Shelf Life

The end of the year holidays is a time for tidying. Winter cleaning if you will. So once a year, I rifle through my books- sorting, shelving, re-organising to make more shelf space, for the inevitable book buys of the next year.

Books and I, we have a long history. All 25 years of my existence. Mostly because, 1. I am unable to resist buying books. 2. I can never give away any of my books- not even those childhood ladybird books that I will likely never look at again 3. I kinda really love books.

Maybe one day, I will get around to retrieving a hoard from unreliable borrowers, printing bookplates and cataloging them. But for now, some photographic documentation will have to do.

What’s on your bookshelf?

ps-

For those of you who like looking at bookshelves, here’s a tiny treat of the eyecandy variety:

Bookshelves, bookshelves and more bookshelves!

“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.

A Year in Books

I’ve been good about reading this year. Kicking off with perhaps a little too much ambition and a little bit of failing (not sure why I thought 100 books was a possibility alongside full-time employment), I settled on a little task of reading 60 books.

Rambles aside, I’ve picked 12 of the best- in no particular order (blurbs on Goodreads) which are well worth a read, no matter what your interests are.

1) The Lost Flamingos of Bombay by Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi

2) Home Boy by H.M. Naqvi

3) Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, And Hope In A Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo

4) Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

5) Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

6) Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

7) The Collaborator by Mirza Waheed

8) The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje

9) The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

10) I Am An Executioner by Rajesh Parameshwaran

11) The Fall by Albert Camus

12) The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd

Happy reading.

Since I don’t like even numbers, await a post dedicated to lucky #13, my favourite book of the year.

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.

Remembering The Help

The Help has generated glorious buzz among readers and film buffs alike, with the ambitious but ultimately lacklustre cinematic rendition starring the lovely Emma Stone, who is sadly no match for the spunky Miss. Skeeter.

Promising the ‘other side’ of Gone with the Wind (immortalised in the line “Everyone knows how we white people feel, the glorified Mammy figure who dedicates her whole life to a white family. Margaret Mitchell covered that. But no one ever asked Mammy how she felt about it.”), Stockett tells the tale of The Help who populated the peripheries of white Missisipi in the 1960s. The writing is wonderful in its ability to convey the complexity of heartbreak and small joys existing side by side, as these women, both coloured and white, perpetuate and challenge a grey rainbow social injustices.

The book has been met with well-deserved praise, and I shall ramble no further save for saying pick up a copy, if you haven’t already.

I would also however, like to draw attention to the novel’s epilogue that remembers Demetrie, Stockett’s own childhood maid. She writes,

‘I’m, pretty sure I can say that no one in my family ever asked Demetrie what it felt like to be black in Mississipi, working for our white family. It never occurred to us to ask. It was everyday life. It wasn’t something people felt compelled to examine… I have wished, for many years, that I’d been old enough and thoughtful enough to ask Demetrie that question.’ (2009:45)

Within this third world island (Or do I mean a politically correct developing world, emerging economy?), labour is cheap and bound to a tradition of devoted ‘help’ that raise the ‘babies’ of wealthier women, wash clothes, draw baths and prepare meals; the kind of dedication that made ‘Sri Lankan’ domestic labour prized beyond its watery borders.

The peripheries of my own existence in Colombo were populated by a steady stream of women and men, mostly if not entirely of Plantation Tamil origin , who transited through our home, for anything from a few weeks, a few months to a few years. Sometimes three generations of the same family, vertical and horizontal relatives flitted through, attending to our meals and laundry.

I would be lying if I said I remembered the names and faces of these umpteen women whose own lives were intimately bound with our own for pockets of time. But several remain deeply ingrained as a part of my childhood.

There was Mallika, a teenager with a mop of curly hair from Kandy, who was a worthy playmate and went on a trip with us to Anuradhapura.

There was Mary from Rathnapura, who watched me when schools were shut at length in the late 90s and adept at frying prawns and letting me sneak ice cubes out of the fridge.

There was Poovathi from Badulla, my sister’s nanny whose incessant aches and pains made me dub her ‘the paper doll’. Her family remained linked to our’s  for many years: son, daughter, husband, a cousin who had a dramatic encounter with ‘spirit possession’ in our living room one night.

There was also Seetha who lasted three days, being intermittently possessed by her dead father severely interfering with her ability to hold down a job. I kid you not.

There was Yogamma, a refugee from Trincomalee whose tragic life we still speak of. She liked me the best, I think of all her counterparts and spared no butter in making me sour dosai. She wanted more than anything to ‘go to Dubai’ as she would say to earn money for her children who had been relegated to a refugee camp in India. Conned by several employment agencies, she died in the Tsunami in 2004 while attempting to claim and sell her family’s land in Trincomalee.

There was Letchumi, a raging but ultimately endearing alcoholic from Rathnapura who lived with us for many years, until she fell off a Jack tree while on leave at home. She thankfully recovered, but her love for the bottle continues.

Presently, there is Kala, the most idiosyncratic of them all and Letchumi’s daughter. A riot around the house, she once garnished coconut chutney with sliced plums, coriander, carrot and one solitary segment of green bean. She is also of the bucket fame, when one morning a group of builders working on our house found her playing Tarzan on a bucket pulley dangling off the roof. We always laugh about that one.

The faces, the names, the stories are numerous. Enlaced but separate, filial but somehow lesser, familiar but never friends.

Within the Sri Lankan context, the relationship between the help and their employers remain as complex and blurred as that of 1960s Mississippi, albeit less about skin colour and more about class and sometimes ethnicity and the injustices, jealousy and resentment that arise from these socio-economic and cultural differences.

Two Sri Lankan writers, whose books I don’t love but certainly consider worth reading, explore the snarled threads that tie nonas, mahaththayas and babas into convoluted relationships of dominance, reciprocity and even wickedness.

In A Disobedient Girl, Ru Freeman captures the interplay between patronising generosity and resentment, between Latha, an orphan deemed to a life of perpetual servanthood , and Thara, the baby of the privileged Vithanage household.

I could not bring myself to sympathise with any of the characters, who I found to be overwhelmingly selfish. I did not care for the plot revolving around the mysterious connection between Latha and Biso, a wronged woman fleeing to safety with her children.

However,

Freeman does succeed tremendously in portraying the sexual politics and tangled struggle of human emotion seeded in the soil of class prejudice; a socio-economic terra firma that both nourishes and poisons the actions of those entrapped in inflexible social hierarchies. Freeman’s account is moving and insightful, allegorically representing relationships of servitude, upper hands and curious unspoken friendships that are all too familiar to those of us who were fed, cleaned and watched over by women and girls not much older.

Karen Roberts‘ The Lament of a Dhobi Woman is not a great piece of literary fiction by a long shot, detailing the life of Seelawathi, a village girl brought into an exploitative and demeaning equation within a Colombo household. However, what it lacks in skilled prose and plot, it somewhat makes up for in its observations on the fractured nature of Sri Lankan society.

The author positions the book as a sort of exposé ‘to shame people into changing their behaviour‘ (2010:288), which in my opinion impacts Roberts’ character development negatively, with an almost unequivocal demonisation of the proverbial ‘Colombo set’, save for the innocent untouched by the wickedness or sociality.

I suppose, the point of this post- aside from a few recommended reads- is to remember, to wonder about those very women whose lives are in most ways no different to those of the real-life Abileens and Minnys from half a century and several continents apart. They toil, raise children and be enmeshed into the most private spheres of those people who will never acknowledge them as equals.

I wonder the same thing Stockett does, the questions it never once occurred to me to ask.

“We are just two people. Not that much separates us. Not nearly as much as I’d thought.” (Kathryn Stockett, The Help)