II: Musing on Writing....

I don't have any personal problems with nice and happy but reclusive old men who write for themselves or even with crotchety old men who having become severely disillusioned with the world or simply disenchanted keep to themselves and write and keep writing. Salinger, in fact, had me quite infatuated at one point in time when I was in college and in fact for a whole year. I remember reading even a batty piece written by some young un’ who’d been living in with him for some time. The piece had come out in a Bengali magazine, and a good friend in college who knew I was at that point a little ga-ga over Salinger as did her mum, gave me the piece to read when I visited her place once. I never did much care for his The Catcher in the Rye. I never could figure out why it was such a cult classic. Yes, so he talked about alienation but there wasn’t much of a connection that I felt with the book or with Holden in his hunting cap…there was one bit that glared through right towards the end where I felt a bit – but it wasn’t anything to leap over the moon about. It was his short stories that had me hooked though, and his odd book called Raise High the Roofbeam Carpenters and Franny and Zooey. I know now why I found those two books so addictive when I did what with their mix of crazy but alarmingly intelligent and perceptive characters and with their curious eccentric humour. In Franny and Zooey, Zooey tells his sister – Jesus came and sat with me at the table and we had some cookies and milk and a pow-wow in the middle of the night…or words to that effect. Sometimes I wonder, says Zooey with a dreamy expression in his eyes, what with all these suburban houses that look identical….I could walk into one of them and fit right in...nobody would even notice that I wasn’t their son. But it’s the short stories that I will re-read some day again. The other books – probably not.

Come to think of it, I’m sure I may have turned out to be a crotchety old woman sitting in a locked room writing away and mumbling too to no good ends in some lifetime – maybe even in this one. This lifetime I was captivated to learn that Marquez hooked himself up to his typewriter night and day while his wife kept him supplied with cigarettes and paper and coffee and food…if I remember right this was when he was writing One Hundred Years of Solitude(although I like to think that it was when he was writing Love in the Time of Cholera). He wrote and he kept on writing, and didn’t stop until he finished his book. I am also amazed by paperback writers who write well and keep spinning out books by the dozens – people like John Grisham for instance and Jeffrey Archer. I was never a Stephen King reader – but he too seems to churn out books almost once a month. I remember reading somewhere of Enid Blyton saying that it took her some hours in a day to write one of those Famous Fives. A whole book written in some hours in a day, and books which had me completely engrossed as a child. P.G. Wodehouse is one who has me rolling around. How on earth did he use the same basic thread and write and keep writing? And books, which leave me in helpless fits (apart from this one time when a book of his came across as being alarmingly sombre…and it was Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera that got me laughing so much that I cried). Agatha Christie comes to mind too. I’m quite batty about both Wodehouse and her (that’s the connection). She seemed to be a little touched in the head, and in a very creative way and it didn’t take her too long either to spin out those wonderfully thrilling psychologically rooted murder mysteries which demonstrated her sharp and penetrating insight into human nature – in all its pettiness, insipidity, wickedness, banality, and cleverness. And she did believe in calling a spade a spade. (Reminds me suddenly of Dumbledore who doesn’t mind calling some people ‘innocent nincompoops’. Chortle-chortle.) She worked as a nurse during the war which gave her a lot of background info on the means of murder. In fact it was her books, which first got me interested in explicitly theorizing about human beings. Her autobiography, which I read just some years ago after trying over and over again while growing up, is a book worth reading. One of her books, which had a peek-a-boo sense of humour running through it – even though it was a murder mystery called The Seven Dials Mystery – she dedicated to ‘my friend, P.G. Wodehouse’. Now if that’s not lovely in all of its dimensions – I don’t know what is.

Hmm...who's next? James Herriot is another author who comes trotting over. A country vet and how he filled his books with love, joy, and humour inspite of all the hardship makes me think that he was blessed with some unusual grace, while I as a reader can experience the reflected rays of the same. I read him for the first time when I was in Class VII. This bit I do indeed remember. A friend had lent me the first book in the series, and then over the years I managed to gather and read his other books. The last writer who saunters in for this completely random list is Roald Dahl. I read him much later – never even having heard of him when I was in school apart from reading one story. I think I actually read the story in a Readers Digest that a friend had lent to me - only I didn't remember the author's name at that point. It was about the the leg of mutton. I enjoyed reading his autobiographies – Boy and Going Solo – both of which, came in one volume, which I found at the Calcutta Book Fair. One day in college street I chanced upon The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar. It cost some ten rupees, and that book has some of my favourite short stories. It has one which I love and remember. The one about the boy who could speak with and understand turtles….I didn’t read his children’s stories until I saw myself as middle-aged but I experienced a rare delight in reading Matilda as I did on reading a short story that another writer had written called A Little Bit of Sorcery. The same writer sent me a story called If Winter Comes – I’ve always called it Natalie - which is my favourite short story of all times. My second favourite is Asimov’s The Last Question. There are other short stories which are floating around - The Teacher, Teddy, So much unfairness in things, Old Love, P(n) uimacha, Chuti, Moru O Sangha, Phutki, and a haunting and somewhat frightening story written by a teen in The Telegraph from many years ago. I remember the story quite clearly but remember neither the writer’s name nor the title of the story. This lifetime I have also wondered how a writer can write on topics as varied as imaginary friends, fantasy, love, baby elephants, civilization, time, nature, beauty, poetry, and The Buddha's word, and ....Hmm.

There are some people who annoy me and irritate me and there are people whom I find silly and superficial. These are the ones who do get their work published, win awards and lots of money, and then claim that they've never written for anyone other than themselves. Right. Then why did you get anything published, or is that being intrusive? Just sit and write. If one really does write for one's own self and for nobody else in the world – then that’s what one should be doing. They even say that they never read their own writing for pleasure, and that they have never loved anything more than to “sit quietly in a room….imagining things”. 'Imagining, what' - I want to ask. And the icing on the cake has to be that the writer didn’t even know that she happened to be a contender for a major award. I am forced to say, “give me a break.” It doesn’t matter how many awards or how famous such a person becomes. I cannot and will not admire such people. The same writers “cringe at the thought” of reading parts from their book in a book gathering because they like their privacy, and yet with every book they have a larger and larger photo of themselves in striking poses. I don’t for one instant disbelieve the fact that some authors are genuinely shy and reticent and quiet people who both love writing and also like communicating with people and are both modest and yet happy with their work, and make it quite clear that they like their own space. I remember watching and hearing Vikram Seth in an interview from many years ago – and he came across as a very gentle, articulate, honest, witty, clever and likeable gentleman…..but people who claim to be shy and reticent yet have these huge spreads of themselves – I cannot help but raise my eyebrows…

What delights me is Asimov writing, "I'm one of those authors who a) likes his own books and b) has no qualms about saying so."

What enchants me as a reader and makes me ponder is when a writer writes, "I write because I want to communicate, and I want to draw like-minded people close to me, and I love to know, again and again, that there are many like-minded people in the world."

So much for my musings....

I: Musing on writing and such matters....

This had started out many weeks ago as a mini-comment for a blog on the right...but I started messing with it and it kept growing and I kept writing. I wonder what I would have done with it had there been no blog...

At one point in time I was absolutely sure I was going to be a writer by profession. Now I know that won’t happen. Not only did I not have the required gumption, which would have been one thing, but I sorely lack(ed) the imagination and skill. And then when I discipline myself I realise that there are holes in the way I imagine things, and there isn’t much of a fertile, brewing imagination - no paths, forking or otherwise - with which I can fill in the gaps. I think it’s what Arthur Koestler pointed out in his The Ghost in the Machine (a book recommended to me in the first year I was here by the only mentor-friend I've ever had). The ‘things I see’ seem to be one whole fabric but then when I sit to put them down there are holes and I don’t know how to fill them. I know I can string words together - yet there is more to writing than stringing words. I know I can describe things but there is more to writing than mere description. Sure, I sometimes have grand ideas/images – but I concur with Asimov and with all other intelligent people who think the same way. It’s the writing that is the real thing – the ideas, well frankly – everyone has ideas. Asimov narrates that a boy once sent him an idea for a story and told Asimov that he wanted half of the royalties once Asimov published the story/novel. Asimov shot out a reply – I’ll give you fifty ideas. Write out the stories and keep the royalties.

I remember when I was in college there was Pakshi Vasudevan who used to write a column for The Telegraph. Little snippets of daily life. Not outstanding but sometimes quirky and sometimes amusing, often times thoughtful and observant, and sometimes uninteresting. I wonder whether I’d like re-reading the columns if I could find them now or whether it was just a phase. I think I would have been able to handle writing a column of that sort. Nothing too strenuous. Nothing too jarring. Just pleasant writing. How pleasant....?

A bird hopping by. An abandoned cat who is dying, but loves being near human beings. A stray cat, with one bad eye, who doesn't trust humans but has befriended the neighbour's black and white tabby. Two cats sleeping in one basket. A giant spruce that is supposed to be about 50 feet or even 70 feet tall but is less than a foot and seems to be growing by the millimetre every year since I've seen it, and how people in the neighbourhood fear that it's never really grown much in all the time that they have seen it. A creek with frozen water. Trees with icicles all over, which make everything around look like a scene from a fairy-tale with no fairies. Grey skies and a faint lemon yellow sun, a sweeping snowstorm, a remembered story, and a walk through the town and over the bridge with the river below, which is filled with happy ducks and flapping ducklings, missing people so far away.....

The homeless man near campus who talks with himself, and whom I've seen every year for every year that I've been in this town. The girl who looked like an 11 year-old who talked with me breathlessly one evening saying that she had run away from a foster home and that she wasn't going back and that they didn't want her back. The boy who had leapt from the 10th floor of a dorm room, and whose body was found half-hanging out from a garbage dumpster. A clever student who died in a car-crash just some hours after he had sent an e-mail with a question about an assignment....

What does it mean to know something? At how many levels can knowing happen? What happens inside and then that which happens again? How does one know that knowing can be trusted or believed? What is knowledge, wisdom, or awareness? Where does conscious awareness come from? What's truth? What's the meaning of life? Who brings/gives meaning? Is it all a mistake? Some kind of a terrible game? Can unkindness be done away with? Can fear really be banished? Where really is God? Whose God? What is life without love? What is anything without love?....

Anything that requires thought I don’t seem to want to write about any more. I won’t go so far as to say that I don’t think about other things – but why I won’t write about them is something I never can quite understand. Is it because I don't really have any thoughts? That I don't even know what questions to ask. Or is it because that real writing takes a lot of concerted effort and determination, and most of all it requires a well-ordered mind so that one knows what one wants to or desires to write about and writes exactly that. I guess the last one is useful while facing lots of things in life, and as Dumbledore pointed out, and beyond.

I don’t remember exactly when I read Fulghum’s classic – All I need to know I learned in Kindergarten. Was it in school? In high-school? It was sometime then. I don’t remember very clearly but I remember the friend who told me to read the book knowing that I’d love it. And I still do. I remember the friend and I still love the book. I would have been happy writing one ‘something of that sort’. I’d have felt quite smug too – knowing that I had made my contribution to the world in some way and for making the money – and I know exactly what I’d do with the money. Chickens and eggs.

I read The Little Prince on Saturday for what has to be the hundred and seventh time – and I know for sure that I would never be able to write something as simple, as magical, as imaginative, as real, and as bizarre as that. It takes a different mind to spin a story of that kind…

When I read Ursula LeGuin’s The Wizard of Earthsea (because a friend had been pestering me to read it for months) some days before I turned 30, I experienced a similar feeling. She has spun a world with characters that is simultaneously unreal and real - and the manner in which she lays out her world and presents her characters as they grow makes me feel as though she has lived in the minds of these characters and in that world – it is a world that I carry around with me. Ged will be with me. And while it is a series written for young adults – she doesn’t seem to think that everything needs to end on a perfect note or at a point where everything is saved with The Chariots of Fire music playing in the background. It is a muted series where something terribly important, the most important I would say, unfolds and comes through in a subtle and almost ‘always known’ manner apart from all the adventure and the horror. Yet other things – some broken things, which do pain one, are never repaired. It’s a series that I would have loved if I’d read it in school but would have also known that imagining a world and its people in the way LeGuin does was beyond my ken. That now is imagination – yet I’ve never heard her thump any drums about it….

I write I now know because I have to. But I write only the minimum – the bits that I must. The rest stays inside my head mostly rolling around and getting mixed up with other things and sometimes when it reads something it recognises – it does some head-nodding and head-shaking, and then it goes back to what it was doing – rolling around. The bits that are written are written because otherwise I get crotchety. The bits written are something like coffee, cigarettes, and bread, and communicating with some real human beings, and the friend in my head…

I like knowing that some person somewhere likes what I write…and as self-centred as it may sound – I like re-reading some of what I write. I even like re-reading some bits that nobody else happens to like. I don’t like re-reading my gushy mails or gushing diary entries, which embarrass me to no end when I chance upon them later (and I have the unfortunate habit of gushing) and I dislike my academic writing, which never sounds smooth or informed enough or remotely interesting and sounds somewhat, excuse me, constipated. I don't think I write enough to like or dislike what I write - but still. Hmm.

Two blonde women, a little boy, and a '?'

Something happened after 10 years yester'. Not the first bit.

Armed with reading and writing stuff, I went over to to a coffee-shop, which I used to visit for long hours during the very first year that I was here. I got myself a cup of coffee and settled down comfortably on a nice long couch made for five people, took out my stuff and started making notes in my head and wrote down almost all of them in my notebook, having a nice quiet and almost splendid time, which was broken every now and again by the very loud voice of a woman with an interesting accent and her sometimes loud hoots of laughter. She had curly blond hair, was wearing some bright make-up, and was slightly on the heavier side although she carried herself with a confident swagger. She was sort of gently flirting with her ex-students, treating them like her willing slaves, and sharing stories from her love life in an unnecessarily loud way. Sadly enough, deaf as I am, I couldn't pick up any interesting bits - and the harder I try to hear, the less I can - and so I just kept hearing her rather raucous voice with some clear words in between. I wouldn't have minded at all of course if I'd taken a liking for the woman but there was something about her manner and demeanour that I simply didn't like. She wasn't wholly unpleasant but I've known people of the same sort. After a while I went out for a smoke and then visited the restroom. When I was washing my hands, a loud and importunate knocking made me jump out of my skin. I always find it odd yelling 'Yes - who's there?' while inside a restroom (I don't need to know and I'm not letting you come in...so kindly wait), and I didn't want to grunt so I pulled out a paper towel to wipe my hands when I saw and heard the door handle being furiously manhandled almost as if someone were trying to break through the door.

I flung the door open, and a bespectacled woman of indeterminate age with a bright shock of blond hair looked at me, and with a fuzzled, frightened, shocked and somewhat righteous glare in my direction, she spluttered "...but...but..this is the women's...." I peered at her and stared at her with a stare (I actually could stare down at her for she was a rarity. Someone shorter than I happen to be). Her voice petered off. "I...I...knocked twice....there was no-no answer. Nobody said anything....So I tried the door-handle." She still stared at me not able to make out any longer 'what' I was. I gave her yet another 'look', swished my skirts and thumped off in my boots without a word.

I always got the 'looks' while in Calcutta - on the buses and on the metro - but I'd never before been mistaken for a member of the opposite sex while dressed in a printed blue skirt, an obviously female cardigan, and a bright blue scarf. Maybe she missed the billowing skirt or maybe she thought I was a cross-dresser. I don't know.

*******

In summer something completely different happened. One of those things that I'll remember with fondness. There was this charming little brown-haired, thin, bespectacled boy of 7 who had come for a barbeque hosted by our neighbour. Guha and I had gone outside for a smoke after almost everyone had left. I had earlier noticed that the little boy had been the only one who had been glancing at me with enormous curiosity and bright eyes, and I knew he would say something. Sure enough he came over to me and with a disarming frankness, asked, "How old are you?" I grinned and said, " I'm 679 years old." He fidgeted and mumbled and hanging from the stair railings, said "Nu-oh." "Really." I said. "What's your name?" he asked me. I told him, and he repeated it after me. I asked him his name and he answered. Then, a little more urgently, he demanded, "How old are you?" I grinned and said, "Okay...okay I'm 98." Guha ventured in on our conversation, when the little boy asked him, "How old are you?" Guha asked him, "...and how old are you?" "I'm 7", said he. "I'm 6", said Guha. "No, you're not. You look old." The little boy turned around and asked Guha, "How old is he?" Guha looked at him and then back at me, and said, "Oh, she's a 1000 years old at least." The young un pointing at me furiously said, "She? She? No, him. She's he. Not she." I looked at him with a huge grin, and said, "No, I'm a she. Really. I'm a girl." He looked at me and said, "No, you're not. You're a boy..." With the grin now threatening to split my face into two, I managed to say, "No, really I'm a girl, and I'm 33 years old." The boy looked at me, and with a terribly disappointed air, that made me want to give him a hug, he turned his back to us. His mum or dad called out to him at that point. He looked back at me and said, "Got to go. Bye..." "Bye Daniel, and take care..." "Grunt" came a reply.

Books are no fun....

Yesterday, while on the road, Guha, directed my attention to an advertisement on the back of a van. The van was a University store van, no less, which proudly flaunted the ad:

NO books. Only Fun Stuff.

To drill home the message - the word 'books' was framed within a red circle and had a black line running through it.