The Long And Short Of Sentences

This appeared in yesterday's The Sunday Guardian.

Take a deep breath before you start to read Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis: the first sentence of the novel is six pages long. (I would have counted the number of words, but then, I would have missed the deadline.) It’s a sentence that is both feverish and descriptive, the extended opening note of a hallucinatory anthem to Mumbai.

You’ll come across a comparatively shorter sentence – only about three pages long – in the Marquez short story, ‘Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship’, from his collection, Leaf Storm. The rhythm of this single-sentence short story matches the ocean liner’s passage it describes, speaking of careful, patient craftsmanship. I don’t envy the translator, though.

In a recent article, Pico Iyer writes that he’s using longer and longer sentences “as a small protest against — and attempt to rescue any readers I might have from — the bombardment of the moment”. With each clause of such a sentence, he continues, we’re taken further away from easy reductionism, realizing that meaning isn’t finite and bite-sized. As he – rather wonderfully -- says of Philip Roth: “His is a prose that banishes all simplicities while never letting go of passion”.

Long or short, sentences aren’t something that most Indian writers in English seem to pay attention to. This is not to say that they use them without regard to grammar – although that can be the case, too – but that, more often than not, they’re simple, declarative carriers of meaning and assertion. This is a style that sees the sentence not as a work of art in its own right, but simply one among a number of unremarkable bricks shoring up a prose edifice. The result is a novel constrained by the very materials that enable it to exist. I’m not upholding meandering late-Jamesian prose here; there’s music to be found in the sentences of Hemingway and Carver, too.

It boils down to a love and respect for language and the realization that it is capable of being fashioned to convey themes and plots with richness and complexity. Jhumpa Lahiri, in a piece co-incidentally written shortly after Pico Iyer’s, speaks of how she used to underline sentences she found notable for “their clarity, their rhythm, their beauty and their enchantment”. As she says, “In fiction, plenty [of sentences] do the job of conveying information, rousing suspense, painting characters, enabling them to speak. But only certain sentences breathe and shift about, like live matter in soil.” When she’s in the middle of a work, sentences arrive, “fully formed in my brain”: “I tend to hear them as I am drifting off to sleep. They are spoken to me, I’m not sure by whom.”

Such observations would please Stanley Fish. The American literary theorist – who’s been criticized for his relativistic take on the humanities, among other things, and who was the inspiration for the character of Morris Zapp in David Lodge’s campus trilogy -- lauds the art and craft of sentence-making in his new book, How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One. It’s a primer for would-be writers to master the nuts and bolts of how words connect in logical ways to create memorable sentences. Or, as he puts it, the “skills of coordination, subordination, allusion, compression, parallelism, alliteration”.

Somewhat unusually, Fish encourages writers to use sentence structures as models, asking them not to, at the start, worry about meaning: “Content will be a distraction and…the skill of writing well-formed, clear, and tightly organized sentences will be acquired by focusing on forms”. Though there are many examples of classic sentences from writers such as Montaigne, Woolf, Stein, Hemingway and more, the book is marked by analytical enquiry, some of it tedious – without, however, getting lost in intricacies of grammar.

The one that stands out from the many that Fish quotes to illustrate sentence forms is by John Updike, from his piece on a 1960 Fenway Park baseball game during which batter Ted Williams hit a memorable home run. Twelve words: “It was in the books while it was still in the sky”. Marvellous. As for this column, it was on the page while it was still on my mind. 

Critics And Enemies Of Promise

This appeared in today's The Sunday Guardian

Critics can’t write good novels. This is as it should be, I suppose, given that the faculties required are quite different. As always, there are exceptions, and in this case John Updike is the notable one. Not only did he write more than 30 novels and short story collections, he contributed regularly to publications such as The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books: these pieces were later published in fat volumes from Odd Jobs to the posthumous Higher Gossip.

On the other hand, take James Wood, the influential critic who’s won his fair share of admirers as well as detractors for championing realism in fiction. When he tried his hand at a novel, the results were middling. The Book Against God, published in 2003, was a sensitive but dour story of a vicar’s son grappling with theological questions. Not many ripples ensued.

The one critic who obsessed more than most about his inability to produce a sterling novel was Cyril Connolly, eminent man of letters and editor of the literary journal, Horizon, in the England of the Thirties and Forties. For years, all I’d read of Connolly was the infamous quote that seemed to be the only thing that outlived him: “There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall”. Connolly’s seminal Enemies of Promise – a book that, shamefully, I only just read – is where that quote is from; as I discovered, the book’s aphoristic nature, delightful though it may be, isn’t the only reason to read it.

At first glance Enemies of Promise seems neither fish nor fowl: about half of it is an analysis of contemporary fiction and pitfalls that await the would-be writer, and the second half is a memoir of Connolly’s youth. However – as Connolly himself mentioned – there are clear correspondences. The magisterial critique of the one is made resonant by the personal tone of the other. Thus, the book can be read as an investigation of the reasons why he – such a promising young fellow– was unable to come up with a novel of worth. Or, as he put it, “a didactic enquiry into the problem of how to write a book which lasts ten years”. (The one novel Connolly wrote, The Rock Pool, was judged unwieldy and uneven: he had difficulty finding a publisher. As he wrote in Enemies of Promise: “Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising”)

I must admit I found myself skipping paragraphs, especially those containing references to writers of his time, many of whom are not so well-known nowadays. Many judgments, though, are spot on: “Contemporary books do not keep. The quality in them that makes for their success is the first to go; they turn overnight”. There’s praise for E.M. Forster; more patrician is the comment on Virginia Woolf, who has “the ability to spin cocoons of language out of nothing” (though he lauds The Waves). There’s also his famous classification of prose styles into the Mandarin and the Vernacular, with Henry James being an example of the former, Hemingway of the latter. Overall, “I do not say one is better than the other; there is much to admire in both; what I have claimed is a relationship between them”.

His litany of traps lying in wait for the novelist  -- from money to success to domesticity -- still rings true, as does his discussion of professions that sap the will of the artist-in-waiting, among them teaching, journalism and advertising. (He would, no doubt, have reacted with alarm to Twitter and Facebook.)

Much of this is made personal in what follows: childhood, the hated early days at Eton and the later more-at-ease time there. (Among his classmates was a boy who came to be known as George Orwell: “I was a stage rebel, Orwell a true one”.)

A cultural critique; an analysis of why he couldn’t write the book he wanted to; autobiographical musings; an unusual mirroring structure: why, had the tone been different, it could almost have been written by Geoff Dyer. Hold on, he’s already done that, hasn’t he?

Why The Rushdie Memoir Should Have Been Called Laurence Fielding James

The next instalment of my column for The Sunday Guardian.

Salman Rushdie’s memoir of the fatwa years, due to be published this September, is one of the most keenly-awaited books of the year and I’m looking forward to getting my hands on a copy before someone in India decides that it’s caused offence. The recently-announced title, however, surprised me: it’s called Joseph Anton, which was one of Rushdie’s aliases when he was in hiding. As Rushdie says in the publisher’s description of the book, “I made up a name from the first names of Conrad and Chekhov”. They’re two of the writers he loved, the release states, quoting Rushdie again: “I made it the title of the book because it always felt very strange to be asked to give up my name, I was always uncomfortable about it, and I thought it might help dramatize, for the reader, the deep strangeness and discomfort of those years.”

Semantically speaking, having a favourite writer and being inspired by a writer isn’t necessarily the same thing. However, it’s justified to assume that there’s a fair degree of overlap, especially when one’s profession is to create worlds from words. Which is precisely why the feeling of mild astonishment at the title.

The style of writing that Rushdie is known for is, to use a by-now shop-soiled term, magic realism. Go beyond the surface level of the fantastical, however, and there is much mischievousness, playfulness, inversion and other forms of inventiveness in Rushdie’s work – things it has in common with, say, Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum and Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. And this approach owes a lot to novelists of the 18th century.

In earlier interviews, Rushdie has confessed to his admiration for such writers, among them Laurence Sterne, Henry Fielding and Jonathan Swift. The correspondences are evident. Yet another feature of Rushdie’s work is the well of wordplay he dips his pen into to sprinkle his prose with puns, spoonerisms and portmanteau words. By way of illustration, I still recall how I chuckled when I read of a character in The Moor’s Last Sigh with the name of Jamshedjee Jamibhoy Cashondeliveri, known as Jimmy Cash, an obvious reference to Mumbai’s Sir Cowasji Jehangir Readymoney.  Elsewhere, he’s notably used the word “disoriented” to refer to “a loss of the Orient”. This trait, so much a part of the appeal of his work, is in turn derived from his stated admiration for James Joyce.

To turn to the Joseph of his memoir’s title, it’s V.S. Naipaul who’s more commonly linked to Conrad, with the Swedish Academy anointing him as “his heir” when it awarded him the Literature Nobel in 2001. Naipaul himself has written perceptively about the Polish émigré – both of them, as has been said, were raised in one world and, via the English language, made themselves at home in another. Typically, though, Naipaul has insisted that Conrad hasn’t been an influence, adding for good measure: ''Actually, I think A Bend in the River is much, much better than Conrad”.

As for Anton Chekhov, his short stories, needless to add, have had a tremendous influence on many writers over the decades, with even the magisterial Nabokov calling The Lady with the Lapdog "one of the greatest stories ever written” (though he had his doubts about the rest of Chekhov’s oeuvre). Read Nabokov’s Spring in Fialta and you’ll find clear parallels with The Lady with the Lapdog. Chekhov’s reputation continues to grow: in America, in fact, writing programs across the country should just go ahead and install small busts of him in every classroom. The point really is that Chekhov’s stories are known for their undemonstrative yet masterly evocation of the agitations of everyday lives; as a realist, he’s nonpareil. Rushdie’s style is so very different.

Which makes it all the more odd that the author of Midnight’s Children would choose Joseph Anton as an alias. One would have thought it would be Laurence Fielding James. Or even the other way around.

Putting The Jewish Into Jewish-American

This is the first of my columns for New Delhi's The Sunday Guardian



 When I first read Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer, I was struck by the audacity of the material. Only Roth, I thought, could conceive of a plot in which a young writer, visiting an older mentor’s house, begins to suspect that the young woman he meets there is none other than Anne Frank, who has survived the Holocaust and is now living anonymously in upstate New York. In that book – and others – Roth explored contrasts common to much Jewish-American writing: between identity and assimilation, secularism and religion, tradition and modernity.

Of late, however, there’s been debate over whether the ‘Jewish’ in ‘Jewish-American writing’ ought to be dropped altogether. With such writers being integrated into the mainstream, does the distinction hold anymore? The argument sometimes assumes other forms, such as Israeli novelist A.B. Yehoshua’s dismissal of diasporic Jews as "playing with Judaism…it’s masturbation”. (Portnoy’s Complaint, anyone?)

I’m not sure if we should discard the category just yet. In particular, two recently-published books illustrate a specifically Jewish-American way of looking at the world: Hope: A Tragedy, by Shalom Auslander and the short-story collection, What We Talk about When We Talk about Anne Frank, by Nathan Englander. In both, one finds “laughter and trembling so curiously mingled that it is not easy to determine the relations of the two”, as Saul Bellow once described Jewish fiction. And in both, one finds, once again, Anne Frank.

In Hope, protagonist Solomon Kugel moves with his family to an old farmhouse  and, investigating sounds from the attic, discovers an ancient, bitter crone who claims to be Anne Frank: “I survived death in my youth and I’ve been surviving life ever since”. (And later:  “I’m Miss Holocaust, 1945”.) After decades in hiding, she’s now writing a follow-up. Auslander’s tone throughout is mordantly funny as a paranoid Kugel attempts to make sense of his situation. There’s much Woody Allen-esque riffing on subjects that range from gluten-free diets, real estate and unlikely ways of dying. Beneath this is a serious concern: are Jews still defining themselves by the horrors of the Holocaust, and is it time to move on?

There’s something akin to this concern in the title story of Englander’s collection. Here, two Jewish couples – one in Miami, the other from Jerusalem -- catch up on a Sunday afternoon, the wives being old friends who haven’t met in a while. Narrated by a wisecracking husband who alternately feels empathy with, and dislikes the others, it’s an afternoon during which vodka is drunk, pot smoked and secrets spilled. Just when you think the story is moving towards an epiphany – the couples go out of the house to get drenched in a shower – Englander has them come back inside and play “the Anne Frank game”, speculating on which friend, neighbour or relative would provide sanctuary in the event of another Holocaust.

Though Englander’s tone is more measured and less astringent than Auslander’s, there’s a similar comic vein that occasionally emerges. At one point, the husband says of the other couple that they “went from Orthodox to ultra-Orthodox, which to me sounds like a repackaged detergent—ORTHODOX ULTRA®, now with more deep-healing power”.  Meanwhile Auslander, in Hope, has Kugel muse in a bookstore: “Twenty full-page photographs inside, promised the cover of the Buchenwald book. Now more ghastly. Twenty percent more depressing”. In another Englander story, there’s a character with the unfortunate name of Yitzy Penis, which reminds one of Auslander’s memoir, Foreskin’s Lament. Other Englander stories, set in Israel and in the US, often have a parable-like nature, the same trait that can be seen under the surface of Hope.

Admittedly, Auslander’s novel is one where the conceit is played out for too long, and Englander’s collection is uneven. But with the quips, Yiddish phrasing, paranoia and interrogation of history, these books show a sensibility that can only be termed Jewish-American. By being specific, both also contain themes that are universal. In the words of another writer from another country – Paul Murray, in Skippy Dies – they tell us that “life makes fools of us all sooner or later. But keep your sense of humour and you’ll at least be able to take your humiliations with some measure of grace.”

Big City Blues

A condensed version of this appeared in the latest issue of Tehelka.

MUMBAI NOIR Ed. Altaf Tyrewala

Writers thrive on decay. Fiction's fertile ground is one in which things are out of whack, giving rise to confusion, chaos and conflict. As such, the current state of the city of Mumbai ought to provide rich pickings, especially when it comes to the noir genre. Some of the 14 stories in Mumbai Noir – a part of the series by Brooklyn-based Akashic Books – live up to the task of mirroring urban bleakness; many others, however, are tepid and underworked. Such patchiness threatens to capsize this noir’s ark.

What’s on offer here is some romanticizing and nostalgia, much obsession with the aftermath of terrorist attacks and the requisite dose of seediness. The cynicism and jadedness that defines the genre: not so much. In his introduction, Tyrewala mentions “the restraints set by the noir genre, which stipulates, among other things, an unflinching gaze at the underbelly, without recourse to sentimentality or forced denouements”. Sentimentality and a forced denouement are, however, what mar the very first story, Riaz Mulla’s ‘Justice’, a story about minorities and ordinary men and women affected by terrorism.

Appropriately enough, deadbeats, sex and decadence are on parade in Avtar Singh’s atmospheric ‘Pakeezah’, about a young man’s swift slide into debauchery among the dance bars and underworld of the city. Abbas Tyrewala’s ‘Chachu at Dusk’ shares some of these qualities; however, though not without a certain flair in the telling, it manages to lose itself in mists of nostalgia. With its unlikely grafting of Raymond Chandler onto low-life Mumbai,  Ahmed Bunglowala’s ‘Nagpada Blues’ is cheeky and likeable, but strictly speaking is more hardboiled than noir. You could say the same of Jerry Pinto’s ‘They’, which also has the not inconsiderable merit of using the Bambaiya patois effectively.

In other stories, though the writers get the atmosphere down pat, they don’t make their protagonists play too much of a role in arriving at the denouement. In R.Raj Rao’s ‘TZP’, about a gay professor’s dubious liaisons and run-in with the law, the said professor stands by while the police complete the investigation, with an ending that can be seen coming from a long distance away. In Smita Harish Jain’s ‘The Body in the Gali’, about a police officer investigating a colleague’s killing, there are effective scenes set among the world of eunuch prostitutes, but  the final realization dawns with something as simple as cleaning out the dead policeman’s desk. When it comes to eunuchs, Sonia Faleiro’s unsettling ‘Lucky 501’, about the community welcoming a teenager into their tribe, is stronger in observed, intimate detail.

There are other noteworthy stories here, but whether they can be classified as noir is a moot question. Annie Zaidi’s chilling ‘A Suitable Girl’, about a single woman and her stalker, demonstrates, among other things, a deft handling of two points of view. Altaf Tyrewala’s fatalistic ‘The Watchman’, about a security guard’s paranoid obsession, has a pleasing, jagged prose rhythm well-suited to its subject. Namita Devidayal’s ‘The Egg’, about a south Mumbai housewife with a mood disorder dealing with her curmudgeonly cook, evokes the protagonist’s increasingly claustrophobic circumstances with a sure hand. And Paromita Vohra’s ‘The Romantic Customer’, about a cyber-café employee’s incipient love affair, is impactful for its open-endedness and portrayal of characters who are neither black nor white, just doing what they need to do to get by.

Otto Penzler, editor and owner of New York’s Mysterious Bookstore, once said of the characters of noir fiction that they’re “dark and doomed – they are losers, they are pessimistic, they are hopeless”. Unfortunately, such traits – and the nihilism and existentialism also associated with the genre – are present only in bits and pieces in Mumbai Noir.

An Existential Laurel And Hardy

This appeared in today's The Indian Express.

DOGMA Lars Iyer

In his recent “literary manifesto after the end of literature and manifestos”,  the Danish-Indian academic Lars Iyer asserted that literature nowadays was no more than a pantomime, and a tired one at that. He called upon writers to “resist closed forms”, to “mark the absence of Hope, of Belief, of Commitments, of high-flown Seriousness” as well as a sense of imposture. “The end is nigh,” he concluded. “The party’s over.”

All of this – along with a vein of dark comedy – was much in evidence in Iyer’s first novel, Spurious (though traditionalists would say it was more a series of linked blog posts than an actual novel). Spurious introduced to the world a pair of bumbling academics, the first one named Lars, the second, simply W. Philosophers manqué, a pair of Brods without a Kafka, they made their way through a universe facing “end times”, with the hapless Lars being grandly insulted and upstaged by W. at every opportunity.

The pair returns in Iyer’s new work, Dogma, with W. still firmly convinced that the end is nigh: “Our end or the end of the world?” “Both!” Happily, his insults are as Falstaffian as ever. He asserts that if he’s a Socrates, Lars is “a Diogenes gone mad”, exhorting him time and again, as the policeman tells the lost wayfarer in the Kafka story, to “give it up!” W. is also compelled to make fun of Lars’ Hindu heritage, including one memorable occasion when, referring to a statue of Nataraja, he mocks his luckless confrère: “What's your cosmic dance like? It's the funky chicken, isn't it?”

Dogma is virtually without plot, but in the course of its pages, the two embark upon a lecture tour of the United States, visiting, among other places, Nashville and Memphis, which of course brings about much mock-philosophizing by W. Not that all of this is without insight, such as the statement that “capitalism is the evil twin of true religion”. At other times, there’s laughter from the abyss: “Philosophy is like an unrequited love affair. You get nothing back; there’s only longing, inadequacy, a life unfulfilled”.

Abandoning their dream to “live on the fruits of America”, the gin-quaffing team returns home, W. to Plymouth, Lars to Newcastle, where the latter discovers an infestation of rats – a slightly forced continuation of the situation in Spurious, where his walls were  beset by mysterious  (and symbolic) damp and fungus. Nothing deterred, Lars and W. conceive of their own dogma for presentations, inspired by filmmaker Lars von Trier’s Dogme95 movement. With these two, however, the dogma is simply an excuse to make up rules as they go along, with no ripples being created in the world they seek to influence.

Soon, W. finds that his academic career in jeopardy and, like a Continental philosopher’s version of Laurel and Hardy, or even an updated, garrulous version of Vladimir and Estragon, the two stagger through life as if in an “eternal waiting room”, sometimes sinking into nihilism: “Every day is only the fresh ruination of any project we might give ourselves…What have we learnt except that we have no contribution to make, nothing to say, nothing to write, and that we have long since been outflanked by the world, overtaken by it, beaten half to death by it?”

Dogma, then, is a snap of the fingers in the faces of those still under the spell of traditional novelistic forms. As for Lars and W., there’s another book on the way charting their further exploits. They can’t go on, they’ll go on.

Mumbai: The Cities Within

What's interesting about these five recent books set in Mumbai is that they bring us glimpses of the city, from the Thirties to the present day, in almost chronological order. 


This piece appeared in the March 2012 issue of MW Magazine.

If you were to arrive at Mumbai’s Sahar airport and take a taxi all the way to the Taj Mahal hotel in Colaba, you would travel through not one city, but several. 

There would be the city of the slums bordering the airport, the blue tarpaulin roofs of which you would have been able to spot even as the plane was circling above. There would then be the neighbourhoods from Andheri to Bandra, the tony coffee shops and meretricious pubs of which would be filled with scriptwriters, actors, models and others looking for the break to transform their lives. If an especially chatty driver was behind the wheel of the taxi you were in, he’d tell you of his world, of how his current occupation was just a stop-gap before he hit the big time with a home-grown scheme or two. After a quick glance at the rear-view mirror to assess his chances, he might even offer to escort you to the city’s quarters of ill-repute, where, he would affirm, you would be able to sample the pleasures of drugs or the flesh. Shrugging off his offers, you would look out of the window to find yourself in the area of Mumbai called “the town” by suburban commuters. Sweeping down the Art Deco bordered sea-face to the mock Gothic buildings that still speak of colonial solidity, you’d finally reach your destination, the hotel that, though scarred by a recent, horrific act of terrorism, still stands as a beacon of civility and repose.

Centuries ago, the roads you just travelled down didn’t exist; it was a series of reclamation projects – not to mention the fortunes that arose from trade in opium and cotton -- that unified the seven islands to create the city you witnessed. Now, five authors of recently published books seek to reclaim older memories and more contemporary ways of life, charting, almost in reverse chronological order, the ages of Mumbai that made up your journey from airport to hotel.

 The Mumbai of the three decades from 1935 -- a time of intermingling, of civility and of hospitality --  is what Naresh Fernandes brings alive in his Taj Mahal Foxtrot. Even those not alive during those years would be nostalgic about this age of “conspicuous cosmopolitanism”; in fact, to look at the photographs that the book is sprinkled with is to wonder whether this really was the same city you see when looking out of the window today.

Fernandes unearths the often-ignored legacy of the jazz musicians who came here from the US and Europe as well as home-grown talent, much of it from Goa. The “energetic, improvised form” of the book celebrates a long-gone culture, chronicling visits by Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck and others, and the rapturous reception they received – not to mention Frank Fernand and Chic Chocolate, and the latter’s effect on Hindi film music because of his participation in the songs of Bhagwan’s Albela.

The grand ballroom of the Taj Mahal played host to many a memorable concert, and Fernandes also mentions other institutions, now vanished from sight if not memory: Napoli and Bombelli’s in Churchgate, for instance. Though the recollections are largely effervescent – such as the time when the combined bands of Chic Chocolate and Micky Correa launched into a jaunty swing version of Jana Gana Mana to cheering crowds at the Taj on the night of August 14, 1947 – there’s also an elegiac quality to the book. Scott Fitzgerald wrote of America’s Jazz Age that “it was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire’, and, as TajMahal Foxtrot makes clear, Mumbai itself experienced such an age.

It was a city, Fernandes writes in summation, “that gave everyone the space to play their own melody the way they heard it”. Before you can do so, he himself adds tersely: “That era has passed.” The city rode into the Sixties on waves of rising populist agitations but optimism undimmed. This is the Mumbai of Kiran Nagarkar’s novel, The Extras, his follow-up to Ravan and Eddie, and reading it is like listening to the tales told by an interesting yet garrulous uncle reminiscing about his past. It follows the fortunes of Ram Pawar and Eddie Coutinho as they make their way through a city teeming with people and stories. The music they’re inspired by is not jazz but pop and rock standards as well as, of course, Bollywood songs, initially performed in the novel by local “brass bandwallahs”.

Life as a taxi driver, as a film extra and as a music composer: through Ravan and Eddie’s occupations, Nagarkar paints a picture of a city impatient to get ahead. The pace of Mumbai is already frantic: one of the characters observes that her life is like a counter on a carom board, hurtling from one corner to another. Nagarkar’s characters grow increasingly anxious to break out of their ways of life at the crumbling CWD chawl in Mazagaon, as a fictional Maiboli Sangh launches a ‘Maharashtra for Maharashtrians’ agitation and underworld dons seek to carve out fiefdoms. That representatives of both these types would, in years to come, scar the city forever is what you can discern between the lines.

At one point, with trademark irreverence, Nagarkar has Ravan muse that national integration could only truly be found on Falkland Road, the city’s red-light district, as women of all nationalities were to be found there. That infamous area – as your taxi driver would have informed you -- is bordered by Shuklaji Street, where you could once discover integration of another kind, the one forged by smoking opium. This “city of O” is what you come across in Jeet Thayil’s debut novel, Narcopolis. Primarily set in the Seventies, this is a hallucinatory ode to Mumbai: the “hero or heroin” of the story.

In Narcopolis is to be found a city wallowing in its refuse, as the narrative interweaves the lives of those such as Dimple, a hijra with a penchant for reading; Rumi, a violent and desperate businessman; Mr Lee, a refugee from mainland China; Dom, the narrator, who speaks of “visitations from absent friends”, stories that are “straight from the pipe’s mouth”; and Rashid, the owner of the opium den in which the others congregate.

It’s a chemical romance that begins and ends with the word “Bombay”, where all manner of depravity arising out of addiction is on parade. When the novel moves on from the Seventies in tracing the decline in the characters’ lives, you find an elegy for an earlier time: “Already now there were times when he could feel it slipping away, a way of life vanishing as he watched, the pipes, the oil lamps layered with years of black residue, the conversations that a man would begin and lose interest in, all the rituals that he revered and obeyed, all disappearing.” 

Narcopolis sweeps on to cover the aftermath of the bloody 1992/93 riots, “when the city killed itself” and after which the narrator begins to see the metropolis as an “image of my cancelled self: an object of dereliction, deserving only of pity, closed, in all ways, to the world”.

For others, though, the city represents a way to validate the self, not to cancel it. Like Ravan and Eddie, these aspirants seek to break into the world of film and TV; that most who pursue such dreams fall by the wayside is no deterrent. This is the backdrop to the by-now well-known saga of Maria Susairaj, Neeraj Grover and Emile Jerome, names gleefully pounced upon by the tabloids just some years ago.

 The tragedy is recounted with chilling exactitude in Meenal Baghel’s Death in Mumbai. This is the Mumbai of the 2000s, brash and unapologetic about reaching out to grasp the brass ring, its values amoral and avaricious. It’s not an attitude that’s spoken about when you hear the words, “the spirit of Mumbai”. The suburb of Oshiwara and its environs, where much of the book is set, is revealed to be “an ocean of anxious insecure, ambitious, competitive, vulnerable and often rudderless people”.

Baghel meets those known to and touched by Grover’s murder – friends, families, colleagues, room-mates – to create a riveting narrative. In her hands, the affair isn’t just a triangle; it’s a polygon, with numerous sides encompassing a murky centre.  She also talks to those such as TV and film producer Ekta Kapur and director Ram Gopal Varma – the latter referred to as “cinema’s equivalent of an ambulance chaser”. Stating that “crime, not Bollywood is our salutary entertainment”, Baghel illustrates the intermingling of the two, pointing out that Love Sex Dhokha was “an edgy triptych about sexual betrayal, cinematic aspirations and parental disapproval – themes that deeply resonated with Neeraj’s killing.”

Death in Mumbai, then, is a well-researched cautionary tale, reportage that reaches beyond the incident it describes. Another such example set in another suburb of the city, Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers, is the most compelling of these books. Boo takes us into the slum of Annawadi, bordering the international airport and in the shadow of luxury hotels, to reveal people hanging on by their fingernails to globalisation’s promise of a better tomorrow. As she writes, in just one of the book’s many memorable phrases, “Annawadians now spoke of better lives casually, as if fortune were a cousin arriving on Sunday, as if the future would look nothing like the past”.  Things are bleaker with the economic downturn: “We try so many things,” says one slum-dweller, “but the world doesn't move in our favour”.

At first, one is reluctant to get deeper into the book: surely, one has had one’s fill of spirited recreations of those from the slums, especially on screen. Below this is the reluctance to engage with familiar middle-class guilt. To overcome those qualms is to find that Boo’s book is necessary reading: amazingly detailed, accurate and revelatory of an “enriching, unequal world” where “anger and hope were being privatized” like much else in the city. Corruption is everywhere; government agencies are “operating as private market stalls not public guardians”.

The characters that populate the “undercity” of Annawadi are a far cry from jazz musicians and star aspirants, and the only addicts here are those who get high by sniffing discarded bottles of correction fluid. There’s Abdul, a garbage picker accused of a horrific crime and caught up in a web of courtroom appearances, police cells and detention centres to outrival Dickens. There’s the ambitious Asha, who believes that politics is her way out of the slum: “She had by now seen past the obvious truth – that Mumbai was a hive of hope and ambition – to a profitable corollary. Mumbai was a place of festering grievance and ambient envy”.

Though Boo’s book is more a critique of what the forces of globalization do to the underclass than a book about Mumbai, you soon realize that it could only have been set in this city, with an ever-growing influx of migrants, and with political collusion and corruption leading to the proliferation of shantytowns.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers is not without its moments of grim humour – a youth engaging in petty theft is referred to as a “new economy saboteur” – but the overall picture that emerges is that of adapting to an uncaring environment, if not downright resignation. These slumdogs don’t want to be millionaires; they just want to lead a life more decent than the ones they live at present.

For some, then, it’s still a maximum city; for others, it has a minimal future. Some arrive here hoping to find streets paved with gold; others realize that they’re filled with no more than garbage. Whichever version of Mumbai you inhabit, from swinging past to crumbling present, the city has always found a way, as these five books reveal, to both surpass and confound expectations.

If You Really Want To Hear About It

This appeared in today's DNA.

J.D. SALINGER: A LIFE RAISED HIGH Kenneth Slawenski

In The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger has Holden Caulfield say, “What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it”. This feeling of intimacy between author and reader is one of the defining characteristics of Salinger’s work. As such, a biography of the author may seem like an intrusion, a stepping into a sacred space – more so, given Salinger’s own obsession with privacy.

In the latest such attempt, it helps to find that the biographer, Kenneth Slawenski, counts himself as one of Salinger’s chief fans, being the administrator of a website devoted to the man and his work. The tone throughout, therefore, is one of respect, not to mention outright admiration. (This is something that can be taken too far, such as when Slawenski affirms that Salinger’s short story, ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’ was the inspiration for Nabokov’s Lolita.)

Nevertheless, J.D. Salinger: A Life Raised High is readable for the persistence with which it takes us through the main facets of Salinger’s life – beginning with the early ambition to become a writer, his repeated efforts to be accepted for publication in magazines such as Saturday Evening Post on one hand and The New Yorker on the other, and first mentors such as editor Whit Burnett and publisher Jamie Hamilton, both of whom he was to have a falling-out with decades later because of the manner in which they represented his work. What comes through time and again is Salinger’s obsession with his craft over the years, writing to the exclusion of all else, and revising and re-revising until he was happy with the results.

From the start, Slawenski tries to establish correspondences between Salinger’s fiction and his life, an early example being his pointing out that the author’s half-Jewish-half-Catholic heritage is something shared by the fictional Glass family. Given the restrictions on quoting from Salinger’s stories or letters, the in-depth analyses of his output comes across as dry, bereft of the voice that Salinger strove so hard to perfect.

However, what is riveting is the biographer’s piecing together of Salinger’s time in the army during WWII. Starting with a relatively quiet stint at army bases in New Jersey and Georgia, Slawenski goes on to recreate Salinger’s participation in the bloody Normandy landing, the liberation of Paris, the depredations during the Battle of the Bulge and – if Slawenski’s speculation is right – the discovery of the horrors of Dachau. All of this, he emphasizes, was to have a marked effect on Salinger, causing him to deal with trauma by treating writing as a form of healing. He was to be profoundly influenced by the teachings of those such as Ramakrishna Paramhansa (calling The Gospels of Sri Ramakrishna “the religious book of the century”) and by Zen teachings via, among other things, his friendship with D.T. Suzuki.

With an archivist’s glee, Slawenski traces the many short stories in which Holden Caulfield and his siblings make an appearance, all of which – starting with ‘Slight Rebellion off Madison’ in 1941 – were to culminate in the seminal The Catcher in the Rye, published ten years later.  From this time on, Salinger’s taste for solitude was to become even more pronounced: he was to ensconce himself in a secluded, picturesque property in Cornish, New Hampshire, where stayed until his death in 2010, at 91.

In Cornish, he was to immerse himself in writing the “prose home movies” about his beloved Glass family – the seven children of Bessie and Les, including Seymour Glass, whom many believed was a stand-in for Salinger himself. The last of these stories, ‘Hapworth 16, 1921’, was published in the New Yorker in 1965; from that time on, though Salinger was believed to be writing obsessively, there’s been no new story published.

Slawenski outlines Salinger’s well-known attempts to protect his privacy, including the court case against Ian Hamilton to block the publication of his biography, which the British journalist then had to recast as In Search of J.D. Salinger. (Another often-told tale repeated here is that of Salinger refusing Elia Kazan the rights to turn Catcher into a Broadway show, saying “I fear that Holden wouldn’t like it”.)

The biographer’s respectful attitude extends to Salinger’s relationships with women, from the early liaison with Oona O’Neill -- daughter of the playwright and later wife of Charlie Chaplin – to the ups-and-downs in his life with Claire Douglas, his second wife, whom many believe was the template for the fictional Franny. Of other relationships with those much younger, there’s not much said here, barring a passing reference to Joyce Maynard, whose side of the relationship can be found in her controversial, not-so-flattering recollection, At Home in the World.

The influence that Salinger still exerts on authors and reader is remarkable, considering that it’s been over two years since he died, and over 40 since any new work was published. In a rare 1974 interview to The New York Times, he confessed: “There is a marvelous peace in not publishing. ... It's peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I live to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure”. That pleasure was something he protected till the very end.

Shackled

This appeared in yesterday's The Indian Express

THE PRISONER OF PARADISE Romesh Gunesekera

Naïve young men and women. A bespoiled Eden. And lost innocence. That’s what Romesh Gunesekera’s first novel, Reef, was made of. With The Prisoner of Paradise, he returns to the same elements, this time with middling results.

The novel is set in the Mauritius of 1825, less than two decades after the French ceded the island to the British. On this land arrives the orphaned 19-year-old Lucy Gladwell, wanting “much more from the world than could be found within England's pebbly shores”. She’s to stay with her aunt and uncle, the latter being a Colonel Blimp-ish colonial administrator, very much a stock character.  (Lucy’s circumstances are thus markedly different from those of Deeti, who, in Amitav Ghosh’s River of Smoke, also arrives in Mauritius in the early decades of the 19^th century to start a new life.)

With her secluded, poetry-steeped upbringing – Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh being a favourite – Lucy is initially charmed by “this sunny southern island bursting with colour and full of the sounds of singing and buzzing, gurgling and rustling, whistling and whispering…” Must have been difficult to sleep at night.

Soon, she meets and is attracted to the Darcy-like Don Lambodar, a suave, saturnine translator at the service of a rebellious princeling from Sri Lanka. But this is an island -- peopled by those from India, England, France, Mozambique and Sri Lanka, among others -- that, in the words of Lambodar, “the French emancipation failed to reach and the English abolitionists have yet to discover”. Soon, there are rumblings in paradise: disaffection spreads amongst the indentured plantation workers and others over the construction of a temple, as well as their overall circumstances. Natural and man-made storms will ensue, and lives will be overturned.

There’s certain obviousness to much of the material – Wide Sargasso Sea, this isn’t -- and many of the events occur offstage, being subsequently recounted by witnesses in the form of long conversations. This isn’t helped by stilted dialogue, even if you take into account the attempt to mirror earlier speech patterns. The prose, too, can veer towards the overheated: “He thought he was conducting a conversation, but discovered it had turned into a quarrel of silence with pauses and peripeteia of peculiar proportions”. A little later, flowers are revealed to be "sucking the morning sun into their dewy delicate tubes and releasing faint undulating vapours..."

What does come through, however, is Gunesekera’s earnestness in unfolding the narrative, as well as the sincerity with which he conveys the depth of feeling between Don and Lucy. Other than that, Prisoner of Paradise is too shackled to satisfy.

Posters For #flashreads

Some rough-and-ready posters for use on February 14: e-mail, display, put up on your blog or print and wrap fish in them. For the initiative itself, see this.

(Update: Have added two new posters. These are the last ones, I promise.)