Ghetu files a new story

I had been so curious to read his new story. It had been such a long time since the last that I could hardly believe he would be able to write as he used to, with such extraordinary power and naturalness and ability to wrap a world into a narrative, a world moreover which would catch the reader’s heart-strings and declare its own importance in the reader’s life, like a stranger you meet on the street, a stranger in need …

But we haven’t got to that yet. When the story commences it seems a piece of mundane actuality, a description of its author at his Bombay office—Mumbai I should say for this ancient city has rewritten its identity, or has it? I am disappointed almost, because he goes on about his character Lokesh’s routines or lack of routines, in particular his eating habits, his idiosyncrasy of going to a particular boiled-egg vendor. At this early point I think “Ghetu, there is no theme here, you are too much in the here and now, we need a fast-paced narrative.” In fact I am as impatient as the drivers in his jammed Mumbai street, honking as the lights go green without any corresponding surge forward …

Well, now we have got there, for this is what’s happening. I see Mumbai in the minutest detail, its needs, its urgencies, its impatience, its grudging compassion, its corruption, the mesh of its net cast into the waters drawing humanity together too close for comfort.

The story is the tiniest of incidents: a cripple crossing the road. Ghetu carves it into an enduring monument, a little rough at this stage, but—contrary to my initial impatience—perfectly proportioned, its lines and flow perfectly delineated. Only the surface needs to be polished here, gouged out to make a little more differentiation there …

The editing required is merely some orthopaedic work on the sentences, phrases, words; to feed this monumental wretchedness of a story (it's titled The Wretched) with a little fruit, a couple of eggs, till it can stand on its own two feet without a crutch …

Lokesh is you and I. Mumbai is the world. Ghetu has captured the spectrum. I could be Lokesh, who fails to take the initiative; or Ravi who takes it swiftly with a heroic flourish but fails to follow through; or the policeman who disappears from the scene pretending he has seen nothing …

I have read the story once only, but its details are etched in my mind, even in this rough-cut version. Its power is all there. All it needs is streamlining to make it into the precise missile, able to deliver its explosive message efficiently into the reader’s heart.

It’s not a piece of activism advocating a particular solution to the world’s problems. It doesn’t use cheap tricks to provoke an emotional response. It depicts the truth, and its genius is to compact the teeming city of Mumbai into one perfectly balanced anecdote; and to compact the entire world into the city of Mumbai, so that we can see, as it were, the whole earth from a spaceship. But even as I write the preceding sentence, I see that the story’s point is not to summarize the world’s dilemma; not its only point, anyhow. For even if it does nothing but portray the mind of one character Lokesh in one place, one hour, it does that with consummate skill; a skill whose component parts I can only guess. Did the story really happen, and the author merely describe it as best he could, like someone writing a diary, but giving himself the fictional name Lokesh? Or did he block it together cunningly, with deliberate craft? Or did it visit him like a vision, fully-formed? Never mind. We don’t need to know.

It is a wonderful story, a parable for our times, reminds me of Jesus’ tale of the Good Samaritan, answering the question “Who is my neighbour?” Reminds me of someone who told me, “If you see something that needs to be done, it means that it’s for you to do something.” I see that it needs editing. I shall carry the wretch across the road and feed him.

Plunging in where angels fear to tread

I nearly swallowed some extra strong bleach. I can tell you how it happened, but I don’t know how it could happen. Perhaps I unwittingly broke a law of physics. You can’t do that? Tell me what law says you can’t break a law of physics! I don’t know of a law of Nature that says you can’t.

I was using a length of hosepipe to siphon out all the water from the sink that wouldn’t go down the blocked drain. As you know, to use the siphoning principle, which obeys some law of physics, I don’t know which, you start by sucking on the pipe and then quickly drop that end low, to send the flow to a bucket on the floor. Yes, a little water went in my mouth, and it certainly wasn’t tasty, but it wasn't bleach. Not yet, please wait. So now the drain was as empty as I could get it. I’d already checked the sink trap, that bendy pipe that usually gets clogged first, but it was clean. So the blockage must be further along. Now I put in the extra strong bleach, followed by a kettleful of hot water. What we needed of course was a plunger but it was Sunday and the shops were closed. We improvised with a bendy plastic dish: but it did bring up some blackened slimy stuff, which we scooped away. This dish was K's brilliant idea, and led me to exclaim “You can be my plumber's mate any day!”—words I never thought I would say. But when it broke she suggested we give up for the evening, and left me to my own devices.

So then I had the clever idea of putting back the hosepipe, pushing it down the drainhole as far as it would go and blocking all exits with rags. I blew down the pipe with all my might, and this is when, a second later, there was a great gurgling and the bleach blew back up the pipe into my mouth. I wanted to cough, spit, groan, vomit, and die, all at the same time. This proved impossible so I did the first three and tried to do the fourth, with slight success. As to the fifth, I consulted the Oracle, I mean Google, entering the keywords “bleach” and “throat”. You would be surprised how many people have asked whether it was a good idea to gargle with bleach if you have a sore throat. I know the answer to that one. You would be also surprised at the range of online opinions: bleach-drinking is harmless; it permanently wrecks the oesophagus; it might kill you; it’s so unspeakable that you have to seek immediate medical attention, if you can still speak. Me, I could only manage a hoarse croak. Anyhow by the time I read that milk was the recommended thing to drink, I had already quaffed some lemon juice, plain water, a spoonful of honey and a couple of biscuits, whilst wondering if some rum might also be a comfort. By the time I went to bed, I was convinced it wasn’t fatal in my case, but wondered whether life without an oesophagus was something I could get used to.

I woke up this morning feeling generally bruised, like one who has suffered some generic trauma, such as surgery. As soon as the shop opened I bought a plunger. It worked as it is supposed to do. The sink has never drained so quickly before, and finishes with an eager gurgle.

Searching for an illustration, I’m astonished to find you can buy plungers at the bookseller Amazon, where it says alongside: “Usually dispatched within 4 to 5 days” and also “Ordering for Christmas? Based on the delivery schedule of Heritage Home and Garden, this item will arrive after December 24”. They must be pitching at purchasers whose desire for this useful item is not suicidally impatient.

Sexual Energy

Years ago, before the public library in this town was cunningly pruned and restocked to reflect the scientifically-determined reading taste of the residents, it contained some quirky books that made a rainy-day visit into an exciting adventure. In the foreign languages section I found a novel by Pierre Boulle. I was astonished to discover he had also written the story on which the famous English film The Bridge over the River Kwai was based. My astonishment was partly based on a concept that the French inhabited a completely different cultural space, one which contained no Anglo-Saxons. I should have remembered Jules Verne. Like him, Boulle is drawn to science fiction, of a psychological as well as technological kind.

If you have seen River Kwai, you’ll remember that Colonel Nicholson, played by Alec Guinness, spends time in a tiny solitary-confinement shed with the Burma sun beating down on the corrugated iron roof turning it into an oven. This confinement energizes Colonel and prisoners alike, and leads to the construction of the great bridge, as well as its destruction on the day it’s finished.

The book of Boulle’s that I read in the library had a similar theme though I didn't spot it at the time. In a forest somewhere in France, some civil works are being undertaken: the building of what looks like a prison, and also of some high-voltage power lines—the sort that would take the current directly from a power-station for distribution later at lower voltages. It’s all very mysterious. Eventually we discover the extraordinary secret. Two large buildings like prison blocks are built close and parallel to one another, with the most elaborate barbed-wire fences separating them. It’s a mental institution for incarcerating teenage boys and girls. They are kept in segregated blocks and the sexual frustration generated across the fences is so strong that it generates a powerful electric current, exploited by the owners of the institution to sell at market prices on the public grid. Pierre Boulle’s L’énergie Du Désespoir is no longer amongst the County Library stocks.

PS Pierre Boulle also wrote Planet of the Apes.

Act of penance

I have an urge to penance. It is not to punish myself for any particular sin, but to follow an inbuilt impulse towards sackcloth and ashes, that the Bible refers to so many times; as if depriving oneself of physical comfort helps obtain spiritual comfort. Prayer and fasting comes naturally to the human animal. And confession too …

A certain blogger is my confessor and has prescribed that I mend my ways. As a Bengali, he helps me see how loose and meandering are the ways of the Anglo-Saxons. Anything goes with us, and such eclecticism is not to our advantage. I learnt this not just from that blogger but the character Gogol in Mira Nair’s film, The Namesake. The hero acquires an American girlfriend, but when his father dies he feels bad about straying from the ways of his ancestors, shaves his head, and gives her up. Then he falls in love with a Bengali girl who had been introduced to him in a meeting of match-arranging parents long before. We really believe this will work, for what they have in common is being half-Westernized. So they endure the traditional wedding ceremony with the chanting and silly hats (to me that would be the worst part), proving they are really American by immediately rushing off to a bedroom, to consummate what has hardly yet been formalized. Alas, she betrays him later with a Frenchman. She is too Westernized. His roots are pulling him back, in the form of love for his parents, alive and dead, and for the Bengal he turned his back on. Hold on, how could he be blamed for betraying Bengal—he was born in New York!

And all the time I was watching the film I was thinking of that blogger, imagining at first he was the hero Ashoke (played by Irfan Khan) and then his son Gogol (played by Kahl Penn). I wanted to tell him “Please please don’t go to America! Don’t sell your soul!” And even whilst watching the film I said to my beloved that if I, a rootless alien, had to choose between the culture of America or Bengal I would choose the latter, despite all sorts of reasons.

This is part of what the blogger sent me from his mobile:
“Boss, you did a great injustice to your natural talent of a narrator, who can actually draw pictures with his words, by not following this style of writing.”

And other words of encouragement.

Which shows that he is an angel-messenger, something which I periodically need, because I go more and more off-course. “Boss” indeed? Who does he think he is? Zorba the Greek? Well, why not? Zorba was an angel-messenger too, to his boss. And anyhow, we have a literary relationship of mutual criticism and a bit of editing, with a view to a Joint Project which shall dazzle the world, or at least some of its human population, before the century is out.

So, penance is the only answer. Any time other than winter, I would go for a long walk, ending up footsore, hungry and thirsty like a pilgrim of old who goes on till he sees visions in the clouds and hears choirs of angels. But I stay in and hibernate, in this house of warm-toned wood; stripping a couple of original Windsor chairs, in this town which once made most of the chairs in England, in factories a stone’s throw from here. Lacking the skills of making, I pay them homage by stripping off the varnish, exposing the elm seats, the beech legs and backs, that might have been rough-hewn by bodgers in the woods.

I shall perform my penance with sandpaper. And apologize to any readers who expect any particular style or theme for this particular example of the ephemeral literary medium called "blog".

The Namesake

You can read plenty of on-line reviews, so I will only add my own observations which you won't find anywhere else. I loved this film for being poetic and simple in story, and telling me what it is like to be a Bengali, by putting a family of these South Asians, as we must call them these days, alternately in America (against university backgrounds) and Calcutta. The story spans forty years and has its share of births, marriages and deaths. I found it a smooth believable narrative (asking for no effort to adjust to its cinematic conventions) with enough depth and beauty (in the actors, scenic backgrounds, music) to maintain total interest throughout. The director is Mira Nair. Now we want to see her Monsoon Wedding.

Recently we watched the two films about Elizabeth I (Elizabeth, Elizabeth: the Golden Age, both starring Cate Blanchett, Geoffrey Rush), directed by Shekhar Kapur, another Indian director. There was much in them, and I ignore what the critics say. What I found hard to swallow was the cinematic conventions: I call them that but they seem to my unpractised eye to have been crafted by Kapur for the purpose. Many of the actors seem twenty-first century in their hairstyles and demeanour, which is better than the phony period swashbuckling that you used to get in historical movies. And Kapur eschews blocks of narrative text on screen, or voiceovers to give the historical background. Instead he makes big scenes carry more than their own weight by having to convey too much about the circumstances of history, at the cost of any realism. So that the whole thing becomes an animated slideshow or diorama. Still the gorgeousness of the costumes and interiors gave me plenty to chew on, and I was particularly taken with the carved stone and oak panels.

Odd jottings

Tytthaspis sedecimpunctata (16-spot)
Pic: Vincent / flickr

We have a lot of low walls round here, convenient for sitting on; for example in the playground, a favourite haunt of drinkers. A couple were there yesterday morning, spreading their belongings and litter, a man and a woman. They chatted, played cards, greeted me as I passed and were relieved at my friendly response. This morning I passed a man on our street whom I’ve seen several times in the summer sitting under a tall buddleia shrub in front of the pharmaceutical warehouse, opposite the Baptist Church and the mosque next door. This morning he was just arriving there. I greeted him and I said I’d seen him there before. He has sad eyes. He replied that he goes there “to get away from it all”.

Later I went to see poor Mr A., for whom I’ve been renovating a shed door: burning off the old paint, filling and sanding, applying three coats of new paint. He was shocked by the bill for the labour involved. The money all goes to the charity I work for as a volunteer. So we negotiated and I agreed to charge for fewer hours. It was wonderful to see his relief. In some of these cases you know that there’s a wife involved in the background, pushing the husband to make a stand. I was very relieved too, for I’d known he was worried: more out of pride than not being able to afford the true cost.

Yesterday evening in a light drizzle I decided I must go out and lie under the Gift Horse—the 1991 luxury car I bought for £100. I’d poured the antifreeze into the expansion tank but thought it would not circulate. So I had the idea to drain out some water from the radiator and pour it back in the top. It came out so murky I could not tell if it was already blue from a dilution of antifreeze. But I poured it back in the top, then tightened the drain plug. I couldn’t stop it dripping.

Tytthaspis sedecimpunctata
Pic: Vincent / flickr

Nasty mess over my hands and everything whilst I smeared some plumber’s gunk over the plug. Still dripping, from a different place where it looked cracked and I couldn’t seal it with gunk. I remember from when I had my first car in 1966 being told that you could seal a radiator by popping in a raw egg. But this morning, whether it was dripping or not, the water level was still high, so that was another relief. This car is worth a lot more to me than a hundred pounds. It is worth whatever it would cost to replace it, which might be several thousand.

By way of illustration, I reproduce photos from A Wayfarer's Notes on 4th December 2006. The relevance? On 7th December 2008 I went in search of the same fencepost to see if these insects had gathered to hibernate in the same spot. Though I found the spot with no difficulty, I couldn't identify the actual fencepost, suspecting there has been an alteration to the gate. My surmise, from observation of other insects, especially the larvae of the peacock butterfly inachis io, is that insects gather at exactly the same place each year, at the same time for their primal rituals of mating and hibernation. It was pointless to seek these tiny creatures nearby or anywhere else in this rural landscape. They are almost invisible, and I have no idea what determines their behaviour. I returned to another haunt nearby: an unofficial rubbish dump the other side of the main road. Here, in what resembles a former layby with a well-made concrete base, are strewn hundreds of items over at least half an acre. Many have an engineering connection. There are many small toolboxes of various types. The designs must go back fifty years. I could not solve the mystery. I picked up a small golf club, a Slazenger iron, from amongst the detritus, and used it for a walking stick as I penetrated the woods through a broad avenue, developed for pheasant shooting. There were little numbered signs left from the last shoot, and a place for the chicks to feed, with small barrels of grain and a canopy against the marauding red kites. These birds, almost extinct a few years ago, are everywhere, including town. You can see them circling on thermals from my study window, beautiful big solitary birds (not social like seagulls). And they have a soft high call, like whistling, very human, just one or two gentle notes. What do they feed on? How can they thrive?

I know so little about the world. I think I mean the world of Nature. Is there another world? If there is, perhaps it is the world of illusion. I don't know. Not knowing feels like a good place to dwell.

Some tedious verbiage

This blog started out with the title An Ongoing Experiment, which is still reflected in its web address, “perpetual-lab”. What the experiment was designed to investigate was never clear to me: it was ongoing, and its discoveries would define its objectives. The spirit of the “perpetual laboratory” remains, though it later changed its name to As in Life, emulating a still pool reflecting the sky—art imitating life. Then, when I was working for some months at a global computer corporation, which I code-named MaxiRam, locating it in Babylon Town, I found it necessary to go wayfaring for an hour each day, in my lunch-break, to retain, as I thought of it, my sanity. “Sanity” was a shorthand for something I had not troubled to analyse, but all the same had felt deeply. Right outside the revolving doors that led to the company’s Reception lobby was a low wall colonised by an exquisite lichen that affected the eyeballs with a yellow like van Gogh’s paintings of harvest or sunflowers.

. See this post. Beyond that was a little path unknown except to pedestrians like me, which took you through a small shrubbery, still on MaxiRam’s land: and here it was that one of those shrubs spoke to me, not in words of course but its own language; and our conversation was affectionate. See this post. I won’t describe now all the places I went and the vivid memories of Nature amongst the pavements and buildings of that industrial park and beyond. Some I have written up and some remain to be described. There was a place with a large pond, originally associated with a water-mill but now catches rainwater displaced by all the concrete and asphalt of the surrounding developments. When there were floods and storms, the excess water raised the pond’s level, letting it flow into main sewers without overloading them. In rebuilding the pond for this purpose, the authorities created a nature reserve at the same time, with various sedges and aquatic birds; as well as cafés and paths for strolling or jogging, and boardwalks for fishing. There was well-managed woodland too, and paths to reach the park via underpasses so that you could walk or cycle there safely. At one time I planned to write a full-size book of essays entitled “Mill Park”, fed by whatever came to me when I visited that place; for it flowed with ideas as much as water.See this post.

A mile beyond, in the town centre, again reachable by footpath without crossing any road, stood a supermarket. The joy of that mill pond turned sombre when I saw little green boxes at the base of the supermarket walls, with a hole at each end, designed to poison rats in privacy, without killing pets too. What saddened me was this: that the rats would not have flocked to that locality, would not have nested and reproduced in any numbers, if they had not been drawn to the irresistible aroma of man-made food products. Instinctively, I felt that this was an ugliness: a minor one, doubtless, in the bigger scheme of man’s ugly behaviour. I only responded to it because that day I was feeling sombre already, as my post that day records.

I write this in the dead of night, anticipating the dead of day, for we are near the Winter Solstice, and in this frost my instinct is to stay in a warm place, curled up reading a good book, rather than go a-wayfaring. And then I discover how hard it is to read a book through, as I used to do, when going by train to work. I get out my pen and notebook, for I cannot read passively: my own thoughts interrupt the author’s. But what has moved me this morning in the darkness is an essay by David Abram, “The Ecology of Magic”, in Ecopsychology (Sierra Club Books). He speaks of visiting Bali as a magician, not an academic, and understanding what the shamans there really do, and interacting with animals. He was a guest of a magic practitioner there, whose wife each morning would take little offerings of cooked rice on woven palm-frond platters, to the spirits. Curious, he went to look for himself after she had left them a little distance from the house, in several locations. A small trail of ants came along, climbed the heap and took away the grains of rice one by one. He learned that to these animistic Indonesians, spirits were not like those taught by the missionaries. They were forces of nature, which magicians and simple people understood. Translating this act into his own Western understanding, he saw that feeding the spirits kept ants away from the kitchen, without the use of poison.

There is much more, but this is enough. A book is too much, but a blog can distil an essence into a nutshell.

Note on top picture: the white bridge elegantly spanned a patch of dry mud when I first encountered it, comic in its incongruity. A bridge needs water just as much as water needs a bridge.

The ongoing experiment of this blog turns out to be a bridge between nature and mind. Why do we need a bridge? This earth is undergoing a bigger challenge than the one faced by Noah in the Book of Genesis. Let's see what we can do with a bridge before we build an ark.