Little grown-ups, and other misfits

[Did this for my Forbes Life books column – around the time I was part of the jury for the children’s fiction prize at the Goodbooks Awards]
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Discussions about literature for children and young adults often pivot around the question: should young readers be spoon-fed? Do messages and morals have to be spelt out? Some parents and teachers seem to think so, but there are others who give pre-teen readers more credit and point out that the best way to engage a mind – and to provoke some thought in the process – is to tell a story really well, to make the characters and situations involving. Ideas can lie embedded within a “fun” narrative. Besides, as the writer EB White once put it, “Children are the most attentive, curious, eager, observant, sensitive, quick, and generally congenial readers on earth. Anyone who writes down to them is wasting his time.” A related observation is that it makes little sense to shield children from “dark” subject matter, especially at a time when content of all sorts is so easy to access.

Having recently read a number of new young-adult (YA) books by Indian authors, I was pleased to find that many of them – some to a greater degree than others – steer clear of pedantry. Even the ones that are set in a school environment and deal with a vulnerable but intelligent child beginning to make sense of the world, working his way through notions of right and wrong, seeing a friend or classmate through fresh eyes and learning about empathy.

A good example of this is in Payal Dhar’s Slightly Burnt, which begins by cleverly misdirecting the reader: the narrator, a 16-year-old named Komal, has just had her life turned upside down, because her best friend Sahil (and she only wants them to be friends, nothing more) has said three little words to her. We think we know what those words are, but soon we discover that we were wrong; we then follow Komal on a journey to understanding and acceptance. I won’t provide big spoilers here, but this novel addresses an important subject – the marginalization of people who are unconventional in some way – with lightness. You won’t at all feel you are being preached to.

Which is also the case with Samit Basu’s delightful The Adventures of Stoob: Testing Times. If you’re in a solemn mood, you might tell someone that this book’s lesson is: It Isn’t Good to Cheat in Your Exams. But that wouldn’t begin to convey the strengths of this fluid narrative about a boy who has a rich inner life, and who is so nervous about his exams that he nearly crosses over to the dark side. In a smart demonstration that “doing the right thing” can be cool, some of the most fun passages have Stoob and his friends thinking up ways to prevent another friend from cheating during a test. The writing aside, I enjoyed Sunaina Coelho’s illustrations, which complement the text wonderfully – as in the drawing of Stoob being chased by weapon-wielding Hindi alphabets, or the hilarious one of him and his parents depicted as mythological characters from an old, melodramatic movie.

Another of my recent favourites in the school sub-genre was Shabnam Minwalla’s The Strange Haunting of Model High School. Though set in south Mumbai – with references to real-world landmarks such as Churchgate station – this book might remind you a little of Enid Blyton’s St Clare’s stories, with a supernatural twist thrown in. The characters here include a lonely girl-ghost who has been floating around the school’s corridors for over a hundred years seeking a piece of information that will put her mind at rest, a conniving deputy principal named Mrs Rangachari, and the three protagonists – BFFs named Lara, Mallika and Sunu – who set out to help the ghost even as they prepare for an inter-school production of the musical Annie.

One of the incidental themes in Minwalla’s novel – a less-privileged girl attending a posh school – is handled more directly, and a little more self-consciously, in Kate Darnton’s The Misfits, told from the perspective of an American girl named Chloe who has recently moved to Delhi with her parents. When Chloe encounters another misfit, the dark-skinned Lakshmi, who is very Indian but not of the “right class”, she gets an insight into the workings of the adult world, and gets to play savior as well. Darnton’s book is sensitive and engaging, but since it seems to have been written in part for a non-Indian readership, some of the content might feel over-expository, and just a teeny bit patronizing, to an Indian reader. (Chloe’s parents, who used to be hippies in their own youth, keep shaking their heads indignantly at the class prejudice they see around them.)

Another, breezier story about an 11-year-old girl is Judy Balan’s How to Stop Your Grownup from Making Bad Decisions, written as a series of blog entries by “Nina the Philosopher”. A few dramatic things happen here (Nina and her friend Aakash blow up the school swimming pool with stolen chemicals; her single mom has a serious accident and must also be kept from getting married to a seemingly unsuitable boy), but the overall tone is that of a chatty diary entry – Nina isn’t trying to write a thriller for us, she is simply going through life and negotiating things as they happen. In the process she shows the clear-sighted wisdom one might expect in an intelligent child, but which some adults might also envy. “People who THINK all the time should have their own rooms,” she observes, making a case for introverts who need a lot of space to themselves, even when they aren’t doing anything observably important.

At one point, Nina says she feels like she is the grown-up and her mom the teenager in the house. A more literal version of this situation can be found in Andaleeb Wajid’s No Time for Goodbyes, which operates at the intersection of YA fantasy and teen romance: after glancing at a Polaroid photo, 16-year-old Tamanna finds herself back in 1982, where her future mom is a little younger than her, and where she has to pretend to be a visitor from Australia (while dodging questions such as why the Harry Potter book she has brought along has a “2000” publishing date). A nice nostalgia trip for those of us who remember the times Wajid is writing about, this is the first in a three-book series (the sequel, Back in Time, is out too), and I’d be interested in seeing how she manages to stretch out this one-note premise without getting too repetitive.

One thing she does well is to invoke the pang of knowing that the person you want to be with may always remain inaccessible or out of bounds – in this case, literally belonging to another dimension. Looked at that way, notwithstanding the time-travel angle, this book is about the very universal “outsider” emotions that are also evoked in real-world narratives like Slightly Burnt and The Misfits.

[Other recent posts on children's/young adult books: Manan and Ela; Tik-Tik, the Master of Time]

Child in time: thoughts on Richard Linklater’s Boyhood

“I don’t want to live my life through a screen,” says 17-year-old Mason Jr in a late scene in Richard Linklater’s exquisite new film Boyhood. Within the narrative, Mason – a sensitive young man with an artistic temperament – is fretting about the pressures of staying visible on Facebook and other social media; that these things now seem to validate your existence, and he wants to switch off from them. But at an extra-narrative level too, the line is resonant – because young Ellar Coltrane, who plays the role, has lived so much of his life on the screen created by this remarkable project.*** Though a scripted fiction film, Boyhood was made in installments over 12 years, capturing Coltrane’s own growth from age seven to age 18. In the finished work, when Mason speaks about how futures can seem pre-ordained, how it can feel like the path ahead has been mapped out, one hears an echo of the actor who, as a child barely comprehending the scale of what he was getting into, became part of Linklater’s grand vision.

Time, and what it does to people and their relationships, is one of the big themes of Linklater’s cinema – most famously demonstrated in the three “Before” films made over 18 years with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy – but even by his standards Boyhood was a risky experiment that could easily have crumbled in the execution, or worse, have come off as one giant gimmick. An important difference between watching Hawke and Delpy age over the course of Before Sunrise, Before Sunset and Before Midnight and watching Coltrane grow up in Boyhood is that the latter was so young and vulnerable when this project began. In this interview he says he doesn’t even remember his first meeting with his director, and barely has any memory of the first 2-3 years of shooting. One might say that the concept of “performance” (which implies self-awareness to begin with) doesn’t apply in the normal sense to his early scenes.

To a degree, that is true for all child actors, and there is a danger of making the story of Boyhood’s filming sound more dramatic than it was. From what I know, though scenes were shot every year, each schedule took only a few days or weeks; Coltrane wasn’t like a willing version of Jim Carrey’s Truman in The Truman Show, under a camera’s scrutiny for every minute of his growing-up years. He continued to live his own life, as the other cast members did. Still, it couldn’t have been a quite normal childhood (whatever the ideal of “normal childhood” is). And though Boyhood is a lovely, absorbing film on its own terms, while watching it I kept thinking about the effect it must have had on the young actor.

What is it like to be the subject of such an experiment from an early age? How does your own (nascent) self get shaped by and subsumed in the character you are playing, and how does the role affect your own future real-life decisions? In his “young adult” scenes, Coltrane projects such a calm, mature personality it is hard to imagine that in real life he might be a different, more boisterous person. In his interviews too, he sounds like Mason, and some of his own interests – in photography, for instance – were absorbed into the film’s script. When Linklater picked the six-year-old all those years ago, he must have seen the seeds of the qualities he wanted for his protagonist. But could the very process of being filmed every year also have contributed to making Coltrane more inward-looking, more understanding of creative processes? And is it significant that though Coltrane cooperated with his director unfailingly, year after year, Linklater’s extroverted daughter Lorelei (who plays Mason’s sister Samantha) told her dad at some point that she didn’t want to participate anymore; couldn’t he kill her character off?

Watching the transitions in Mason’s (or Ellar’s) features over the film’s three hours – dreaminess and reticence shifting into something like confidence, a sense of a young person becoming comfortable in his skin (without losing his vulnerability) – I began free-associating, thinking of other films and books. The Antoine Doinel films made by Francois Truffaut, for example, in which Jean-Pierre Leaud played the central character from age 12 on, beginning with The 400 Blows and ending with Love on the Run 20 years later. Michael Ondaatje’s novel The Cat’s Table, in which a boy’s three-week ship journey between Sri Lanka and England becomes a symbol for “the floating dream of childhood”, the vast ocean unmarked by milestones. (In Boyhood, Mason Jr’s pre-teen life seems to go by like a dream, with people and houses flitting in and out of sight, and around half the film deals with his life between age 16 and 18.) Or even the strange career of child actors like Mayur, who played the young version of Amitabh Bachchan so often that by the time he did it in Laawaris – as a gangly 16-year-old – he had all the expressions and movements down pat, even in the little jig he does while listening to “Mere Angne Mein” on the radio; he was performing in a pre-constructed mould.

These thoughts, though, were secondary to the experience to watching Boyhood unfold at its leisurely pace. Like much of Linklater’s other work, it is driven by naturalistic conversation and by a disavowal of clearly set-up dramatic situations for the characters to respond to in familiar ways. There are a few such situations here (which life doesn’t have them?) – a drunk stepfather terrifying his wife and kids at a dining table, a sweet old geezer from the Bible belt (Mason’s dad’s new father-in-law) gifting the boy a shotgun and assuming that everyone will be happy to go to Sunday church together – but they aren’t underlined. The obvious awkwardness felt by Mason, Samantha and their dad about the overt religiosity of the stepmother’s family doesn't lead to a “confrontation” or even a brief teenage outburst; instead the tension is diffused in a charming little moment when the siblings and their father whisper to each other about this “God thing” and the stepmom calls out jovially from a distance “I can hear you!”

Such is the “verite” nature of the film in any case that the dramatic moments aren’t presented in terms of a clear beginning, middle and end. Exhibit: a scene where Mason and Samantha and their step-siblings cycle up to their house and see Mason’s mother lying awkwardly on the ground while her husband yells at her. We don’t see the start of the fight or see him hitting her, we arrive right in the middle of a messy situation, disoriented, slowly piecing together what must have happened. This is slice-of-life storytelling at its sparest. And at the end here is Mason/Ellar, on the verge of being free from the screen at last, liberated and unsure in equal measure, looking ahead to a future that is no longer pre-ordained.

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*** As David Thomson noted in another context, here are two opposing – but also complementary – meanings of “screen”: one involves concealment, the other exhibition.

The boy who fixed Earth - on Tik-Tik, The Master of Time

[Did this for the Hindu Literary Review]

The narrator-hero of Musharraf Ali Farooqi’s new book for young readers is preoccupied with Time and wastes none of it in letting us know what the central peeve of his existence is. “There was one gigantic, colossal fault with our species which trumped all the advantages,” says Tik-Tik – a boy from the planet Nopter – on the opening page, “Our species was slow to grow up. Very slow.” In case you’re wondering, “growing up” isn’t code for a people collectively becoming wiser, or something else abstract or allegorical; it is literally about moving from childhood to adulthood. Hankering after the many freedoms available to adults, and impatient to become one of their rank, the single-minded Tik-Tik decides that “this state of affairs should not be allowed to continue unchallenged and uncured”.

In fact he continues to make such self-important proclamations throughout the book, for he is an endearingly deluded fellow. He gives himself heaps of credit along with many grand-sounding designations, but he constantly misreads situations and overestimates the worth of his own initiatives – which means much rescue work has to be done by other people, notably his unruffled friend Nib-Nib, with whom he shares a love-hate relationship (and whose cat Dum-Dum is a personal nemesis). This brings a bumbling charm to Tik-Tik’s narrative, which serves the book well, especially when he makes a proud announcement only to have the wind taken out of his sails a few sentences later. Or when he indulges in quasi-philosophical asides (“I realised that all planets have their Dum-Dums. One cannot escape them”) or over-dramatizes his problems: “With Dum-Dum prowling on the land mass, and the penguins underwater, this planet had now become for me the single most dangerous place in the whole cosmos [...] I hoped to find their military training camp, fitted out with rope ladders, horizontal beams and swings.” Even when he casts himself as an Evil Scientist driven to nefarious means for his survival, the effect is funny, not least because we know that little will come of his schemes.

This winsome book begins slowly, with a series of developments that culminate in Tik-Tik setting off on an inter-galactic journey in a space egg with his grandpa, but the pace lifts once they land on Earth and start figuring out “high science” methods to remedy the planet’s construction flaws. Hanging a giant comet from the “bottom” of Earth, for instance, would stabilise it and do away with the menace of changing seasons. A huge propeller fixed to the North Pole would be a nice way to speed up rotation and make time pass more quickly. And a polarity device is a neat method for keeping unwanted things and creatures as far away from you as possible (though this can, like anything else, backfire).

Sprinkled through the story are illustrations by Michelle Farooqi – the author’s wife – the best of which do a valuable job of enhancing the text and clarifying the things described. For example, it wasn’t until I saw the lovely drawing on page 61, a depiction of what Earth looks like after the propeller and the comet have been attached, that I felt I had a real sense of what Tik-Tik had been up to. The drawing is non-realist in that it shows Tik-Tik, his grandpa and five waddling penguins as abnormally large figures occupying a sizable part of the planet’s surface, both on the “top” and the “bottom” (the effect is similar to the famous images of Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince on his tiny asteroid) but it is an instant mood-establisher, affectionate and quaint while also making the familiar seem unfamiliar.

Tik-Tik, The Master of Time is a breezy, humorous adventure story – with some very rudimentary science for young readers – but it has a self-evidently serious side too. Tik-Tik’s impatience is a version of a paranoia many of us have experienced as children: suspecting that Adulthood is an exclusive, privileged club floating unreachably in the misty distance; wondering when (or if!) we will be admitted to this fellowship and what deep secrets we might learn when that happens. The irony is that for a grown-up reader, a book such as this one can both create and fulfil the opposite sort of yearning. And this may be why the climax, though a bit laboured in its spelling out of ideas, is so affecting – Tik-Tik’s sense of loss and disorientation when he finally gets his wish and then realises that there is no going back is easy to relate to. For those of us with limited access to space eggs and giant propellers, revisiting our favourite children’s books – and discovering new ones – is a good practical way of bridging time’s great divide.

(Some earlier posts on the work of the versatile Farooqi: on his excellent translation of the Hamzanama here and here; on another children’s book, The Amazing Moustaches of Moochhander the Iron Man, here)

Tinkle tinkle little store

[A nostalgia piece I did for Kindle magazine's issue on book-stores and book spaces]

The first bookstore in my life – and the only one I can claim to feel really nostalgic about – had two wheels and a nasal voice that called out “Maga-zine! Maga-zine!” late in the evening. This was a thin man on a bicycle, bearing an improbably large selection of glossies tucked into a small space behind his seat. He would come to our house in south Delhi’s Panchshila Park each day – my mother being a compulsive renter of movie magazines – and it was through him that I discovered Amar Chitra Katha’s Tinkle comics. I was five years old; I know this because the oldest of the comics in my carefully maintained stack is dated July 1982.

Tinkle was a fortnightly then, and one could expect the latest issue to arrive anytime between 12 and 15 days after the previous one. I suspect my earliest understanding of the passage of time developed during those days. On most evenings I wasn’t too interested in the kitaab-wallah uncle’s comings and goings, but a little calendar in my head told me when nine or ten days had elapsed since the last Tinkle, and then the next few evenings were filled with anticipation. The sound of the bicycle bell, the dash to the door, the disappointment when I realised that today wasn’t the day, or the thrill when I saw the cover of a fresh issue for the first time (and quickly flipped through it to check if the final story was Kaalia the Crow, which I loved, or Shikari Shambhu, which I only mildly liked) – these things became a part of the daily routine. He sometimes played teasing games, claiming with a sad face that the latest issue was going to be delayed and then unveiling it just as I had turned away balefully.

It may seem like pushing things to designate this slender herald a “bookstore”, but I should stress that we bought every one of those Tinkles. I was just starting to learn that the books one found interesting were to be kept and hoarded and revisited and fussed over, not merely read once and returned (like the magazines that my mother exchanged every day). It’s a lesson I have never unlearnt; as I write this, a number of bookshelves, makeshift bookshelves, tables, racks, bed-boxes and bed surfaces in my house are creaking in confirmation.

It didn’t take me long to learn that Bicycle Uncle was the mobile arm of a tiny shop – more like a stall – in the nearby Malviya Nagar market. Today this market occupies a low-rung position in a south Delhi filled with mall complexes, but even back then it was mainly a muddy, winding maze of vegetable stalls, shops selling groceries and trinkets, artificial jewellery and countless packets of bindis – most of this of very little interest to the child that I was. However, at some point during our walk through the back-lanes, we turned a corner and there the book stall was with its egalitarian display: Amar Chitra Kathas sharing space with Archie comics and digests, Jataka tales in one corner, Jughead Jones in the other. I have no idea now what the stall was called, if it was called anything (quite possibly it was only informally referred to by the owner’s name) or if it still exists. But I recall many happy times spent there on cold winter evenings and on rainy days when one had to wade through slush to reach it.

The Malviya Nagar byways wouldn’t have done for the “proper” books, though – the sophisticated publications by Enid Blyton and suchlike. For these, one had to travel what seemed to my child-self a very long distance – a 20-minute drive to South Extension, the home of Teksons.

It feels strange now to think of how central Teksons was to my early life: the shop is still around, in the same location, but I haven’t been to it in years, or felt the slightest desire to do so. In the same way that one doesn’t get to choose one’s relatives or one’s earliest nursery-level friends, it became the bookstore of my childhood by default, only because my family so often went to South Extension. As a young adult my preferred haunt would be the Midlands in Aurobindo Market, mainly for its round-the-year, unadvertised 20 percent discount on all IBH prices and its efficient display. And there would be many other fortuitous encounters: locating a much-sought-after graphic novel in London’s Foyles, for example, and picking it up despite its price and weight only because I knew there was no hope of getting it in India. Or a clearing-up sale in a shabby Connaught Place store, where I chanced upon a rare film book that is still one of my most prized possessions: Danny Peary’s Cult Movies, a collection of warm and informed essays that had a huge influence on me as a writer and movie-watcher (and which, incidentally, is not available anywhere today, even online).

But it was in Teksons that I formed most of my early reading habits, moving over the years from Blytons to Agatha Christies, and thence to Maughams, Wodehouses and Hemingways. Each visit was an encounter with new possibilities and changing tastes: becoming aware of a world outside that of the Famous Five’s macaroon-and-scone picnics; working out what type of book to turn to next; reading descriptions on back jackets, flipping pages to see if a stray passage of text struck a chord or revealed an interesting conversation or idea. It was here that I bought my first Christie, Murder in Retrospect, which would chill the summer afternoons I spent in Ludhiana during a family trip. Here it was that I felt indescribably proud lugging a copy of Maugham’s Of Human Bondage to the cashier’s counter: it was such a bulky book with such a grown-up title, it was so much more respectable to be seen buying something like this rather than another in the Hardy Boys Case Files series (which I may also have smuggled across to the counter). It was at Teksons too that I bought my first proper dictionary, a pleasingly heavy Oxford publication that made me feel much empowered as a reader. (Today, in the Internet age, physical dictionaries seem laughably unnecessary – but that only makes the memory even more precious.)

All this said, I am not sentimental about book-stores as physical spaces. Certainly, I don’t fetishize them like some of my friends do. This might seem odd coming from someone who has been an eager reader since a young age, worked professionally on the literary beat for years, never used an electronic-reader to date, and been a late convert to online buying (my first Flipkart purchase was as recently as early 2011). But perhaps it has to do with the fact that for much of the past decade my job has entailed receiving unmanageable quantities of books, more than 90 percent of which I will never read. I can understand the attraction a good bookstore holds for a keen reader who doesn’t work professionally with books – and who perhaps only gets to indulge the reading habit for 20 minutes at the end of a tiring day – but take it from me: when one’s own room starts looking like a particularly messy publisher’s warehouse, some of the romanticism associated with entering a store and smelling thousands of new books (or thousands of old books in a second-hand store) wears away.

What doesn’t wear away is the memory of early discovery – of the browsing rituals that become a gateway to new knowledge about the world and about oneself. Or simply hearing the sound of a bicycle bell tinkling and knowing that 30 pages of fresh stories await a reader's immersion.

A boy and a ship: unstructured thoughts on Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table

[Notes for a review I may or may not finish writing - as you can probably tell, I have conflicted feelings about the book]

– On a large ship travelling from Sri Lanka to England in 1954, an 11-year-old boy makes the first significant journey of his life; it will be a rite of passage too. Three weeks are to be spent at sea and he is for all practical purposes travelling alone: a distant acquaintance who happens to be on board keeps an eye on him, but she is a First Class passenger while Michael – along with two boys his age and a few scattered adults – has his meals in the least privileged section of the ship’s huge dining room.

The good thing about being placed at the “cat’s table” is the sense of independence and vague disreputability it creates in one so young. Michael spends his days mostly in the company of his two new friends, the self-assured Cassius and the introverted Ramadhin, and their paths intersect with those of the adults around them: a botanist who is transporting a whole shimmering garden in the ship’s hold; a half-Sicilian pianist named Max Mazappa; an acrobat with the stage name The Hyderabad Mind; a quiet teacher going to England for the first time; the enigmatically spinsterish Miss Perinetta Lasqueti; and most thrillingly, a shackled convict who is believed to have killed a judge.

– “Once we climbed the gangplank onto the Oronsay, we were for the first time by necessity in close quarters with adults,” says the grown-up Michael, narrating the story decades after the journey. Over the course of this novel (written by another Michael – Ondaatje – who also happened to be on an ocean liner from Ceylon to England in 1954), we are left in little doubt that his shipboard experiences have resonated throughout his life and become reference points for him. (As a married man, when Michael sees his wife dancing with someone else and making a casual gesture that implies intimacy, he is reminded of seeing a similar gesture made on the ship’s deck years earlier. There are many other echoes of this sort.)

But even while The Cat’s Table recognises the ways in which people are shaped by – and return to – their early experiences, it is perceptive about the huge gulf between childhood and adulthood. At one point, Cassius suggests that the boys keep their backgrounds to themselves. “He liked the idea, I think, of being self-sufficient. That is how he saw our little gang existing on the ship.” It’s a reminder that this is how so many of our earliest friendships play out, with the participants being unaware of, or uninterested in, family and background details that will later come to mean a great deal.

– This book is also about the impossibility of knowing exactly how and when you pass from one life-stage to the next. (When sailing through one vast body of water after another, the boundaries are necessarily imprecise. There are no signposts to tell you exactly where this sea ends and that ocean begins.) Even as Michael spends his time blithely adventuring with his friends – “being a child”, in other words – there are passages where he shows the self-awareness one associates with growing up. A significant moment between him and his older cousin Emily, who is also on the ship, carries a hint of sexual awakening before resolving itself into a more conventional scene of a distraught child being consoled by a relative. On another occasion, briefly coerced into assisting a thieving Baron - his body covered in the oil that allows him to slither through a narrow cabin window - Michael sees himself in a mirror. “This was, I think, the first reflection or portrait that I remember of myself,” the adult Michael tells us, “It was the image of my youth that I would hold on to for years – someone startled, half-formed, who had not become anyone or anything yet."

(This reminded me of Pip in the graveyard in the superb opening pages of Great Expectations: “My first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening...”. Incidentally The Cat’s Table contains a brief but important reference to Dickens’s convict Magwitch.)

– What slightly muddied my appreciation of The Cat’s Table is that this is two different novels in one, and they cut into each other’s space. The first is a pure adventure tale, a boy’s voyage of discovery on board an unimaginably big ship where many exciting things happen and many intriguing people are met. The second is a more reflective attempt to link these events with Michael’s future, and while this is done with care and insight, the two modes don’t always come together seamlessly.

Initially it seems the story will be set exclusively in the distant past (and aboard the ship), but then the first of many “flash-forwards” occurs – a bracket-enclosed, page-length paragraph in which Michael mentions a further acquaintance with Ramadhin in London. Later, midway through the book, we are taken off the ship for 30 pages and given extended information about Michael’s subsequent life, including a relationship with Ramadhin’s sister Massi; and there is another long detour towards the end. I found my attention drifting during these sections. The Cat’s Table has many lovely passages and a real feel for how people and their relationships change over time, but the minor disconnect between its two halves make it as choppy in places as the ocean Michael crosses on his way to a new life.

– Some of the flash-forwards do work well on their own terms, adding new layers to our perspective on the ship days. For instance, though Michael appears to be closer to Cassius than to Ramadhin while they are together on the Oronsay, we learn that he will lose all contact with the former after they disembark. This is believable at a strictly realist level: we all know about intense childhood friendships which, when freed from the contexts in which they were formed, were quickly forgotten. But since The Cat’s Table constantly invites us to read it at a metaphorical level (with the three-week journey representing the wonders and uncertainties of childhood), I think it’s worth considering that Cassius stands for something latent in Michael – a feral side, perhaps, that he brushes against on the voyage and then turns away from once he reaches cold England. (At one point, recalling a subsequent adult visit to Cassius’s art exhibition – where they don’t meet – Michael uses this intriguing sentence: “Some grains of Cassius had after all remained in my system.”)

Echoes from a floating dream

– I don’t usually pay much attention to book-jacket texts – they can become traps for a reviewer – but there’s a striking phrase in this one: the Oronsay is likened to “the floating dream of childhood”. Ondaatje isn’t subtle about the symbolism of a large ship moving through the great unknown, but he very skilfully evokes the amorphous quality of our childhood recollections. The 21 days at sea don’t come to us in chronological order – the fragmented memory of the book’s narrator does not permit this. Two events – or encounters with different people – that might have occurred on the same day are narrated several chapters apart as Michael gives them a context. The three weeks become a cornucopia of colourful incidents, so that it’s difficult to pin down the order in which they occurred.

And of course, this is how most of our childhood memories work. Those of us who have held on to diaries we kept at a young age, or who have an unusually acute memory for dates, might theoretically know that two significant but unconnected incidents took place in (say) the same week 22 years ago; but when we actually try to recall them, our minds might find it impossible to fill in the other details of the time-span in which they occurred – or to even believe that they happened so near each other.

Towards the end of The Cat’s Table, the adult Michael muses: “Looking back, I am no longer certain who gave me what pieces of advice, or befriended us, or deceived us.” Throughout the book there is a sense of barely remembered conversations, or events that echo one another, so that the possibility arises that Michael’s memory is conflating one experience with another (which, again, is something we all do when attempting to recapture the past).

For example, at one point the adult Michael reads a letter written by Perinetta Lasqueti, where she mentions dressing up as Marcel Proust – complete with a slim moustache – at a fancy-dress party in her youth. This feels like an echo of an incident earlier in the book, when the child Michael describes Perinetta similarly disguised as a man during a port of call at Aden. It leads one to wonder: did the Aden episode really happen as he remembered it? (And could the Proust reference be a sly nod – by Michael Ondaatje the author – to the whimsies of memory?) There are other little recurrences in the writing (such as two references, a few pages apart but in completely different contexts, to the application of unguent on a skin wound) and they probably aren’t accidental, coming as they do from the pen of such a careful and organised writer.

Boy and wolf: thoughts on Stanley ka Dabba

The figure of the Big Bad Wolf is central to fairy tales about the fears and trials of childhood, and there are many variations on the character. The Wolf doesn’t have to be the villain-in-chief: he can be watching from the shadows, a potential rather than explicit threat. Or he might be revealed to be something very different from the bogeyman of the child’s nightmares (see Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird, for example). But that doesn’t necessarily make the nightmares any less vivid.

In the Red Riding Hood story the Wolf has big, sharp teeth and reckons that the little heroine might make a tasty dinner. The villain of the new film Stanley ka Dabba isn’t that fearsome, but he’s a nuisance at the very least – a school-teacher with a wolfish appetite, who bullies children into sharing their tiffin lunches with him. The role is played by the film’s writer-director Amole Gupte, who also wrote the very popular Taare Zameen Par (and was originally going to direct that film, before Aamir Khan took over the production). In the Acknowledgements, Gupte mentions director Vishal Bhardwaj, with whom he has worked in the past – and indeed his own shifty-eyed portrayal in this film reminded me of the avaricious shopkeeper in Bhardwaj’s The Blue Umbrella, a man who thinks nothing of taking a little girl’s precious umbrella away from her.

Gupte plays a “khadoos” in Stanley ka Dabba, but his own empathy for the interior world of children is visible throughout this well-written and acted – if somewhat unevenly paced – film. It’s about a boy named Stanley (wonderfully played by Gupte’s own son Partho), popular among his classmates for his storytelling skills – though none of them realise just how good he is at making up fictions about himself. We sense early on that something is wrong when he tells a colourful but unconvincing tale about fighting with a bigger boy, and when he makes a hurried phone call to an unseen mother to tell her he’ll be late coming home from school. But things come to a head when Verma, the Hindi teacher, insists that he bring his own lunchbox to school (mainly so he put his own grubby hands in it). In the face of adult hegemony of this sort, the happy-go-lucky boy starts to wilt.

(Minor spoiler alert) As it turns out, this story is building up to the revelation that Stanley is an orphan who spends his non-school hours performing menial tasks at an uncle’s rundown little dhaba. The closing credits turn this into a commentary on child labour in India, complete with relevant statistics, and I was ambivalent about this ending – I thought it was a little too hurried, with too much centred on the revelation. But there’s no doubt that the film’s structure as a whole is a clever and effective exercise in viewer manipulation – it pulls the carpet out from under the feet of the urban, English-speaking viewer, by giving us a seemingly middle-class, Convent-educated boy to identify with and then presenting him in an unsettlingly different avatar at the end **.

But what I personally found more interesting than the ending was something the film chooses to be nebulous about: the way it hints lightly at Verma’s human side. This isn’t done in an obvious or sentimental way, and there is no real attempt at redeeming the character – certainly, his back-story is never revealed to us in the way that Aamir Khan’s teacher in TZP was revealed to have been dyslexic himself. But many of the scenes involving this gruff, hairy man make it possible for us to wonder about his own background, and where his great hunger springs from. It’s possible even to speculate that he and Stanley might have more in common than either of them realise. In any case, he is by no means the only – or the most dangerous – wolf in the little boy’s life.

** Note: there is of course a distinction to be made between 1) “viewer manipulation” as done in an artistically satisfying way, without upsetting a film’s internal equilibrium, and 2) yanking indiscriminately at the heartstrings of the most easily manipulated viewer. But there are times when the line can be a surprisingly thin one, and I thought this was one of those times. (While on that, do read this excellent piece by Trisha Gupta.) Stanley ka Dabba has greater integrity in some ways than Taare Zameen Par, but it does make its own small compromises; there's no losing sight of the fact that it was made specifically for a complacent multiplex audience.

P.S. Gupte's performance as Verma can be included in a (very lengthy) hypothetical postscript to my Yahoo! column about directors in acting roles.

Fathers, sons, flight and flightiness: thoughts on Udaan

“He’s my son,” Bhairav Singh tells his factory workers as he introduces 17-year-old Rohan to them, “but that’s only at home. Not here. If he makes a mistake, don’t go easy on him.” This is a remark laden with irony, for Rohan is much more likely to get a curt word of appreciation – or a half-smile – from his father at the workplace than at home. Calling their relationship awkward would be an understatement; in fact, they barely even knew each other until Rohan was sent home to Jamshedpur from his boarding school in Shimla. He wants to be a writer, but Bhairav – a grim-faced disciplinarian given to bouts of violent rage – wants him to study engineering and work in his steel factory. “Yeh udhne ke sapne bandh karo aur pair zameen par utaaro,” (“Keep your feet on the ground and stop dreaming of flying away”) he snaps.

Vikramaditya Motwane’s Udaan begins with another scene that connotes flight and escape in a slightly different context: four friends sneak out of their hostel late in the evening and visit a shady cinema hall to watch bikini babes in the edifyingly titled film “Kanti Shah ke Angoor”. In this early sequence, the camera treats the four boys as equals – if you don’t know anything about Udaan beforehand, you won’t identify any one of them as its protagonist. But by the time they are caught and expelled from school, Rohan is the clear focal point. From the reactions of his principal and his friends we can tell there’s something special about his situation, and soon enough we learn that he hasn’t seen his father in eight years. Once back home, he discovers he has a six-year-old half-brother named Arjun, intelligent and alert but clearly cowed down. Meanwhile, Bhairav’s idea of being a dad is to impersonally show Rohan the “sights” of Jamshedpur (mainly statues of the overachieving entrepreneurs of the Tata dynasty - inspirational figures from the only world Bhairav really knows) during a regimented daily jog, and to punch the dreams out of his head. "Mujhe aankh mat dikhao," he commands whenever Rohan looks at him with anything other than meek compliance.

“Small-town fathers are like that,” one of Rohan’s new friends says during a drinking session, “Family business – very good. Dream business – very bad.” No doubt this town, and countless others like it, are full of young men whose lives are being straitjacketed by their dads (who were similarly the victims of family expectations when they were young).

Udaan is a beautiful, economically made film full of brief but evocative shots such as the one where Rohan sits on a lawn, writing his poetry, while smoke billows out of factory chimneys in the distant background – a nice visualisation of the contrast between the life he wants to lead and the career that seems to be waiting for him. Most of the key sequences are tightly constructed, though I got a bit impatient with a couple of scenes in the second half that seemed self-consciously Cinema Verite (with extreme close-ups of characters talking in the pause-filled style that sometimes passes for “naturalism”). That’s a small quibble, though - it doesn’t weaken the film’s considerable emotional impact, which comes from the main characters being written and performed as multi-dimensional people.

From the first scene Rohan is established as a street-smart boy rather than as an innocent, naïve victim. He composes thoughtful poems and reads them with feeling, but he’s also good-humoured enough to tell a listening friend “Samajh nahin aaya, na?” with a gleam in his eye, and to leave it at that. He plays pranks, watches sleazy films, gets drunk and takes his father’s car out late at night. He’s even capable of hitting Bhairav back when things go too far. In portraying him, the film doesn’t trade in clichés about over-sensitive “writer types” who spend all their time moping around dreamily, and young Rajat Barmecha's performance in the role couldn't be any better (incidentally, with his full lips and smooth features, Barmecha looks like a dead ringer for the actor Imran Khan from certain angles).

Bhairav (played by Ronit Roy - an intriguing bit of casting because of the association with stern patriarchs in regressive TV soaps) is somewhat closer to being a caricature – the monstrous, overbearing parent – but we get the impression that as a businessman at least he’s a genuinely disciplined person who holds himself to the same (or higher) standards as he expects from others. And there are suggestions that still waters run deep. In one scene during a family picnic, when Rohan’s kindhearted uncle encourages him to recite a poem, there’s a flicker of a moment where Bhairav looks at his son as if he’s seeing him with new eyes – but then he puts his mask on again and the moment passes.

Watching that scene and others like it, I had a scary thought: it’s easy to see Arjun, Rohan and Bhairav as stages in the life of a single person. Wholly unlikable as Bhairav is in his current state, he was probably a cute, sensitive kid like Arjun once – and possibly a rebellious adolescent like Rohan, until he had it beaten out of him. At one point he tells Rohan that if he had ever back-answered his own dad, his bones would have been pounded along with the steel in the family factory. We are never told what dreams he may have had as a youngster (and I’m glad about that – a forced attempt to humanise Bhairav by giving us his back-story would have diluted the film’s focus), but there's little doubting that much of his personal frustration and bitterness comes from his own childhood experiences.

At one, obvious level Udaan is a "follow your heart" tale about a young boy refusing to tread the path his authoritarian father has mapped out for him. But at another, deeper level it’s about having the freedom to be young, exuberant and irresponsible – and after that having the freedom to find your own path towards responsibility and maturity, rather than slip into pre-determined roles that won’t allow you to be either a fulfilled youngster or a fulfilled adult. In this context, Rohan’s final decision is particularly significant. It shows that while he’s ready to udo, to “take flight”, he isn’t going to be flighty; he’s prepared for the responsibilities that come with living his own life. The film takes its time arriving at this ending, but when it does it’s a thematically apt and satisfying one.

PoV 6: Memories of Master Mayur

On misremembering a scene from Yaadon ki Baaraat, and the tragic fate of the 1970s Bollywood child actor - here's my new Persistence of Vision column for Yahoo India.

(Earlier columns here)


Update: the full piece

The human mind is a worryingly unreliable thing. For years, I had the most vivid memory of an early scene from the 1973 film Yaadon ki Baaraat. Boy steals something from a shop, escapes pursuers, leaps off a bridge onto a train chugging below. When his feet hit the top of the coach, he is all grown up. Better yet, he is Dharmendra. In a Bollywood quiz conducted by Satan, with my soul at stake, I would have sworn that this was exactly what happened.

But it turns out my reptile brain was giving me the goli all this time. The other day I saw bits of the film again on TV and the scene was very different from what I'd remembered. The boy, having (naturally) been separated from his siblings, is leaning on the bridge, staring into the distance. The camera now begins a complicated movement: first it pans down to his legs and feet, and then, without cutting, it swivels through 360 degrees (in the process giving us a glimpse of a train moving slowly nearby). When it returns to its starting point, the shorts-clad legs have been replaced by dark blue trousers. The camera moves up to reveal the gloom-stricken mien of Dharam paaji.

And he doesn't even jump off the bridge! Not in this scene anyway.

Actually, as Bollywood representations of children morphing into adults go, this is quite a complex and artistic sequence - better crafted than all those standard-issue shots of a boy's running legs dissolving into the man's. One might even call it cinematically ambitious. After all, a dissolve or a cut is the accepted way of marking a shift in time; movies use these techniques all the time. For example, a little later in Yaadon ki Baaraat, a scene where another boy runs behind a train, losing the race as it enters a tunnel, segues into a shot of the grown-up version of the character riding his bike out of a similar tunnel (except that he now has Zeenat Aman driving a very stylish car - or is it a small plane? - behind him, honking impatiently as the spoilt rich girls of 1970s Hindi cinema are wont to do).

Now that's what I'd call a conventional time-shift scene (by Hindi-movie standards). But when 20 years rush by within the span of a single, unbroken shot, it really makes you sit up and take notice.

Watching the 360-degree shot on the bridge also made me wonder about the fate of the kid playing the young Dharmendra. Imagine being the focal point of the action at the beginning of a shot and being completely forgotten by the time the shot ends. One of the crew-members probably yanked him away as soon as his feet were out of the camera's line of vision, so that the real star could come and stand in the exact same place.

But then, such was the lot of child actors in those days - there was little or no appreciation for their very presence, much less their thespian skills. And being an avid watcher of those movies, I plead guilty: as a child I often fantasised about being Amitabh Bachchan but never, not once, did I fantasise about being Master Mayur.

You remember Master Mayur. For most Hindi film buffs he is frozen in time as the sad-faced, snot-nosed urchin with ridiculous sideburns, holding a piece of stolen bread in his hand and wishing desperately that he were all grown up already so he could brood like Amitabh, wear a leather jacket and sing in Kishore Kumar's voice. Mayur played the young Amitabh in a number of films, and the first requirement for such a role was to swallow all your self-esteem and to learn to move and speak like a member of the Keystone Kops, the slapstick-comedy policemen from Hollywood's earliest years.

During Amitabh's superstar phase, the first 10-15 minutes of many of his films played on fast-forward, as if the projectionist was screening at thirty-six frames a second instead of the customary twenty-four. This was because most of the stories were founded on an obligatory tragic childhood incident, which formed a necessary but low-investment "prologue". (Often the opening credits would appear only after this was over.) Watching these scenes today, one gets the impression that the child actors were asked to speed things up - to say the dialogue as fast as possible and walk hurriedly - so that the establishing sequences could be got out of the way and the superstar could come on. I can just picture directors prodding Master Mayur or Master Raju from off-camera: "Arre, lines jaldi bol, audience Amitabh ko dekhne aa rahi hai, tujhe nahin".

In one of my favourite 1970s films Muqaddar ka Sikandar, there's a scene where the intrepid orphan played by Mayur fights a thief (his own age) and recovers a woman's purse. Being grateful, kind-hearted and Nirupa Roy, the woman expresses a wish to be the mother he never had.

"Beta, ab se main tumhari maa hoon," she says quickly.

"Sach, ma? Tum bahut achi ho, ma," says Master Mayur, speaking his lines just as fast, glancing about nervously for the director's cattle prod.

Tears flow at double-speed, like the Rishikesh rapids in spate. Arm in arm, they scuttle away in the jerky Kops style. The whole sequence - including the fight scene and the establishment of a key, sentimental relationship - has taken up less than two minutes of screen time.

And shortly afterwards, Amitabh makes his first appearance on a motorbike, singing the film's title song. "Rote huay aate hain sab," he croons, "Hansta hua jo jaayega, Woh Muqaddar ka Sikandar, Jaaneman kehlaayega." Translation: "Child actors come wailing into the studios. But the adult stars who laugh heartily, they will be the kings of their own destiny." Or something like that.

****

However, I'm happy to report that the tale of the perpetually stricken Master Mayur had a short but pleasing sequel: more than a decade after Muqaddar ka Sikandar, he played the valiant Abhimanyu in B R Chopra's TV serial of the Mahabharat. If the show had been made 10 years earlier, Mayur would have been a shoo-in for the little Arjuna, telling his guru (in speeded-up sound) that he could see only the eye of the wooden bird. But as things turned out, he got to sport a moustache and be an (almost) adult hero in the Kurukshetra war's most intense battle sequence. Playing one of the most luminous cameo roles in all of ancient literature, Mayur had, much like his character, entered the inner circle at last. He went out in style, holding his own - at least briefly - against grown men.

Childhood’s end (the day the comfort food died)

Heartbreaking news came to me as I stood at the Nirula’s counter earlier this afternoon, and its bearer was a man with a large grin on his face.

Nirula’s has discontinued its mutton sausage pizza.

“Why?” I asked, swaying on my feet. To expand the “Indian” menu, replied the grinner. (“Try our new keema-do-pyaaza pizza, it’s very good.”)

I suddenly feel very old. Just a few days ago I was reminiscing with an old school-friend, Nakul, over lunch (at the Chi Kitchen & Bar, incidentally – one of my favourite restaurants), and I told him that he was central to my first ever memory of a proper Nirula’s meal. A group of us were at the Chanakyapuri branch sometime in the early 80s at a birthday party when I heard Nakul telling the waiter:

“One cheese sausage pizza, please.”

Each syllable was clearly enunciated; even at age 7 he had a deep and powerful voice, seemingly tailor-made for elocution classes or annual school debates. Just as important, he spoke with the confidence of a kid who had eaten at Nirula’s many times before and knew exactly what he wanted to order.

It was my introduction to the idea that things like pizzas could exist outside of Archie comics – that they could be a part of my world too. So I ordered the same thing, trying my best to sound like a veteran, and within weeks the simple, chewy Nirula’s sausage pizza went from being something daunting and unfamiliar to being the best sort of comfort food. In later years it would become peripheral, as I got acquainted with more sophisticated pizzas at more sophisticated restaurants, but it was always just a phone call away. Even my London-based cousin, visiting last year, said it reminded him of his childhood, though he had never spent more than a couple of weeks in India as a child.

And now, it’s gone. Because Nirula’s is suddenly “Desilicious”.

I can be just as desi in my eating tastes as the next guy, but why was this necessary? What next, hot chocolate fudge with a kulfi base?

[Another food-related nostalgia rant here]

A childhood skin-deep

Completely missed this – apparently little Shirley Temple turned 80 a couple of days ago! Via the Bright Lights blog, here’s an excerpt from Graham Greene’s controversial review of the Temple-starrer Wee Willie Winkie from 1937:

Infancy is her disguise, her appeal is more secret and more adult...she wore trousers with the mature suggestiveness of a Dietrich: her neat and well-developed rump twisted in the tap-dance; her eyes had a sidelong searching coquetry...Watch the way she measures a man with agile studio eyes, with dimpled depravity. Adult emotions of love and grief glissade across the mask of childhood, a childhood skin-deep.

Full piece here. It was written more than seven decades ago, to describe the carefully cultivated, "sexualised" screen persona of a specific child star, but I think it’s just as relevant to all the little boys and girls who appear on TV reality shows like Boogie Woogie today, enthusiastically simulating the dance movements of adult Bollywood heroes and heroines, while their parents watch fondly in the audience. In the age of 15 minutes of fame, you don't have to be a Hollywood superstar to grow up too fast.

On diary writing, and memories of 1990

[Long personal post. Go away]

Yesterday evening I pulled out my 1990 diary from the dusty old mini-cupboard it’s been in since...well, since December 31, 1990, I should think. It’s the first of my 18 diaries, most of which have entries on every page. The ritual began almost by accident when I was 12 years old. In late 1989 my grandparents, aware of my Mahabharata obsession, ordered a diary for me (I’m not sure about this, but I think it came with a subscription to India Today). It had a graceful cloth binding and a velvety bookmark, and told the story of the epic in very basic, Amar Chitra Katha-like prose and illustrations – the pictures and text took up the top fourth of each page, while the rest of the page was for entries. Initially I thought of it as a nice decorative item (it didn’t work as a book; I already had far more extensive versions of the Mahabharata), but at some point on the night of January 1 it occurred to me that it might be fun to actually write something in it.

And so it began. In my terrible, no-chemist-could-read-this scrawl, I wrote the opening sentence: “Today was the first day of the year, and I was so excited!” The entry went on to mention games of cricket and hide-n-seek played with a long list of neighborhood friends, many of whose faces I can’t even recall today; the buying of audio-cassettes (the soundtracks of “Chandni”, “Mitti aur Sona” and “Khoon Bhari Maang” among them) and books (Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge, an Agatha Christie); and the evening viewing of what I described as “the movies Star Wars parts I and II, and a part of Star Trek IV”. In all, the entry was around 200 words long, written in full sentences, no shorthand, though I misspelt the word “tuitions” (“tutions”).

Soon I was addicted to journal-writing and this was the beginning of a habit that would last 16-and-a-half years. Between January 1, 1990 and June 2006, I wrote an entry every night. It was usually just a log of the day’s events, with maybe a few “deep” thoughts scattered here and there, and the occasional jokey philosophical aside, but it was a very important part of my life, helping me to organise my thoughts, make some sense of the things (however seemingly insignificant) that happened each day. Whenever I went anywhere for an overnight stay, the diary was the first thing I would pack. Friends, especially the ones who weren’t really into reading or writing, would give me amused looks when I took the thing out at the end of a late-night chat session. (I think it was perceived as a girlie thing to do.) Buying a new diary featured at the top of my to-do list in the last week of every December (it wasn’t always a straightforward task because many stationery shops kept only executive diaries where Saturdays and Sundays have to share a page, whereas I needed one that had a generous amount of writing space for each day of the week). None of the post-1990 diaries were as colourful or as good to look at as the Mahabharata one, but that no longer mattered.

A year and a half ago, I finally discontinued the daily writing. The main reason was that I was writing too much anyway (at the time I was doing between 12-18 stories/reviews/columns per month, in addition to a large amount of blogging) and feeling jaded; I had to cut down on something. Also, I had begun to question the usefulness of the diary-writing. Over the years, there were times when it had become a chore – I was doing it not because I had something interesting to write about (or an interesting way in which to write it) but simply because it had to be done. I frequently treated it as something to finish before going to bed – a quarter-page of scribbled lines, dashed off in two or three minutes, which said nothing much more substantial than “Got up at 7. Spent most of the day reading. Went for a walk in the evening” and suchlike. It made sense to stop.

Since then I’ve written only sporadically, the last occasion being a couple of months ago when a dear old friend from post-grad came to Delhi and stayed over for a few days, and I got nostalgic, pulled out my 1998-2000 diaries, went through them, and then sat down and filled a few fresh pages with “Then and Now” musings. (A couple of this blog’s readers will know why those years were so important.) Revisiting those ghosts from the past, I was suddenly glad that I had kept the practice going for so many years. There isn’t much chance of my going through all the old diaries frequently or in great detail (especially with the handwriting being the way it is!), but it’s reassuring to know that I have all these records at hand – to refer to, perhaps, when one has lost track of a date or a sequence of events, or just to open at random and remember something that had slipped completely out of memory. As Salman Rushdie said once, “Writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things – childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves – that go on slipping, like sand, through our fingers.”

Take the 1990 diary, which I had a lot of fun going through. Reading it, I discovered many surprising things about my younger self, including that I appear to have had a healthy irreverence towards the gods long before I could call myself a non-believer (possibly before I even knew it was an option at all) or articulate serious thoughts about religious faith. In the illustration of the scene where Duryodhana and his men try to capture Krishna, who then reveals his cosmic self to them, I’ve scrawled all over the page: a giant Krishna is standing there with miniature versions of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva contained within him, and I’ve added a speech-bubble that says, “Will you silly asses get off my chest?” (I know, it isn’t sublimely witty, but what the heck, I was 12 and couldn’t even spell “tuitions”. Though I did come second in a school Spelling Bee that year, and the ten-rupee note that was my share of the Rs 500 prize divided among our batch was preserved in the diary's pages, 18 years old but still crisp.)


1990 was also the last full year of my childhood obsession with Bollywood. (It was in mid-1991 that I became sated with Hindi films and began looking elsewhere for my entertainment – more on that in this post.) But what a magnificent obsession it was! It’s common knowledge today that some of the crappiest Hindi movies ever were made in the late 1980s, but I have very fond memories of most of them; for some reason, nothing makes me more nostalgic than thinking about the early Salman Khan films that followed Maine Pyar Kiya (Baaghi, Sanam Bewafa, Pathar ke Phool, all of whose soundtracks I loved), though I wouldn’t want to see any of them again today, and though I wasn’t a Salman Khan fan at the time. (I used to look down on my friend Amit, who was.) In the 2-3 years leading up to and including 1990, I watched nearly everything, rushing to the nearby video library every Friday afternoon for prints of the latest release. (One randomly picked Friday entry gushes: “Din Dahade, Gunahon ka Devta and Solah Satrah have all released today!” Does even Great Bong remember those films?) I also indiscriminately bought audio-cassettes of any movie with a halfway-decent (or halfway-terrible) soundtrack, and the diary carefully records all this. In between all the cheerfully plagiarised badness, there were of course gems like the Lekin soundtrack (“Yaara Seeli Seeli”, “Kesariya Balma”), which for some reason I still associate with the taste of the Cadbury “silky” chocolates that were briefly available in those days.

Kittu, our cat of eight years (who plays a supporting role in this old post about my other cat Sandy), first came into our lives in early 1990, cannily usurping the house a few weeks after my mother began feeding him on the stairs outside; throughout my diary that year, I refer to him simply as Cat. Going to the local magazine library for mum in the evenings was a daily feature, and each of those visits is chronicled as if it were a matter of national importance (“Went to the library and picked up the latest Society”, “Got a Showtime today”). Then there are references to nighttime TV serials (“Gaurav” and “Noopur”) that I have almost no recollection of today. (I remember B R Chopra’s Mahabharata, of course, which I enjoyed but also regularly scoffed at for getting things “wrong” and for its many descents into melodrama.)

In the October 9 entry, I describe being sent on some errands by our class teacher – which meant walking from the St Columba’s middle school building to the senior school building – and finding out later that night that a 14-year-old Delhi schoolgirl had been forcibly immolated within her school premises during the Mandal Commission protests. (This made my own jaunt earlier that day seem very heroic and fraught with danger.) I must have read Jerome K Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat and Three Men on the Bummel in the second half of 1990, because for a few weeks around that time each diary entry is headlined by a brief summary of the day’s highlights, written (or so I must have imagined) in the humorous style of the chapter-heads in Jerome’s books. (November 8: PM goes missing [a reference to V P Singh’s resignation the previous night], 4 marks cut from test, of Gagan’s digestion problems, cat scratches and a bad bus ride.)

I can go on, but I’ll stop here – just realised that I still haven’t bought my 2008 diary. Am strongly motivated to do it now. Also, a couple of resolutions: to get back to journal-writing, not daily but at least once every 2-3 weeks; and to go through my other old diaries, beginning with the 1991 one. Who knows what dastardly things I’ll discover about my life and times.

Notes on Craig Thompson's Blankets

Just had to pick up Craig Thompson’s graphic novel Blankets when I saw it at Full Circle in Greater Kailash. I have it on DVD, but it’s difficult to read a big book for the first time on a computer screen (tactile experience, convenience, etc). Haven't regretted it. This is a gentle, elegiac, beautifully illustrated work, well worth investing time and money into.

A semi-autobiographical story, Blankets moves between two phases of the narrator Craig’s life: his childhood days, sharing (and squabbling over) a single bed with his kid brother Phil; and his years as a confused adolescent, finding some comfort in an intense but fragile relationship with a girl named Raina. Through all this, Craig struggles with questions about religion, art, the ephemeral nature of our existence on earth (and whether it will be followed by something more rewarding), the importance of family and the difficulty of achieving genuine closeness with another person. A loner, he feels dissociated from most people around him and struggles in vain to stay rooted to something. Growing up in a staunchly Christian family, taught at Sunday school that God can properly be worshipped only by singing His praises, not by drawing pictures, he becomes concerned that his passion for drawing might amount to blasphemy; he burns all his artwork, but this doesn’t bring him the peace of mind he was hoping for.


According to the Wikipedia entry on Craig Thompson, the idea for Blankets came out of his wanting “to describe how it feels to sleep next to someone for the first time”. This idea – seeking comfort, however fleetingly, in someone else’s physical presence – runs through the book: initially Craig and Phil resent having to share a small bed, but when they are finally put in separate rooms they quickly find excuses to get back together. Craig and Raina’s relationship is marked by their finding ways to spend the night together, or just to lie down next to each other (even before their relationship becomes sexual). Blankets are integral to the story too – the brothers fight over them in winter and push them away in the muggy Wisconsin summers, and later, Raina gifts Craig a richly patterned quilt she made herself, which becomes a symbol of the bond between them.

There are many things to say about this detailed book – for instance, I could observe that the overused phrase “deceptively simple” is an apt description of it. Despite frequently cutting between the past and present, the narrative is straightforward, in traditional story-book style. And though many of the drawings are outstanding studies in characters’ expressions and little pauses in conversations, the storyboarding is not especially experimental; Blankets doesn’t demand the rigorous concentration that one needs while reading a graphic novel conceptualised by, say, Alan Moore – where many different layers of meaning often coexist within a single panel. But this is no simple picture-book either. Look at the drawings more closely (preferably after having read the book once, so that the plot is no longer in the way) and you’ll appreciate how effectively they depict Craig’s interior life, his sense of isolation.

The artwork is often quite complex in terms of prefiguring, in the way the characters are positioned in relation to each other, and the visual connections between panels. Small example: two panels, 450 pages apart, show Craig entering the house, saying “Hey, Phil” to his brother and eliciting a lazy “Hey” in response. In the first of these panels, they are children and Phil is reclining on the couch watching Tom and Jerry; in the second, they are young men, with Phil again absorbed by the TV, but playing on his Playstation this time. The two panels contain shared associations – this is the same house where the brothers grew up, and the same room, many years apart – but also indicate how much their relationship has changed over time (Craig and Phil are so much a part of each others’ lives in the childhood sections that it comes as a shock when, after a few chapters that focus on the adult Craig’s relationship with Raina, we see the grown-up Phil and realise that the siblings are now aloof, brooding teens, speaking in monosyllables to each other).

The child's perspective

Thompson’s depiction of the hegemony of adults, and how threatening the world can be for sensitive children, reminded me of one of my favourite books from last year, David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green (a related post here). Mitchell’s novel, about a year in the life of a young boy, Jason, growing up in an English village in the early 1980s, drew some criticism for being too simple, and a “throwback” from the complex narrative techniques he employed in his earlier books. But there was a lot going on under its placid surface: each chapter, written in a subtly different style from the others, was a vivid portrayal of a child’s inner life and the story, coloured as it was by Jason’s fantasies, couldn’t always be taken at face value.

Blankets has a similar effect in places. I liked Thompson’s evocation of the magic that exists in a child’s world, which adults turn into something mundane (Craig and Phil are excited by the sparks of light – fairies? Tinkerbell? – they see in their room late at night, but their parents coolly inform them that it’s merely static electricity). And early on, when the boys’ father punishes them by making little Phil spend the night in a dreaded hidden room called the “cubby hole”, he is depicted as an imposing, outsize authority figure. When Mr Thompson snaps open the elastic bed in this room, the image is a surreal one straight out of the boys’ nightmares: there are demons lurking in the cubby hole’s dark corners and the bed takes the form of a primeval monster, jaws agape, waiting to sink its giant teeth into poor Phil.


Of course, when we see Craig and Phil’s parents much later in the book, they don’t seem threatening anymore; we understand that they aren’t the fiends (or even the apathetic slouches) that the early chapters suggested, just simple, conservative folk making the best of difficult circumstances. But the cubby-hole image is powerful enough for us to appreciate how Craig's life has been coloured by these early experiences.

More panels from the book (click to enlarge):

P.S. Thompson's official website is here.