A book about book-lovers - on The Collected Works of AJ Fikry

[Did this review for the Sunday Guardian]

The protagonist of Gabrielle Zevin’s The Collected Works of AJ Fikry is a man who lives, literally and otherwise, on an island. AJ Fikry runs a bookstore – the only one on Alice Island, off the coast of Hyannis, Massachusetts – and has very specific tastes and a clear sense of what he will and will not stock (no postmodernism, magic realism, vampires, or memoirs by little old people whose spouses have died of cancer). Only once in the book is it mentioned that his real first name is Ajay and that he is partly Indian – this information is tossed off lightly, for there are more important things we need to know about Fikry. Having lost his wife in a road accident a year and a half before this narrative begins, he is withdrawn and depressive, and generally cut off from human company. One of the few people he spends time with is introduced thus: “He amuses AJ to an extent. This is to say, Daniel Parish is one of AJ’s closest friends.”

But two significant things now happen to Fikry: first a rare, enormously valuable edition of an early Edgar Allan Poe work is stolen from him; and a few weeks later, someone leaves a two-year-old baby girl in his shop (“she weighs at least as much as a twenty-four carton of hardcovers, heavy enough to strain his back”). The single mother, a suicide, wanted little Maya – an unusually bright child – to grow up in a place surrounded by books “and among people who care about those kinds of things”. And so, AJ’s life story takes an unexpected twist, even a genre-bending one: Maya’s advent leads to a degree of (reluctant) socialising, the setting up of local book clubs for mothers and even for cops, and the commencement of a romance with a woman named Amelia Loman, a publisher’s sales rep whom AJ had been rude to when they first met.

At this point in the synopsis, a reader wary of maudlin, life-affirming stories may back away a little. And I won’t pretend that this novel is not, in its own way, sentimental. But it is also a literate, thoughtful work about the often-shaky foundations of very meaningful relationships, about the happenstance that can change lives and shape personalities. (“Once a person gives a shit about one thing, he finds he has to start giving a shit about everything,” AJ thinks as he considers the effect his love for Maya has had on his life.) Some of the ideas expressed here – such as “your whole life is determined by what store you get left in” – can feel trite depending on the sort of reader you are and the mood you happen to be in. But then a key thing in this novel’s favour is that it understands readers and writers very well.

In a nerdy, unselfconscious way, this is a book about book-lovers: people who judge new acquaintances based on their reading tastes (without always realising how much one’s own feelings may change as one grows older or accumulates life experiences); people who delight in literary references and wordplay, not just to show off to others but even while having conversations in their own heads (AJ decides to give Maya a bath because he doesn’t want to take her to the social services department looking like “a miniature Miss Havisham”); people who feel that with the loss of record stores and now bookstores, “all the best things in the world are being carved away like fat from meat”. It doesn’t feel weird to encounter within these pages a kid who might bunk school for a month not so he can hang out with his rough crowd, do drugs and get into trouble, but so he can sneak away to read David Foster Wallace’s massive novel Infinite Jest without being disturbed. This is a story about how excessive bibliophilia can be isolating and corrosive (and misleading too, if you come to love a particular book so much that develop fixed ideas about what its author must be like) – but can also, in the right circumstances, facilitate generosity of spirit. It is about the escapist, armchair reader facing the complications of the real world, and perhaps being surprised by hidden streams in his own personality.

Most of all, despite its apparent simplicity of plot, this novel is sharp enough in the actual writing to evoke some of the literary tropes and devices that its characters discuss. Thus there are little shifts in perspective, gradual revelations that make us rethink something we read a few pages earlier, even a twist in the tale. Each chapter is introduced by Fikry’s notes – addressed to Maya – about a particular story, ranging from Roald Dahl’s “Lamb to the Slaughter” to Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk about When We Talk about Love” to JD Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”, and we see how the story finds a subtle echo in the contents of the chapter, in the characters’ shifting arcs.

And given that this book is so insightful about the links between the lives we lead and the art we encounter, it feels apt to indulge myself here with a personal aside. Things about AJ’s personality were already resonating with me by the time I was halfway through, but then came a more specific coincidence that seems suited to the reading of a book like this one: I came to a passage about a high-school student’s story titled “My Grandmother’s Hands” at exactly the point when I was sitting in a hospital room, awaiting news of a seriously ill grandmother, reflecting on how frail she had looked in the ICU bed; a reference in the story made me think about how her ancient hands had looked like tissue paper. This coincidence could – to channel one of Fikry’s more cynical monologues – have made me feel like a character in a bad novel, allowing my own thoughts and feelings to be manipulated by someone else’s template of clichés. Or it could (as it did in this case) make me feel a kinship with the book I was reading. One of the best things about The Collected Works of AJ Fikry is that it keeps both possibilities open for the reader.

Stupid Guy Goes Back to India (the bewakoof chronicles contd)

The cover of Yukichi Yamamatsu’s Stupid Guy Goes Back to India has a “Hey Bewakoof!” in large font above a drawing of an irascible old Japanese man glaring at the reader, yelling that since this is a translation of a manga, we have to turn it over and read it from right to left. Both the drawing and the bad-temperedness will be familiar to anyone who experienced Yamamatsu’s graphic novel Stupid Guy Goes to India, to which this is a sequel. On the jacket of that earlier book, he gave us the same instructions with a simple “Hey!” minus the “bewakoof”. Perhaps he feels like he knows us better now, and can take more liberties. Yukichi first visited India in 2004, hoping to sell his comics, and his love-hate relationship with the country continues here, though there is a little more khandaani “love” in the mix than there was in the first book (where he was often scornful – or just brutally frank – about India, and honest about his own insularity).

The sequel begins with the artist – now in his 60s – surviving a bout with cancer. “What a waste of a life it was!” he grumbles to himself when he thinks he is dying; the self-deprecation is so mixed with genuine peevishness that the effect is funny rather than maudlin. At various points in both these books, Yukichi appears annoyed at himself and at the world in equal measure, and his exaggerated self-portrait is closer to the worlds of Noh theatre and the medieval Samurai than the reserved placidity we associate with modern Japanese culture. In any case, having lived on, he decides to rejuvenate himself by – what else? – returning to India, having finally earned some money through the earlier book.

This time he is more immune to culture shock, which is not to say that new misadventures don’t present themselves – and he often invites them with his ambitious but not particularly well thought out schemes for making money. He is routinely cheated by people who, when confronted, stare into space as if nothing has happened (or twitch their heads in that ambiguous Indian way that so fascinates Yukichi). He confuses an air cooler with an air conditioner, screams “Do you have any idea what the word PROMISE even means?!” after being let down by someone who had committed to helping him. (“VACHAN?!!? Do they not exist in India or WHAT?!”) But there are gentler passages too: he allows himself to get reflective about growing old, and there is even a tiny bit of social commentary when, after a set of public-toilet-related mishaps (this bit is not for queasy readers), he wonders how women in India must get along.

A notable difference between Stupid Guy Goes Back to India and its predecessor is that a much larger number of the conversations here take place in stilted Hindi (written in the Roman script, of course), reflecting Yukichi’s growing familiarity with the language over his two trips. The results are often very droll – “Sir ke andar theek nahin!” shouts a hysterical Yukichi, trying to explain to a married couple that their baby might have an undiagnosed mental problem; “Kya mazedaar hai AAPKO tay karna nahin!” he shouts, when someone suggests that his stand-up comedy routine might not appeal to local slum-dwellers – but this also means the reader needs basic acquaintance with Hindi to fully appreciate what is going on (and to see the humour in the mixing of the shuddh and the profane).

The narrative itself - in its original, untranslated form - probably held some appeal for Japanese readers who don’t know much about life in India’s dustier, poorer crannies and might therefore be able to read this as a novel set in a fantasy world. For the Indian though, it can become repetitive and over-familiar after a while. The novelty value of the earlier book – which I enjoyed – has abated. Like the badly made Udon noodles that Yukichi tries without success to sell at a roadside stall (he belatedly learns that there is only one type of flour in India), the jokes can only be stretched so far before they wear thin and leave a rancid taste in your mouth.

A running theme through this book is Yukichi’s struggles to publish and sell a slim manga titled “Cycle Rickshaw Wallay ki Dukaan”. He includes that comic at the end of this book (“by “end”, I mean the first pages of a left-to-right publication, bewakoof), so that Stupid Guy Goes Back to India finishes on a note of grace, with a short story that doesn’t feature Yukichi at all but is about a gruff man whose path crosses with a group of orphaned children. Perhaps this is a sign that Yukichi did, after all, develop affection for life in this noisy, messy, complicated country. Or perhaps he is trying to tell us that like the cycle-rickshaw wala, he has always had a soft heart under his cold and self-absorbed exterior. Whatever the case, it makes for a warm ending to a book that otherwise has too many slack passages and too much forced humour.

[Did this for the Hindu Literary Review. My review of the first book, Stupid Guy Goes to India, is here]

Lord of the rink: on Hawaa Hawaai

Amole Gupte’s new film Hawaa Hawaai begins with a lush, elegantly shot scene where a poor man sings a devotional hymn in the presence of his family, including his little son Arjun: learn to embrace a hard life (“angaaray pe chal”) if that is what fate has in store, go the words of the song. This poetic sequence can be viewed as a prelude that exists independently of the film’s main narrative. The light is warm and soothing, the music builds in intensity… and then there’s a segue to the first scene of the story proper: a harsher, more prosaic outdoor scene in which Arjun’s mother reluctantly sets him to work at a Bandra tea-stall. He is called “Raju” here, the generic name allotted by the shop-keeper to his employees, and he leads the sort of life where dreaming is forbidden. But then, working at the stall late at night, he sees rich kids being coached for a skating competition and is smitten by the shiny wheels.

One of the things I liked about Gupte’s first film as director, Stanley ka Dabba, was that it refrained from over-explaining things: the engaged viewer was allowed to connect dots, fill in the gaps, or to speculate about a character’s back-story. Hawaa Hawaai has the same quality. The transition from that opening sequence to the next one in Bandra doesn’t immediately tell us that Arjun’s father is no longer alive – this is something we only gather a little later. Nor do we know yet that the boy had started going to school and was apparently a good student before circumstances led him into this new life. The show-don’t-tell principle is very much in place, with snatches of information accumulating over the course of the story, so that we gradually learn more about the characters and understand their personal arcs. This applies not just to Arjun, but also to his friends from the slum, who help him construct a makeshift pair of skates. It also applies to the skating coach and to his elder brother who works as an investment banker in the US. (We see the closeness as well as the tension between the brothers, but some things about their past – including their parents, who were killed in a road accident – are not elaborated on.)

I enjoyed this film hugely and thought it was tighter and better paced than Stanley ka Dabba, which had a few slack moments. In fact, Hawaa Hawaai often transcends its own genre. “Inspirational” films about underdogs triumphing against the odds can so easily become trite, wringing gallons of fake emotion from the premise alone. The familiar template for such stories includes stock scenes such as a climactic competition where flesh-and-blood opponents as well as private demons must be conquered at the same time. Those clichés aren’t avoided here, but the key lies in the handling. There is restraint and interiority, and the film in general is less sentimental than it might have been – not least thanks to the excellent performances of the child actors, led by Gupte’s son Partho in the lead role (at 13, Partho, who was also so good in Gupte’s earlier film, may already be one of the finest actors we have), and a likable adult cast including Saqib Saleem as the young coach, “Lucky sir”, who (cliché alert) wants to "give these kids wings".

The understatement is also admirable given that this is a tale of contrasts between the lives of the privileged and the unprivileged. Images of pampered kids being chauffeured around in big cars are juxtaposed with shots of Arjun and his friends scavenging in garbage dumps. The line “Lakh ki cheez hai” (a reference to the cost of an impossibly sleek pair of skates that Arjun has been admiring from a distance) is followed just a few seconds later by a shot of the boy getting his day’s salary – a worn 20-rupee note, a couple of tens. And inevitably, there are a few facile shots like the one of a kid clambering down a mountain of garbage while an airplane flies past in the background. But again, the film mostly manages to negotiate this subject matter without getting didactic about it.

Importantly, it has a sense of humour, which both offsets and heightens the effect of the serious scenes. Raju/Arjun’s first appearance on the “skating rink” is a scene that could easily have been played only for laughs – he is wearing a ludicrous robot outfit with blinking lights, his skates are covered with a carefully woven zari cloth in the fashion of a new bride, and the other kids understandably yelp and scatter as if an extraterrestrial has appeared in their midst – but surface comedy aside, this is a very important scene, where a modern-day Ekalavya will transform into an Arjuna. (Literally, as it happens: the coach learns “Raju’s” real name, confers him the dignity of calling him by it, and legitimizes his dreams in a way that was denied to the unfortunate tribal boy of the Mahabharata.) Without the lightness of touch, this scene would probably not have worked so well. Gupte’s script also allows the poor children to be irreverent, even crude, without letting us lose sight of their hardships. When the well-mannered Arjun asks his friends to refer to their fathers as “pitaji” instead of “baap”, they retort, “Pitaji bolenge toh baap badal jaayega kya?” - a smart-aleck line, sure, but also a reminder that these children, who constantly see other children leading much cushier lives, might yearn to have been born into a different family.

Perhaps it is also notable that the plot MacGuffin – the thing that sets Arjun dreaming – is something as low-key as skating, as opposed to a mainstream sport such as cricket or even hockey. Even though the film does enter high-drama mode in the climax (complete with suspenseful stops and starts and a droning commentator who seems concerned only with Arjun’s progress in the race), there is no pretence that Arjun’s whole life can be magically transformed by his becoming a district champion – or that he will spend the next few years gliding from one international championship to another, earning lakhs along the way – and that isn’t the point anyway. The point is that he has got the chance to do something on his own terms and to find a measure of success in it – which can perhaps be a stepping stone to self-sufficiency in other fields, and realising other sorts of dreams. No wonder the roller-skate scenes have the feel of rebirth about them. When Arjun puts them on and tries gingerly to move about on them, he is like a fawn taking its first baby steps.

P.S. What I thought was a cute little snide reference: at one point in the race, Arjun is trying to overtake another boy who doesn’t let him pass, and the commentator goes “Aamir is blocking his progress.” Anyone who knows about Amole Gupte’s troubles during the making of Taare Zameen Par, a film that was his baby and that he was originally supposed to direct, will probably get the import of that line.

Harmonious notes – music and manliness in Alaap and Parichay

In one of those coincidences that stalk movie buffs, last week I happened to re-watch two films in which a man is discouraged from pursuing his interest in music. Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s 1977 Alaap, perhaps Amitabh Bachchan’s most low-key and least-seen film in the first few years of his superstardom, has the actor playing a variant on some of his larger-than-life parts of the time. In mainstream movies like Trishul, Shakti and Deewaar, Bachchan was often in conflict with, or defined by the absence of, a father figure. He is in similar straits in Alaap, but the tone of the conflict is from the tradition of the grounded “Middle Cinema” that Mukherjee specialised in – less dramatic and fiery, more rooted in the everyday dilemmas that face a middle-class family.

As the film begins, Bachchan’s Alok Prasad has just returned to his home-town after studying classical music. “Ab toh saadhna ka lamba raasta hai, jo jeevan ki tarah saral bhi hai aur kathin bhi,” Alok’s guru has cautioned the students – meaning they aren’t “finished” with their studies, years of disciplined practice lie ahead and true commitment must span a lifetime. But this is not something Alok’s worldly father could ever understand. Barely greeting his son, he peremptorily asks what Alok plans to do with his life now, as if he had been away just for a lark. The senior Prasad (described as “Hitler”, though he is played by the Teddy-Bearish Om Prakash trying hard to look tyrannical) is contesting local elections and no doubt has firm ideas about what a worthy pursuit for a son is. Some of the early scenes make light of this situation (if I had to argue a murder case in court, I would do it in Raag Deepak, Alok quips to his bhabhi as he mulls his unsuitability to follow in his lawyer brother’s footsteps, “aur talaaq ka case Raag Jogiya mein gaoonga”), but soon there is a parting of ways, and it becomes obvious that the hero’s single-minded dedication to his art could endanger his very existence.

The other film was Gulzar’s 1972 Parichay, which is sometimes described as a reworking of The Sound of Music – and indeed there are similarities in the plot of a teacher who tries to bring joy, including the love of music, into the lives of his sullen young wards. But like Alaap, the story is also about two opposing views of what a man may do with his life. In flashback, we see the music-loving Nilesh (Sanjeev Kumar) playing the sitar in his room early in the morning, going out onto the verandah to sing and to contemplate the beauty of nature, and his clashes with his authoritarian father Rai Saab (Pran), who wants his son to grow out of this dreamy-eyed artistic “phase” and do the things he is supposed to do as his only heir. To, essentially, “be a man”.

Given that ours is a cinema where music plays such a vital role – and where music composers and lyricists have mostly been male – there is something faintly ironical about narratives in which men are looked down on, or disinherited, for pursuing music as a profession. But it is easy to see why music, or art more generally, can be a threat to the status quo of a feudal or patriarchal society. The artist or artiste – with his knack for introspection ("thinking too much", as the lament goes) and his frequent inability to conform to societal expectations of people or groups – can be a problematic creature in a regimented world obsessed with class or power, and afraid of change. (Even in more benevolent contexts, there have been clashes between the pursuit of “soft” interests like art and culture, and the business of engaging with the more practical side of life; the written record of the ideological differences between Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore includes an essay where the former repeatedly referred to the latter as “the Poet”, the refrain suggesting that Gandhi was being gently sarcastic about Tagore’s rose-tinted idealism and his disconnect from the hard demands of the freedom struggle.)

In so many films made by directors like Mukherjee and Gulzar, music is a force for egalitarianism, something that helps blur boundaries. Men become more “feminine” when they sing or dance, women can become more assertive and emotionally expressive than the codes of a conservative society would normally allow them to be; gender is transcended in each direction. Music can also be equalizing in the way it erases class and caste lines. Early in Alaap, the well-off Alok bonds over a song with the cart-driver (Asrani in a super performance) who transports him home; later he finds his true home away from his father’s mansion, in the little basti where a classical singer named Sarju Bai resides. Similarly, in another Mukherjee film Aashirwad, the music-loving zamindar Jogi Thakur (Ashok Kumar) is never so happy as when he is practicing with his guru, a lower-class man named Baiju. 

For me you are the real Brahmin, says Jogi Thakur, because a Brahmin is one who teaches. Later, the two men sit together on the floor as they watch – and eventually participate in – a lavani dance performance; sitting with them is a Muslim friend referred to as “Mirza sahib”, and the unforced bonhomie between these three men, from very different backgrounds, is a direct result of their enthusiasm for the performing arts.** What they are doing is, within their social milieu, as subversive as Alok supporting the basti-dwellers against his own father’s land-appropriating schemes, and it shows how the performing arts can – temporarily at least – bring some harmony to an inherently unjust world.

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** From Louise Brown's book The Dancing Girls of Lahore: Selling Love and Saving Dreams in Pakistan’s Pleasure District:

Because the emotional power of music was considered raw and uncontrolled, music was deemed, like love, to have the potential to rob a man of his self-control and virtue. It was believed to possess the same subversive erotic power as the beloved. Because of its potentially destabilizing feminine power, music itself threatened the mirza’s masculinity […] for a man to dance was to indicate his receptivity to erotic attention, a passive erotic behavior that was unacceptable for a mirza.

[Related thoughts in these posts: fathers and sons in the anthology film Bombay Talkies; the lavani sequence in Aashirwad. And a post about Mukherjee's lovely film Anuradha, in which the title character must sacrifice her singing career to join her doctor husband as he sets about contributing to the national cause - another pointer to sangeet as something to be reserved for the “gentler” sex, and only so long as it doesn't interfere with more "important" things]