The best sentences orient us, like stars in the sky: Jhumpa Lahiri

In college, I used to underline sentences that struck me, that made me look up from the page. They were not necessarily the same sentences the professors pointed out, which would turn up for further explication on an exam. I noted them for their clarity, their rhythm, their beauty and their enchantment. For surely it is a magical thing for a handful of words, artfully arranged, to stop time. To conjure a place, a person, a situation, in all its specificity and dimensions. To affect us and alter us, as profoundly as real people and things do.

I remember reading a sentence by Joyce, in the short story “Araby.” It appears toward the beginning. “The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed.” I have never forgotten it. This seems to me as perfect as a sentence can be. It is measured, unguarded, direct and transcendent, all at once. It is full of movement, of imagery. It distills a precise mood. It radiates with meaning and yet its sensibility is discreet.

When I am experiencing a complex story or novel, the broader planes, and also details, tend to fall away. Rereading them, certain sentences are what greet me as familiars. You have visited before, they say when I recognize them. We encounter books at different times in life, often appreciating them, apprehending them, in different ways. But their language is constant. The best sentences orient us, like stars in the sky, like landmarks on a trail.

***

The first sentence of a book is a handshake, perhaps an embrace. Style and personality are irrelevant. They can be formal or casual. They can be tall or short or fat or thin. They can obey the rules or break them. But they need to contain a charge. A live current, which shocks and illuminates.

***

As a book or story nears completion, I grow acutely, obsessively conscious of each sentence in the text. They enter into the blood. They seem to replace it, for a while. When something is in proofs I sit in solitary confinement with them. Each is confronted, inspected, turned inside out. Each is sentenced, literally, to be part of the text, or not. Such close scrutiny can lead to blindness. At times — and these times terrify — they cease to make sense. When a book is finally out of my hands I feel bereft. It is the absence of all those sentences that had circulated through me for a period of my life. A complex root system, extracted.

Even printed, on pages that are bound, sentences remain unsettled organisms. Years later, I can always reach out to smooth a stray hair. And yet, at a certain point, I must walk away, trusting them to do their work. I am left looking over my shoulder, wondering if I might have structured one more effectively. This is why I avoid reading the books I’ve written. Why, when I must, I approach the book as a stranger, and pretend the sentences were written by someone else.

Jhumpa Lahiri in The New York Times. Here

The art of distraction

If you’re writing and you get stuck, and you then make tea, while waiting for the kettle to boil the chances are good ideas will occur to you. Seeing that a sentence has to have a particular shape can’t be forced; you have to wait for your own judgment to inform you, and it usually does, in time. Some interruptions are worth having if they create a space for something to work in the fertile unconscious. Indeed, some distractions are more than useful; they might be more like realizations and can be as informative and multilayered as dreams. They might be where the excitement is. You could say that attention needs to be paid to intuition; that one can learn to attend to the hidden self, and there might be something there worth listening to.

It is said that distractions are too easy to come by now that most writers use computers, though it’s just as convenient to flee through the mind’s window into fantasy. In the end, a person requires a method. He must be able to distinguish between creative and destructive distractions by the sort of taste they leave, whether they feel depleting or fulfilling. And this can work only if he is, as much as possible, in good communication with himself — if he is, as it were, on his own side, caring for himself imaginatively, an artist of his own life.

As we as a society become desperate financially, and more regulated and conformist, our ideals of competence become more misleading and cruel, making people feel like losers. There might be more to our distractions than we realized we knew. We might need to be irresponsible. But to follow a distraction requires independence and disobedience; there will be anxiety in not completing something, in looking away, or in not looking where others prefer you to. This may be why most art is either collaborative — the cinema, pop, theater, opera — or is made by individual artists supporting one another in various forms of loose arrangement, where people might find the solidarity and backing they need.

Hanif Kureishi in New York Times. Here

Arvind Adiga: Why I have learned many languages?

I grew up, as many Indians do, in an archipelago of tongues. My maternal grandfather, who was a surgeon in the city of Madras, was fluent in at least four languages and used each of them daily. He spoke Tulu with his wife, Kannada with his daughters, Tamil with his patients, and English with his grandchildren. In my hometown of Mangalore, on India’s southern coast, it was common for a boy of my generation to speak one language at home, another on the way to school, and a third one in the classroom. These were not just dialects or variants, either. Kannada, which I spoke at home, and Hindi, which I had to learn in school, belong to different linguistic families and are as dissimilar as, say, Spanish and Russian.

Columbia University, where I went to study in 1993, insisted its undergraduates learn a foreign language, so I discovered French. I remember the thrill of sitting in the Hungarian Pastry Shop on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and working my way, over the course of a week, through an entire André Gide novel in the original French. In England, where I studied in the late 1990s, I took a class in German, having heard that its peculiar syntax and word structure posed not just a linguistic, but a cognitive, challenge: German speakers apparently thought about the world in an entirely different way.

By the time I returned to India in 2003, I had been speaking, reading, and writing almost exclusively in English for more than a decade. Nothing much changed after I moved back. The international success of novelists such as Arundhati Roy and Vikram Seth meant that most younger Indians in the big cities wanted to read and write in English. There were novelists, such as Kiran Nagarkar, who worked in both English and an Indian language, but bilingual proficiency of this kind was increasingly rare. The glamour, acclaim, and money were in English; why read or write in anything else?

My life is now divided between the cities of Bangalore and Mumbai. About a year ago, I decided to read only in Kannada, the dominant local language, whenever I visited Bangalore. My reasoning was partly pragmatic. Regional-language newspapers in India have a richness of local detail that is often absent in the country’s English media. A friend tells me of the time he was on holiday in Nainital, a lake city in India’s north. He was about to take a walk around the lake when an article in a Hindi newspaper reported that a man-eating leopard was on the loose. The English dailies had not reported this. He now buys the Hindi paper whenever he visits Nainital. Some of India’s best writers, such as playwright Girish Karnad and novelist U.R. Ananthamurthy, work in Kannada, and I keep discovering excellent writers who will probably never be translated into English.

Arvind Adiga in The Daily Beast. Here

“Concentration is one of the happiest things in my life”: Haruki Murakami

Murakami submitted “Hear the Wind Sing” for a prestigious new writers’ prize and won. After another year and another novel — this one featuring a possibly sentient pinball machine — Murakami sold his jazz club in order to devote himself, full time, to writing.

“Full time,” for Murakami, means something different from what it does for most people. For 30 years now, he has lived a monkishly regimented life, each facet of which has been precisely engineered to help him produce his work. He runs or swims long distances almost every day, eats a healthful diet, goes to bed around 9 p.m. and wakes up, without an alarm, around 4 a.m. — at which point he goes straight to his desk for five to six hours of concentrated writing. (Sometimes he wakes up as early as 2.) He thinks of his office, he told me, as a place of confinement — “but voluntary confinement, happy confinement.”

“Concentration is one of the happiest things in my life,” he said. “If you cannot concentrate, you are not so happy. I’m not a fast thinker, but once I am interested in something, I am doing it for many years. I don’t get bored. I’m kind of a big kettle. It takes time to get boiled, but then I’m always hot.”

Sam Anderson in The New York Times. Here

R K Narayan of Malgudi: "India will go on"

2011 marks the 10th death anniversary of one of India’s most-loved authors, RK Narayan. Step back with us to Malgudi, that “vague place not found anywhere”, peopled with sign-painters and sweet vendors, Swami and his friends. Was it really a timeless stage for the charming human comedy of small men and small schemes? And what would it have been today, this small town in 21st century India?

Rasipuram krishnaswami Iyer Narayanaswami, BA, had just emerged from an unfortunate stint of schoolmastering. An abject failure in the classroom, he had returned to his family home in Mysore, trying hard to give the impression of knowing what he was doing. He would wake, bathe, and take his coffee — his standards were exacting — and head out, an umbrella in one hand, a pen and pad in the other. Under a tree at the foot of Chamundi Hill, he would sit and write.

Inevitably, a sceptical uncle demanded to inspect the fruits of the young man’s endeavours. He was unimpressed: “What’s this Malgudi? Where is it? Why do you write about some vague place not found anywhere, while there are millions of real places you can write about?”

Narayan was not one to speak of these matters explicitly, but Malgudi was a town whose people were divided — as they would be — in all the usual ways: caste, class, gender, and religion. Equally, they were brought together in all the usual ways: blood, friendship, enmity, and work. The Malgudi of the novels is not, contrary to an old cliché, in any sense timeless. It is shaped by all the usual forces of history, religion, conquest, migration, and colonialism, though Narayan never alluded to these matters explicitly.

Some have been troubled by Narayan’s silence on the big questions.

VS Naipaul and Narayan had met once, in London in 1961. Asked about the prospects for India after Nehru, Narayan had pronounced sagely: “India will go on”.

If we could visit Malgudi, we would see changes of the same sort we see elsewhere in small-town India. Cable television, the internet, mobile phones, certainly, and more generally, a rise in wealth and entrepreneurship. No doubt the great social movements based on caste and religion of the last few decades, many of them violent, would have left their mark on the small town. Some of this has been chronicled by other Indian writers — Pankaj Mishra in Butter Chicken in Ludhiana (1995), or Naipaul in his own India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990). Perhaps the novel Narayan was planning from his hospital bed would have dealt with some of these matters.

Yet, the mutinies of contemporary India invite us to pose some of Narayan’s questions. Does money necessarily make one happier? And to what extent are happiness and suffering, success and failure, matters not of individual striving but of luck? These are deep questions, but we should not be too quick to write off Narayan’s response, not so much an answer as an attitude: of irony, of scepticism, of caution, and a faith that Malgudi, and India, will go on.

Nakul Krishna in Indian Express. Here

Khushwant Singh: "I may die any day now"

Last week, lakhs of newspaper readers across the country woke up to find their weekly fix missing. The ‘Sardar in the lightbulb’, loved and loathed in over 17 Indian languages, had hung up his pen without saying goodbye. After more than 70 uninterrupted years of ceaselessly needling readers, Khushwant Singh suddenly decided he’d had enough. “I’m 97,” (he isn’t, he’s 96) “I may die any day now,” is all he’ll say about his self-imposed exile into silence.

 “I’ll miss the money,” he says when I prod him, adding as an afterthought: “And the people fawning over me to write about them in my columns.” Fat chance, considering that the same evening, he was entertaining two editors, one of whom was trying to trawl yet another book out of his old columns and the other had brought along his latest novel for him to review. “You want me to praise it?” he asked, almost innocently. “Yes!” was the fervent response. Perhaps he did not know Khushwant’s column-writing days are over.

It couldn’t have been much fun: getting up before dawn every single day, an endless round of deadlines, chasing payments, readers’ letters, keeping track of events, and people dropping in, hoping to be written about. Now that he has given it all up, you’d think he’d rest. But he’s already reaching for his yellow legal pad, scribbling away as if it’s a guilty pleasure. “I can’t stop,” he says a trifle sheepishly, “I don’t know how to sit and do nothing.” The columns are done and over with—but it looks as if another book is on its way.

Sheela Reddy in Outlook. Here

The culprits of the Bombay riots had never been prosecuted : Aravind Adiga

That evening, sitting at an outdoor table in Vihar, a restaurant on the eastern side of the Santacruz station, I began thinking, whom will I talk to in this city, how will I live here, when a tall fair man with a moustache came up to me.

"You're from Udupi," he said.

"My mother was," I replied. "I grew up in Mangalore." 

"You have a South Canara face." 

He was the manager; he told me that everyone in the restaurant was from around Mangalore. I watched them, chatting in Kannada or Tulu, wiping tables and buzzing about that humid kitchen. A tough life, but they seemed full of energy and hope for the future. It occurred to me that if I worked on my novel as they were working on the tables, I too would be taken care of. 

We had water only twice a day in my building, so I had to plan things in such a way that I was free from seven to nine in the mornings, and six to eight in the evenings. The rest of the time I wrote. The broker who had found me the place called one day: "The neighbours complain that you make no noise at all." To frighten my neighbours less, and to give myself a routine, I took the train every morning to the British Council Library in Nariman Point; for a change I would visit the Prithvi Theatre's outdoor café, where, if the writing had gone well, I would buy a ticket for a play in the evening. 

I made a happy discovery: my grand-uncle Suresh was still in Mumbai. In the 1990s, he had been a judge in the Bombay high court, where he had earned his reputation as an opponent of the Shiv Sena ("Who is this man Suresh, with only one name? He must be a Christian!" its newspaper Saamna had railed.) He was now retired and lived on the Juhu-Versova link road. 

Grand-uncle Suresh is a talking man. He told me stories late into the night about the Bombay riots, of things that had been done in daylight and men who had never been prosecuted for doing them; I took the auto-rickshaw home, and returned to my novel.

Aravind Adiga in The Independent. Here

"...and I managed to write a thousand words a day" : R K Narayan

He was a frugal man – his lunch was rice and curds with a bit of pickle, the classic Brahmin dish – and physically slight. His childhood nickname, Kunjappa (Little Fellow), followed him through life. In later years he was described as looking like "a very intelligent bird". In photographs with his wife, the strikingly beautiful Rajam, he is shorter than her. Rajam died young, of typhoid, in 1939, an experience relived in his most sombre novel, The Dark Room. Narayan's name is well-known here, but is oddly lacking in official recognition. "He is an internationally recognised writer, and Mysore was his muse," says Raghuram, "but there is not a road named after him, not a circle [roundabout] named after him." (There is, admittedly, a Malgudi Coffee Shop in the upmarket Green Hotel just outside Mysore, but that seems more branding than commemoration.)

There is at least one place in Mysore where you can put your finger on the elusive RKN – at his former home, up in the northern suburb of Yadavagiri. It was built to his own specifications in the late 1940s. The area, then rustic and isolated, is now a leafy street in a pleasantly breezy uphill location, but the house stands empty and rather forlorn, with a look of out-of-date modernity – two storeys, cream-coloured plaster, with a stoutly pillared verandah on the first floor. The idiosyncratic touch is a semi-circular extension at the south end of the house, like the apse of a church. On the upper floor of this, lit by eight windows with cross-staved metal grilles, he had his writing room. It had such a splendid view over the city – the Chamundi Hill temple, the turrets and domes of the palace, the trainline below the house – that he had to curtain the windows, "so that my eyes might fall on nothing more attractive than a grey drape, and thus I managed to write a thousand words a day".

A few hundred yards up the street stands the smart Hotel Paradise. The manager is Mr Jagadish, a courteous and slightly mournful man with a neat grey moustache. He knew Narayan in the 1980s, when he would sometimes dine at the hotel with his equally famous younger brother, the Times of India cartoonist, RK Laxman. I ask what he was like, but it is Laxman who stands out in his memory. Laxman was "very funny", and had opinions about everything, but Narayan was "more serious". He was a modest man, he didn't "blow his trumpet".

Sometimes, says Mr Jagadish, he has guests who ask him: "Where is Malgudi?" He laughs and taps the side of his head. For a moment I think he is giving an answer to the question – that Malgudi was all inside one man's head – but what he means, of course, is that the question is daft. Narayan was asked it many times, and ducked it in a variety of ways. One of his more enigmatic answers was this – "Malgudi is where we all belong, and where we wish we lived."

Rereading R K Narayan by Charles Nicholl in Guardian. Here

When I began to make friends, writing was the vehicle: Jhumpa Lahiri

Books, and the stories they contained, were the only things I felt I was able to possess as a child. Even then, the possession was not literal; my father is a librarian, and perhaps because he believed in collective property, or perhaps because my parents considered buying books for me an extravagance, or perhaps because people generally acquired less then than they do now, I had almost no books to call my own. I remember coveting and eventually being permitted to own a book for the first time. I was five or six. The book was diminutive, about four inches square, and was called “You’ll Never Have to Look for Friends.” It lived among the penny candy and the Wacky Packs at the old-fashioned general store across the street from our first house in Rhode Island. The plot was trite, more an extended greeting card than a story. But I remember the excitement of watching my mother purchase it for me and of bringing it home. Inside the front cover, beneath the declaration “This book is especially for,” was a line on which to write my name. My mother did so, and also wrote the word “mother” to indicate that the book had been given to me by her, though I did not call her Mother but Ma. “Mother” was an alternate guardian. But she had given me a book that, nearly forty years later, still dwells on a bookcase in my childhood room.

Our house was not devoid of things to read, but the offerings felt scant, and were of little interest to me. There were books about China and Russia that my father read for his graduate studies in political science, and issues of Time that he read to relax. My mother owned novels and short stories and stacks of a literary magazine called Desh, but they were in Bengali, even the titles illegible to me. She kept her reading material on metal shelves in the basement, or off limits by her bedside. I remember a yellow volume of lyrics by the poet Kazi Nazrul Islam, which seemed to be a holy text to her, and a thick, fraying English dictionary with a maroon cover that was pulled out for Scrabble games. At one point, we bought the first few volumes of a set of encyclopedias that the supermarket where we shopped was promoting, but we never got them all. There was an arbitrary, haphazard quality to the books in our house, as there was to certain other aspects of our material lives. I craved the opposite: a house where books were a solid presence, piled on every surface and cheerfully lining the walls. At times, my family’s effort to fill our house with books seemed thwarted; this was the case when my father mounted rods and brackets to hold a set of olive-green shelves. Within a few days the shelves collapsed, the Sheetrocked walls of our seventies-era Colonial unable to support them.

When I began to make friends, writing was the vehicle. So that, in the beginning, writing, like reading, was less a solitary pursuit than an attempt to connect with others. I did not write alone but with another student in my class at school. We would sit together, this friend and I, dreaming up characters and plots, taking turns writing sections of the story, passing the pages back and forth. Our handwriting was the only thing that separated us, the only way to determine which section was whose. I always preferred rainy days to bright ones, so that we could stay indoors at recess, sit in the hallway, and concentrate. But even on nice days I found somewhere to sit, under a tree or on the ledge of the sandbox, with this friend, and sometimes one or two others, to continue the work on our tale. The stories were transparent riffs on what I was reading at the time: families living on prairies, orphaned girls sent off to boarding schools or educated by stern governesses, children with supernatural powers, or the ability to slip through closets into alternate worlds. My reading was my mirror, and my material; I saw no other part of myself.

Jhumpa Lahiri in The New Yorker. Here

Nikkamma number 1

First, I want to assert that I am not a blind supporter of Manmohan Singh. How could I love a man who openly declares his love for George Bush and who has stooped low to get an autograph of Obama! But, nevertheless, I didn't like the way he was ridiculed, scolded and derided by Luh purush L K Advani. The choice of the word Nikkamma was in bad taste. Manmohan Singh may have played with the destiny of the nation in bonding with USA. But to call him Nikkamma is different.

All these days, weeks and months the scathing comment by L K Advani never faded away. Now I was pleased to hear it from Khushwant Singh. Oh! what a reply it is! I enjoyed it. Each and every word of it.

Dr. Ajmal sent it to me. Thank you, Dr. Ajmal!!

Now read the story! It was published here and here.

Nikkamma number 1

By Khushwant Singh
Like millions, I watched Mohan Bhagwat’s press conference on TV. He is the head of the RSS; the BJP is the progenyNikkamma number 1 of the RSS. The BJP leaders had a bitter fallout and are looking for guidance from one who now represents their founding father.
Bhagwat did not commit himself to anything specific. Like any father would, he told his squabbling children to settle their differences between themselves, without involving him. However, he did express the opinion that it was time the BJP retired its old leaders and infused younger blood in the party. He did not name anyone, but it was obvious who he meant. That his voice counts a lot was proved by the fact that the next day most of the top leaders of the party, including L.K. Advani, Rajnath Singh, Sushma Swaraj, Arun Jaitley and Venkaiah Naidu went to call on him to get his aasheervad — blessings.
It can be assumed that the one man almost certainly to be asked to step down will be L.K. Advani. He should have left the political scene in a blaze of glory, but now not many tears will be shed for him. And for good reasons. Did he ever regret the role he played in the demolition of the Babri Masjid? If he did, as he claims, why did he not tender an apology? Did he regret the anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat? If so, why did he protect Narendra Modi from being sacked as Prime Minister Vajpayee evidently wanted to do? Is it possible that as home minister he did not know of Jaswant Singh’s mission to Kandahar to swap three jehadi militants for 150-odd Indians held hostage in hostile territory? There cannot be an iota of truth in his statement that he knew nothing about Jaswant’s mission till it was over.
An important omission in the analysis of the rapid decline of the BJP is the role of the RSS. The BJP took its ideology from the RSS. Islamophobia was its motivating factor as it was of militant right-wing organisations like the Shiv Sena and Ram Sena. An increasing number of people no longer subscribe to this ideology. Membership of these parties has dwindled.
Mohan Bhagwat’s assertion that the RSS includes members of the minority communities, including Muslims, has to be taken with a large dose of salt. While he decides on replacements for Advani and Rajnath Singh, he should also take a closer look at the factors which have contributed to peoples’ disenchantment with what all these parties stand for and the readiness with which they resort to violence to achieve their ends.
I have no regret over Advani’s discomfiture and imminent fadeout from national politics. He has done grievous harm to our efforts to create a truly secular India. He described Manmohan Singh as nikamma — useless. It so happens, Manmohan is still much in use, while Advani’s own erstwhile colleagues have pronounced him as of no use any longer. It is as comic a tragedy as any we have witnessed in recent times.