Movies as mirrors, and new-age hitmen

[From my Business Standard column. Will extend some of these thoughts into a longer piece sometime; for now I only had the time/energy to meet the column’s word-length]

In Vikram Chandra’s superb novel Sacred Games, there is a passage where a group of Mumbai gangsters watch the film Deewaar (for probably the umpteenth time) and get tearful because they can identify with Amitabh Bachchan’s angry young man Vijay, driven by circumstances to a life outside the law. Though the point isn’t underlined, one realises that some of these young thugs have modelled themselves on this onscreen anti-hero, right down to the swagger and the one-liners. (“Main aaj bhi phenke huye paise nahin uthaata.”) But it’s also worth remembering that Vijay himself was loosely based on a real-life underworld figure, Haji Mastan.

Here and elsewhere, Chandra’s book shows a sharp understanding of the symbiotic relationship between cinema and life – how they can be mirrors facing each other, producing countless reflections and counter-reflections, so that (in this context) a generation of criminals might get behaviourial cues from what they have seen in movies. A review I once read of the 1995 film Heat – in which Al Pacino played a cop and Robert De Niro a criminal – made a similar point. Speculating on the research the actors might have done, the reviewer observed that Pacino and De Niro had been playing such characters in iconic films since the 1970s: if they went out on the streets to observe real-life cops and gangsters, it’s likely that those cops and gangsters would have modelled their own personalities on roles played by these very actors 20 years earlier.

 

Anurag Kashyap’s epic Gangs of Wasseypur – about multi-generational gang wars in the Jharkhand hinterland – understands this relationship very well. It contains many references to B-movies with titles like Kasam Paida Karne Waale Ki; a lead character, Faizal, is a version of The Godfather’s Michael Corleone (he wouldn't have seen that film, but he is mesmerised by Bachchan’s beedi-chomping, devil-may-care stance in movies like Trishul. There is even what seems like a visual gag, when someone mentions Amitabh in Zanjeer and Faizal bolts up from a reclining position in exactly the way Bachchan’s nightmare-afflicted Vijay did in his first appearance in that film). And as you’d expect, given its story, setting and pop-cultural references, Gangs of Wasseypur is rife with displays of uber-machismo: burly gangsters gun each other down, gleefully stab people on the streets and make proclamations about badla and izzat.

Yet a different tone is revealed in other scenes, such as the one where the protagonist Sardar Khan is sexually objectified – as he struts about in a loin-cloth, we see him through the entranced eyes of the woman who will become his second wife - and the one where Faizal is presented as a sensitive, new-age man, wiping tears from his eyes when a woman he has a crush on speaks to him harshly. And in this vein, the film also has a moment that runs against the grain of every gangster/killer portrayal one expects from the cinema of violence. In one of its wittiest and most sinister scenes, a character named Shahid Khan – proud, well-built, scourge of his enemies – is assassinated by a bespectacled, dhoti-clad wisp of a man with an almost melancholy expression on his face – someone who might easily have been the village master-ji in a film of earlier vintage.

This gunrunner-cum-hired gun can be seen as a cinematic cousin of another memorable meek hitman from a few months ago – Bob Biswas in Kahaani. Pudgy and unfit, Bob is a tangle of contradictions: a life-insurance agent moonlighting as an executioner; a sweet-looking Bengali babu who resembles a creepy bogeyman from a slasher-film series; a seemingly omniscient killer who is vanquished not by human adversaries but by the Kolkata traffic, which bows to no man. Looked at up close, his face appears almost to be crumbling, like one of his city’s decrepit havelis.
Watching these two improbable hitmen, one wonders if our cinema has had its fill of the flamboyant, big-talking bad guys. Don’t be too surprised to see an effetely polite serial killer on our screens in the near future. Conversely, given how life draws from film, be very wary of the harmless-looking, jhola-carrying chap you meet on a lonely road late at night.

[A somewhat related post: on the terrific documentary Videokaaran, with a protagonist who is a construct of the films he loves]

In memory of a beautiful, brave child

For Fox, with all our love (June 23, 2008 – June 16, 2012)

One Sunday afternoon in August 2007, I was standing in the little lane behind our new flat in Saket – the flat my wife and I had moved into after our wedding – and supervising the installation of a new booster for our water tank. In posts of that time (this one for instance) I grumbled profusely about the many teething troubles we faced in the new house. The booster installation was part of all that – it had to be done, it would take a few hours and someone had to be outside with the plumber’s helpers, checking wires and switches and things.

I had a deadline to review Hari Kunzru’s book My Revolutions, so I took it down with me. Reading it there in the sun, to the rhythm of metal pipes being fit and bolts being unscrewed, I remember being moved by a short passage. The book’s protagonist needs to steal an identity, so he visits a graveyard and searches for names of infants who were born around the same time as he was, but who had died very young (so that there is little or no complicating paperwork about their existence). On the tombstone of a child who had lived for less than two years, he reads the epitaph: “Resting where no shadows fall”.
 
Something about that line resonated with me. The picture it created in my mind was that of an unfortunate baby born with a serious medical condition, and the effect this knowledge had on the stricken parents, who experienced countless emotions over the months that followed: praying for a miracle, veering between a selfish desire to see the child live a full life (even if it was suffering) and the numbing realisation that this would not be in anyone’s best interests. Then the coming of the end – the immense grief tempered by an acknowledgement that the child was at peace at last, untouched by the shadows that had plagued it for all of its short life. Finally, choosing the appropriate words for the gravestone.

When I read that passage I had no firsthand experience of being a parent, but in the years ahead I was to understand not just the general feelings involved but also what it was like to have a special child, in need of constant attention and care – and what it was like to see it suffering. And there’s a little coincidence here too: it was in that very same back-lane, almost a year after I stood reading My Revolutions, that I saw my baby for the first time.

At the time, I could have no idea how closely our lives would become linked. She was just one of six pups snuggled up next to each other, fast asleep, limbs twitching sporadically as flies landed on them. In any case, dogs and their possibilities were at the margins of my consciousness: I was fond of them in a distant sort of way, but I had never been seriously close to one despite having lived for years in the same house as my mother’s Pomeranian.

Some of those early days were chronicled on this blog, since we were trying to find homes for the litter. The video in this post is one of the first videos we ever took of the pup who became our Foxie (she’s the one on top, just a little over a month old, wrestling with one of her siblings).

How she became ours, and the centre of my life for nearly four years, is a story I still can’t completely make sense of. But things slowly fell together. We were taking milk and bread down for the pups every day for weeks, and my mother had her eye on Fox from the very beginning (her features reminded mum of another street dog whom she had fed for close to a decade, and who had died a short while earlier). Coincidentally she was the last pup left after her surviving brothers were adopted. On the first night that she was alone – whimpering, missing her siblings – Abhilasha and I went to the lane and discovered she had been bitten near the cheek by an adult dog. That decided it: we made a hurried trip to the nearby vet, got the lotion he prescribed, applied it and took her upstairs to our flat for what we thought would be just one night. It wasn’t.  

That was close to four years ago. On the same vet’s table, on the 16th of this month, Foxie passed away, with the three people she loved most by her side. It was a complication related to a chronic intestinal problem – one that had been diagnosed in February 2010 and had cast a shadow over her life. At no point in the last two-and-a-half years had she been really healthy, but her condition had improved in the final 10-11 months, and the end – coming as it did – was a huge shock. Two hours before she began showing the symptoms that set alarms bells off in my head, she had been fine, greedily gulping down her afternoon meal.

Nothing I write here can come close to capturing what she meant to me – language has never been so inadequate – and I’ve felt exhausted just thinking of writing about this. But I’ll try.

For her first year with us, Foxie was the most energetic, brightest-eyed, most personable dog you could imagine. Her early life is a blur in some ways, partly because the first 9-10 months of her time as a house dog overlapped with the final months of my nani’s illness (and the attendant chaos in the house); but also partly because Fox herself was healthy and “normal” throughout that period.

It’s impossible to know how one comes to develop a particular type of closeness with a particular creature. (I was flummoxed by a comment on this old post about the need to know the “difference” between a relationship with a human and an animal – as if it is possible to set such boundaries and chains in place for one’s deepest feelings.) In the case of my relationship with Foxie, much of it had to do with our situation: I was working from home, which meant she was around me all the time. Crabby as I usually am about my writing, she always had the right to barge into my room any time she wanted and demand to be taken down, or to play ball or tug of war. (In the pre-Fox days, I kept my room door locked for much of the day.) My routine became centred around her, the bond between us grew and I began to understand the things that parents feel. Not in the distant, second-hand, vaguely empathetic way where you can imagine what the emotions are like – but really understand.

I knew now what my mother had meant all those years when she would fuss over me, worry about my being out of the house for too long, and mouth annoying platitudes about how I would understand “one day”. When I heard people talking about their kids, I related. Heck, when I heard the Steve Jobs quote about children being “your heart running around outside your body”, I knew exactly what it meant, and I wasn’t embarrassed by the rawness (or triteness) of the sentiment. Little things like that. When Jaane bhi do Yaaro: Seriously Funny Since 1983 came out, I often told friends – only half-jokingly – that the biggest justification for the book’s existence was that I had managed to get Fox’s photo and name into it. (She was unwell by that time, and the photo in the book - the one here, on the left - is not a flattering one. But I cherish it.)

All these feelings intensified when her illness was diagnosed and her condition required constant monitoring: a strictly regulated diet, enzymes with every meal, newspapers spread out on the terrace because she had to go to the toilet five or six times each day. Even knowing that my mum (the best dadi in the world) was around all the time, it became difficult for me to contemplate going out of town for more than 3-4 days at a stretch. And on the very rare occasions that I did, I would be calling my mother up every few hours to check on Fox’s condition: was she eating okay, showing signs of discomfort or pain? Did she still have trouble walking around?

This may seem like a dark picture, but here is the comforting knowledge that we will hold on to: in the last year of her life, thanks to some medicinal and dietary changes, she had become happier and more active. The pain in her hind legs and abdomen had greatly reduced; she had regained some of her natural beauty, with many of her skin patches clearing. In this last year I saw her do things I had once reconciled myself to never seeing again: tearing through the house from one balcony to the other to monitor the movements of a dog downstairs; standing briefly on her delicate hind legs, with her front legs on the trunk of a tree, cocking her head as she searched for a squirrel; playing hide-and-seek with Abhilasha and me, and whining – in the petulant, spoilt-brat way she used to as a pup – when one of us was out of sight for longer than she could bear; bringing us her stuffed toys one by one so we could throw them along the floor for her to dash after; slapping a tennis ball about with something approaching the verve she had shown in her early months.

None of this knowledge can take away what I’m feeling now in my heart and in the pit of my stomach – what I have been feeling every second for the past two weeks. (The moment I knew for sure that she was gone, these words leapt into my head: "This is the first day of the rest of my life." That sounds dramatic, and it’s true that at times like this we tend to borrow words from the literature and cinema of grief. But it was exactly how I felt. The world changes: the way you look around you, the things you see, everything has a different colour and texture.) But in the long run, when some of the wounds have healed and it’s possible to focus on the good times, the memories of those final months will be immeasurably precious. If Foxie had gone a year earlier (as she nearly did in May 2011, in similar circumstances), our lasting memories would have been of a very sick, listless dog who staggered about the house on three legs, her back abnormally arched because she was in so much pain. (Well-wishers who had seen her condition at the time had delicately suggested putting her down.) Instead, we had this grace period when she regained something of the vitality of her childhood.

There is much more to write – I’ll do it as I find the energy for it. Meanwhile, here are a few photos.

These three are from the bad days, from around a year and a half ago. The mattress is spread out on the floor in the first pic because she was too weak at the time to climb up on a bed or sofa. (She also has a scarf tied around her, in addition to the coat – that winter was particularly bad given her emaciated condition.)

She is very skinny in the third pic (though she was even worse at one point). The pose is a characteristic one – she is resting her left hind leg, which was always weak.

From happier times: checking out a handsome male dog in the park; competing with Indian Idols; relaxing generally.

Her favourite place – my mother’s balcony, which gave her a fine view of the world she knew.

And two of her very last photos - playing dadi's pet at the dining table and elsewhere.

 

(Other photos and memories in these posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7)

A quick note to say...

I’m taking a break from writing – and blogging – for a while. Life has taken a sudden and difficult turn and there are lots of things to be dealt with. Will return to this space when I can (it probably won't be too long because I can't defer the professional writing beyond a point). Until then...

A brush with academic writing (and poor writing in general)

Recently I agreed to review a book titled Bollywood Travels: Culture, Diaspora and Border Crossings in Popular Hindi Cinema, by Rajinder Dudrah (a senior lecturer at the University of Manchester). When it arrived, I flipped through the first 4-5 pages and knew I was in for a long, hard ride. Sample sentences:

All cinemas offer border places and spaces of ideas, of different sorts, but it is the focus on the imaginative positing of border places and spaces through Bollywood’s idiosyncratic audio-visual construction of such a possibility that is of focus here.

The notion of the haptic urban ethnoscape is developed out of a critical theorising about the concept of representation, as a way of extending text-based analyses beyond the materiality of film and media, and to consider their articulations in and through urban cultural geographies.

It’s a slim book, thank FSM, but even 110 more pages of this...long, deep sigh.

As I’ve often said in this space, we need more intelligent literature on popular films. But such writing – rare as it already is – should try to be accessible to readers who have not been weaned on the hermetically sealed language of academia, and who believe that there are lucid ways of expressing ideas.

Pauline Kael often cautioned against the dangers of film criticism falling into the hands of university circles, resulting in stodgy “over-analysis”. This view is, of course, open to debate: you might disagree with it if you believe (as I do) that popular films deserve serious, engaged analysis. But it's important to consider the quality of the analytical writing. Remember that Kael herself wrote many long, passionate reviews full of detailed observations that could only have come from her and no one else. And some of my own favourite cinema writing is by academics such as Robin Wood, who knew how to write clearly and directly.

Dudrah’s writing, on the other hand, is often dense and obfuscating in the way that a certain type of (widely parodied) academic writing tends to be – full of generously recurring “heuristics” and “diagetics” and convoluted sentences that appear to be an end in themselves rather than channels for conveying meaning or insight. But the problem with Bollywood Travels isn’t just that it is over-academic – in fact, it isn’t consistently so. There are passages where it is self-consciously informal, almost as if making a hip effort to eschew the language of the classroom (and perhaps suggesting that behind the garb of the lecturer is a fanboy who is interested in movies and movie stars at a more elementary level). Dudrah references the dim-witted comments that typically appear under YouTube videos (“srk is a kid, Amit G is his baap”) and elaborately quotes Tweets by Bollywood stars like the Bachchans to understand how stars “are using this medium to extend their onscreen personas, to perform themselves in a virtual public setting...”. In a charming little aside he even mentions asking Salman Khan (on Twitter) why he disliked the term “Bollywood”, and not receiving a response.

The bigger problem is that much of the prose – both in the complicated passages and in the simple ones – is awkward in ways that anyone with a functioning knowledge of English would recognise. Thus: “John Abraham is known for keeping fit and working out regular (sic) and his buff body is put to good titillating use, often revealed at almost every opportunity with only shorts on throughout the film.” And: “Jhoom Barabar Jhoom [...] is a knowing film: knowing that Bollywood is being noticed by the international entertainment industries and knowing too that a little creative licence would not go amiss in the execution of this popular text.” There are many other instances of such triteness.

It’s a pity, because there are passages here – especially the detailed analyses of sequences from Jhoom Barabar Jhoom and Dostana – where one senses that Dudrah has an eye for detail, knows how to read movies and occasionally has noteworthy things to say about them. But his form is so muddled that the content rarely stands a chance.

[More on the book later]

A book on Indian boxing

My friend Shamya Dasgupta’s book Bhiwani Junction: The Untold Story of Boxing in India can now be pre-ordered on Flipkart – highly recommended for anyone interested in the subject (or in the many human-interest stories around Vijender Singh and other contenders at the London Summer Olympics). I’ve been envious of Shamya’s lucid, to-the-point writing style ever since I first encountered it in post-grad a lifetime and a half ago, and though this is chiefly a reportage-driven project done on a short deadline, it has a personal touch and quite a bit of whimsy too. (I think I’m allowed to reveal that the opening sentences of the book’s Introduction contain a reference to the Rashomon Effect as well as to those past masters of pugilism, Naseeruddin Shah, Voltaire and Swami Vivekananda.)

So kindly spread the word. And buy. 

P.S. Shamya is also hot. You can verify this by befriending him on Facebook or otherwise Googling his journalistic work.

Popular science (and more) in Forbes Life

A shout-out for the latest issue of that elegant and supremely well-produced magazine ForbesLife India – it’s on the stands now. This edition has a long essay I wrote about some of my favourite popular-science books, including works by Stephen Jay Gould, Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, Oliver Sacks and V S Ramachandran. There are also columns and features by such fine writers as Urvashi Butalia, Kai Friese, Manjula Padmanabhan, Sumana Mukherjee and Meenakshi Shedde. Topics include film, food, travel, personal history and much else – in all, highly recommended.

(Might put up my books piece here at a future date)

Some thoughts on Shanghai

Dibakar Banerjee’s Shanghai begins with a prologue of sorts – a scene where casual chatter between two lower-class men slowly gives way to something more intense and shadowy. The younger man, Bhagu, is brash and excited about the assignment that lies ahead; the older one, Jaggu, is reluctant, wary and more concerned about the safety of his small truck than anything else. Bhagu is played by the diminutive Pitobash Tripathy, who was so good in another fine film Shor in the City – he is well cast here as a loose cannon, capable of temporarily unnerving even the smug people who give him his orders. And yet, both men are basically patsies for larger forces that they cannot begin to understand. (One might, at a stretch, say they have been shanghaied.)

Together they will engineer the fatal incident that lies at the heart of this story – the mowing down of political activist Dr Ahmedi (Prosenjit Chatterjee) shortly after he makes a speech denouncing the high-profile International Business Park (IBP) project. “They’ll take your land and call it pragati,” Ahmedi has been telling the poor people who gather to hear him speak (“they” meaning the government, which has started the project in collusion with big business houses). The parable he relates is that of an unfortunate man visited by big-shots who usurp his property, build a mall on it, charge him money for water and behave like they are doing him a favour. Naturally this activism makes him a controversial figure, and when the truck “accidentally” hits him, his former student and sometime lover Shalini (Kalki Koechlin) sees the attack for what it is. But she may need the help of a small-time maker of sleazy films (Emraan Hashmi) if she wants proof that can hold up in court.
 

Banerjee and his co-writer Urmi Juvekar have done a solid job of adapting Vassilis Vassilikos’s 1967 novel Z (a story situated in a very specific political context) to the contemporary Indian situation – this film is a tightly knit comment on the aspirations and power struggles that brush against each other in a messy, many-layered society. Though the genre is that of the political thriller (complete with the “what really happened?” narrative that marked such movies as Blow Out and The Manchurian Candidate), this is also a slice-of-life depiction of a world where there is no lasting solution to the hegemony of power, where underprivileged people unwittingly participate in their own exploitation, pages routinely go missing in reports, and the rich and their merry men rob from the poor. (No wonder the descriptor “Robin Hood” is sarcastically used at one point to describe someone who tries to go against the grain of things.)

No time for a structured review just now, but here are a few notes:

– I watched Costa-Gavras’s film version of Z a long time ago and only remember it dimly (not having completely understood the politics of the story at the time), but I do recall the magnetic presence of Jean-Louis Trintignant as the investigating magistrate – very deadpan and very expressive at the same time as he tries to sift truth from fiction. Abhay Deol does a decent workmanlike job as that character’s equivalent, the conscientious bureaucrat Krishnan – a Naxal sympathiser (it is hinted) who understands the many ways in which power can be misused. For all the seriousness of Krishnan’s intentions, however, his “investigation” takes place in a shabby, mosquito-ridden hall with barely functioning coolers and dirty bathrooms. Some of the scenes here – the surreal appearance of a basketball mid-proceedings, a sight gag where first Shalini and then Krishnan slip on the just-washed floor outside the hall – are played for humour, but there is a subtext: this dingy, out-of-the-way setting (galaxies away from the fantasy of the posh business city “Shanghai”) is just the place for a token enquiry, the findings of which are likely to be swept under the carpet. (There is no actual carpet in the investigation room, but if there were you can be sure there would be plenty of dirt under it.) And this is a morally slippery place where people struggle – literally and figuratively – to maintain their footing. Krishnan may seem in charge, but even the policemen he interrogates regard him with a blasé eye. “When a chief minister, other politicians and Bollywood celebrities are in the city, the force has to be occupied elsewhere,” he is told when he asks about inadequate security arrangements.

– The screenplay has many neat little touches. “Mujhe interference na milay toh main aur andar tak pahunch sakta hoon,” (“If my work is not interfered with, I can make further inroads”) Krishnan tells the chief minister (played by Supriya Pathak) during his meeting with her. This is ironical because he is already sitting inside the private chamber of someone who probably orchestrated the events he is investigating – a fly in the spider’s parlour – and also because, a short while later, he will get an offer to become an “insider” in another sense. Incidentally Farooque Shaikh plays the CM’s principal secretary Kaul; it’s nice to see him and Pathak together after so many years, but it's also pleasing that these two actors – known best for playing likable, homely people in the Middle Cinema of the early 80s – are made to inhabit very different character types. Pathak looks positively sinister in her one major scene near the end, when the CM steps out of the shadows to greet Krishnan, asking him with fake warmth about how his wife is doing.

– As in his last film LSD, Banerjee makes effective use of the handheld camera, but here the handheld shots are “objective” (which is basically to say that there isn’t someone within the narrative holding the camera: it’s more a case of an invisible narrator juddering between characters, putting us in the middle of the action, creating a sense of claustrophobia). There are some fine compositions, as in a scene where the principal secretary speaks with Krishnan while huffing away on a treadmill. We see the two men’s reflections in the fitness room’s mirrors, but in the very centre of the frame is a third mirror, and in it is the silent, statue-like figure of a man holding a bottle of water and a hand-towel for Kaul. One wonders what “pragati” might mean to this anonymous minion.

There are other clever visuals: a shot of a large SUV being trailed by a small (but lethal) van; the irony of road traffic being stalled by a street celebration in honour of “progress”; the word “Dreemgirl” flashing on the Hashmi character Joginder’s cellphone. And the scary depictions of anarchy in the making include a morcha scene where you feel that the revellers are drunk on the idea of being part of something big and important, regardless of what it is. (The frenzied “Bharat Mata ki Jai” dance has a similar mood.) “Hum China ko peechhe chhod sakte thhe,” (“We could have left China behind”) someone ruefully says at one point. Presumably he means in terms of economic progress, but by the end we have seen the emergence – in the fictitious city of Bharat Nagar – of something that resembles a police state more than a transparent democracy.

– Trying to keep your equilibrium, turning your face away from injustice until your conscience no longer lets you...these are repeated motifs in this film. In a late scene, a character is asked to leave a building from the back-door because there are angry people outside waiting for him, and in the next scene another person (who has amusingly been portraying himself as a macho Rajput) recalls how he had to flee his home through the back-door because people were coming for him. This adds up to a study of individual scruples confronted with permanent threat of repercussion. And so, it makes sense that the ending is cynical and idealistic at the same time: on the one hand, a character does something that in a more simple-minded film might result in the cleaning up of the political order; on the other hand, we see that nothing has really changed. Perhaps the “pragati” being constantly talked about is a version of the principal secretary on his treadmill, running to stay in the same place.

Lovers, elephants and other aliens: on Rajesh Parameswaran's I am an Executioner

[About one of the most stimulating books I've read in some time - did a version of this review for The Sunday Guardian]

When I first read Rajesh Parameswaran’s “The Infamous Bengal Ming” in the Granta Horror special, I was only moderately impressed. The story, told in the voice of a tiger living in a zoo, was unsettling in places but felt a little trite overall, and it sat uneasily in that anthology. But encountering it again in Parameswaran’s own collection I am an Executioner was a revelation. When you read his pieces in succession, noting the subtle ways in which they play off each other, what emerges is a distinct sensibility and storytelling flair.

These are all – to different degrees – teasingly self-reflexive narratives. The mysterious “Four Rajeshes”, for example, is apparently told in the voice of an early 20th century station manager named P Rajarajeshwaran Iyer, but soon we realise that this voice has been imagined into existence by another, contemporary Rajesh. Further, not only does the modern Rajesh make up the earlier Rajesh’s story, he also imagines his subject occasionally chastising him for getting his voice wrong, so that the narrative might include a parenthetical paragraph like this:

“May I interrupt myself? The preceding paragraph is unspeakable, disgusting, implausible and totally unlike me. I know that to you I am just a man in a photograph – and indeed, I appreciate your efforts in bringing me to a kind of puppetlike life and transcribing my words as I speak them, even down to these too clever asides – but please consider that no doubt I was a real man, with an impeccable reputation in my time.”

Such narrative ambiguity, with its suggestion of the barriers to understanding another life (and also the self-consciousness of a narrator attempting to do so), is integral to a book where voice is often given - in unexpected ways - to voiceless people and beasts. As the Bengal Ming in the first story describes “the worst and most amazing day of my life”, we see (from our anthropic viewpoint) the gulf in thought and experience that separates him from human beings. In “Elephants in Captivity (Part One)”, a human editor supplies detailed, rambling footnotes to a story told in a captive elephant’s voice – these notes are so elaborate that they often take up more page space than the main narrative, until you realise that they are a narrative unto themselves. The “editor” doesn’t merely provide context and background explanation; he engages creatively with the elephant Shanti’s tale, writing “scenes” – as in a play – that describe the conversations in the herd. (“While the editor’s job is normally to clarify, when duty calls, he must not shy from the role of a sort of Shamspeare in Love. I humbly comply. Imagine, if you will, a scene, exterior, a jungle, daytime...”) And finally, he supplies the vital connection between his own life and that of the elephant, allowing us the reflection that perhaps this is a most unusual sort of autobiography.

Then consider “On the Banks of Table River (Planet Lucina, Andromeda Galaxy, AD 2319)”, a poignant story about foreignness – which could take the shape of inter-planetary suspicion, but could also mean a parent looking at his child and seeing her, for the first time, as someone with a life of her own. The narrator Thoren is an insect-like being who must sometimes interact with human “tourists” to his planet, and so immersed does the reader become in his perspective that it seems perfectly natural when he describes a human man’s “little egglike eyes” and expresses distaste at the sight of “broad white teeth, edged with brown-pink mouth flesh”. But what happens when his own daughter becomes alien-like? This dislocation is echoed in the more “realist” story “Demons” wherein a woman named Savitri – living in the US and feeling awkward when she has to leave a message on her teenage daughter’s answering machine – becomes convinced that she has mystically caused her husband’s death.


Ironically, Savitri shares her name with the mythological heroine whose devotion brought her husband back from the dead. I am an Executioner bears the subtitle “Love Stories”, but this is not the stuff of conventional romance: layers of doubt and betrayal run through these stories, even the ones that are about genuinely caring relationships. At least four of the pieces involve people hiding significant things from their spouses, but one never gets a sense of repetition; instead, it’s as if the angle of a mirror has been slightly altered to give us a new perspective on love and its possibilities.

Thus, in “Narrative of Agent 97-4702”, a woman – living in a totalitarian society that might be almost entirely made up of secret “agents” – must conceal her real job from her husband, who “tacitly participates in the fiction”. (But what, in turn, is he hiding from her?) In “Bibhutibhushan Mallik’s Final Storyboard”, an aging production designer for a distinguished Bengali film director has an affair with the director’s wife (“Only people the age of sixty-plus can properly enjoy love”) while desperately attempting to become recognised as an artist in his own right. The protagonist of “The Strange Case of Dr Raju Gopalarajan” conducts an elaborate subterfuge by practising as a doctor despite having no qualifications, and even his wife of many years does not know about his secret life. (Here too, the unnamed narrator – someone who knew “Dr Raju” and his wife – spends much time interpreting their story, extrapolating from the available details.) And in one of the most moving passages in this collection, the title story’s narrator muses in his poetically ungrammatical English that though he can whisper his darkest secrets into the ears of the prisoners whom he is about to execute, he can never share them with his new wife: “We didn’t talk nothing, and I wondered myself, what can I tell to her, who is always going to be there in the following days remembering it?”

This is a difficult book to categorise. It could be said that it is about passionate and duplicitous lovers, about narrators who are unreliable and deeply perceptive in turn, about animals and extraterrestrials who are strangers to people, and about people who are strangers to each other. But ultimately, a clinical listing of “abouts” is an inadequate way to describe such a varied yet organically linked collection. Hesitant as I am to descend into the language of the cheaply procured book-jacket blurb, this is among the most stimulating story collections I’ve read in a long while, and a reminder of the possibilities that still exist for short fiction in a jaded, post-post-modern world.

The Obliterary Journal, an anthology of visual storytelling

[Did this for the Hindu Literary Review. Also see this story about the Indian comics industry]

The publishing house Blaft has earned a cult following for its offbeat choices, high production quality and an inventiveness that is just right for its material. For anyone familiar with their earlier work – notably the Tamil Pulp Fiction anthologies and the picture book Kumari Loves a Monster – it's no surprise that the comics anthology The Obliterary Journal (co-published with Tranquebar) is a good-looking book that establishes a playful aesthetic sense right at the outset. The Table of Contents is a wall mural done by a Chennai-based artist named S Venkataraman, who gets a credit at the end, and there is an amusing two-page Foreword in which three pictorial symbols discuss the need to “obliterate” text-driven literature. (Of course, they are then branded “infidels” and destroyed by angry alphabets. It’s enough to make one feel guilty about attempting a text review of this book!)

A strident view of things has it that an anthology is only as good as its weakest link. I don’t quite subscribe to this – two or three brilliant pieces and a few good ones can give a book abiding value. The 20 pieces in The Obliterary Journal represent a fine array of drawing styles, themes and ideas; the techniques range from atmospheric black-and-white charcoal images to brightly coloured comics to classic manga; and there is usually something to appreciate in even the hit-and-miss inclusions.

Since it isn’t possible to write comprehensively about them all in limited space, I’ll mention some of my favourites. In “Memories of the Nayagarh Incident”, the Odiya style of pata chitra is employed for a straight-faced account of extraterrestrial sightings in Orissa in 1947 (among the depictions are a “yantra-purusha” with pincer-like hands and a space-suit wearing alien raising its palm in the “ashirvad stance”). Somdutt Sarkar brings visual life to mathematics problems posed by Bhaskacharya in the 12th century. (“Arjuna used four times the square root of the number of arrows to kill off all Karna’s horses ... How many did he shoot in all?”) The excerpt from The Hyderabad Graphic Novel (an ambitious project about the city’s history, written by Jai Undurti and intricately drawn by Harsh Mohan Chattoraj) reminded me of passages from the great Alan Moore-Eddie Campbell comic From Hell. And Amitabh Kumar’s piece (which obliterates text in its own way by having a title made up not of words but a symbol – an image of a plane inside a bisected heart) is a stark, minimalist tale about an ill-fated goat on a gruesome journey.

  
There isn’t a rigid emphasis on storytelling or on narratives: two of the most enjoyable pieces here are really collections of individual artwork that come together under an overriding theme. “One Dozen Dangerous Food Items” (written by Rashmi Ruth Devadasan, drawn by B Anitha) has a cast of characters including a kleptomaniac okra named “Villain Vendakkai” and the gruesome gourd “Psycho Sorakkai”. And “Twenty Three from the One Gross” (illustrated by Malavika PC) is made up of a series of clever juxtapositions (“Lemur rhymes with femur”; elephants wait on a helipad) that are hard to describe but pleasing to experience.

Some of the simpler stories do experiment with form too. Bharath Murthy’s “A Kovai Gay Story”, for instance, has an intriguingly meta-textual component: it begins with a panel where Blaft editor Rakesh Khanna commissions a story from an artist named Surendran, and ends with a close-up of Surendran’s email account as he sends the final PDF (and we note that this gay man’s chat status is set to “Invisible”). Marginalised figures also dominate Roney Devassia’s “Karuna Bhavanam”, which presents conversations in an old-folks’ home in austere black-and-white – or rather, in moody shades of grey. The content here is reportage-driven, but the drawings make these forgotten old people seem like ghostly figures, which is of course what they have become.

I was less stirred by the inclusion of vehicle art – in “Autoraj”, about an enterprising Bangalorean rickshaw-driver – and pictures of street art from the tiny South American nation Suriname (which has a highly eclectic population, including Bhojpuri and Javanese people). These images make the book more colourful than it would otherwise have been and several of the pictures are entertaining in their own right, but cut off from their context and confined to the pages of a print publication, they seem sapped of vitality.

A case can therefore be made that this collection is too wide-ranging. Most (text-only) anthologies are built around a theme or the work of a single person, which carries appeal for a specific readership. But here, the only “peg” is visual storytelling, which accommodates many varieties of drawings placed at the service of different types of narratives (or anti-narratives). The ideal reader for this book, therefore, will be someone with hugely eclectic tastes – which is a good quality, of course, but also a rare one.

[Earlier pieces on Blaft publications: Tamil pulp fiction and Ibne Safi's Jasoosi Duniya]