I’m often asked why I prefer to rent rather than buy (especially in these times when the real estate market is low) and I always find myself making up mealy-mouthed excuses. But the truth is it’s because I like the freedom of renting. I like the fact that we can get up and move any time we want. An empty house is like a blank canvas. The possibility it contains is hugely exciting.
I like moving house so much that I get envious when someone walks into an empty apartment in a movie. In Love Aaj Kal, Deepika Padukone walks into an empty apartment. It’s a sad moment. She’s been through some hellish realizations and now she’s alone. Of course I empathized but a little voice at the back of my head was saying ‘oh but look at all that white space waiting to be filled up!’
Frustrated gypsy blood. Some deep-seated neurosis. Probably both.
More seriously, I think the desire for displacement can be a strong one and we’re usually so busy talking about the desire for stability that we forget about our need for its opposite. In Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being, Sabina represented this spectacularly: “Betrayal. From tender youth we are told by father and teacher that betrayal is the most heinous offense imaginable. But what is betrayal? Betrayal means breaking ranks. Betrayal means breaking ranks and going off into the unknown. Sabina knew of nothing more magnificent than going off into the unknown.”
With age (or is it the social boxes we willingly climb into), it gets harder and harder to go off into the unknown. One keeps shearing out the possibilities until one is left with the chiseled bone of one’s life, stripped down to its last choices, it’s essentials. What one can live with. What one can’t live without.
We chain ourselves to things, people, places.
It’s so liberating to shake that up once in a while. One can’t always shake it up magnificently, definitively. But one can at least move in wider and wider circles within the bounds, prevent atrophy.
I’m also always asked ‘but you loved this house so much…’ which is telling of our attitudes to moving on from one thing to another. There is the assumption that if you love something, you can’t love something else more. Or you didn’t love it enough in the first place. Staying fixed in the same place means you’re committed and commitment is the bedrock of our social structures. There is a demand that we should love the same thing, always, in the same way. It makes people insecure when someone flouts this principle of fixedness.
My answer is: ‘Of course, I did. But now I love the other one.’ The other day, even A (who understands me better than any dead or living person) accused me of a complete lack of sentimentality. I say ‘accused’ but actually he just pointed it out. In any case, lack of sentimentality is a good thing in a writer so I can’t say I’m unhappy. It’s been six years since my father died, six and a half since my first dog, and 13 since my grandfather. I haven’t stopped missing any of them. If there was a fire in the house, the first thing I’d try to save (thing as opposed to living beings) are my photo albums. But no, I don’t mourn things that have served their time well. I just accept they’ve run out of energy. And I move.
Anyway, this is to announce that we’re moving house later this month. I will be carrying heavy stuff around but will be feeling lightness. Wish me luck!
I’m commitment-phobic and Wordpress has made it so easy to pick and choose and play around with themes. I’ve really been trying to stick with one. But I can’t. So I’m just going to change the look depending on the mood. It’ll be like those smileys you put at the end of each post. This one appeals to my playful mood. How can it not? Just look at those camels.
Hiroshima anniversary. Bombs in general, actually. Coincidentally, I saw this production of Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen over the weekend. I liked the play (and the performance) and it took me back to poems on bombs including Yehuda Amichai’s ‘Diameter of the Bomb’ which I’ve posted earlier. Also, a few days back The Guardian featured war poetry commissioned by Carol Ann Duffy. I’ve been very upset with the poems she’s written since she became poet laureate and the one she’s contributed here didn’t do much for me either. But war poetry is very difficult to do well — the stock images just overflow so easily plus one is battling general fatigue and inurement because they’ve become common on TV news. However, I liked:
Afghanistan by Paul Muldoon
It’s getting dark, but not dark enough to see
An exit wound as an exit strategy.
In related thoughts, death and grief and so on, something in Jeanette Winterson’s column for July on her blog moved me very much:
So the book finished, I was just moving forwards, when I faced two deaths in the next 4 months: Pat Kavanagh, who had been my agent at the most formative time of my writing life, and with whom I had had a very serious affair. For me, if I love, it doesn’t stop, even if the shape changes. Love is as strong as death.
And then my father…
What a time… so if I say that I am in a good place now, and that everything has changed – both at a deep level, and on the surface… I keep remembering that the the opening line of my book Written on the Body, is ‘Why is the measure of love loss?’
At one time I could relate to the ‘love doesn’t stop’ bit, but over time, I find myself growing more cynical. Does it become easier to start and stop love once you “master the art of losing”, get used to measuring loss? There are people I can imagine loving all my life. But there are enough others who I loved desperately at one time and now feel a vast sense of fatigue and indifference towards. My mother says “what is true for a time is true for that time” — and post-loss fading should not blur or sully that truth. I lean towards this most days. I really like Winterson. I think her writing is luminous. A friend, who had the incredibly good fortune to attend a reading, tells me that she is as impressive in person. And the generosity and faith of this statement, the heart in it, lives up to all that.
I also find it amazing and very admirable when people notice and remark on beauty even when shrouded in grief. When my father died five years ago, I went into a fugue from which I took months to emerge. I don’t remember writing about a single thing, let alone about his death or the grief. Clearly, my coping mechanisms were not very evolved. I think, today, I would try to do it differently, turn more to things of beauty around me, and to writing. Because that is the best way to cope, isn’t it? To continue to do the things you love most, the things that nourish and nurture.
Winterson mentions the lunar eclipse in her column and I’ve been thinking about it too. Firstly, because I love the moon. I like putting it in poems despite being advised not to. I like reading poems about it even though it’s a face pocked with as many cliches as craters. And the actual eclipse may have been a damp squib but I’m excited anyway because Susan Miller, who is my secret vice and superstition(al) weakness tells me that it will bring me good things and make August generally fabulous. I’m not arguing with anyone who says such nice things.
And lastly, here are two poems of mine — one on war and one on the damned moon. They’ve both been published before (Mosaic, Unisun; Not A Muse, Haven Books) and will also be in my first collection City of Water, to be published by Sahitya Akademi some time soon (hopefully this year)…
Homecoming
You cried while telling me–
about the land, packed stone
under your boots, the air
dry as burnt bread, your skin
blistering like volcanic earth,
your head, a numb knob, stunned
by the monotony of the miles
and the village,
its cluster of homes
like a flock of sheep
in the open, its people
dim with terror,
and how you raped
the first woman you saw there,
how she crumpled like wet newspaper,
pounded your back with her hands
as the child in the corner
cried and cried without knowing why,
and crawled about
and knocked over the kerosene stove.
Your tea had gone cold.
I put my hand on the back
of your neck and said
everything would be okay.
I said that I understood.
But even after all these years,
when I close my eyes, hers
swim up, warm and brown,
and every time we make love,
I see her bruised hands
reach up like a prayer.
***
Moonsong
My love
shames rivals into oblivion,
obscures them
until all that is left in the sky is my orb,
its one gleaming eyeball
white as sand on foreign beaches,
hollow as dust.
You slid in
to find mountains, craters
and lava spew.
Now you are afraid
of my solitary anger,
the coiled serpent
at the base of my spine.
You are afraid
of its nameless hungers,
its slow uncurling down the length
of your body.
You are afraid
it will stalk you in dreams.
You are afraid
of my haunted face in the night,
my fragilities–
the soft space
at the base of my throat,
the fine line of my collar bone.
You are afraid they will unravel you.
You, who have spent a lifetime
simplifying yourself.
K, a dear friend and someone I knew for ten years and across two cities, died of a heart attack last week. He was in his early thirties.
Apart from the usual grief and sudden awareness of mortality, there was a lot of guilt to deal with. K and I had a falling out some years back. It was mostly my fault and I never quite got around to saying sorry. We sidled back into an uneasy truce but lost the closeness. I wanted to avoid melodrama and apology. I assumed that we’d get back to being the same ‘any day now’.
Sometimes, there really isn’t enough time.
K was one of the most life-affirming people I knew — kind, generous, almost spiritual in his ability to love and forgive. He didn’t judge or demand or complain. He miraculously managed to make everyone he met feel good about themselves. He loved parties. He played crazy fortune-telling card games. He liked cats. He was also curiously open, even vulnerable.
I can’t do much justice to this obit but his closest friend has. As for me, I’m vibing all the love in the world to those I love and saying sorry where I need to. That’s what he would have advised.
Just when I was wondering what on earth to blog about, I got this new, shiny thing from Aditi. Tada…!
This means I get to devote one post to entirely pointless, self-indulgent revealings. Because see, according to the rules, I have to list seven things I love and award seven bloggers I love. So here goes…
1. Night-time drives. All sorts of conditions have to be met. Somebody else must drive because I hate driving. That somebody else must be silent so I can just look out of the window and pretend they don’t exist. There must be music of my choice. We must cross at least one flyover or under-bridge so I can think about the Icarus myth or the Persephone myth. Oh, and there must be breeze, lots of it.
2. Bollywood. Including the song and dance (and the ham and cheese).
3. Plans, lists, schedules, time-tables. Pretending to be organised, in other words. I actually get a thrill out of preparing these meticulously. (I have an excel sheet for every occasion). The problem is I get an equal thrill from flouting all these plans and declaring sudden detours.
4. Road trips / trees / birds. I put them together because my love for road trips (or any travel) has a lot to do with my love for trees and creatures. But I also love these (things?) separately.
5. Old houses in Calcutta, the ones with green shuttered windows, creaky fans, dusty corners.
6. Bath products.
7. Okay, I’m going to be boring and say poems. Reading, writing and editing them.
Etiquette is not, these days, a growth industry. The Internet is inundated with bile in the name of free expression. Television reality shows encourage a thumbs-up, thumbs-down mentality. The allure of instantaneous reaction makes Twitter the talk of the town. Meanwhile, the economic meltdown is melting down manners: More than ever, people who pay good money to see a show feel they have every right to express righteous anger.
Art isn’t easy, but booing is. A mind-closing activity, it tends to be the expression of rigidity in the face of invention. Artists are almost never booed for incompetence (no one can deny the craft of Freyer’s stagecraft). They are booed for intent and out of partisanship. I don’t necessarily advocate acclaim for nothing more than mindless effort, but in a lifetime of attending the performing arts, I have encountered an insignificant number of truly insincere artists.
Not everything works, but at least in the noncommercial realm of the concert stage and the opera house, I credit nearly everyone with trying to say something. And when they actually manage to, the meaning may not immediately sink in.
Booing may be pointless but I’m all for honest panning. Art isn’t easy, true. It’s not meant to be. But is sincerity enough to merit applause, let alone money? I don’t see why I should credit “nearly everyone with trying to say something”. In poetry, we are repeatedly told that it is clearly not enough to just say something. What matters is how you say it. Why should this be different for the performing arts?
In Bangalore, I’ve seen disastrous plays that were touted as good. There are times when I’ve cared less about the money spent and more about how I’m going to make it through the next hour or so before they open the doors and let me out. (It’s difficult to walk out midway at Ranga Shankara though in situations of extreme boredom, I’ve even done that.) Few things are as tortuous as a play with banal lines, flat humour or terrible acting. Being stung to death by bees, for instance.
If the state of literary reviews is not top notch, the state of theatre reviewing in the English language newspapers is even worse. Most feature supplements in the city have degenerated to celebrity-obsessed rags. There are few play reviews and most are written by rookie reporters who know little about art or performance or performing arts. Under these circumstances honest audience reaction is not only healthy, it’s necessary.
Having said this, I must raise a thumb (in typical trigger-happy fashion) for Butter and Mashed Bananas, which I finally managed to catch. They had a clear premise and they managed to communicate it. Their funny lines were actually funny. There was movement and energy. And oh yes, a script that actually seemed to have some thought behind it. All good things.
And the World Digital Library recently went online, which “makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world”. Basically, lots of gorgeous manuscripts and maps and other ancient things.
It’s still hanging over our heads: the neat hair argument. I remember when the hair-straightening craze started a few years back, I felt increasingly uncomfortable with my hair which is wavy and temperamental, the opposite of neat. (No silky waterfalls here.) It was all those adverts. Plus the nuns I grew up with had drummed into my head that hair must always look neat. It seemed like the adult world complied with such ridiculous notions.
I couldn’t bring myself to endure the unhealthy manipulation of permanent straightening. So I settled for using the hair-dryer and brush rather fiercely.
But it was tedious. And what a waste of time! And after one too many person had said, ‘oh your hair looks different all the time,’ I just chopped it off.
Now I’m growing it back, without interference. It is being given free run and every time I see it being its not curly-not straight, hyperactive self, I feel a little surge of pride like I’m bringing up someone particularly well.
Of course, I don’t have to go to places which demand strait-lacing of any kind so it’s easy. I wonder what I would do if I still had to attend client meetings, board meetings, weekly meetings and other such in some stuffy office. The pressure on women working in mainstream professions can be formidable. In a setting where you’re fighting to be ‘taken seriously’ most waking hours of your day, you’re unlikely to do anything that detracts from your cause. Add the public face element like in tv news or public relations or a host of others, and you’re even more screwed because they can actually demand you look a certain way. Between losing your job and losing your waves / curls, most women would choose the latter.
But there are enough women who don’t need to change their natural looks because of their profession but do it anyway. The urge to look like role models, the urge to fit in, the urge to belong — all hefty forces. But can we start fighting them, please?
Also, please read Nisha Susan’s story (in Tehelka again) on how we are creating an army of clones.
***
Also, Jeanette Winterson reviews Alice Oswald’s new collection and talks about the role of nature in poetry, even today.
We can expect poetry to be relevant to our lives, but our lives include the inner and the mythic, the creative and the inventive. Our lives are lived on Earth, however much tarmac gets between us and the soil, and our lives are lived with the Moon and the stars above our heads, whatever the street lighting. Tarmac and street lighting are not more relevant than the estuary marsh or the Moon, only more pressing, which is a good reason for poetry to remind us of other truths.
***
And this is what it looks like when the sea explodes.
…and thank god. Not one of my favourite years, this. And yet this date-to-date construct is misleading. Some months were good, some bad. Really, some days were good, others bad. But we need our spans, our lengths, our life measured out in new year parties (if not coffee spoons). And the events of the past two months have led to a general agreement that this was a terrible year.
It makes me wonder about those who fell in love or got married or had babies or struck it lucky / rich this year. Do they feel guilty or want to say, ‘er…but it wasn’t such a bad year for me.’ Do they feel the world’s anguish crowding in on personal joy? Do they feel pressured to relinquish it? I feel a little bad for them.
No matter what kind of year you’ve had, this definitely is a time for hope.And who can blame us for sorely needing some? So I was thinking about hopeful poems and Sometimes by Sheenagh Pugh came to mind. (Do read her disclaimers / disowning of it. Heh.) I rather like it precisely because it is one of those simple, feel-good poems but it reminded me of how hard it is to write about happy things without sounding greeting card-ish. My attempt at a new year poem resulted in something fairly bleak which I won’t impose on you right now. So instead, here’s New Year by Rachel Hadas, and for those who like it the old-fashioned way, Ring Out Old Bells by Tennyson.
And a bit late in the day, here’sMrs Scrooge written by Carol Ann Duffy for Christmas.
Margaret Atwood, I mean. Her latest book is due this month and as usual, she has her finger unflinchingly on the pulse. This one’s called Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth and it talks about the phenomenon of borrowing and owing as a cultural issue. She weaves in Faustus, Scrooge and Eric Berne to link the US economic crisis with primal human urges to get right now and pay later. She also looks at how Faustus is a generous guy, why we love the reformed Scrooge (“because, true to the laws of wish-fulfilment, which always involve a free lunch or a get-out-of-jail card, he embodies both sides of the equation”) and why we choose to go into debt — as a life script, or even as a ‘fix’.
In our minds — as reflected in our language — debt is a mental or spiritual non-place, like the Hell described by Christopher Marlowe’s Mephistopheles when Faust asks him why he’s not in Hell but right there in the same room as Faust. “Why, this is Hell, nor am I out of it,” says Mephistopheles. He carries Hell around with him like a private climate: He’s in it and it’s in him. Substitute “debt” and you can see that, in the way we talk about it, debt is the same kind of placeless place. “Why, this is Debt, nor am I out of it,” the beleaguered debtor might similarly declaim.
Which makes the whole idea of debt — especially massive and hopeless debt — sound brave and noble and interesting rather than merely squalid, and gives it a larger-than-life tragic air. Could it be that some people get into debt because, like speeding on a motorbike, it adds an adrenalin hit to their otherwise humdrum lives?
When the bailiffs are knocking at the door and the lights go off because you didn’t pay the water bill and the bank’s threatening to foreclose, at least you can’t complain of ennui.
It’s interesting that the passage from Dr Faustus always made me think of ‘guilt’ as akin to Hell. And debt and guilt are very closely linked, aren’t they?
What’s she also saying here is that debt is, in its own way, exciting. It gives us ’something to think about’. And it’s probably true. How many joyful evenings in how many households have been spent discussing when the EMI on the car will be over so that the money can then be used for the EMI on a new car?
I’m one of those people who hate handling money. Don’t get me wrong. I love many of the things it can assure — certain kinds of freedom, travel, fast-speed Internet, books — but prefer to never actually have to think about it. Which means, perhaps, that this is a particular type of excitement I don’t have the stomach for. Perhaps, the fear and guilt squelch out the adrenalin. Which I why I strike big blows against feminism sometimes and let A handle the bank work. Or maybe I’m just being a clever feminist (“It’s a dirty job and someone’s got to do it,” as I rub my hands together wickedly.)
In other news, I had four glorious days away from all this vulgar talk of money last week. I was in Pondicherry and besides eating, drinking, walking, mooning at the sea, eating, drinking, I concentrated on spending the little money I have in Pondicherry’s quaint, expensive ’boutiques’ (nothing is just a ’shop’ anymore, apparently). I like to buy heaps of seemingly small, cheap things rather than big, costly things because this allows me to feel all non-materialistic and virtuous. As a result, I have come back with many aromatic candles and enough incense for three medium-sized temples. Pictures soon. Of the place, not the incense.
More seriously, I think the desire for displacement can be a strong one and we’re usually so busy talking about the desire for stability that we forget about our need for its opposite. In Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being, Sabina represented this spectacularly: “Betrayal. From tender youth we are told by father and teacher that betrayal is the most heinous offense imaginable. But what is betrayal? Betrayal means breaking ranks. Betrayal means breaking ranks and going off into the unknown. Sabina knew of nothing more magnificent than going off into the unknown.”
