claims that clutter my virtual world sadden and disgust me as I see more protesters still uncertainly lurking at Town Hall.The conflation of anti-US sentiment with the purpose of the resolution thickens.

G.L Peiris states,

‘The most distressing feature of this experience is the obvious reality that voting at the Human Rights Council is now determined not by the merits of a particular issue but by strategic alliances and domestic political issues in other countries which have nothing to do with the subject matter of a Resolution or the best interests of the country to which the Resolution relates.  This is a cynical negation of the purposes for which the Human Rights Council was established.

Many countries which voted with Sri Lanka were acutely conscious of the danger of setting a precedent which enables ad hoc intervention by powerful countries in the internal affairs of other nations.  This is a highly selective and arbitrary process not governed by objective norms or criteria of any kind.  The implications of this were not lost on many countries.

As far as Sri Lanka is concerned, our policy in respect of all matters will continue to be guided by the vital interests and wellbeing of the people of our country.  It hardly requires emphasis that this cannot yield place to any other consideration.’

—

Perhaps what we as a Nation, should be concerned with instead is our grave need for introspection and realising what passive crimes occur each day through our own choice of ignorance, apathy and prejudice in the name of a misguided patriotism.

Knowing that I am not alone in my sentiments however, comforts me.

Perhaps there is hope? Perhaps.

Finding ‘Home’ in the South Asian Novel

‘South Asian literature’ populated my early teenage years very sparsely; the only names I can recall being the standard R.K. Narayan fare like the English Teacher and Malgudi Days or E. M. Forster’s Passage to India (which I happen to detest) and Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book made tolerable by song and dance Disney renditions (I really brought down the post’s tone, now didn’t I?). These weren’t quite my cup of tea- vaguely interesting enough but never books I sought after.

However, truth was that South Asian fiction barely existed as a genre as it does now.

In an age marked by the diaspora experience, where lives exist, as my friend Bronte (quoting a line from a talk by the fabulous Pico Iyer at the’09 Galle Literary Festival) often fondly describes as ‘the corridors between cultures’. We’re intrigued and curious, much like the colonials were of exotic travelogues, about what binds us and separates us across cultures. The thread of shared human emotion and conflict being a trendy spin on reconciling worlds of difference. (Is diaspora fiction the new para-ethnography?)

The late 1990s however, saw a shift from ‘world literature’ as one penned by a handful of genteel colonised elites who’d mastered the colonisers’ tongues to a genre of its own right as concepts of home, culture and identity became significant markers of self within the flux of globalisation. My own obsession with diaspora fiction and South Asian literature did not begin until I too had packed up and left Sri Lanka, on my rite of passage pilgrimage to the hallowed halls of university. Home became something I would become interested in, beyond a roof over my head- because, I suppose if university teaches you anything it’s the ability to separate house from home.

It was a veritable magic lantern as it were, of thoughts, images and even geopolitical ideologies. To me, South Asian literature came to represent home, and given the explosion of the genre, I guess it did the same for many others to.

Thus, a series featuring of my favourite South Asian reads seemed necessary.

1) The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

I find Arundhati Roy’s political opinions rather distasteful at times, however, there is no denying that Roy possesses a skill with the pen (or typewriter, or keyboard) that few writers do. Her work was arguably among  the pioneers of the South-Asian literary surge. The writing is stunning and Roy’s ability to create profound meanings out of casual repetitions spins literary magic that leaps off her pages with a Kathakali primo uomo‘s liquid, eloquent grace.

I first picked up my mother’s copy of the book sometime in the late 90s, when I was well, not even a teenager and needless to say, read a few pages and got very bored and forgot all about it until sometime in the late 2000s. Although, I am still conflicted about how the book ended, the writing was without exaggeration beautiful and emotive.

Tracing the tragic events that unfold in a Keralan Syrian-Christian household in 1969, a forbidden love and two untimely deaths shape the paths of fraternal twins Esthappen and Rahel.  Roy’s characters are beautifully formed through their relationships to other characters, speaking with meditations and actions in a novel that depends very little on dialogue. Roy conveys the misery and human consequences of India’s caste-riddled social injustices, navigating the predicaments of gender, class, communist politics, divorce and single motherhood as endured by Rahel and Estha’s Ammu.

The book is a must-read for anyone with an interest in discovering a fantastic piece of literature.

2) The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

I LOVE this book. One of my all-time favourites, both as a film and book, Jhumpa Lahiri skillfully captures with unadorned yet lovely prose, the multi-faceted nature of the immigrant experience.

Somewhat of a wunderkind in the South Asian literary circles, Lahiri secured the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2000 with her debut collection of short stories ‘The Interpreter of Maladies’ (also an excellent read drawing major influence from another must-read Romesh Gunasekera’s Monkfish Moon). Her works focus largely on the complexities of migration, third culture and the entanglement of identity, family and human emotion.

The Namesake chronicles a tale that lies at the nexus of home, dislocation, identity and the significance of names in such uncertainty, following the journey of the Ganguly family from Calcutta to Masachusetts. Ashok, Ashima, Gogol (or Nikhil as we come to know him) and Sonia face their own conflicts entrapped in these culture corridors, always in the peripheries of being at home, but never quite achieving its comfort. Ashima is a beautifully written character, who carries with her a perpetual sad nostalgia for her desh left behind. Ashok attempts to come to terms with the accident that defined his life and journey away from India, while their son Gogol struggles against his parents’ Indian beliefs, the dilemma of his Russian name and its painful link to his father’s past, and carving out his own American identity as Nikhil.

So, if you’re looking for something to read this weekend… Or are faraway and looking to find home.