From English to Kannada to Kannada to English: Tejaswini Niranjana’s mirrored path to translation

My interview with a polyglot cultural theorist on the practice of translation. Published in Scroll.

Tejaswini Niranjana is a well-known academic and cultural theorist who occasionally doubles up as a translator. Her deeply attentive translations from Kannada to English include the works of two eminent Kannada writers: Vaidehi and Jayant Kaikini. Gulabi Talkies and Other Stories, a collection of Vaidehi’s short stories which Niranjana edited and translated in collaboration with three other translators, came out in 2006, while No Presents Please: Mumbai Stories – a collection of stories by Jayant Kaikini – was published in 2017. Niranjana spoke to me about her relationship with Kannada, bilingualism in India, and how she got into translation. Excerpts from the interview:

As an academic and as a translator, too, your work is in English. But I’d like to hear more about your relationship with Kannada. With your parents (Niranjana and Anupama Niranjana) both being writers in Kannada, I imagine that it was not just a language of domesticity, but a literary language that you grew up around. Did you ever yourself write in Kannada?

My mother was not so fluent in English, she went to medical college and later in life she was able to manage in English, but she always spoke to us in Kannada. My father was a journalist in both English and Kannada. He was a tenth standard dropout – because of the freedom struggle he walked out. So he was completely self-taught, prided himself on his English and so on. So he often ended up speaking to me and my younger sister (who is no more) in English. But it was something that was common in the world around us: people just kept switching back and forth between these languages.

This is while you were growing up, in Bangalore?
Yes, I was born in Dharwar but when I was two, we moved to Bangalore. Being nationalists and communists, my parents had some idea that children should know English. There was no huge politics around English, because independence was political, not about culture: that only came to me much later. At the same time they didn’t want us to forget Kannada. From the very beginning, they put me and my sister in an English medium school: a very quaint school called The Home School in Basavangudi. It had a Kannada language option which my parents forced me to take (everyone else was taking Sanskrit, because you could score 95 even without knowing the language as opposed to 60-65, if you were lucky, in Kannada).

[While I was] in primary school, there was no great engagement with Kannada, except that a lot of writers used to come home all the time. I didn’t really read a lot of Kannada literature. To this day I haven’t even read all of my father’s and mother’s works...I’ve read some.

They were very prolific, weren’t they?

Very prolific: [they wrote] dozens and dozens of books. But I knew all the writers, by name and by face. Then, when I was twelve or so, I started to write poetry in English. My parents were uncertain about the quality of this, and when I was 14 or so they decided they needed to figure out whether it was good enough. Actually I was helped by very well-known Kannada poets, like Nisar Ahmad. I remember him very fondly; he gave me my first modernist poetry – Eliot, Auden, stuff I wouldn’t have read otherwise because my parents were not poets and not in English.

Anyway, my father decided to send off some of my poems to some of the well-known names in the Indo-Anglian world, without saying how old I was. Professor P Lal, of Writers’ Workshop in Calcutta, and Professor Meenakshi Mukherjee, who used to run a translation journal, both published some of my work. My parents felt reassured, so they offered to finance my first book.

That first collection of poetry in English, when I was sixteen, got sent to the Commonwealth Poetry Competition. A little afterwards, I started translating my own poetry into Kannada. Because I couldn’t produce it in Kannada...But at the same time, in translation, it became a different poem.

So at this point, would you say you were quite bilingual?

I would read my Kannada poems in competitions and win prizes for them, so I became known as a bilingual poet. That was also the time that I first met Jayant [Kaikini], he was in college, around three years older than me. I really liked his poetry, and said that I would translate it, and I sent it to him. Then we didn’t meet for some twenty years. But my introduction to him is also part of the bilingualism story.

Until my BA, I was still trying to write in both languages. That was also the time when I first got into translating fiction. My father’s novel Chirasmarane, about the Kayur peasant struggle in Kerala, which he had covered as a young journalist, had not been one of his more popular novels in Kannada. Twenty years later, for the anniversary of the struggle, someone translated it into Malayalam and then it suddenly found a huge audience. EMS Namboodiripad reviewed it...So then my father and I did many tours.

You had translated your father’s novel into English?

Yes. But I had also translated Pablo Neruda into Kannada. And Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. I still hear of my translation of Julius Caesar being performed, but after the fact, because no one asks for permissions in Kannada [laughs]. But it means it’s still in circulation, which is nice.

Today, I think I’d be a little more uncertain about translating into Kannada. At the time I was living there and Kannada was part of my daily life, which it hasn’t been for a long time. Because when I was 23-24, I went off to the US to study at UCLA. I continued writing in English. I think when I wound up my US life and got a job in Hyderabad in the English department, I was still sort of writing poetry.

But I also wrote an academic book on translation, about the politics of colonialism. And somehow after all the years of thinking through that, I felt I couldn’t write in English any more. It wasn’t a conscious decision, but I just stopped writing poetry in English. Even to this day, people ask me, why did you stop writing? And I say, I still write lots of books. But I stopped writing poetry.

I used to have arguments with people like the great UR Ananthamurthy, who was a friend of my father’s. He said, the kinds of things that you say should be in Kannada, why don’t you write in Kannada? I said, I engage with Kannada all the time; people have different modes of engagement with a language. But he was an indigenist of a particular kind, I am not an indigenist. I think that I am constantly in and out of languages.

You also continue to learn other languages, don’t you? You mentioned learning Spanish...

Oh, I just learnt it a little bit, when I was studying in California. I did two courses in French and two in Spanish. I did five years of German, that stuck a little more. When I was in Hyderabad, I learnt Telugu – more [a case of] speaking [it], but I can read because it’s similar to Kannada. Tamil you absorb living in Bangalore, though not very well. And I can follow the movies. And Hindi one is compelled to learn. About twelve years ago, I started learning Hindustani classical music, and I think that’s made me more open to Hindi.

I’ve kept in touch with Kannada through all my travels – living five and a half years in the US, then ten years in Hyderabad. I did come back to Bangalore in 1998, and stayed there until 2016, when I moved to Hong Kong with a full-time position at Lingnan University. More recently, I’ve been working on learning Cantonese and Mandarin for a project studying digital intimacy.

Starting out by translating poetry, some might say, is to begin with the impossible. There is a 2002 Paris Review interview in which William Weaver says that he started translating poetry from Italian as part of the process of learning the language. But that when he had actually learned Italian, he “stopped translating poetry immediately because I realised what I was doing to it.” Was translating poetry for you also imbued with a kind of beginner’s confidence, since you seem to have shifted to translating prose? Is poetry harder?

It is harder, but I still translate poetry. More on commission, or when someone asks me – so I did some of the Kannada works for the anthology of Dalit literature that Susie Tharu and K Satyanarayana edited recently.

Do you think translation alters the original more in poetry than in prose. That thing you said earlier, about it becoming a different poem...

I don’t know the answer to that. It takes me too deep into something that I am probably not paying attention to.

I guess I’m pushing here at the question of untranslatability. In your translation of Vaidehi’s work (Gulabi Talkies and Other Stories) I remember your introduction mentioned that you and the other translators had discussions about which stories would “work” in English and which wouldn’t. What for you are the reasons some texts might be harder to translate?

I think it’s about disparate experiences. Vaidehi’s work deals with a kind of village life that I am not familiar with, even though I am ancestrally from there. The west coast of Karnataka, particular forms of upper caste family life, which I have no experience of, because my father was an illegitimate and an only child with no contact with any families whatsoever. While Jayant [Kaikini]’s characters are deeply singular, right? I think I imagined that something from an urban setting would be easier to translate for me, because it’s my life as well. But at the same time, I felt deeply connected to Vaidehi’s style, which is very oblique, almost like poetry.

What about language, specifically dialect? Did you approach the Kundapur dialect in Vaidehi’s work very differently from the speech in Kaikini’s work? You’ve written of how his deliberate “plain Kannada” is sometimes interrupted by the hybrid Hindi-Urdu-Dakhani that is Bombay’s urban vernacular. As a translator, would you ever choose to use English slang to represent a dialect of Kannada?

I think the parallels don’t hold in our context, because a place like Bombay is a multilingual space. And I don’t think Jayant, in his Kannada, is trying to establish dialectical difference. You can see that characters are Gujarati or Maharashtrian or Bengali. But I wouldn’t pick out some slang that you associate with Gujaratis who speaks English and stick it in there for a Gujarati character!

Is there anything in Kaikini’s Kannada that identifies these characters in terms of their communities or language?

No. He just does it by naming them. It’s usually through other details, experiences, that he builds the profile. I don’t think he dwells too much on it; it’s in brushstrokes, passing that you figure where they’re from. Vaidehi’s stories, on the other hand, are so completely provincial that you don’t have the outside seeping in...

So there is no need to distinguish her characters by their language.

Exactly. Though she does also have some autobiographical stories which are in standard Kannada.

To return to poetry, from a different angle: do you think a translator needs to be a writer? Do you think writers would have trusted you less with their work if they didn’t think of you as a poet?

I don’t think so. People are just so happy that you’re translating their work. I don’t write fiction but I translate it. I was translating Dalit poetry, Siddalingaiah and so on, and the stories of Devanuru Mahadeva when I was very young. I enjoy different kinds of translation. One of my most fun experiences was doing subtitles for Girish Kasaravalli’s second film, Akramana (1980). That was a different kind of discipline, almost like writing metered verse: you couldn’t just write what you wanted, so many characters in celluloid, and you had to fit the dialogue on screen. He approached me, knowing about my bilingual facility – there weren’t too many people then who were literary and bilingual, then. Or if they were, they did it in very old-fashioned language...

You don’t feel like bilinguality is decreasing? That there is a growing number of monolingual English-speakers in India who’re oblivious to other languages?

If you read social media, and the amount of journalism that’s being produced, you’d think everyone is only writing in English. But I don’t think that’s everyday reality for most people. Obviously, there are thousands more Indians writing in English than there were say, thirty or forty years ago. But using the example of my own niece, I kept worrying about this. But she consciously cultivates other languages: Telugu and Hindi, and she can speak in Kannada quite easily after moving to Bangalore. She texts friends in Hindi. I think Hindi often becomes the default language for young people even when it isn’t the default language for either person. I don’t think there’s an only-English setting for kids in their twenties who’re not seriously upper class...this is the sense I get, I could be wrong.

You’ve also thought a lot about the politics of translation in your academic work. In 1992, you authored a volume titled Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context. I know this is an impossible request, but could you tell us what the argument of that book was?

Very very broadly, the book was among the first to point out that though it is often seen as a transparent medium by which you transport one culture into another, translation is mobilised as a way of enforcing colonial domination. I look in detail at some major texts and at the ideas of translation that were circulating in colonial times, how it worked through the missionary activity and through administrators like William Jones. In the 1780s, in the early colonial period, there was a great curiosity and romanticism about the East – and the whole understanding of translation was informed by that, by a desire not to interfere in the lives of the natives. But by the 1820s, under the East India Company, with the Utilitarian influence, the whole understanding of India changed – from seeing it as an advanced civilisation to a barbaric place. What kind of conceptual and political labour did translation do, to help colonial domination? In a literal way, too: even someone like John Mill’s understanding of India is informed by translations.

I end the book by looking at an 18th century translation of a 12th century vachana, a very Orientalist translation, and at AK Ramanujan’s translation of the same text, which is a very modernist translation. My point was not that they were good or bad, but that the discursive space they came from informed the actual translations that they did. And I offered my own translation of the vachana.

The book is 25 years old, and I don’t talk about it any more. But without my having been a translator, I would not have written that book.

Do you think in any way, that the converse is true? Did your critical focus on the politics of translation ever cripple you as a practitioner? A feeling that “I can’t be that person who translates into English in India...”

No. I don’t think any of us is so coherent as an individual. I feel like I can do both!

...

This interview continues. Read the whole thing on Scroll, here.

Big screen, writ larger

My Mirror column:

Life and cinema in Tamil Nadu seem to intersect more than in most places. The first of a multi-part column on a unique cultural universe.

Wellingdon Theatre in Madras screening the film Parthiban Kanavu in the 1960s

Over the century and a bit that it has existed, cinema has successfully established its dominion over most parts of the world. Still, as I found myself wondering for the umpteenth time during a recent visit to Tamil Nadu, is it likely that there exists another corner of the globe as deeply steeped in film?

The way in which this cinematic state is usually marked is by noting the intertwining of the Tamil world of film with that of politics. Dravidian cultural nationalism came of age alongside film production in the state, and since then the relationship between popular cinema and populist politics has been a shaping influence on twentieth century Tamil culture and history. It is an absolutely remarkable fact that the office of Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu has been occupied almost continuously since 1967 by people with a film background (up until the present incumbent). These comprise two screenwriters – CN Annadurai and M Karunanidhi; one actor – MG Ramachandran (MGR); and two actresses – Janaki Ramachandran (VN Janaki) and J Jayalalithaa.What does it mean that Tamils constantly elect their film folk? Is this a love of the big screen writ larger still, upon life itself? It certainly feels like it, and that is what makes Tamil Nadu unique. That constant feedback loop between everyday life and cinema exists all over India, but one senses something qualitatively different about the level at which it works in TN. One of the ways this power is expressed is in the cinema’s lasting colonisation of urban space –or rather in the tribute city-dwellers still seem to willingly pay to the film god. One still cannot turn a corner in any town without encountering a film poster, or more likely three.

The state’s literary sorts have also paid tribute to the cinema in plenty. As a non-Tamil reader, sadly, I must depend on my meagre reading of translations to make this claim. The great Perumal Murugan has an early book called Nizhal Muttram (1993), brought out in V Geetha’s English translation by Tara Books in 2004 under the title Current Show. It revolves around a young man called Sathivel, who works selling cold drinks at a beat-up cinema theatre in an obscure Tamil highway town.


Each chapter of Murugan’s strange, disjointed but striking book begins with an italicised timeline which is almost always connected to the time and place of the theatre. “ Like a giant snake, the queue passages twist and wind their way. It is always dark inside them. Sometime, chips of light get past the queue doors and flee into the theatre.” One particular queue passage is never opened to the public, because it was originally built for those who wanted “Sofa Ticket: Rs 2.00”. As there had never been enough customers for Sofa Tickets, the passage had become the “boys’ room”.

In Murugan’s telling, the cinema theatre emerges as its own universe: its dark interiors an alternative to the harsh sunlight of the everyday world, and its comfortingly repetitive cyclical clock a reprieve from the inevitable onward march of real time. “ In a few minutes the counters will open for the night show. Already, there are crowds at the gate. For a film such as this one, there is no need to worry. The seats fill up, though it has been running for a week already.” Or this, where he details the routines of the players for the successive acts that make up the day’s performance: “ The Betelnut-man lives close to the theatre. He leaves as soon as he shuts down late in the evening. The Teashopman is from Morepalayam, but he has a cycle which he rides home after the interval. He only returns in the afternoon of the next day. The Soda-man prefers to sleep the night at the theatre. He usually asks for his ramshackle cot to be brought out after the interval. He positions it near the stairs.”

The world of Sathi and his companions – some only called ‘Filmreelman’ and ‘Watchman’ – bears some sociological similarity to that of Kannada writer Jayant Kaikini’s story ‘Interval’ that I described in a recent column.

But here the very history and geography of the land can seem built-up of film theatres: The Filmreel-man, for instance, must carry around boxes of MGR films to distribute on a commission basis, traversing a landscape of names that goes from Pallipalayam to Tiruchengode and onwards – “Finish with one town and move to another” with not “a single free day”. In another conversation, the building of a new theatre called Flower King brings on the ancient Watchman’s reminiscences about how the book’s Vijaya Theatre came to be. “There is silence all around, only the rustling sounds of hands moving over posters. Who doesn’t love a tale?” Who doesn’t, indeed?

[To be continued]

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 14 May 2018.

Book review - No Presents Please: Mumbai Stories

Kannada writer Jayant Kaikini’s evocative stories are infused with the body and soul of Mumbai.

Set in Mumbai, and translated into English, this is an insightful, illuminating, and powerful collection.

In a freewheeling conversation at the end of this superb book, the translator Tejaswini Niranjana tells us that while this book was being envisaged, the writer Jayant Kaikini said to her on WhatsApp: “Do not hang all these stories on the Bombay peg.” She told him to trust her. The result is Kaikini’s No Presents Please: Mumbai Stories, a volume whose wondrous evocation of city life is only aided by the cheeky inclusion of this meta-data.

Kaikini is an extremely well-known figure in the Kannada world, as a writer of short stories, a poet and last but not least, a lyricist for Kannada films (he has won the Filmfare award for Kannada lyrics four times). Now based in Bangalore, Kaikini has previously lived in Mumbai for two decades, working with pharmaceutical companies.

There are other famous Kannada litterateurs who have made Mumbai their home and fictional focus, among them Shantinath Desai and Yashwant Chittal (whose famous 1978 Bombay novel Shikari was also recently translated into English). But Kaikini’s stories seem to breathe the city’s air. Reading them, in Tejaswini Niranjana’s magnificent translation, one feels they simply could not have been written without Mumbai.

Sub-local identities

Part of the reason for this is Kaikini’s obvious spatial immersion in the city, his unerring sense of characters’ lives unfolding not in some generic “Bombay”/”Mumbai”, but in very particular sub-locales. There are several stories here in which Mumbai’s powerful neighbourhood identities are placed upfront. So, for example, in “Opera House”, a cinema sweeper’s sense of local geography illuminates the charms of an increasingly sidelined urban history. “Indranil wove his small world around the Opera House theatre. The night streets, the local trains, the colourful curtains of the rooms of the naachwalis that one could see from Kennedy Bridge, the Anantashram rice-and-fish plate, the round aluminium boxes containing the film reels – these were the small strands of his web.”

Or in “Mogri’s World”, Kaikini delineates with stunning evocativeness what it might be like to grow up in the Shivaji Nagar chawl, or to watch the world go by from inside the Light of India restaurant. Sometimes everything is contained in a one line reference to a place: “The past three days he had got caught in some lafda of a Sindhi fellow in Dombivli.”

Even when a story moves us across the city, Kaikini’s gaze remains located and we always know what speed we’re travelling at. So in “Partner”, Roopak Rathod has his epiphany while gripping the poles of the Murphy Baby hoarding “glistening blue, pink and purple in the weak sunlight near Nana Chowk”. In “Toofan Mail”, we attach ourselves to Toofan and his mother as they walk to the end of Teli Gali, run till Andheri Station, jump into a local train to Dahisar to meet the Toofan Mail. In “Water”, we sit in the back seat as Kunjbihari the driver starts “throwing the taxi into little lanes and alleys” only to get stuck in the torrential rain near Mahim Creek with his two passengers, strangers off a plane.

“Water” is a masterful evocation of how the city reflects itself back – whether it is the view of traffic on the Mahim-Bandra flyover, or the radio song requests that seem to allow communication across the enforced isolation of a crippling breakdown: “For Pankaj, Shweta and Nobin who are stuck at Dadar TT, this special song... Kajra Re”.

Signs and Secrets

Kaikini is powerful and valuable as a documenter, a mapper of the city. But he is much more than that. He is able to make the city resonate with the dreams, hopes and fears of those who live in it. Mumbai’s neighbourhoods and landmarks come to serve as metaphorical markers, animated signs that become keys to the surreal landscape. To Sudhanshu in “Gateway”, the thirty-storied Communication Tower in the distance seems like a giant tomb, with the two big antenna dishes on top like gigantic begging bowls held out.

The title story, “No Presents Please”, effortlessly establishes the mood with its opening reference to the half-finished Ghatkopar Flyover, whose iron spikes Kaikini describes as having trapped bits of the sky. “Below, the vehicles crawled their way through the construction rubble and slowly disappeared. This was the fate of all roads. A man could stop wherever he wanted, but a road?” This is, of course, also the sort of sentence that almost doesn’t need a story attached to it. Kaikini is a poet, and he does aphorism with ease. But as you read on, you are primed to be sensitive to Popat’s sense of being trapped in an identity, by a name that seems to him to leave him nameless.

Sometimes it is a person who becomes a sign, coming to stand in for something in the eyes of the beholder. Seen through Sudhanshu’s tired, questioning eyes, the keychain seller at Kala Ghoda seems like a seer who will answer his life questions. Even this “nameless man with his greying eyebrows” who stands “in two feet of space” is someone for whom Kaikini can conjure up a detailed tender backstory: “when he was a child in the cradle, when he used to be rubbed with oil and then bathed, who competed in school sports, lived different roles”.

In the dream-like world of “Interval”, both Nandu (the battery-torch boy of Malhar Theatre) and Manjari (film-viewer from Mahindrakar Chawl) wordlessly become for each other the beacons of an imagined alternative future. Even when Kaikini enables his two naive protagonists to gently disengage – having made them see, equally wordlessly, that they know nothing about each other – their symbolic importance to each other remains.

There is no dearth here of sociological detail – class, age, gender and caste are sharply observed and sensitively understood. Yet in the end, Kaikini’s Mumbai is a majestic microcosm of humanity, and his stories are concerned with quivering, beautiful examples of how stranger sociality can be meaningful. The locations for these loving exchanges between strangers can range from hospital wards and picture framers’ shops (in the superb “Unframed”) to the tea shop in “A Spare Pair of Legs” at which the village’s naughty boy Chandu encounters the urban working child Popat, one of the “army of brave boys” who “leap from running trains so that not a single peanut fell”, holding the city up on their thin hands like some Govardhan Hill.

Kaikini is often tuned to the saddest, most secret frequencies – the quiz contestant squirming as her father grovels before an oblivious TV show host; the film extra covering her face with her hands as her husband berates her in public for pretending to be shy; the two halves of a couple who’re actually relieved when the other doesn’t come home, because sleep will be undisturbed. He is an antenna, gathering up the city’s dreams and hurt, bewilderment and rage, and transmitting them ever so gently back into the zeitgeist. The result is a gift worth receiving.

Published in Scroll, 25 Mar 2018.

After the Intermission

My Mirror column:

Jayant Kaikini’s brilliant, dreamy Mumbai stories illuminate the city — and the inner lives of its citizens — through the lens of cinema.

At the end of a cinema program,” wrote the French filmmaker and writer Jean Cocteau in 1919, “figures in the crowd outside seem small and lacklustre. We remember an alabaster race of beings as if glowing from within. On the screen, enormous objects become superb. A sort of moonlight sculpts a telephone, a revolver, a hand of cards, an automobile. We believe we are seeing them for the first time.”
Cocteau, who adapted The Beauty and The Beast into a most dreamlike film in 1946, was among the first writers to recognize this fantastical quality of the cinema. Many fiction writers since have been inspired by its larger-than life magic, by its ability to transmute our dreams to reality – and sometimes reality to dreams.

The stories of Jayant Kaikini, published recently in Tejaswini Niranjana’s superb new English translation under the title No Presents Please, offer a wonderful example of such cross-fertilization between the two arts. Kaikini writes in Kannada, but the stories in this collection are set in Mumbai, and the cinema looms large over several of them. If ‘Opera House’ produces a milieu of urban melancholia centred on a once-grand theatre, ‘Toofan Mail’ pierces painfully through the surface sheen of ordinary lives on a film set. In a 1986 story called ‘Interval’, the images on screen seem to speak to each person watching alone in the dark – in this case, most clearly, to Nandkishore Jagtap, alias Nandu, whose journey from Vidarbha to Mumbai has brought him to the position of attendant at the Malhar Theatre in Naupada.

“For the last three years, in this theatre, heroes of different complexions have kept saying to the heroine, ‘Let’s run away somewhere’ four times a day, until the crowded twenty-seventh week. Gazing into the hero’s eyes, smiling coyly, the heroine runs through the fountains and into the upper stalls and disappears...” writes Kaikini. “As the audience floats away into the enchanting world of the film, our hero selects the ceiling fan in the lobby under which he will nap, between the posters, behind the curtains, where the theatre owner’s servants will not find him. When he dozes, a million heroines lose their bodies and minds and names in the glistening screen. In the dark, disembodied, they wander into the hero’s dreams – ‘Here I am!’, ‘Am I not here?’ -they mob him, kiss him, stroke him.”

If the cinema stokes Nandu’s dreams, it also makes new realities seem within his grasp. First, working with the men pasting film posters, he marvels that “they held the actress’s limbs and noses in their hands.” Then, as the battery-torch boy at Malhar Theatre, “[t]he same city which had seemed from the distance of Vidarbha like an unreachable star” now lies in his grip, its fate contained “in the very tickets whose stubs he tore off”. It is also in the cinema that he meets Manjari Sawant of Mahindrakar Chawl, whom he woos with movie tickets to house-full shows and ice creams that he waits in vain for her to share a spoonful of.

Manjari and Nandu, not unexpectedly, make a plan to elope. But Kaikini’s genius lies in the way he shows the moment of elopement unravel. As they stand in the ticket queue, Nandu suddenly feels bereft: “he felt that all his heroes had pushed him into battle without any weapons”. Manjari, too, realizes that her dreams are not the same as Nandu’s. Belying our tawdry expectations, with no filmi gestures, Manjari and Nandu take off in different directions – “[h]aving given each the stimulus to start a new life”. Their coming together is only the interval, not the climax of their lives.

The theme of the interval recurs in a much more recent story, ‘Gateway’ (2003), where its philosophical implications are much sharper. The much married, long unemployed Sudhanshu finds himself at the Gateway of India in adespairing state of mind, addressing a long monologue in his head to ‘Dear Time’: “In a film, after the intermission, all kinds of things can happen. Lost children are found again. Villains beg for forgiveness. Brothers unite. The heroine’s illness goes away. Or those who were found are lost again. Good men become badmaash. The hero dies atop a cliff. No, I don’t want any of this. No shocks, no magic. Just an intermission will do. After that I can watch my own film.”

Freedom can be of many kinds, Kaikini seems to be saying. But the most important kind is the freedom to depart from our own previous narratives.

And for that, we could all do with an interval.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 18 Mar 2018.