Anindita Sengupta

Revisit notions of beauty and ugliness–all notions, actually–plus get my head out of the sand and not plunge it back there again. This is the closest I’m going to come to a new year resolution. Of sorts (, out of sorts). Last year, it was consistency and balance and I’m happy to reminisce that I’ve almost been successful. When I’ve eaten, drunk or slept too much (or too little), slept and woken at odd hours, been workaholic or too-lazy, been extreme in other words, at least I’ve pursued one end consistently for many days. And then the opposite for an equal number of days. Which balances it out in the end, I suppose.

So there it is for 2010: revisiting and clear-eyedness. This ostrich, which is ugly or beautiful depending on how you look at it and does not have its head buried in the sand, is a mascot.

Oh, and I hope y’all noticed how I’ve done some dusting and cleaning around here with categories and links. This look, I think, will stay for a while. I’ve been playing around with it too much and there’s no reason to give up on consistency just because the year’s over.

Happy 2010!

So we are continuing with the cheer. Look, I even changed to a Christmassy theme! I thought this was nice, sort of subtle, unlike the ones which had holly all over them. I heart WordPress more and more for making it so easy to change look. I dabbled in web design a few years back, even made money from it which qualifies it as a previous profession, and I used to enjoy playing around with typeface and colour. I don’t do that anymore so this is my consolation.

Anyway, over the weekend I watched Cheri, Stephen Frears’ film of Colette’s novella Cheri. I have a weakness for lush period movies and this one is certainly both lush and period — 19th C France and the life of the rich and infamous. Lea, an aging courtesan takes Cheri, the decadent and disaffected son of a friend, under her wing and into her bed. The relationship starts off as a transaction of sorts, the age-old exchange of wisdom and youth, and the two are so cynical about love that they don’t imagine it could happen to them. Against all expectations, they stay together for six years. When he goes off to get married in keeping with his mother’s wishes, they realise they love each other.

The movie has lavish sets and costumes. Rupert Friend looks both callous and vulnerable. Michelle Pfeiffer makes up in style what she lacks in substance, and is patently well-cast as the aging beauty. But it’s no Dangerous Liaisons so don’t expect a huge deal. It feels rushed in the beginning and abrupt at the end because they’ve crammed the entire story of the sequel, The Last of Cheri, into a four-line voiced narration. The lovers are unconvincing in bits and there’s something incomplete about the whole venture. Still, if you have an afternoon to spare and and like period movies, it’s a relaxing sort of watch.

I was struck and a little amused by something while watching the movie. Much of it is about the lovers’ suffering. And because they’re rich, they have the means to ‘cope’ rather well. So here is evidence of my flawed heart: I was finding it hard to sympathise with people who can check into luxurious hotels for weeks to get over someone. I had to remind myself of the debilitating nature of heartbreak, its sapping of colour from everyday things, its dulling. Most likely, the brilliant blue of the Atlantic seemed pale to Lea in her post-love blues. It’s unfair to not extend the same level of human compassion to everyone (including the rich) but I think it does happen sometimes.

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Movies often speed up the pace of books. In one of the essays in Art Objects, Jeanette Winterson talks about how each book has its own pace and good reading means finding the pace of a book and settling into it. Because pace is integral to any text, its deeply unsettling when it’s manipulated too much for adaptation. I think that’s why the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice was one of the more satisfying ones because at least they gave the story enough time. Also Jane Eyre, which I watched twice for its gothic mood and for Timothy Dalton as Rochester.

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Speaking of hot men, have you seen Captain Kirk make beat poetry of Palin’s speech? Some of my happiest memories of childhood include ‘Captain Curd’ as I inexplicably called him. I was always torn about who I wanted to grow up and marry more: him or Mr Spock. Twenty years and the Star Trek movie later, I’ve decided on Spock but it was real close.

…I’ve changed back to the camels which is cheery (I think) and plan to deal only in happy stuff for a while. Wait, that might mean I have nothing to write about. But we shall take that risk.

Next month I leave for Canterbury where for three months I will be reading, writing, walking about and trying to keep my toes unfrozen. Of course, I’m very excited about all this. Most of all, about the mountains of free time to do nothing but stare at my blank screen and will poetry to come. More seriously, I’m looking forward to traveling England and attending poetry readings and performances in London.

I also seem to have developed an irrational fear of not getting enough spicy-tangy food to eat in those three months. Which would explain why I’ve been hastily eating every kind of chaat, thali, curry, tandoori and biriyani that I can lay my hands on. Maybe I fancy I’m a camel. By the time I get there, I’m going to be a blimp.

Besides eating, I’m looking for a coat and boots to fight the winter there. This means that I have to spend a lot of time trying to get inside shops. Sometimes, I manage this. But often I do not, because of sheer lack of stamina and will power. On Sunday, we drove down Commercial Street and the entire city was doing their Christmas shopping. A sea of people rustling packets with that curiously determined look that shoppers acquire — beady eyes, sweat on the upper lip, steely jaw. We drove down the street in awe. He cursed the shops, the people, the traffic. I slumped in my seat as if I was being led to the torture chamber. Predictably, we didn’t find parking, heaved a sigh of relief and quickly left to get a drink instead.

I decided to go back on a weekday morning, and am now convinced that this is the only way to do it without getting stampeded. People who have to go to offices will have to take the morning off, but what’s half a day’s pay for health, sanity — and who knows — life? Of course, if everyone does this, then Monday mornings will be as bad as weekends. So on second thoughts, strike that suggestion.

Anyway, I did some shopping that I liked. Goobe’s Book Republic on Church Street has expanded their collection and I bought two poetry books: Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf and Margaret Atwood’s Selected Poems II. Quite pleased. For the uninitiated, Goobe is a bookshop and a library so you can rent or buy, or first rent and then buy if you like the book. I think it’s totally cool.

The year end is full of ‘best of’ and Rob Mackenzie’s holding a poll over at Magma Poetry on what was the best poetry collection of 2009. Of course, most (none?) of these books are available here but I like to look at the lists so that when I buy online, it’s easier to choose what to go broke on. The usual votes for Alice Oswald and Don Paterson but another name that cropped up quite often is Orphaned Latitudes by Gerard Rudolf.

Lastly, I’m not very fond of having to choose what I liked best in a year mainly because I tend to like too many different things at the same time but here are the poetry books I bought / got in 2009 roughly in order of acquisition (not all of them were published this year):

1. Bearings by Karthika Nair
2. Boki by Nitoo Das
3. Night River by Keki N. Daruwalla
4. Nights and Days by James Merill
5. Isla Negra by Pablo Neruda
6. Human Dark with Sugar by Brenda O’ Shaughnessy
7. View From An Escalator by Liesl Jobson
8. Bantu Ghost by Lesego Rampolokeng
9. Poems by Mongane Wally Serote
10. The Poet Lied by Odia Ofeimun
11. The Boiling Caracas by Odia Ofeimun
12. Glumlazi by Pravasan Pillay
13. Romancing the Dead by Gary Cummiskey
14. Beowulf by Seamus Heaney
15. Selected Poems II by Margaret Atwood

Hari Batti’s talking about Bhopal all week at his Green Light Dhaba, a place I’ve wanted to give a shout-out to in any case.

Suketu Mehta’s piece in NY Times. Very well-written and quite unflinching.

Imagine if an Indian chief executive had jumped bail for causing an industrial disaster that killed tens of thousands of Americans. What are the chances he’d be sunning himself in Goa?

Here’s where you can donate money for victims: bhopal.org.

And my piece at Guardian Cif. I don’t know why they removed the link to the site from the bottom where I had put it. Must be some policy thing. But anyway, take a look at the comments section where someone’s taking apart Union Carbide’s PR bullshit.

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!