Love, longing and philanthropy in Parvati Sharma's Close to Home

[Did this review for The Sunday Guardian. When writing about film, I often – too often perhaps – bring up Manny Farber’s “termite art-elephant art” formulation. Well, here’s a novel that I thought might be classified as good termite art]
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Among the many carefully observed moments in Parvati Sharma’s novel Close to Home is one where the protagonist, a young woman named Mrinalini, is entertaining her maid’s little daughter Anjali with cartoon films. They are in Mrinalini’s room – her husband Siddhartha is also around – sitting together on the bed in front of the laptop, when the maid Beena comes in to check on the child. Mrinalini craned her neck to look up at Beena; mother and daughter had the same smile: willing to be pleased, then delighted. “See,” said Mrinalini, “it’s a cartoon. Sit?” She wasn’t sure where Beena would sit and counted on her declining the offer, which she did.

The notable things about this episode, and the larger scene it is situated in, include the suggestion that the class barrier separating the two sets of people in the room doesn’t quite apply to the little girl yet; Anjali, barely three and hence not a card-carrying citizen of one of the many countries adults create for themselves, can casually make the bed her own (though Siddhartha is a little concerned that she will get her heavily oiled hair on the pillows), but it would be an immediate, noticeable transgression if her mother were to sit on it. The scene also depicts the mixing and mashing of backgrounds and cultural reference points in a world where one can shift from watching kung-fu pandas (“too much in English” for this little girl) to watching an animated Ganesha (wherein an upper-middle-class woman might feel self-conscious when a servant’s child commands her to “do namoh” to the cartoon God) or listening to a bhajan about the infant Krishna. And there is the description “willing to be pleased, then delighted”, which lets us imagine Anjali and Beena, so happy to be in the unusual position of watching shiny images on a computer in this room – but also allows us to reflect that maybe this is just Mrinalini’s perspective, born of self-congratulation.

This slim, sharp book centres on a woman trying to fill a blank screen, at work and in life. As a writer, Mrinalini stresses over the empty word-files on her computer. As a person, she wants to prove – to herself and to others – that she cares, that she can make a difference, and perhaps that confronting discrimination in the real world is more meaningful than writing about it. But being well-off carries its own traps. Even with the best intentions, you may have to deal with the possibility that the poor aren’t just an amorphous mass of eyes brimming with tears of appreciation for the little things you do for them, the favours and kindnesses you dole out at your own convenience; they are just as complex as you are, they have their own capacities for resentment or pettiness, or for wanting more than you think they should be satisfied with. The ayah whose child you are self-consciously looking out for isn’t always going to be the grateful supplicant, she might turn out to be a shrill-voiced bitch who rants about you behind your back, accusing you of using her daughter as a toy. And there could be some truth in that charge.

These are some of the things this book “is about”, but to list them like this makes Close to Home sound ponderous and doesn’t adequately convey what a fun, fast-paced read it is. (It took me just three or four hours to finish it.) The seven chapter heads are lines that come together wittily to make up a little poem – the sort where “Jangpura Ext” can be made to rhyme with “vexed” – and the main narrative has its own rhythm and flow. It begins with a chapter set before Mrinalini is married – she is smoking a joint with her roommate Jahanara, who confesses her love for her. Here as elsewhere, Sharma uses long sentences with unfussy, elegant flair. (Mrinalini was so obviously delighted by this – the dotcom, though unstinting by way of motivational talk and pizza lunches, offered little real excitement, and Siddhartha only called on Sundays – and so eager with her questions and generous in her felicitations, that Jahanara, who had tensed after uttering the words I think I’m gay, had uncoiled and unfurled and unthinkingly discovered, in the time it took them to roll another, that she only ever wanted to tell Mrinalini all her secrets and fears, and the strength of her feeling being what it was, it must be, it had to be, reciprocated.) There is an eye for detail, for pithy observations about behaviour and body language – whether in a description of a character laughing “from fear and happiness”, or a long, seemingly indolent chat between two people where layers of desire, insecurity and awkwardness are revealed. (Mrinalini indulges Jahanara a little, they banter and speculate about a fantasy future together, it seems like harmless fun but the frothy surface is misleading, and it all ends with Jahanara accusing her friend of being insensitive. This is the set-up for much of what follows.)

Though an easy read, Close to Home is in some ways a hard-to-classify book, and this is true of its characters as well – which is probably part of the point. Mrinalini and Sidhartha are well-meaning people, potentially non-conformist in some ways (he gives up a job in banking – though shortly afterwards he lets his father settle him in a government job), but there is something synthetic about their conversations, the hip self-awareness mixed with naiveté. They are so lovey-dovey, so much in tune all the time, articulating their thoughts so clearly even when they disagree – and you just know they will have fantastic make-up sex (“I’ll make your world spin, baby”) just a few hours after a nasty, crippling fight – that I found them a bit annoying. But it would be too easy to say this book invites us to judge them wholesale, even though some passages seem to play out that way. One subplot has their tenant Brajeshwar, also an author, writing an “ethnographic memoir” in which he casts them as a bubble-gum couple who have superficial conversations about important things, and even patronisingly gives them the names of the lead characters in Dilwale Dulhaniya le Jaayenge. There is some truth in this description, but counter-perspectives are immediately presented too, and we get to see the gaps in Brajeshwar’s own understanding (and later, his vulnerabilities as well).

All of which means that this story about the troubled relationships between the advantaged and the disadvantaged, and how philanthropy is so often about the giver rather than the beneficiary, should cut close to the bone for any privileged reader (and by “privileged” I mean anyone who has the means and ability to read this book in the first place) – even someone whose first instinct may be to see Mrinalini as a shallow dilettante. Possibly she is, but then possibly the best of us are too, forever struggling with the question that makes up the final chapter head: “Do you choose good or bad, or merely all right?"

Ghosts of the old rich

[Never been too happy writing for “special” issues on short notice. It can be taxing to be told a day in advance that the paper is doing a “Billionaire’s Club” special this weekend, so could your column be on films about rich people – especially when I had already done this piece for the last such issue less than a year ago. But well, I complied. As long as one can complain a little afterwards]

The dominant image of Luchino Visconti’s 1963 film The Leopard – set during the Italian Risorgimento, when aristocrats began to be supplanted by the rising middle classes – is that of the old prince of Salina (Burt Lancaster in a super performance) wandering about his palace, contemplating the end of a world he once bestrode like a colossus. Satyajit Ray’s Jalsaghar, about a music-loving zamindar living his last days alone in a mansion, has even bleaker views of fading grandeur – a spider scuttling across a large portrait of royalty, a disused chandelier collecting cobwebs and dust. More recently, in Vikramaditya Motwane’s lush Lootera, set in the post-Independence years, another old zamindar tries to maintain his composure and dignity as the government reclaims treasures bequeathed to his ancestors by the East India Company 200 years earlier.

These are all gorgeous-looking films about once-rich people in the process of losing their privileges, being swept away in the face of a more egalitarian, less genteel world. In principle, the change depicted in these movies is a welcome one for anyone with liberal sensibilities – it symbolises the coming of equal opportunity, democracy, even soft socialism. One might ask then: how do these films succeed in evoking a quiet, melancholic sympathy for the fall of billionaires?

One answer is that human responses to such things are complex; regardless of one’s ideological position, it is possible to feel a small aesthetic pang about the withering away of grand havelis and the dispersing of valuables that seemed to belong together in a special treasure room. More important, these films are ultimately about people whom it is possible to relate to as individuals. The landlords and royals shown here may have benefitted from excessive privilege throughout their lives, but they also have admirable human qualities, such as a genuine love for music and the other arts, and we are privy to their finer emotions. And they were, after all, to the manor born. Having only ever known one way of life, they are now – at an advanced, vulnerable age – seeing that way of life slipping away. Even with the most meritocratic worldview, one can still feel for their private tragedies. Underlying this is the bitter pill of the knowledge that the beneficiaries of the new order – the people who deserve their place in the sun – can become just as corrupt and exploitative down the line; that change doesn’t mean a final victory of good over evil, and obscenely affluent people will always be around anyway.

Some films about the old rich and the nouveau riche uneasily circling each other are also doomed love stories, which adds to their human appeal – while reminding us that denizens of an old world can become like ghosts when the new world arrives. Lootera has a great shot of the disconsolate zamindar, shortly after he learns he has been “framed”, at the entrance of a tunnel dug by crooks who were posing as archaeologists – it is shorthand for a man in his grave, and it is the last time we see him in the film. Simultaneously his daughter is betrayed by a young man who is a symbol of modern times, and though the film does everything it can to convince us that they really do love each other, one constantly gets the sense that these two people don’t even exist in the same dimension – they come from such vastly different backgrounds, their destinies are so unlinked.

There is an even subtler relationship in Abrar Alvi’s Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam. The tragic protagonist Chhoti Bahu (Meena Kumari) – daughter-in-law of a zamindar family falling on bad times – forges an emotional bond with a lower-class man named Bhoothnath (Guru Dutt), but there is never any pretence that this relationship has a future, or that they can even acknowledge romantic feelings for each other. Chhoti Bahu eventually comes to a tragic end, but even when she and her haveli are “alive”, there is something distant and otherworldly about them – much like the prince of Salina in The Leopard watching the young people dance around him, or like the zamindar in Jalsaghar looking into an unpolished mirror with a puzzled expression, perhaps wondering if he had imagined the great days of his past.

["March 4th" does seem an inappropriate date for a post about people trapped in time. Anyway, here are two old posts on films about relics of the past trying to stay relevant: Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam and The Man who Shot Liberty Valance. And an extended piece on Lootera here]

Aspiration, then and now - from Naukri to Fukrey

[Did this column for Democratic World magazine]

The other day, I was watching the 1954 Bimal Roy film Naukri, with the young Kishore Kumar in an uncharacteristically solemn role as a job-seeking naujavaan named Ratan, who travels from his village to the big city (Calcutta) but encounters disappointment at nearly every turn. The film contains many plot elements we might think of as clichés of a cinematic past - the beloved sister suffering from TB, the widowed mother, the arrival of a letter bearing exam results, the long journey that begins with tearful farewells and a bullock-cart ride to the railway station. But these were understandable concerns of the “social” cinema of the post-Independence decade, when so many films were about young people from modest backgrounds entering a new world and trying to take the tide at its flood.

The main markers of that new world were a naukri or job (which often went to less deserving people with “connections”); a much-coveted makaan or house of one’s own (the first song in the film is “Chhota sa Ghar Hoga”, where Ratan dreams about having a small house under the clouds, with a golden throne for his mother); and the ladki, girlfriend or wife (often the girl in the window across the lane, essentially inaccessible until job and accommodation have both been secured). There was tremendous idealism and hope, which sometimes went sour and turned into equally strong cynicism.

Understandably, male bonding featured strongly in this universe too. In Calcutta, Ratan boards in the ominously named “bekaari block” in a small hotel, a space he shares with other unemployed men who have been here longer than he has. One lovely scene has him humming a song to himself about his joblessness, while writing a letter in his room; soon, heads pop up from behind the partition and the other boarders start singing – humorously but also poignantly – about their travails. One of them, played by the then-young character actor Iftekhar, warbles “Main collector na banu aur na banunga officer / Apna baabu hi bana lo mukhe, bekaar hoon main”. (“I couldn’t become a collector and won’t become an officer / At least give me a job as your assistant or baabu.”)

Watching that scene, I was reminded that more than 20 years later, the same Iftekhar played a man in a position of privilege in Deewaar: the rich businessman-cum-smuggler who gets his shoes polished by a little boy on the footpath, a scene that sets the stage for the classic Bachchan line “Main aaj bhi phenke huye paise nahin uthaata.” (“Even today, I don’t pick up money that has been tossed at me.”) In the fantasy world where movies can converse with each other across time, it is conceivable that the two men are the same person: that the frustrated youngster of Naukri found a way to operate outside the law until he achieved everything he couldn’t achieve honestly, eventually arriving at a position from where he could guide the next generation through equally dubious routes.

Social aspiration – the need to move up in the world, to bridge the divide between want and privilege – has always been an important theme in Indian films, and how could it not be, in a society where the gap between the advantaged and the disadvantaged is always so large. The theme has taken on various shades in very different types of cinema: from social realism of the Naukri kind to black comedy (as in Satyajit Ray’s Jana Aranya, about an innocent man drawn ever deeper into a vortex of amorality) to Angry Young Man dramas inspired by the mythological epics, and even comedies that conceal serious themes beneath a frothy exterior.

Given the changes in Indian society in the past two decades (especially after economic liberalisation) and the concurrent changes in our cinema, it is tempting to think that the world depicted 60 years ago in films like Naukri has faded. That is nonsense, of course. And even if mainstream Hindi films tend not to venture into villages these days, the basic emotions and internal struggles experienced by the characters in those stories are still very much in place.

For instance, one of our best films of the past decade, Dibakar Banerjee's Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!, was not about the village-city dichotomy – it was about a subtler divide within Delhi itself, what getting to wear fashionable clothes to an exclusive hotel or mall can mean to someone who grew up in a cramped house in a poor neighborhood. The narrative, about a West Delhi boy who grows up to become a master thief, understands the spiraling nature of class aspiration and upward mobility, and the tricks of survival in a dog-eat-dog world where the kindly, “God-fearing” family man who befriends you and encourages his little son to call you “maama” might have a dagger ready to plunge into your back.

Many old films like Guru Dutt’s Baazi and Raj Kapoor’s Awaara featured street naifs being led into an impossibly lavish world but (just about) retaining their personal integrity; not becoming “corrupted” by wealth. Some of this idealism has vanished in our own times, where films like Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! and Special 26 are founded on a more complex sense of social justice: in an inherently unfair world, they suggest, it is okay for the underprivileged person to reach out and grab what he can. But there are also some fine films about youngsters who choose to stay on the “right” path, or who momentarily get swayed into doing something underhanded but gather themselves just in time.

One of my favourite recent examples of a good-hearted, well-observed film about aspiration was Mrighdeep Singh Lamba's Fukrey, about four boys dreaming of a bright future. Here, the main goal is admission to a good, smart college, and given the premise Fukrey could so easily have been an Indian version of American horny-teen films from the 80s - a desi Porky's - but even when two of the boys talk about the hot girls they will find in college, the film isn't gratuitous about it: the scene is more about fearfully approaching a strange new world, wondering if they will gain acceptance (and it is reminiscent of a girl from a conservative background in Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! watching short-skirted college-goers with a mixture of envy and distaste). When these boys mispronounce words (“negotion” for “negotiation”) or say “voilin” when they mean “guitar”, or when one of them tries to be “cool” by pretending he knows what a French kiss is, the film isn’t mocking them: it invites us to see where they come from and where they want to be. When they are temporarily seduced by the dark side, getting a chance to peddle a drug that fetches an unimaginable Rs 3,000 per goli (“Mere maheene ka ration!”), we can see that this is potentially a magic pill, the panacea for all their problems – it allows us to empathise.

But throughout, we recognise their capacity for intelligence and decency too. Scenes like the one where the Sikh boy Lali prays in a gurudwara, asking for admission to college and even giving God a list of his specific requirements, may be played for humour (a little kid watching him cheekily says “Roll number bhi likhwa de!”), but they have a sense of character and circumstance built into them. Lali speaks in slang, wears torn jeans and a colourful T-shirt and is very evidently a teen of the new millennium, but at this moment he evokes the Ratan of Naukri, smiling and keeping his spirits high as he walks from one door to another, running his fingers over the “No Vacancy” signs.

[Extended posts on Naukri and Special 26 are here and here]

On the streets and in the workshops - Salaam Bombay!, 25 years later

[Salaam Bombay! is being rereleased by PVR Director’s Rare on the 22nd, in a fine restored print. I strongly recommend watching it on the big screen. Did this piece for Tehelka]

“I believe I may have been put on this earth to tell stories of living between worlds,” writes Mira Nair in her introduction to the soon-to-be-published book The Reluctant Fundamentalist: From Book to Film. It’s a theme that runs through her wide-ranging movie career, and it takes on a very large scale in her adaptation of Mohsin Hamid’s novel; The Reluctant Fundamentalist is about nothing less than the clash of civilisations, about the East-West conflict that hangs over the planet. But the canvas was smaller, more intimate – and no less powerful for it – in Nair’s first feature film Salaam Bombay!, which is being released this week in a re-mastered print to mark its 25th anniversary.

That movie’s version of “between worlds” is summed up in a quiet scene where the 12-year-old protagonist Krishna/Chaipau and his older, more experienced junkie friend Chillum sit talking together in a graveyard. (Coming as it does in a frequently Dickensian film, the scene might make you imagine a more genial version of Magwitch sharing a peace-pipe with a more confused version of Pip.) Living in the big city, they yearn for the pastoral life, for the cool air of the “muluk” that they left behind. Chaipau has at least a theoretical chance of returning to that world – the film centres on his efforts to earn the 500 rupees that will allow him to do this – but for Chillum, we will soon see, it is already too late.

A quarter-century after it was made, there are many ways to take stock of Nair’s extraordinary film. There is, of course, the saphead position – having little to do with meaningful criticism – that goes roughly like this: any depiction of our poor is inherently demeaning, or amounts to exoticising poverty for a western audience***. Salaam Bombay! was, to an extent, insulated from such charges because it had the stamp of government approval, being co-produced by the NFDC. But watch it and there is no doubting the seriousness of its intentions and the quality of its execution. Two decades before The White Tiger won the Man Booker and Slumdog Millionnaire got its grubby hands on all those Oscars, Nair’s film depicted the lives of Bombay’s street children with a pragmatic refusal to be either maudlin or voyeuristic. After all, one of her reference points was Bunuel’s Los Olvidados, a film that, as Andre Bazin put it, “did not refer to moral categories” or sentimentalise the poor.

Just as remarkable is Salaam Bombay!’s nearly seamless mixing of two disparate cinematic modes: this is a fiction narrative with scripted characters, but it also has elements of the Cinema Vérité in which Nair was trained in the US, including lengthy held shots where the camera is doing little more than observing life unfolding at its own pace. It was shot - on an unprecedented scale - on Bombay’s streets, in real train stations and real brothels, and hidden cameras were used for some scenes. The adult roles were played by professional actors such as Anita Kanwar, Nana Patekar and Raghuvir Yadav (magnificent as the snivelling, giggling Chillum, driven to animal-like whines and bursts of impotent rage as addiction corrodes him), but working alongside them were a group of wonderful non-professional child performers, and there is no telling the difference. Workshops were conducted to siphon out the children’s preconceived ideas of what “movie acting” should be; in other words, to get these real-life street kids to play versions of themselves, Nair had to make them unlearn the larger-than-life mannerisms they knew from watching commercial Hindi cinema. (This is a telling comment on the relationship between a society and its popular culture, also reflected in scenes like the one where a boy sings "Hawa Hawaii" as he pees on the tracks, or in the raunchy use of the lyrics "Chal chal dhakha maar" from the title track of Haathi Mere Saathi.) The final film is a testament to the effectiveness of those workshops, as well as a reminder that assiduous preparation can pave the way for on-set improvisation and the illusion of spontaneity – something that would also be seen in Nair’s Monsoon Wedding years later.

Handled with less care, some of Salaam Bombay!’s characters could have been hollow symbols (consider “Solah Saal”, the 16-year-old virgin from Nepal whose “seal” is valued at Rs 10,000 and who becomes the mute, uncomprehending catalyst for the viewer's understanding of the people around her) but Nair’s direction and Sooni Taraporevala's writing achieve a synthesis between sympathy and detachment. Sandi Sissel's cinematography creates numerous elegant frames without over-prettifying. And then there is the way in which L Subramaniam's beautiful violin-led score - a masterstroke by Nair that might have seemed an eccentric or "Western" decision on paper - embellishes, as opposed to thickly underlines, the story's dramatic moments.

With the passage of time, we can see that Salaam Bombay! helped open doors for a newer, grittier brand of Bombay filmmaking, beginning with the 1990s work of Ram Gopal Varma. It also led to the creation of the Salaam Baalak Trust, which has provided financial and emotional support to thousands of street children over the years. And so it is fitting that Penguin India has reprinted Nair’s 1989 book about the film’s genesis and legacy, a singular account of “private madness”, as she called it then (and her new Foreword to which mulls the question "Can art change the world?"). But there is no substitute for watching the film itself, especially on the big screen and in the re-mastered print. This is “pure cinema” while also being quasi-documentary, and it is as fresh today as when it was made.
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*** At Nair's Spring Fever session on Sunday, a member of the audience asked her that tired question "Why are filmmakers so obsessed with India’s poverty?" The man expressed his views genially and mentioned his admiration for Nair's work, but I was amused when he said that Monsoon Wedding was the only high-profile international film he could think of that presented a "positive" picture of India to the West. Now I absolutely love that film, but it's odd to think that a depiction of an upper-class family spending obscene quantities of money on an ostentatious wedding can be construed as an unqualifiedly positive representation of modern India, while a portrayal of street-children's lives should be seen as something to frown at.

Of snails and superhumans - Uday Prakash's tales of deprivation

[Did a version of this review for Mint Lounge]

With the surge in Indian English publishing and a concurrent increase in literature festivals with an Anglophone slant, it is no secret that writers who work in the other Indian languages have felt increasingly neglected and undervalued. A particularly sharp expression of this occurs in the story “Mangosil”, by the celebrated Hindi writer Uday Prakash. “When I tried explaining my troubles to Delhi’s influential writers and thinkers,” says the narrator, a possible stand-in for Prakash himself, “I felt as if I were a snail that had surfaced to the world above, telling the divine bipeds patting their fat bellies about his wild, weird, othercaste experiences from his home at the bottom of the sea. My language was incomprehensible. They viewed my utterances born of sorrow, vulnerability, and nerves with indifference, curiosity, wonder.”

The chilling sense one gets from this passage is of someone trapped in a hermetically sealed room, failing to be heard (much less understood), the echoes of his own cries bouncing off the walls. It is unsurprising then that Prakash’s collection The Walls of Delhi - three stories translated by Jason Grunebaum - contain powerful representations of other forms of marginalisation too. The world of this book is one of spectral tunnels in which the untold chronicles of the dispossessed lie hidden (“walk outside your home and take a good look at the little crowd that hangs out at the shop or stall or cart – and who knows? You might find where the tunnel comes out”) as well as hollow walls containing the dark secrets of privileged people.

Thus, in the title story, a poor man named Ramnivas finds seemingly limitless treasure in an improbable but oddly appropriate place: inside a wall of a south Delhi gym to which the children of the rich come to work off the weight they have accumulated from eating too much (even as Ramnivas mulls that one of his own children died after eating fish caught from the sewer). The stacks of currency notes change Ramnivas’s life – and a man who had looked like an emaciated version of the actor Jeetendra transforms into a “gregarious, colourful, radiant Govinda, always ready to flash a smile” – but soon his dream begins to unravel. In “Mohandas”, a lower-caste man discovers that his name and job have been stolen by an upper-caste loafer, and then comes upon what seems to be a village of doppelgangers, each usurping another’s rightful place in the world. (“Were all the people who had good jobs and held high positions and ran around in automobiles and caroused who they really claimed to be?” he wonders.) And in “Mangosil” a child’s head grows at an abnormal pace because it knows things other heads don’t know, or don’t want to know; the virus that causes this mysterious disease, we learn, is poverty.

These are angry, sarcastic stories, infused with the rage of someone who has seen far too much meaningless injustice to want to withhold judgements or trade in nuances. It is the rage that comes with seeing the cities of a half-developed country from the sky, as “incongruous tokens of priceless, shining marble stuck in the mire and mud”. Prakash’s writing is full of poetic imagery. “One more stomach had delivered itself to the house that morning,” it is said of a child’s birth in a poor family. Insects seem to recognise the cough of a dying man and arrive in droves as his phlegm hits the ground. When Mohandas wades into a river to pray, “tiny kothari fish swam to the surface and fought to nip at the salt from his teardrops”. And the narrator occasionally breaks the fourth wall by giving us parenthetical asides about politics or the economy, showing a sense of curiosity about the wider world and about the lives of distant figures like Bill Clinton, almost as if trying to convince himself that his derelict protagonists really do inhabit the same planet as the one on which these other, “important” things involving supra-humans are taking place. (One thinks again of the snail and the well-cushioned bipeds.)

Not having read these stories in the original Hindi, Grunebaum’s translation seemed serviceable to me, though there is the odd jarring note: an old man says “hey blindy” – an awkward, slangy rendering of “andhi” – to his wife, and some phrases – “Isn’t this peachy?” – feel culturally discordant. But Grunebaum clarifies that he wanted to make these stories accessible to a non-Indian readership, which is as well, for their content is unsettling to begin with; there are some obviously fabulist elements in them, especially in the story of the large-headed Suri. At the same time it is useful to remember how strange reality can be. In his Afterword, Grunebaum mentions a trip with Uday Prakash to Chhatisgarh, where they just happened to run into the “real Mohandas”, walking on the road, “looking just as haggard and resilient as described in the story”. They spoke for a bit, took some photos and then went their separate ways – “Mohandas” presumably to continue fighting his small battles against shadowy imposters, Grunebaum returning to translate stories about deprivation for a readership that can sympathise but perhaps not fully understand.

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[Also see: Jason Grunebaum speaks with Trisha Gupta about translation here]

Crorepatis, kal aur aaj

[From my Business Standard Weekend column – did this little theme-fitting piece to go with their “Billionaire’s Club” edition]

Old Hindi cinema had an impressive line-up of billionaires (but let’s adjust for inflation and allow them to be mere crorepatis). For the purposes of a short column, it is useful to divide them into two broad categories: the bad guys and the good guys. The former were the ones who eventually became the Bond-style villains of 1970s movies, living in dens with spiky walls, quicksand pits, dancing sylphs and floors that would part to reveal a shark tank into which an inefficient minion or the hero’s beleaguered father could be dipped. The other types of crorepatis were decent – or relatively decent – people. They wore their wealth lightly, called their grown-up daughters “baby” and were good to the less privileged in the indulgent way that people who have never known true hardship can afford to be. In Yash Chopra’s Waqt, Shashi Kapoor as the poor driver walks into a high-society party to ask his employer if he can use the car to take his mother to the hospital. The boss, played by Rehman, looks solicitous, says “haan, le jaao, le jaao” and gets back to his socialising. (And this despite the fact that he isn’t a good guy in the overall scheme of things. He has bigger fish to fry, but he can be nice at a micro-level.)

Some things were common to both sets of wealthy people: the mansions of the Good could be just as vulgarly opulent as the villains’ lairs (minus the shark tanks). In Manmohan Desai’s Parvarish, an underappreciated classic of commercial Hindi cinema, Kishan (Vinod Khanna) takes up smuggling in his off-hours. This was the get-rich-quick profession of the time, but what is perplexing is that he already lives (with his honest police-inspector dad) in an eye-poppingly fancy house. In a confrontation where the father pulls out his gun and shoots about randomly while the wayward son ducks behind a sofa, one worries more for the well-being of the velvety furniture than for any of the human characters.

In fact, there are hundreds of films where the decor interfered with the playing out of real emotion (not always to the movie’s detriment). Take the scene in the Kapoor family’s ego project about generational conflict, Kal, Aaj aur Kal, where Prithviraj Kapoor as the “yesterday” and Randhir Kapoor as the “tomorrow” have their big spat while Raj Kapoor watches despairingly. It’s a tragic moment in its conception, and various hyper-dramatic things are happening at the level of the music, the camerawork and the facial expressions, but who notices? You gape instead at the interior design – the enormous bifurcated staircase, the endless halls – and feel that it would be worth not getting along with anyone in your family if you could only live in a house like this.

It was surprising then that some of these films featured youngsters trying to break out of their stifling ancestral wealth. In Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s enjoyable but ideologically muddled Asli-Naqli, Dev Anand is a spoilt rich boy who sulks when his grandfather ticks him off, and then sets out to discover How the Other Half Lives. His adventures – which unfold in an idealised basti populated by poor people who are basically good-natured even when they are beating their wives – are shown as fun and games; there is no real sense of danger or sacrifice, no accrual of responsibility. The story amounts to an idealising of both rich and poor, with the suggestion that they are each more or less content in their respective places, and that they can role-play once in a while, when things get dull. (Role-playing would become an important theme in Mukherjee’s cinema, but this is a shallow manifestation of it.)

Amitabh Bachchan’s angry young Vijay would not have approved of such idealising. In the 1970s, Vijay became a symbol for the wronged man working his way up in the world by operating outside the law if necessary: his progression from footpath boy to millionaire is strikingly summed up in the shot where he looks up at a skyscraper his mother once toiled on, and which he has now bought for her. But such were the moral imperatives of this cinema that even while you sympathised with the character at an individual level, the film couldn’t let him go unpunished. The great conceit was that if you have to become a billionaire, do it the “honest” way or else.

Today things are more cynical and perhaps more pragmatic, with many recent films depicting a social landscape where everything is up for grabs – Special 26, for instance, ends with the conmen played by Akshay Kumar and Anupam Kher settling down in the Middle East, having got away with their heists, and the film encourages us to cheer for them. The message is clear: it is okay to be crooked if you do it with panache; the ends justify the means. “Be a billionaire. Accha hai.” The genteel villains of the 1970s might have found it a little distasteful.

Notes on Special 26

If you study its surface, Neeraj Pandey’s Special 26 seems like an urgent, busy film: there are abrupt cuts, split screens, swish pans and many tracking shots where the camera retreats in haste as groups of men stride purposefully towards it. Yet I thought it was oddly inert and slack in some ways, not as focussed as Pandey's debut A Wednesday, and a good half-hour longer than it needed to be. Some of this has to do with a larger cast of characters and increased deference to the commercial star system: for instance, the narrative shudders to a halt during a superfluous dance number at a wedding where Akshay Kumar gets to be the gyrating hero in a smart sherwani (here is an example of a sequence that is very energetic on its own terms, yet is slowing the film down). I don’t want to indulge in kneejerk criticism of Kumar’s casting, especially since he is good enough in this role – as Ajay, a conman who conducts fake CBI and income-tax raids along with three friends across the India of the late 1980s – but this may have been a tighter film if the lead character had been played by someone whose star persona and contract do not necessitate the inclusion of scenes where he walks towards the camera in slow motion, removing his glasses stylishly.

Even otherwise, Special 26 has a little too much exposition and some redundant sequences, such as a flashback that shows us fragments from a heist operation after we have already seen the whole thing earlier in the film. Or the late scene where Wasim (Manoj Bajpayee), a real CBI officer, comes to a realisation and showy camerawork is used to over-dramatise the moment to the point of tedium. (Having finally pieced together the details of a plot that had eluded him – which we knew about before he did – Wasim then relates the whole thing to a subordinate for good measure.) Even the idea of the nemesis, or of two strong characters pitting wits against each other – which is central to Pandey’s work so far – is overemphasised here. (Compare the delicate moment at the end of A Wednesday, where Anupam Kher’s police commissioner and Naseeruddin Shah’s aam aadmi meet very fleetingly, with the strained and self-conscious hotel-bar scene between Ajay and Wasim in this film.)


This is not to overlook the good things about the film, notable among which are its solid recreation of period detail (I think I can speak for my generation in lamenting that a movie set in 1987 can now officially be thought of as a “period film”, and that young viewers might turn wide-eyed at the sight of rotary-dial telephones and black-and-white TV). There are also fine performances from most of the leads, especially Bajpayee as the sharp, honest CBI man who is good at his job but also struggling with an inadequate salary (and with this whole tedious business of being contentedly middle-class: in one funny, telling scene, he deadpans “rishwat lena shuru kar doon, sir?” to his boss), and Jimmy Shergill who can imbue a small gesture – or a single word like “Janaab” – with significance. (Unfortunately the talented Divya Dutta is lost in a thankless, one-joke role.)

****

There has been a clear element of wish-fulfilment in both Pandey’s films so far. I remember A Wednesday drawing some flak on ideological grounds, for its apparent endorsement of the idea that it is okay for the Common Man to turn cold-bloodedly vigilante in special cases (such as when we conveniently know that undisputed criminals are about to slip through the legal system’s net). And it’s true that if you take the film at face value or as prescriptive, it can be seen as irresponsible, leading us down a very slippery moral slope. But what if one considers instead that fantasy – in many forms and degrees – is an important part of what makes life tolerable (at least for those of us who can make a basic distinction between the world as it is and as we would like it to be), and that for over a century movies have played the therapeutic function of letting people participate in pipe-dreams from a safe distance - whether it involves being able to eliminate Evil in one clean stroke or imagining, for a couple of hours in that dark hall, that the beautiful person on the screen belongs to us alone. A case can be made for viewing A Wednesday in those terms, rather than as a literal-minded call to anarchist justice. (I'm not saying that this is necessarily what Pandey intended, but based on a couple of his interviews when it came out, I got the impression that writing and making the film was a form of personal catharsis for him.)

In a similar way, it is possible to see Special 26 – for much of its duration – as a wish-fulfilling fantasy about “little people” forging their own path in an unjust, corrupt world. Having recently read Uday Prakash’s story “Mohandas”, in which a lower-caste man becomes a victim of identity theft and flounders while the upper-caste rogue who has stolen his name flourishes in a good job, I couldn’t help thinking that what Ajay and his gang do here – donning the identities of authority figures in order to loot corrupt people – is a sort of reversal of what happens in Prakash’s allegory. In other words the underprivileged are striking back, uncovering vast quantities of ill-gotten wealth hidden in a plush house (which, coincidentally, is similar to what happens in another Prakash story “The Walls of Delhi”). And the film does everything it can do to generate sympathy – or at least fondness – for the four conmen, all of whom are likable people in their own ways, and at least two of whom are leading hand-to-mouth lives.

But as it progresses, much of that sympathy is diluted. We see them robbing people who are not much better off than they are; what initially seemed like genuine attempts at character development soon make way for shortcuts and facile one-liners; by the time we learn that Ajay was a CBI aspirant who became bitter after failing the interview (and there is a picture-postcard, vaseline-coated shot of him sitting sadly in the rain), it’s hard to feel for the character unless you’re the most indiscriminating Akshay Kumar fan. And (Spoiler alert) I thought the final twist – where we learn that the foursome have perpetrated a double-con – was problematic in how it affects our attitude to the characters. Suddenly we have to start thinking of Ajay and cohorts as almost omniscient superheroes who will come out trumps no matter what, fashioning convoluted schemes for the thrill and challenge more than anything else; our view of the Anupam Kher character PK – who had latterly come across as a tired, nervous, scared old man on the horns of a personal dilemma – is especially altered; the film takes a right turn to become an Ocean’s Eleven-style movie where all that matters is getting the last laugh and coming out of a tricky situation without getting your hair mussed. I have nothing against that kind of heist film, but I got the impression early on that Special 26 was trying to be a more pointed social commentary with a feel for the complexities of the time and place it is set in. And given that assumption, it felt half-baked in the end.

An old woman and her dogs

Just to spread the word about one of the most amazing people I know: an old woman who lives in a small makeshift shanty next to the PVR Anupam complex in Saket (near the entrance leading to the main parking lot). Pratima Devi – called “Amma” by most of her acquaintances – has been looking after street dogs for years now, on her meagre earnings from collecting and selling reusable garbage. She feeds them, gets them sterilised through Friendicoes or other local organisations; dozens of them sleep huddled together in and around her little home – it’s a truly wondrous sight for anyone who knows how territorial street dogs are, and how aggressively they keep newcomers from encroaching on their spaces.

I’ve only actually known Pratima Devi for the past six months, though we have both been in Saket – living five minutes apart – since 1987. I was vaguely aware of her existence over the years: when passing her side of the PVR complex on winter nights, I would see a couple of charpoys with dogs on them, a bonfire burning nearby. Once or twice I saw her looking very dishevelled, yelling at someone in what seemed an ill-tempered way, and I may have formed the impression that she was a belligerent nutcase who communicated only with animals and didn’t like people.

There was a story with a very interior, contemplative tone that I read as a child in one of our Hindi textbooks – I forget the title, but the premise has stayed with me all these years, long after much of what I learnt in school has been forgotten. It was told in the voice of a privileged man who sees a poor person and wants to go across and talk – to try and understand something of this person’s life and circumstances – but finds an invisible force holding him back; some combination of self-consciousness, social conditioning and perhaps an internal prejudice that makes him believe meaningful communication with someone from such a different background is impossible.

Whatever the case, though I was intrigued by the “kutton waali amma” who was often spoken of in our colony, I didn’t make an effort to come close or get to know her. That changed last June, after Foxie went. Driven by an urge that overrode all our hesitations and procrastinations, we went across and said namaste to Pratima Devi, and were relieved to find that she was extremely warm and friendly, and most happy to talk – not just about the dogs but about her life, and ours.

As we spoke to her over the next few days, many little details emerged. She left her village in West Bengal’s Nandigram in the early 1980s, she told us, mainly to get away from her husband, a lout and wastrel. She once worked as an ayah for the family of the actor-model Rahul Dev (and is still in occasional touch with them). A tea-stall she ran in the spot where she currently lives was shut down by the MCD; later she set up a little temple against the wall near her shack – it has, in a way, legitimised her presence, made it more acceptable to the people around (including the many youngsters who park their bikes nearby and are unnerved by the dogs). One of her sons lives in Sangam Vihar, working as a mistri – she has the option of staying with him (I’ve met him, he seems a kindly, concerned chap), but she can’t leave her dogs, and besides one senses that self-sufficiency is important to her. She was awarded a Godfrey Phillips prize for “social courage” a few years ago and proudly shows photos from the ceremony to anyone who visits her. She has applied for an Aadhaar card but is puzzled by the complications of the procedure; a card was once despatched but never made it to her because she has no fixed address. (I’ve seen the application form – it simply says “Near Saket Shauchalay, PVR Complex”.) Many of the dogs have film-star names - Raj Kumar, Dharmendra - which they live up to with their strutting and preening.

Every week or so I go across and check on Pratima Devi, take some food, but hardly ever has she given the impression of being in need. When I show up and ask if I can get some bread and milk for the dogs from the nearby Mother Dairy, she nods with an indulgent little smile, as if she is doing me a favour (and of course, in a post-Foxie world, she is). Or if the evening’s ration has already arrived, she asks me to come after a day or two, or to call her beforehand to check. On one occasion my mother, cradling one of the new pups, remarked aloud that she felt like adopting this one. You’d think that Pratima Devi, given her hand-to-mouth situation, would be only too glad for people to take dogs off her hand, but she practically jumped up and said “Nahin nahin! Abhi yeh bahut chhoti hai – isse mere paas kuch din aur rehna do.” (“No, she’s too little now – let me look after her for a few more days.”)

But it isn’t my intention to paint a rosy picture of her life. One often hears clichés about the “warm smiles” of the poor – clichés built on the sentimentalising of poverty, on the self-serving myopia of the well-off person who chances to see poor people in their moments of relative comfort and tells himself “They have nothing, but look how happy they are.” I have felt strongly about such hypocrisy for a long time, so it came as a jolt to me one day when I realised I may have been adopting a similar attitude to Pratima Devi; taking for granted her apparently infinite capacity for cheerfulness and optimism.

It happened on a day I went to see her after more than a week. She was with a couple of her associates – a parking attendant and another garbage-collector – and looking more depressed and agitated than I had ever seen her. The previous few days had been particularly hard: she had been laid up with a bad fever and cold, had been unable to work or to go to INA market to buy meat for the dogs, and it happened to be one of those phases when hardly anyone had come across to see her or offer help - her son wasn’t in town either.

Moaning through a backache, describing how one of her pups (a tiny Dalmatian, abandoned by some heartless sub-human) had a festering wound and was being treated by a local doctor for an exorbitant Rs 100 a day, gentle Pratima Devi muttered and fumed, half to herself, half to us: she used maa-behen gaalis as she spoke of a man who had promised to help her secure an electricity connection through the MCD, but who had then made off with more than a thousand rupees. “Gareebon ka sab phaaydaa uthaate hain,” she wailed, her face showing no trace of its characteristic warmth and openness. She wondered aloud what would happen to her dogs after she passed on. (It’s a thought that worries everyone who knows her; though these are street dogs, they are more pampered and loved than many house pets. When she’s away even for an hour or two, they get restless and start chasing after passing autorickshaws to see if she has returned.)

This encounter was a bucket of cold water in my face. I have seen her many times since that day, and she has mostly been back to her upbeat self – but that one day, when the mask slipped, is not something to forget.

I didn’t intend this post as a call for aid, but Pratima Devi has had more bad days than good ones recently (being old and living on the street as the Delhi winter gets worse will do that), and she could always do with some help, even if she doesn’t ask for it. So do go across and see her if you are in Saket sometime, and if you like dogs. (I wouldn’t normally put in that second proviso – Pratima Devi is well worth meeting even if you aren’t an animal-lover – but one must be practical and spell out these things; if you get within 10 feet of her you’ll have to contend with a few dogs first growling softly and then, when they know you mean no harm, sniffing or nuzzling you.) Or if you’re interested in meeting her but would prefer a sort of “introduction”, send me an email and I’ll take you across.

P.S. must say this, though I wish I didn’t have to. It infuriates me that people sometimes come by in their cars and leave their animals with this poor old woman, treating her like a fully funded animal shelter – which she emphatically is not. (Not that registered animal shelters have it easy either.) Her heart is big enough for all these dogs (her son tells me she holds the compassionate but highly impractical view that she should get bitches spayed only after they have had one litter of pups), but it increases her burden enormously, as well as adding to her worries about the future. So please, DO NOT use her as a dumping ground for unwanted pets.

P.P.S. Here's a photo of Pratima Devi with two of her friends at an event held to mark Anti-Rabies Day; Abhilasha went with her.

Jack London and the people of the abyss

From the slimy sidewalk, they were picking up bits of orange peel, apple skin, and grape stems, and they were eating them. The pips of green gage plums they cracked between their teeth for the kernels inside. They picked up stray crumbs of bread the size of peas, apple cores so black and dirty one would not take them to be apple cores, and these things these two men took into their mouths, and chewed them, and swallowed them; and this, between six and seven o'clock in the evening of August 20, year of our Lord 1902, in the heart of the greatest, wealthiest, and most powerful empire the world has ever seen.

Jack London’s The People of the Abyss – an equal-parts wry and harrowing journalistic account of the time he spent living in the most poverty-stricken areas of London’s East End in 1902 – has been one of my favourite reads in the past few months. I’ve been meaning to write about it for a while but haven’t had the time, so I’m taking the lazier option of just pointing you to it. The full text of the book can be accessed here. (I have a hard-copy myself and prefer reading that way, but it’s always good to have the other option.) You’ll find most of London’s other writings on that site too.

Incidentally I first learnt about this book from a reference in the footnotes of Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s magnificent graphic novel From Hell (which is not just one of my favourite pieces of literature but – ponderous though this might sound – one of my most cherished works of art; a book I turn to again and again for affirmation of what the human mind can achieve, individually and in collaboration). Two short posts with artwork from From Hell (and links to Eddie Campbell’s blog) are here and here.

Also, here’s a post on Katherine Boo and her book about Mumbai’s Annawadi slum, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, which represented a journalistic project not too dissimilar to the one London had embarked on more than a century earlier.

Notes on A Separation

The Iranian film A Separation was one of the most widely acclaimed movies of the past year, but I went into it knowing very little other than that it was about a married couple on the verge of divorce because the wife wants a better life (outside Iran) for their young daughter while the husband needs to look after his Alzheimer’s-afflicted father. Based on this synopsis, I expected to see a nuanced story about people trying to balance their responsibilities, feelings and circumstances. And indeed, Asghar Farhadi’s film is all of this.

But it is also (and this I wasn’t expecting) something very much like a thriller, complete with tale-altering twists; a psychological detective story where revelations aren’t just frisson-generators but flow all too naturally from the characters’ personalities and situations. Emerging from the screening at the Devi Art Foundation in Gurgaon, I found myself in a variant of the discussions one has after watching a film from the mystery genre, such as Kahaani or The Usual Suspects. ”Remember that line where she says...?” “What did that glance really mean?” “That exchange was so unobtrusive, one barely registered it at the time.” “I need to see THAT scene again.”

Two levels of suspense – inseparable from each other – exist in A Separation, and they both circle around the film’s central incident: a brief scuffle between the husband, Nader, and the lower-class woman, Razieh, whom he has employed to look after his father while he is away at work. There is, first, the mode of the conventional “whodunit” (or “what happened”) and though it feels glib to discuss a slice-of-life drama in such terms, the film itself makes nods to such suspense – as in a scene where Nader retraces the incident (which has got him into legal trouble) for the police.

But the other form of suspense – one that persists through the film – is at the level of character, where the concealment of seemingly minor information gives us a different perspective on a person's behaviour. Layers are gradually peeled away and we see the full potential (for goodness, anger, deception, understanding) of all the protagonists: Nader and (to a lesser extent) his wife Simin; their intelligent daughter Termeh; Razieh and her hot-headed husband Houjat.

Here's just one example of this understated suspense and the emotional complexity in this film’s best scenes. (Minor spoiler alert) Razieh has accused Nader of causing her miscarriage, which is a very serious matter because the foetus was over four months old and therefore technically a human being as per the local law. Much hinges on whether he knew she was pregnant when he gave her a slight push to get her out of his house.

At one point Nader confesses to his daughter that he had known Razieh was pregnant, but it had slipped his mind at that specific moment. (“But you know how the law is – they expect everything to be in black or white. According to them, either I knew or I didn’t know.”) This is borne out cinematically: the early scene where Nader (and by extension the viewer) overhears a conversation mentioning the pregnancy is shot in such a way that the information is presented almost subliminally, with other things simultaneously occupying his (and our) attention – it isn’t stressed at all. At the time of the altercation, therefore, the viewer is in the same position as Nader: so focused on the high emotion of the moment (he has just discovered that Razieh left his father alone at home, almost causing his death) that he isn’t thinking about Razieh’s condition. In other words, he knew and he didn’t know; it’s a difficult idea to express in a film, but this one manages it.

****

After watching A Separation I read two or three reviews by Western critics, and thought it interesting that they discussed it mainly in terms of the broad cultural differences between Iran and the West (therefore clubbing all the characters in this film together) while glossing over the schism between the two sets of lifestyles depicted within the story: the relatively well-off, cosmopolitan life of Nader’s family as opposed to the penury of Razieh and Houjat. But this is another important kind of separation, one that is based on privilege and education – it’s a separation between those who can (just about) afford to employ domestic staff and those who are forced to take up such positions to make ends meet (even if it means that a woman from a tradition-bound family must hide the fact that she is working). It’s a separation between people who are still rigidly devout (to the extent of staking their souls on the Holy Book) and those who have moved away from (or adopted a more relaxed attitude to) religion. And this separation has a distinct bearing on the plot arc, the actions of these people and their attitudes to one another.

The tension of the class divide is manifest in offhand little exchanges. “You think all we do is beat our wives all day” Houjat shouts at Nader in the judge’s chambers; in another context, he exclaims “These people don’t even believe in God”, to which Nader retorts sarcastically, “Yes, God is only for you people.” At one point the conservative Razieh has to take religious advice about whether she is allowed to change the old man’s trousers when he has soiled himself. And Nader tells the judge that he couldn’t make out Razieh was pregnant because “she is wearing a chador all the time”. Over the course of the story, these separations become so overwhelming that the characters can barely see or hear each other; cultural differences, secrets and misunderstandings accumulate to create a snowball effect; much is revealed about individual character and, by extension, about the workings of a society.

I thought the growing complexity of the film’s structure (wherein we come to empathise with different people in turn) was reflected in the difference between its opening and closing shots, both of which are lengthy takes. The opening shot is relatively straightforward, with the camera adopting the perspective of the judge who listens to Nader and Simin make their case for a divorce. As viewers we are put in his position, asked to listen to these two people (whom we barely know at this stage) and form opinions about them. But in the long closing shot, which takes place as the end-credits roll and Nader and Simin wait outside the judge’s room (with other people, all of whom no doubt have their own dramatic stories, moving about in the corridor near them), the camera’s eye has become “objective”. We are no longer expected to judge (and by this point, the immense difficulty of forming judgements has been made obvious). We simply watch and wait for further developments.

Annawadi, "by heart": on Katherine Boo and Behind the Beautiful Forevers

[Did a version of this review-cum-interview for The Sunday Guardian]

One is almost conditioned these days, while reading a book (or watching a film) about the Indian poor, to expect clichés, generalisations, facile commentaries and quick-fix solutions. And so, around 20 pages into Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers – a non-fiction chronicle set in Mumbai’s Annawadi slum – I felt a very particular sort of trepidation. It’s what happens when you’re starting to be seriously invigorated by a book but also thinking, “This is too good to last.”

Surely, at some point, these carefully observed vignettes would devolve into a pat story about a kid pulling himself into a better world through pluck and initiative? Or perhaps there would be some gratuitous sentimentalising – a banality about how happy these children were, how their smiles were warmer than the smiles of more fortunate people elsewhere?

It doesn’t happen (and to be honest, it wasn’t until the last page that I sighed with relief). This intimate, novelistic work manages not to strike that fatal wrong note, and it achieves this while telling the interlinked stories of many different people, all of whom “know” that there are three main ways out of poverty: entrepreneurial initiative; politics and corruption (the two things being inseparable); and education. The first is the path chosen by a teenaged garbage trader named Abdul, the eldest son of the large (and, by Annawadi standards, well-off) Hussain family. On a different route is the 39-year-old Asha, who is in a power struggle to become the unofficial slum boss (“chosen by local politicians and police officers to run the settlement according to the authorities’ interests”). Her college-going daughter Manju “by-hearts” her way through mystifying texts by Virginia Woolf and Congreve, but conscientiously teaches other children in her hut during her spare time. Meanwhile a resourceful 12-year-old named Sunil reckons that he must become a better scavenger if he wants to “jump-start the system”.

Photo: MANOJ PATIL

In various ways, the lives of these residents of the “undercity” (a phrase that reminded me of Gorky’s The Lower Depths and one of the many films based on it, Chetan Anand’s 1946 Neecha Nagar) intersect with the privileged world outside. The threat of demolition hangs over the slum and the future must be thought about, but there is also the matter of securing the here and now, seizing each moment as it presents itself. Thus, even as Asha’s son Rahul boasts to his friends about his temporary job at the Intercontinental Hotel (“we laid this thick white carpet – you stepped on it and sank down”), he is alert enough to spot – and make a beeline for – a plastic kite stuck in a nearby tree; he might be able to sell it for two rupees.

I didn’t much care for this book’s precious-sounding title when I first heard it, but it’s easier to appreciate when you know the context: a wall advertisement for stylish floor tiles that hides the slum from the view of cars heading to the nearby international airport. There are only a couple of fleeting references to this artificial boundary – Boo doesn’t turn it into a heavy-handed symbol. More importantly, she doesn’t just take us “behind” the Beautiful Forever sign (in which case we might still have had only a brief aerial view of Annawadi, a snapshot of poverty porn) – she takes us to ground level. It’s the perspective a movie buff might remember from the chase sequences in Black Friday and Slumdog Millionaire) – but this isn’t a short-lived pursuit, this is life unfolding at its own unhurried pace. And the triumph of this book is to catch the many complexities of the Annawadians in such a way that the most complacent reader can no longer hide behind comforting “us” vs “them” distinctions.

To achieve this, Boo – who is married to the writer-academic Sunil Khilnani – knew that she needed to make a very long-term commitment of time and energy. When I meet her, the first thing I learn is that she had all sorts of misgivings. “I feared being a laughing stock,” she says, “I was embarrassed to talk about it with other people because it felt like such a cliché: white woman in an Indian slum, hanging around sewage lakes.” And this coming from someone who has impeccable credentials in writing about underprivileged people: she won a Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for a Washington Post series about group homes for mentally disadvantaged people, and a National Magazine Award in 2003 for a New Yorker feature about “marriage classes” in a poor Oklahoma community. “As a journalist, you know there are some things you can do well,” she says, “I knew I wouldn’t be any good interviewing politicians, but here’s something I could put my heart into.”

Photo credit: JORDAN TIERNEY

Growing up, she had learnt from her parents – who were very involved with the Civil Rights Movement – that much of what got written about the poor was simplistic. “So much reporting involved people hooking up with an NGO, which would pick a success story and get them to write about it. The way the world looked in a newspaper was not the way the world really looks to people who are making choices every day.” Her own first piece – for a shoestring magazine called the Washington Monthly, which she later edited – was about how, when a fire broke out in a New Orleans housing project, everyone made a fine show of outrage and the residents were given fire detectors; “but when you went back a few months later, the things were still in their boxes. In moments of crisis, people would come in, do their work and leave – but what was going on in ordinary times wasn’t being chronicled.”

One reason why the prettifying of poverty occurs in so much literature and reportage, she points out, is that many reporters are content to slip in and out of a place – “and naturally, in that situation, there is much excitement, people laugh and point and tell you about themselves, and if you leave immediately you only come away with that happy picture.” She didn’t want to be the tourist-reporter collecting sound-bytes as souvenirs. (“The ‘real story’ doesn’t emerge from my sticking a tape recorder into a poor kid’s face and asking him about the philosophy that keeps him going.”) The way to do it was to spend so much time with the Annawadians that she could go from being the weird white woman – a conspicuous, warning presence – to becoming part of the furniture, someone in whose presence people could be themselves. And so, aided by translators (three of them, at different points in her research), Boo made the slum her second home for nearly four years, filling notebooks and tapes with conversations and observations.

Photo: MANOJ PATIL

Remarkably, given the free-flowing nature of her research (“for me the process of reporting is a giving up of control – you have to let the day happen and adjust to it”), Behind the Beautiful Forevers pivots around a dramatic event: the self-immolation of a one-legged woman named Fatima, querulous neighbour to the Hussains. This tragedy cast a long shadow over the family's lives; Abdul and his father were arrested for being complicit in Fatima’s death, and the case dragged on. Since all this began eight months into Boo’s time in Annawadi, she had to refocus her narrative. “I had no idea going in that this would happen, or that I would be following the trial or investigating death. But when those things happen, you can’t say: let that be.” Later, when another youngster died in suspicious circumstances, she became deeply involved again. This also means that the ghosts of many other stories lie between these pages; some of the peripheral figures in the finished book - such as Raja Kamble, a once-respected man fallen on bad times and in need of a new heart valve - are people whom she could easily have written about at much greater length. "There was so much other material - and of course the final reader doesn't see the many blind alleys that I encountered."

That the story is told in the third person (Boo keeps herself firmly out of it) comes as a surprise given the level of her involvement. There have been excellent reportage-driven works in recent times – Sonia Faleiro’s Beautiful Thing and Aman Sethi’s A Free Man come to mind – where the writer is very much part of the narrative, and this can be very effective if it’s well-executed: for instance, A Free Man gains from the reader’s sense that Sethi the narrator is growing as a person as he tries to understand the life of his protagonist, the “small man” Mohammed Ashraf; that he is subtly changed by the things he is writing about.

But while Boo is an admirer of both books, she says this approach wouldn’t have worked for her. “I would have been conscious that every word or sentence I used up on myself was something I was taking away from the Annawadians.”

This does raise questions for a reader, though. In many passages – records of conversations and encounters – it’s clear that Boo was present, and the writing is a descriptive account of what she saw and heard (thus, Abdul says something sharply to his mother and “A rich silence followed”). But there were other times where she had to reconstruct what had happened through the not-completely-reliable accounts of witnesses. “We investigated the hell out of Fatima’s death,” she says, “Even though I was already close to the Hussains, we didn’t just presume they were innocent. We interviewed dozens of people, made sure the stories matched, fact-checked compulsively.”

“And the other thing I’ve always tried to do in my work is that if I cannot establish something, I put that in the narrative too. You have to be upfront with the reader, you can’t bluff your way through it.”

Being completely upfront also means that all names in the book – including those of corrupt or incompetent policemen and corporators – are real, and naturally this was risky. “I did feel threatened,” she said, “and there was one night with the police that was not a good night. In retrospect I realised the danger. But in general, my curiosity is greater than my fear. I don’t feel afraid till much later, because I get so involved in trying to figure things out – that’s part of the losing control that comes with reportage.”

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There has been much talk recently about the increase in narrative non-fiction in India, but some of the best books in this category don’t create “narratives” in the most specific sense of that word. These are not stories with a definite beginning, a definite middle and a neat summing up: Sethi’s and Faleiro’s books, for instance, both end with their subjects (a labourer and a bar-dancer respectively) moving out of the reader’s line of vision, to a place where even the sympathetic reporter-writer can no longer reach them, their eventual fate uncertain. Much of the books’ power lies in their refusal to peremptorily tell the “India story”: even when small details point to larger truths (about the state of a society, a nation, the world, or the human spirit), it’s done quietly, in the manner of what the critic Manny Farber called Termite Art (“immersion in a small area ... concentration on nailing down one moment without glamorising it”), and without any pretence that this is all there is to be said.

Photo: MANOJ PATIL

To an even greater extent than those books, Behind the Beautiful Forevers left me with the impression of being an ongoing, uncompleted story (and given the story behind its writing, how could it be otherwise?). One sees at the end that many different possibilities lie ahead for Abdul and his family, for Asha and Manju, for Sunil and the other children – and which of these possibilities will come to pass depends on a combination of several factors, including the one that flies in the face of every glib narrative: blind, meaningless luck.

It’s important to Boo that her readers recognise this, instead of buying into the comforting notion that the difference between rich and poor people is purely a measure of innate intelligence, talent or the “will to make it”. “We construct such reassuring stories for ourselves,” she sighs, “Even people who were born into lives of privilege, sitting on the wealth of generations, are convinced that they have motored their own successes. And one way of doing this is to think of the poor as a separate species.”

Even literally. “Where’s your Dalmatian?” a friend asked her after reading part of the manuscript, meaning: if you don’t give the reader a sweet, fluffy person to pet, why will they care? “But if you can only relate to these people as stereotypes, I’m not going to make it easy for you,” Boo says. “They are every bit as complex as you or me, and they are smarter than you realise. This isn’t an alien world where you lift the curtain and see wondrous new things. I see so much of myself in the people I write about.”

Indeed, by the time you reach the last page, the under-city and the over-city have melted away – what’s left is a long continuum leading from one way of life to another, and it’s possible to see the people of this book, Boo and her readers included, as occupying various positions along that line. Behind the Beautiful Forevers may begin as a very specific story about a scared young man hiding in a little hut to evade the police, but it ends as a powerful reflecting mirror.