How iPhone met my mother (and turned her into Darth Vader)

[Did this piece for the Daily O website]

A few years ago I bought my mom a computer and made her say hello to the internet. This was long-overdue and I had been feeling guilty about putting it off for so long. Naturally, there were teething troubles: I had to keep an eye on things, tell her not to get hysterical each time a notification appeared on the screen, or when a new window popped up and hid an earlier one. Being in a position to provide reassurances, to supervise these baby steps, made me feel smug and in control – which is not something I often experience when it comes to technology. (Even today, after switching on my laptop, I sometimes reflexively look for the little “VSNL dial-up” icon that made getting online – via a medley of shrieking bell sounds – such an adventure back in 1998.)

My new role as improbable tech-guru didn’t last long though. While I stayed safely atop my Luddite plateau – using my computer mainly for writing and for basic net use, congratulating myself if I managed to pull off something as complicated as taking a screen grab – my mother was scaling new peaks just because they were there. And because she had now been gifted an iPhone by a cousin, following which the laptop was relegated to its bag. Later, an iPad or some similar tablet-like thing arrived and conversations in the house began to pivot around the word “Apps”. The realisation that Skype could be accessed on a small device, easily carried about the house, came with a roar of triumph akin to that of the primitive ape-man in 2001: A Space Odyssey discovering that a large bone could be used to smash in enemies’ heads and thence lay the road to civilisation.

Watching a parent learn to stand on her feet – to probe the marvels of the world for herself without constantly pointing at things and asking questions (“What is a Cloud?”) – was poignant in its way, though I felt I could do without this bratty business of having a phone thrust at my face (“Look look, Jai has just come in – isn’t that an ugly beard?”) so my maasi could glare at me all the way from Chandigarh.

As this sort of thing continued, I became increasingly self-conscious about the bulkiness of my own laptop. Feeling like the Jedi masters must have felt on learning that their precocious student Anakin had not only surpassed their skills but was now also a bad-ass in a shiny black suit, dispensing storm-troopers across the galaxies, I tried suggesting to mum that she use her computer once in a while because, well, all those Engelbert Humperdinck and Pat Boone music videos look better on a big screen. But she had moved well out of my ether. Worse, having grown up much too fast, she was becoming faintly parent-like again. “Jai, you aren’t on WhatsApp?” was no longer said hesitantly (as if wondering if I were using something more sophisticated that she didn’t know about) – instead it had the sharp, accusatory timbre of those cold 1982 pre-school mornings: “You haven’t finished your milk?”

Much of this could still be shrugged off, but when I began eavesdropping on her video conversations I was mystified. Smart-phone and tablet technology is so empowering for people of a certain age – people who spent decades being in touch with loved ones only via snail mail and expensive long-distance phone calls – you’d think it would lead to actual talk: gossip about the good old days, the childhood and college years in Ludhiana and Bombay, the problematic parents and spouses.

Instead, all the conversation now is about the very gizmos they are using.

It began simply enough (“Neelu, the Wi-fi doesn’t seem to be working, let me use the phone connection instead” and “Yes I can hear you fine, but I can’t see anything... why have you kept your phone facing down?!”), but then progressed to:

“What? Viber? V-I-B-E-R? Okay, wait, I’ll just download it. I heard Tango was better?”

“It says downloading.”

“It still says downloading. Now it is asking if I want to upgrade the App. Should I upgrade the App?”

“Of course I sent you a photo of the new iPad. I sent it through MMS. Should I email it too? Where’s the attachment?”

“I don’t have FaceTime on my phone – this is an old phone – so I’ll move to the tablet, give me a minute, okay?”

Few of these conversations are decipherable to me, stuck as I am with my old machine. But why be surprised? In a post-modernist age where literature is mainly about literature and cinema is mainly about cinema – and where the done thing is to ruminate constantly about the medium one is operating in rather than supply fresh content – perhaps it's natural for new technology to facilitate the sort of communication where all you’re doing is talking about the new technology.

Or maybe she needs a little more time to outgrow the teen-slang.

Mom and pop stories - some thoughts on parents in literature

[Did this some time back for my “thematic” Forbes Life column – this is about some books dealing with the parent-child relationship]

Given that writing is an inherently self-examining – some would say self-obsessed – act, it is no surprise that the parent-child bond has been at the heart of so much literature, going back to the oldest recorded stories in every civilisation. Apart from being gateways to understanding our personal and cultural histories, parents can be foils or inspirations, scapegoats or pretexts for fretting about genetic legacies. And there is strong dramatic potential in the many – positive and negative – facets of these relationships.

In the best such works, personal history is effectively set against a larger social backdrop. For instance, Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel-cum-biography Maus manages to be an intimate story about a son’s attempt to understand his father’s life even while it tackles one of the most important events of the last century – the Holocaust, of which Spiegelman’s parents were survivors. His major stylistic decision is to draw the Jews, including himself and his dad, as mice and the Nazis as cats. (The Holocaust was, after all, founded on the Nazi willingness to see their victims as “filthy vermin”, which was how a manifesto of the time denounced Mickey Mouse.) The present day of the narrative is sometime in the 1970s, when the young Art, tape recorder in hand, visits his cantankerous father Vladek and learns about his youth in the early 1930s as well as the horrors of Auschwitz; their conversations over time show us that Vladek, though a victim of the worst of racial discrimination, is far from unblemished in his own attitudes to other communities, and this in turn helps us understand the distance between father and son.

A less dramatic series of memoirs, Ved Mehta’s “Continents of Exile”, includes two books – Mamaji and Daddyji – that are specifically named for Mehta’s parents and are linear accounts of their lives: these are also explorations of changing worlds, from the provinciality of village life in mid-19th century Punjab (where a journey to Haridwar could be the achievement of a lifetime) to the England of the early 20th century. But for me, the most poignant of Mehta’s books is the smaller-canvas The Red Letters, which is about his father's brief extramarital affair in the early 1930s. “It’s hard to imagine one’s parents having hungers, fears and longings of their own,” Mehta said in an interview. The dialogues between father and son form the book’s most gripping sections; these are tentative exchanges, founded on guilt and reticence, where both men learn things about each other and about themselves.

****

A recurring theme in such writing is grief, and the American novelist Paul Auster has often dealt head-on with it: his The Book of Illusions has the central character, David Zimmer, wallowing for months in self-pity after the deaths of his wife and children. Then the narrative acquires momentum with a single incident, heartbreakingly recounted: watching TV numbly one night, Zimmer finds himself unselfconsciously laughing – for the first time in ages – as he chances on a short film featuring a forgotten silent-screen comedian. He realises that a part of him wants to continue living, and what follows is a portrait of regeneration through newfound obsession. Interestingly, it seems that Auster could only write his own memoir, Winter Journal, by being elusive and indirect – he doesn’t disguise it as fiction, but he uses the second-person “You” instead of the first-person “I”. And passages like the one about his mother’s death may help you see why such detachment was required. That the chapter in question was excerpted in Granta’s collection of “Horror” writing is fitting – horror can mean looking at a corpse and reflecting that “You are familiar with the inertness of the dead...but no other dead body was the body in which your own life began.”

A similar terrifying image – the sight of one’s mother slowly fading, “being sucked into the centre of the earth” – is at the heart of Jerry Pinto’s autobiographical Em and the Big Hoom. This novel is often described as a son’s chronicle of life with a mentally ill mother, but I saw it as being about parents in a more general sense: as looking glasses (or crystal balls?) in whose aging faces and increasingly unpredictable behaviour we might see our own future selves and shudder, or rejoice, or both. Pinto’s book is also very much a professional writer’s memoir: it is about writing as a way of articulating things to preserve one’s sanity. “One of the defences I had devised against the possibility of madness,” its narrator says, “was that I would explain every feeling I had to myself [...] I felt, instinctively, that when you had enough words ... you would be able to deal with the world.”

Dealing with the world in the face of the unfathomable is the subject of Sonali Deraniyagala’s Wave, which is an account of losing her entire family – husband, children, parents – to the tsunami in Sri Lanka in December 2004, and the subsequent haze of her life. It is filled with moments that will strike an immediate chord for anyone who has experienced similar loss, and understandably the emphasis is on the author’s bereavement as a parent: she didn’t know what to do with her arms anymore, she says at one point, if she couldn’t hold her little boys with them. Yet a moment that stayed with me is the one where she recalls not stopping to knock on her own parents’ door as she, her husband and the boys ran out of their hotel. Strictly speaking, it wouldn’t have made a difference – the old people weren’t going to outrun the big wave – yet one senses that Deraniyagala’s regret in this matter is inextricably tied to her larger pain.

A very different sort of regret – the feeling of having let down oneself, one’s child and even society – is at the heart of Lionel Shriver’s chilling novel We Need to Talk About Kevin, told in the form of confessional letters written by a woman, Eva, to her husband, about their son Kevin who murdered nine people in his school gym a few days before his 16th birthday. Over her letters Eva contemplates her peculiar, strained relationship with her child, and what emerges is a startling look at parenthood as an obligation and a burden rather than as a joyous thing. Like the mother in Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby, fearful that she is carrying the devil’s spawn, Eva likens her pregnancy to infestation; later, she discovers that she has no positive feelings for her boy. And yet, throughout, there is a tantalizing quality to the narrative: could this story be a couched confession of guilt by a woman who has still not come to terms with her own part in her son’s life?

Another unreliable narrator – and a transference of guilt – can be found in Kazuo Ishiguro’s debut novel A Pale View of Hills, narrated in the voice of a Japanese woman named Etsuko, who had moved to Britain with her second husband years earlier. Trying to cope with the recent suicide of her daughter, Etsuko tells her younger daughter a story about her life in Japan just after the war, focusing on a relationship with a friend named Sachiko. However, such is the clever circularity of the narrative – with a particularly important passage turning on the replacement of one pronoun for another – that you can never be sure if Sachiko really existed or if she was a creation of the narrator’s fevered mind.

****

This list of books suggests that such literature is skewed towards downbeat or depressing narratives, though more likely that's my personal bias. So, on a marginally more positive note: one of the most haunting yet uplifting tales I have ever read is Ted Chiang’s sci-fi novella Story of Your Life. You may knit your brow when you begin reading this story, for the tenses – past, present, future – seem all mixed up. But that's deliberate; the story is about a woman, a linguistic expert, whose attempt to understand the complex language used by visiting aliens eventually leads to her perceiving the events of her own life in simultaneous rather than sequential terms – which is how she constantly relives the birth, life and untimely death of her daughter. This is a tale of tremendous emotional power, which touches on themes such as free will and the links between joy, pain and memory, and it’s a reminder of how closely good science fiction can engage with the human condition.

Moving to more obviously real-world terrain, perhaps the most famous upstanding parent in a 20th century novel is Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, about two children growing up in a provincial American town in the 1930s. When I first read it as an adolescent, I thought of it as a romanticized tale with Atticus himself a preachy, “vanilla” character. Returning to it as an adult, I revised my assessment. His wisdom is hard-won and though he does make mini-speeches once in a while, he lets his children Scout and Jem figure out most of life’s sterner truths for themselves.

He also has a sense of humour, a healthy irreverence for sacred cows, and in this he reminds me a little of Calvin’s awesome dad in Bill Waterson’s Calvin and Hobbes comics. The restless Calvin is of course the strip’s supreme creation, but the series derives much of its edge from the personalities of his parents, who are so much more interesting than the vapid dupes you find in, say, Dennis the Menace. So you might have Calvin’s mom coolly encouraging her six-year-old to try a cigarette so he is disgusted by the experience, while his dad tells him the world used to be in black-and-white before the 1930s and medieval painters could draw in colour only because they were insane; each of them has a devilish, fabulist side that lets us see where Calvin gets some of his own traits from. They may be no more than lines drawn on paper, but many flesh-and-blood parents I know could pick up a few valuable tips from them.

[Expanded posts about some of the books/characters mentioned here: We Need to Talk about Kevin, Em and the Big Hoom, Calvin,  Granta Horror, Ved Mehta]

A book about book-lovers - on The Collected Works of AJ Fikry

[Did this review for the Sunday Guardian]

The protagonist of Gabrielle Zevin’s The Collected Works of AJ Fikry is a man who lives, literally and otherwise, on an island. AJ Fikry runs a bookstore – the only one on Alice Island, off the coast of Hyannis, Massachusetts – and has very specific tastes and a clear sense of what he will and will not stock (no postmodernism, magic realism, vampires, or memoirs by little old people whose spouses have died of cancer). Only once in the book is it mentioned that his real first name is Ajay and that he is partly Indian – this information is tossed off lightly, for there are more important things we need to know about Fikry. Having lost his wife in a road accident a year and a half before this narrative begins, he is withdrawn and depressive, and generally cut off from human company. One of the few people he spends time with is introduced thus: “He amuses AJ to an extent. This is to say, Daniel Parish is one of AJ’s closest friends.”

But two significant things now happen to Fikry: first a rare, enormously valuable edition of an early Edgar Allan Poe work is stolen from him; and a few weeks later, someone leaves a two-year-old baby girl in his shop (“she weighs at least as much as a twenty-four carton of hardcovers, heavy enough to strain his back”). The single mother, a suicide, wanted little Maya – an unusually bright child – to grow up in a place surrounded by books “and among people who care about those kinds of things”. And so, AJ’s life story takes an unexpected twist, even a genre-bending one: Maya’s advent leads to a degree of (reluctant) socialising, the setting up of local book clubs for mothers and even for cops, and the commencement of a romance with a woman named Amelia Loman, a publisher’s sales rep whom AJ had been rude to when they first met.

At this point in the synopsis, a reader wary of maudlin, life-affirming stories may back away a little. And I won’t pretend that this novel is not, in its own way, sentimental. But it is also a literate, thoughtful work about the often-shaky foundations of very meaningful relationships, about the happenstance that can change lives and shape personalities. (“Once a person gives a shit about one thing, he finds he has to start giving a shit about everything,” AJ thinks as he considers the effect his love for Maya has had on his life.) Some of the ideas expressed here – such as “your whole life is determined by what store you get left in” – can feel trite depending on the sort of reader you are and the mood you happen to be in. But then a key thing in this novel’s favour is that it understands readers and writers very well.

In a nerdy, unselfconscious way, this is a book about book-lovers: people who judge new acquaintances based on their reading tastes (without always realising how much one’s own feelings may change as one grows older or accumulates life experiences); people who delight in literary references and wordplay, not just to show off to others but even while having conversations in their own heads (AJ decides to give Maya a bath because he doesn’t want to take her to the social services department looking like “a miniature Miss Havisham”); people who feel that with the loss of record stores and now bookstores, “all the best things in the world are being carved away like fat from meat”. It doesn’t feel weird to encounter within these pages a kid who might bunk school for a month not so he can hang out with his rough crowd, do drugs and get into trouble, but so he can sneak away to read David Foster Wallace’s massive novel Infinite Jest without being disturbed. This is a story about how excessive bibliophilia can be isolating and corrosive (and misleading too, if you come to love a particular book so much that you develop fixed ideas about what its author must be like) – but can also, in the right circumstances, facilitate generosity of spirit. It is about the escapist, armchair reader facing the complications of the real world, and perhaps being surprised by hidden streams in his own personality.

Most of all, despite its apparent simplicity of plot, this novel is sharp enough in the actual writing to evoke some of the literary tropes and devices that its characters discuss. Thus there are little shifts in perspective, gradual revelations that make us rethink something we read a few pages earlier, even a twist in the tale. Each chapter is introduced by Fikry’s notes – addressed to Maya – about a particular story, ranging from Roald Dahl’s “Lamb to the Slaughter” to Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk about When We Talk about Love” to JD Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”, and we see how the story finds a subtle echo in the contents of the chapter, in the characters’ shifting arcs.

And given that this book is so insightful about the links between the lives we lead and the art we encounter, it feels apt to indulge myself here with a personal aside. Things about AJ’s personality were already resonating with me by the time I was halfway through, but then came a more specific coincidence that seems suited to the reading of a book like this one: I came to a passage about a high-school student’s story titled “My Grandmother’s Hands” at exactly the point when I was sitting in a hospital room, awaiting news of a seriously ill grandmother, reflecting on how frail she had looked in the ICU bed; a reference in the story made me think about how her ancient hands had looked like tissue paper. This coincidence could – to channel one of Fikry’s more cynical monologues – have made me feel like a character in a bad novel, allowing my own thoughts and feelings to be manipulated by someone else’s template of clichés. Or it could (as it did in this case) make me feel a kinship with the book I was reading. One of the best things about The Collected Works of AJ Fikry is that it keeps both possibilities open for the reader.

On Colm Tóibín's The Testament of Mary

[Have taken a break from book-reviewing for various reasons, but here's one I did for the Hindu Literary Review]

In contemporary fiction, the retelling of old stories – myths, folklore and religious texts among them – has become almost a genre unto itself. There have been countless revisionist versions of the Mahabharata or Ramayana in India, including “perspective” narratives that filter events through the eyes of a particular character. Done well, this gives us new lenses through which to see familiar stories we had taken for granted, or grown weary of; in the process, we may also understand something about how legends come into being and then become buttressed and sanctified through repetition over the centuries.

In his slim new book, the Irish writer Colm Tóibín, whose 2004 novel The Master was a fictionalised treatment of a key period in Henry James’s life, turns to a more distant story that is both shrouded in mist and set in stone. The Testament of Mary is an account of certain episodes in Jesus Christ’s life, as told in the confused, plaintive voice of his mother Mary, long after the crucifixion. That the old woman we encounter in these pages will be a de-mythologised version of the Holy Virgin is obvious almost from the opening paragraph: Mary speaks of men who visit her repeatedly, trying to gather anecdotes and recollections ("I like it that they feed me and pay for my clothes and protect me"), and we can tell that these are apostles engaged in the process of myth-making, collecting material for their books. But the narrative she tells, finally, is not to them – it is to us, and throughout Tóibín keeps us aware that this is as much a story as the “official” ones handed down over thousands of years.

Unlike another recent retelling, Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and theScoundrel Christ – told by an omniscient narrator and in the gentle, dialogue-driven cadences of a tale read out to young readers – The Testament of Mary is an intense first-person narrative that comes to resemble interior monologue. The prose has the stillness that marks Tóibín’s best work – the effect is a little like watching incoming waves on a sea-shore, knowing that the soft murmurs might soon turn into something louder, more strident – and naturally, given the subject matter, it is run through with melancholia, the need to remember set against the pain of remembering.

The voice we get here is the one of a mother befuddled by all this talk of her boy being the “Son of God”; a woman who doesn’t care about the big picture, who wishes only that time could be turned back to the days when she and her child and husband were happy together, untouched by the burden of divinity. But it is also the wise, knowing gaze of someone fearful of the things that happen when groups of men – social misfits, who cannot look a woman in the eye, who need a form of validation, and are driven by those twin qualities, “foolishness and cruelty” – gather together. Do such herds inevitably beget cults of violence, or lead to the formation of a new religion, or both? It is a question that hangs over this book, without being explicitly stated.

Being treated as the mother of the Messiah is frightening for Mary, especially as she senses that attempts are being made to co-opt her into the creation of legends. Recalling the famous incident at the Cana wedding, she insists she had nothing to do with the water-into-wine “miracle” (in her telling, Jesus’s remark “Woman, what have I to do with thee?” was made in another context), but that his followers focused their attention on her as if willing her to be part of the episode. Hence the mundane and unglamorous view of big events such as the sermons (“...my son would insist on silence and begin to address them as though they were a crowd, his voice all false and his tone all stilted, and I could not bear to hear him, it was like something grinding...”) or the rise of Lazarus, presented here in ambiguous terms. Hence her recollection of watching her son’s final, painful journey to the hill, his attempts to remove the crown of thorns from his head, and of her own guilt of leaving him on the cross to bear the last moments of his Passion alone. Her searing admission that despite everything she witnessed and felt, ultimately “the pain was his and not mine”, is a poignant counterpoint to the conceit of one man dying for the sins of a race.

The is a quiet book on the face of it, but there is tumult beneath its surface – not the obvious violence of nails being driven into a man’s hands but the violence of pattern-seeking narratives imposing themselves on and bullying “ordinary” lives, so that the world of dreams is the only remaining place where some grace may be found. “I want to be able to imagine that what happened to him will not come, it will see us and decide – not now, not them,” Mary says, “And we will be left in peace to grow old.”

Fox troth - a column about hidden senses

[Did a version of this piece for Kindle magazine’s anniversary issue about sensory experiences that sometimes remain hidden from us, or that we don’t open ourselves to. I hadn’t intended to write about Foxie for a while – not for official publication anyway – but this seemed to fit the subject, so I drew on some of the things I have written earlier. The magazine website is here, and the illustration on the left is by Soumik Lahiri]


----------

It was a magical moment, one I often relive and dwell on. One afternoon in July 2008, walking towards a rough lane behind our building to check on our water booster, I saw a litter of six tiny puppies sleeping together. Perhaps it’s relevant that I didn’t see them from a safe distance – they seemed to materialise right under my nose; I might have stepped on one of them if my eyes hadn’t been on the ground.

What I felt in those first few seconds was generic concern (I didn’t know yet that the pups’ mother was nearby, and that they were being looked after by two kindly watchmen) and perhaps the briefest tug of a heart-string. At this point I couldn’t even see them as individuals, just as a huddled-together mass of vulnerable, twitching life. Even over the next few days, as my mother, wife and I began visiting the lane, taking across milk and bread, helping the watchmen cope, I couldn’t have imagined that one of those little creatures would become mine in the truest, deepest sense of the word – not my “pet” but in nearly every way that mattered, my child – and that the next few months would see the opening up of senses and feelings that I didn’t know existed.

I could write a book, or five, on the years that followed, but here’s a summary. We got a couple of the pups adopted, three others succumbed to infection and to the wheels of careless or callous drivers, and we took in the last remaining one, who became our Foxie. Though a strong and hugely energetic dog at first, she spent the second half of her short life afflicted by an intestinal condition that necessitated monitoring her diet carefully, providing medicines with each meal, cleaning up after her six or seven times a day, and watching the accumulation of side-effects: she became ill-tempered during the bad phases, suffered from pain in her hind legs, was so emaciated that most of her ribs showed, and when I took her for a walk downstairs she spent her time not running around after a ball as she once had but sniffing around for the sort of food we had to deny her at home. Then, just when it seemed her condition had stabilised and she was regaining the old spirit, she passed away on the doctor’s table last year, aged barely four.

It was the most devastating thing I have ever faced (and even that is such an understatement, it feels almost indecent to write the sentence). Yet her short life had opened new doors of perception and feeling for me. Back in 2008, if asked, I would casually have called myself an animal lover; today I realise how misleading that would have been, and how much I still had to learn. Ever since childhood, with my mother's encouragement, I had a basic interest in other life forms, at least the ones that humans find it easy to relate to – asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would reply “a vet”. But the only animals I had been genuinely close to earlier had been cats, who are relatively distanced and independent, and perhaps this was a reflection of my own personality.

Fox was introverted too, by dog standards that is, but my years with her provided another dimension of experience. They taught me in the most immediate terms what it meant to be in communion with another, emotionally demonstrative being – to pick up on aspects of personality and feeling – even when verbal communication is out of the equation. And there was a practical component to the relationship that made it especially deep. Working out of home, I was around her most of the time during the long months of her illness, and my daily routine centered around her needs. I was a more hands-on, invested parent than most of the fathers of human children I know – and even some of the mothers.

I should stress that the intensity of this relationship was very much an individual thing: it hasn’t translated into comparably strong feelings for other dogs. More than a year after she went, the grieving process is still very much on. I still feel incomplete and numb, struck by panic each time I think of those last moments in the vet’s clinic; I have regular nightmares about being on a narrow ledge at a great height with her in my arms, being unsure I can hold on to her and maintain my balance at the same time. And I don’t think I can take on another such responsibility, or make such a strong emotional commitment, in the near future. But my time with her did, in a more abstract sense, heighten my sensitivity towards non-human life. The experience has been one of empathy-creation – the sort of feeling where I might see an emaciated dog with a scared, hunted look in its eyes scavenging for food on the streets and think to myself with a shudder, “That could so easily have been my Foxishka, if I had never seen that litter in the lane, or if we had been a little less concerned or more casual.” Such a notion is unthinkable, but I think it all the time.

Since Fox had a somewhat unusual, elongated body structure and because she stretched out in odd positions, we used to joke that she was many animals in one. When she nibbled on leaves with her ears down, she resembled a goat. Lying on the floor with her arms spread out ahead and her legs on the side, she could seem reptilian: lizard-like or dinosaur-like. There was an odd, camel-like undulation in her movement at other times, and she was a race-horse when she galloped in circles around the park in those precious, much-too-brief early months. When I watched news coverage of the “psychic” octopus Paul, I could imagine a skilled cartoonist drawing a picture of an octopus with a round Foxie head, the eyebrows raised dolefully. I haven’t come close to bonding with any of these creatures, but thanks to her I feel like I know them all a little better.

All that said, I don’t want to get over-sentimental about the idea of dogs as creatures whose inner lives are exactly comparable to ours. It’s natural enough for animal-lovers to project their own thoughts and emotions onto their pets, and in principle this can be a good thing: an extreme version of the empathy that allows us to relate to the experiences of a human being from another gender, class, religion or colour (and therefore linked to the concept of “speciesism” as a form of discrimination along the same continuum as racism or sexism). At the same time there is always a danger of carrying identification too far and seeing the animal purely in human terms, according to our limited sense of what emotion or self-consciousness is. And that is probably not good for an inter-species relationship.

But even if you accept that one can never really know what is going on in another creature’s mind (isn’t that also applicable to other humans?), there are strong indications for anyone who cares to look closely. Dogs who are well-loved come to acquire a very particular set of characteristics: there’s a softness in the eyes that suggests a sense of security, a feeling that nothing really bad can happen in their little world; it’s understood that frenetic tail-wagging is the correct response to the sight of any new human. At the other extreme, there is the perpetual wariness, the suggestion of fear hardened into aggression, on the face of the stray who knows he’s liable to be kicked or have a stone thrown at him. And somewhere in between, in some ways worst of all, is the cagey expression of the pet who lives in a house where people give him food and water and look after him in a detached sort of way, but where affection is in very short supply: a dog who isn’t allowed anywhere near the beds or sofas, who spends most of the day tied up on a short leash and who was quite possibly smacked hard the first time he chewed on a chair leg.

****

In an essay about the self-absorption of human beings, our smug, anthropic inability to really “see” other creatures, the speculative-fiction writer Vandana Singh pointed out that urban development is geared to weeding out the natural world from human lives; it is based on the hubris that we are exalted creatures, capable of leading autonomous lives in our concrete bubbles, never mind the consequences for the ecology and for our own health. During my time with Foxie I got a firsthand sense of the determination with which some people cut themselves off from other life forms. There were fights with residents who don’t want to see dogs in the tiny excuse for a park we have downstairs. The small but devoted group of animal-lovers in our colony – people who have taken responsibility for vaccinations, sterilisations and food – constantly face the ire of the vast majority of households.

There is a tendency, among those who don’t like animals, to get bleeding-heart about “the many human beings who are in an equally bad state – shouldn’t we do something to help them first?” There are obvious logical flaws in this argument: is this a zero-sum game? Is human welfare unrelated to that of other life? Do we need to completely eradicate all human suffering from the planet – as if that is ever possible – before we turn our attention to non-human animals? But beyond that I find this self-serving argument funny because in my experience, many of the people who use it are just as apathetic to other human beings – the ones they don’t count among family and friends, or as “equals”, or the ones they don’t expect to benefit from. True compassion isn’t a quality that can neatly be rationed out by withholding it from one species (or social class, or religion, or caste – you pick the group).

And so, maybe I should end on a somewhat upbeat note by mentioning an old woman who leads a hand-to-mouth existence but can still see and feel things that many far more privileged people can’t. Pratima Devi – “Amma” to everyone who knows her – lives in a small shack next to south Delhi’s PVR Saket multiplex, five minutes from where I stay. For nearly three decades now, though earning a meager livelihood as a ragpicker, she has been looking after dozens of street dogs in the vicinity: feeding them, getting them neutered, maintaining relations with a local vet and animal-welfare organizations. But she is very far from the cliché of the socially inept recluse who is cut off from other human beings: her warmth and openness touches everyone who comes to know her. I discovered that quality for the first time a few days after Foxie died, when, driven by a need to reach out to someone who might understand, I went across to meet her. Since then, she has been a constant reminder of what open-heartedness is, and what seeing and feeling can really mean.

[Related posts: Foxie, a remembrance; An old woman and her dogs; Temple Grandin's Animals in Translation]

Fathers and storytellers (notes on Bombay Talkies)

Last month I wrote about a film – Lessons in Forgetting – that centres on a protective father and his free-spirited daughter, the latter’s personality colliding with stereotypical ideas about the “good Indian girl”. Coincidentally, a few days ago, while watching the anthology film Bombay Talkies, it struck me that all four short movies in it touch on the relationship between fathers and their children, as well as on changing perceptions of masculinity and “male roles”. And a buried theme is a man’s ability – or inability – to tell stories and to deal with different types of narratives.

In fact, the very first scene in Bombay Talkies – in the short film directed by Karan Johar – has a young man angrily confronting his intolerant father who can’t accept, or perhaps even comprehend, that his son is gay. (The film’s title “Ajeeb Dastaan Hai Yeh” comes from one of the great Hindi-film songs, a rendition of which is beautifully used here, but it can also at a stretch be translated as “This is a queer tale”.) Later, in Zoya Akhtar’s short film, another middle-class father – more sensitive on the face of it, but also a man who has clear ideas about what a son should grow up to be – slaps his little boy when he sees him dressed in a girl’s clothes.

There is some ambiguity in this child’s obsession with “Sheila”, the Katrina Kaif character in the Tees Maar Khan item number: does it entail a straight crush on Kaif, expressed through joyful imitation (I’m thinking now of my own childhood dalliances with Parveen Babi or Sridevi songs), or does it reflect gender identification, a biological imperative to “be” a girl? Whatever the case, Akhtar’s film ends with an idyllic scene where the boy gets to perform “Sheila ki Jawani” in front of a small, initially bemused but eventually appreciative audience. Beyond this, his future is uncertain; it’s hard to see him pursuing his dancing ambitions in the long run without a serious conflict with his dad.

Watching that scene, I couldn’t help think that exactly a hundred years ago Dadasaheb Phalke was making films where male actors performed in drag (because respectable women weren’t supposed to act in these shady motion-picture things) - and this led to reflections on gender roles and the creative impulse. In a world that encourages easy classifications, artists, performers or creative people are supposed to be particularly sensitive, and “sensitivity” in turn – broadly defined – is a trait associated more with women than with men. But think of gender characteristics and behaviour as existing along a continuing line (rather than clearly demarcated), and there may be something to the idea that when a man performs on stage, or briefly turns storyteller for his child or for a group of people in his train compartment (which are things that happen in Bombay Talkies), he is tapping into his existing “feminine” side. Or that he is temporarily made more introspective, placed at a remove from the aggression that society often demands of men. (Those men in Phalke’s films – some of them might have felt embarrassed in women’s clothes, but the more dedicated actors among them may have felt briefly liberated from gender expectations. In addition to having a grand time preening about the set, or just reveling in the experience of being “someone else”.)

Bombay Talkies has a number of characters who are performers or mimics or tellers of tales, or people who (channeling Eliot) prepare a face each morning before going out to deal with the world. In Johar’s film, Gayatri (Rani Mukherjee) and her husband are living a lie of sorts; one can easily see the little boy in Akhtar’s film growing up to do the same thing; in Dibakar Banerjee’s film, Purandar (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) dreams of getting rich through emu-farming (though the bird is clearly taking more than it gives) while his mundane real-world existence requires that he heads out to find a building-watchman job where (as he himself puts it) you aren’t required to do much more than stand at attention for hours on end. 

Purandar has other dimensions: he is a loving father who unselfconsciously does household work alongside his wife and is apparently comfortable in female presence, hanging about with the women of his chawl as they exchange a salty joke or two. Perhaps these traits are inseparable from his qualities as an actor who brings all his integrity to a bit-part role, and as a storyteller who puts on a silent performance for his little girl at the end. (Banerjee – who is of course a storyteller himself – has said that his own experience with fatherhood informed his treatment of this narrative.)

Finally, in Anurag Kashyap’s film about a son who travels to Bombay to try and meet his father’s favourite film star, I think one can suggest that movie-love has turned both the protagonist Vijay and his father into raconteurs – people who have a feel for the spoken word, for parody, dramatic flow and the right pauses. They are amateur performers, and I’d think this would make them more attentive people and strengthen the bond between them. If violence and intolerance are failures of the imagination, perhaps the problem with the fathers in Johar’s and Akhtar’s films is that never having developed a taste for fantasy and role-playing, they lack the empathy that comes with it.

*****

Sidenote: In reviews and in casual discussions with friends, I have heard Kashyap’s film being described as disappointingly simple – and indeed, on the face of it, there is something pedestrian about the story of a young man trying to get a darshan of Amitabh Bachchan (who eventually “blesses” us viewers with a cameo appearance and underlines His divinity by doing unto a murabba what Lord Rama did unto the berry offered him by Shabari). It might seem even more trite if you recall all the behind-the-scenes talk about Kashyap’s real-life reconciliation with Bachchan, and how gratified he seemed by it. But given this director’s sly sense of humour and the awareness in his earlier work of the subtle ways in which worship and irreverence mingle (see his superb short film Pramod Bhai 23, for example), I think the story invites more than a face-value reading.

Vineet Kumar is very good as Vijay, but also consider the casting in light of the small part Kumar played in Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur. There he was Sardar Singh’s eldest son Danish, the heir apparent, with the dialogue at one point likening him to the Vijay played by Bachchan in Trishul – the clear hero of that film, whose smouldering presence made younger brother Shashi Kapoor seem effete in comparison. (Indeed there is an oft-circulated joke that Shashi Kapoor was one of Bachchan’s most convincing heroines. In Trishul, when the two men have a fight scene where they get to land an equal number of punches on each other – the obligatory ego-salve for male stars of the time – you don’t for a minute buy into it.)

But Gangs of Wasseypur’s depiction of life as the banana peel on which the fondest cinematic fantasies may slip included a sequence of events where the limp-wristed younger brother Faisal becomes - to his own surprise - the film's protagonist. “Jab aankh khuli to dekha ki hum Shashi Kapoor hai. Bachchan toh koi aur hai,” Faisal says in an earlier moment of drug-addled self-pity, but this “second lead” ends up as the kingpin after his elder brother is casually bumped off. Watch GoW, then see Vijay’s father in Bombay Talkies mimic Dilip Kumar while telling his story about his own encounter with that thespian decades earlier, and consider the eventual fate of the murabba that Bachchan so self-importantly bites into; I think Kashyap’s film is more than a straight-faced, rose-tinted view of supplicants trying to collect stardust in a glass jar.

Exit, pursued by a bear (a grizzly TV set and other horrors in Aatma)

The new film Aatma knows something the cinema of horror has known for decades now – that there is nothing quite as terrifying as a sweet little girl, especially a sweet little girl who looks into your eyes and chirrups “I love you, mama.” Aatma, subtitled “Feel it Around You” (displayed on the neon ticker outside the hall as “Feel Around You”), begins with a sequence where we see just such a girl, Nia, watching a home video on a fancy plasma TV screen that appears to be.... nestled inside the belly of what is either a giant panda or a polar bear with a zebra gene.

It is a heart-stopping moment and yet, astonishingly, it turns out that this is not what we are meant to find scary! The panda is mere interior decoration in a child’s nursery, unremarked on and never held up for judgement or scrutiny. The film doesn’t ask us to consider the effect that this creepy ursine wall-adornment (along with what look like a number of Angry Bird soft toys on a giant bed) might have on the girl’s mental state. Instead, the intended object of terror is harmless little Nawazuddin Siddiqui, who plays the ghost of Nia’s over-possessive father and looks only as menacing as he did in his early scenes as the drug-wasted Faisal, timidly asking for “permission” in Gangs of Wasseypur.

As the deceased but still angry Abhay, Nawazuddin gives the best performance in this film (which is saying very little), but I maintain that the real source of the chills is the girl – not in the scenes where she is possessed (those are just funny) but in the ones where she is being a normal privileged child doing the things normal privileged children these days do with their fake pink cellphones and their furry TV sets.

Okay, seriously: being a big fan of the genre and defensive about the snobbery that comes its way, I really wanted to like Aatma. And this is a good-looking film in many ways, with some interesting – if derivative – things happening at the level of camerawork and framing: a showy tracking shot early on plays like a tribute to Kubrick’s The Shining as well as some of De Palma’s great 70s work; there is a long, self-consciously stationary shot in a judge’s chamber where Abhay is denied custody of his child (and Nawazuddin gets to Act with a capital A). But given the minor flair for psychological tension that the film shows in its initial scenes, I wish it had held back for a while before moving into the realm of the explicitly supernatural. Perhaps it could have kept us guessing for a bit longer, allowed us to wonder if Nia’s mother Maya (Bipasha Basu) is to be trusted, whether Abhay really is dead (and then again, whether he really is undead), or if the kid and her mom have serious emotional issues and are imagining things. But the ghostly stuff kicks in too fast, putting paid to any larger-narrative suspense.

A predictable story arc follows, as the people who offer help or support to Maya are bumped off one by one. This is not in itself problematic, but what could have been fine setpieces are irritatingly listless in their execution, and most of the characters are underwritten and barely performed at all. Consider Nia’s class-teacher, who merely looks a little put out during a spelling session when the little girl spells out words that haven’t even been enunciated yet. Later, working alone in the school, the teacher sees a recently deceased boy walking the corridors, and her ludicrous reaction is to call out “Paras! Paras!” in a flat voice as she follows him around.

Tilottama Shome, who plays this thankless part, is capable of better things, which is a reminder that dialogue-writers and actors working in horror films are often content to be foot-soldiers to the paisa-vasool moments – the ones that they know will (if handled with even minimum competence) make viewers bolt up in their seats or splay their fingers across their eyes. Thus, while Aatma has a couple of obligatory scary moments, it has many more slack “dramatic” scenes where indifferent writing meets (or facilitates) indifferent acting. “Nia, papa se baat kar rahe ho?” Maya asks in an expressionless tone when she sees her daughter talking to her ghost-dad on her pink toy phone. “Aur kya kaha papa ne?” She seems equally impassive after the grisly murder of her child’s psychiatrist (while he was sitting in his office with little Nia) and even manages a rueful little smile (or maybe that’s just the natural curve of Bipasha’s mouth) when she speaks with her colleague shortly after the body has been discovered.

And so it goes. There are purifying havans and jaadu-tona and amulets intended to ward off evil. There are unintentionally funny shots such as the one of the ghost plaintively looking up at the balcony with his arms spread out, after Maya has thwarted one of his attempts to have his daughter join him in the after-life. (Nawazuddin here looks a bit like a sad farmer hoping for rain.) There is not the slightest attempt at making the past history of Maya and Abhay credible, or fleshing out the family’s inner dynamics, or explaining how Abhay managed to simultaneously be so savage towards his wife and so tender towards his daughter.

And maybe I’m becoming bleeding-heart socialist in my old age, but I can invest only so much emotion in the misfortunes of beautiful rich people who react to a loved one’s savage murder with mildly worried expressions (as if the new Koala Bear-TV has malfunctioned and eaten the new Gucci handbag). At least Nawazuddin looks and sounds somewhat like a human being capable of real emotion (even if that emotion is wife-beating rage). It’s another matter that he also looks like a boy from Wasseypur suddenly teleported to Malabar Hill. As a police officer played by Jaideep Ahlawat – who was also in Wasseypur and looks like he preferred it there – says, “I have a bad feeling about this.”

Speaking of Wasseypur and Malabar Hill, in theory at least it is interesting that the film’s two main male figures are rustic types who speak coarsely and seem out of place in this luxurious setting, while the women are self-sufficient, chic and upper-class. If Aatma had been a better-written film, it might have done intriguing things with this men-as-primitive-women-as-modern subtext. It might, for instance, have been a comment on conservative men who feel threatened by confident, working women (Abhay flies into a temper when he suspects Maya has been talking on the phone with her male colleague; the police officer has a nightmare where he sees Maya and her daughter at the edge of his bed, looking back at him menacingly, perhaps implying that he sees them, rather than the father, as the problem). But the implications of this aren’t explored, and what could have been a subtle exploration of the man-woman relationship within the changing contexts of marriage, parenthood and modernity – while also being a very good horror film – ends up being neither.


P.S. (Spoiler Alert) It seems a little unfair that even after dying you have to dig your way out of a pit while other ghosts stand around cackling at you. But at the film’s end Maya heroically overcomes this inconvenience and shows up in time to beat the crap out of Abhay and save their daughter. What she saves her for is questionable though: make what you will of the final scene, in which an 18-year-old Nia, surrounded by zombie-like friends and whatever surviving family members there are, celebrates her birthday in the same mansion while the spirit of her mother watches fondly from a distance (and the television-bear growls “Who’s been sleeping in my bed?”).

-------------
*** The Fellini short “Toby Dammit” is just one of many movies that cast little girls as Satan. More on that here

Bitter, sweet: Marjane Satrapi's Chicken with Plums

Among the many talents of the graphic novelist Marjane Satrapi is a skill for moving fluidly between forms and genres. A few years ago Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud co-directed a film version of her most famous book Persepolis, an autobiographical story about her childhood in Iran under the shadow of the Islamic Revolution and her eventual return as a young woman. I liked the film but I had one reservation: it was too often a straightforward cinematic presentation of the drawings Satrapi had already done for the book. Though there were a few well-chosen moments of added animation – such as an Expressionist scene where little Marjane’s features melt until she resembles the screamer in the famous Munch painting – the overall similarity to the source text made the viewing experience repetitive for a reader who was already very familiar with the book.

I was much happier with Satrapi’s decision to turn her book Chicken with Plums (original title Poulet aux Prunes) into a (mostly) live-action film. The movie, shown recently at Cinefan, is beautifully shot, cleverly structured and anchored by an extraordinary performance by French actor Mathieu Amalric as a depressed, middle-aged violinist named Nasser-Ali – based on a distant relative of Satrapi in 1950s Tehran – who decides to end his life. That doesn’t sound like an upbeat story, and indeed the film makes a point of confirming early on that Nasser-Ali does die: a shot of his funeral is followed by a series of flashbacks that take us through his final eight days, as well as flashbacks within flashbacks that recount various earlier episodes, including a tragic love affair that aided his artistic growth but also cast a black shadow over his personal life. (“The love you have lost,” says his music teacher, not channelling Rockstar, “will be in each note you play.”)

What is most notable though is the film’s consistently whimsical tone and its many quaint asides such as the “flash-forwards” to the future lives of Nasser-Ali’s children, or a scene where he is visited by Azrael, the talkative Angel of Death. Chicken with Plums is a demonstration of how a movie can begin on a farcical, even buffoonish, note but gradually reveal its secrets so that – without the viewer even realising it – a deeply moving portrait of an individual and his society emerges. And yet, the light-hearted tone is never forsaken. Certain characters – such as Nasser-Ali’s apparently sullen, shrewish wife – are presented unflatteringly at first, and only later shown in a more poignant light. There are jokes about death, as in the sequence where he mulls and rejects various suicide options (being discovered with a plastic bag over one’s head would not be very dignified, would it?).

This tenor sometimes tilts into over-the-top slapstick: one scene has vignettes from the crass American life destined for Nasser-Ali’s son Cyrus, who will marry his cheerleader girlfriend after he accidentally gets her pregnant, settle into hick domesticity and look goggle-eyed when he learns that his own (pea-brained but elephant-sized) daughter has a bun in the oven. This is broad caricature, but under it is the suggestion that Cyrus’s life may not have taken this turn if his father had been a happier, more fulfilled man. A personal tragedy involving two people echoes across time and space, affecting the lives of generations and spawning its own mini-histories.

This can be described as a bittersweet film, though I feel like that word is a little insubstantial (it has a patronising edge to it, as if saying “This isn’t really serious, but it’ll do until something deeper comes along”). Chicken with Plums allows a viewer to laugh at certain aspects of situations that are essentially tragic; at times it might even seem that we are laughing at Nasser-Ali himself. But the mirth is less specific, more inclusive than that – it recognises how the profound and the ridiculous constantly coexist in human lives. There is a running gag about Nasser-Ali being interrupted by an inappropriate sound whenever he is about to say something meaningful (and one hilarious scene imagines the philosopher Socrates’s last words being similarly interrupted) – these scenes are reminders of the many banana peels strewn on life's roads, waiting to make us look silly just as we are constructing grand narratives or making life-changing decisions. But that doesn’t make us pathetic, only human, and Satrapi's film is gently, wonderfully cognisant of this.

[Did a version of this for my Business Standard column. An old post on Marjane Satrapi's Embroideries is here]