A Canterbury Tale – a great spiritual film for the incurable nastik

Preamble to an essay: In the Hindi cinema I grew up watching, the definition of “nastik” (atheist) was a hazy one. It never meant authentic, matter-of-fact nonbelief in God: that didn’t even seem to be an option. It was more a case of “bhagwaan se katti hoon” – I’m not on speaking terms with Him because He allowed bad things to happen to my family. Early in the Bachchan-starrer Nastik, little Shankar sulks and tells an idol “Aaj se mera-tera koi vaasta nahin.” But in the film’s climax, when God (or rather the gleaming, jewellery-studded statue that represents Him) shows belated willingness to help by impaling wicked Amjad Khan with a trident, everything is hunky-dory again and it’s back to waking up the neighborhood by clanging those old temple bells. This is a nicely self-serving version of faith, comparable to Pascal’s Wager, which places the “choice” of believing or disbelieving in the context of what one stands to gain or lose.

As you can tell, I don’t usually turn to 1980s Hindi movies for nuanced portrayals of religious faith (or its absence). However, even as a non-believer, there is a small group of “spiritual” films that I find interesting and provocative. These include the work of the Danish director Carl Dreyer (especially Day of Wrath, about a young woman accused of witchcraft) and Ingmar Bergman (who wrestled with the subject of faith throughout his career, notably in Winter Light). Occupying a very special place on the list is the British film A Canterbury Tale, made by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger during World War II. This is among my absolute favourite movies, and one that I’ve wanted to write about for a long time. What follows below is an attempt (note: this is a piece-in-progress, I intend to add to it over time – possibly as part of a larger project).

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Pilgrim’s progress

When I first became interested in the technicalities of moviemaking, one of my favourite extended sequences was the opening 15 minutes of 2001: A Space Odyssey, ending with the famous cut from a bone flung into the air to a spacecraft seen against the backdrop of outer space – a million years(?) in time bridged by the visual linking of two similarly shaped objects. Soon I learnt that this was called a “match cut” - that shot, along with a few other iconic movie scenes, was responsible for my choosing film editing as the subject for a sketchy and derivative post-grad thesis.

I was reminded of 2001 (and of my brief obsession with match cuts) when I watched the opening scene of A Canterbury Tale. The match cut here marks a shift of a “mere” 600 years, from the time of Chaucer’s pilgrims to the Second World War, and the cut is from a pilgrim’s hawk soaring across the sky to a fighter plane occupying the same space in the frame (a parallel link is established by two close-ups of a man watching from the ground, played by the same actor dressed first in 14th century clothes and then in a modern army uniform). The background in both time periods is the same – the English countryside, beautifully shot – but as the contemporary story begins and a tank lumbers into view, a voiceover drolly informs us that “another kind of pilgrim” is now on the move.

The Powell-Pressburger team had made propaganda films to boost wartime morale in the early 1940s, among them 49th Parallel, about a group of Nazis coming ashore in Canada and facing more resistance and courage than they bargained for. A Canterbury Tale does in a sense belong to that band of films – the war was very much on when it was made – but the ideas expressed here are subtler and more open to interpretation than in the earlier movies. The plot centres on - of all things - an attempt to discover the identity of a man who accosts young women late at night and pours glue into their hair. This has seemingly little to do with the big events concerning the world at the time, but by the time we arrive at the superb, graceful climax at the Canterbury cathedral it's evident that there is much going on beneath the surface of this strange story.

Most of the film is set in a small Kent town named Chillingbourne, a 10-minute train journey from Canterbury, and it begins with circumstances bringing three young people together at the station: a drawling American sergeant named Bob Johnson (played by a real-life soldier named John Sweets, who is something of an affable proto-Montgomery Clift), a “Land Girl” named Alison Smith (the spirited Sheila Sim) and a British sergeant Peter Gibbs (Dennis Price, who was so good in another of my favourite British films of the 1940s, Kind Hearts and Coronets). As they leave the station in pitch dark (blackouts being essential in wartime), Alison becomes the latest victim of the Glue Man. (If the reference to “sticky stuff” in her hair reminds you of There’s Something About Mary, congrats – you’re an eclectic movie buff.)

At this early stage the script is emphasising the differences between the Brits and the Americans, two ways of life (represented by the wide-eyed Bob Johnson in one corner and everyone else in the other corner) forced together by circumstance. Chillingbourne was established as a municipal borough in the year 1085, the station master says, pointedly adding for Johnson’s benefit, “407 years before Columbus discovered America”. When Bob takes out an extra-bright flashlight and starts waving it around, much to the horror of those around him, it becomes a display of American brashness, especially incongruous in this quiet little town. Later, a little boy points at him and calls out “This is an American soldier” as if he were identifying a rarely seen species of butterfly.

However, as the film continues, subtler schisms reveal themselves (and meanwhile the drawling Yank is turning into an enormously likable character). “This isn’t Chicago,” someone tells Bob at one point, perhaps naming one of the few American cities he has heard of – to which Bob quietly responds, “I come from Oregon.” Something similar occurs later when Peter, remarking on a tiny local river, says “I’ll admit it isn’t the Mississippi” and the American replies “I’ll admit I haven’t seen the Mississippi.” This is familiar cross-cultural discourse between people who think of other countries in terms of a few easily identifiable characteristics and landmarks, without realising how diverse those places can be. It is also, needless to say, a barrier to deeper understanding of another kind of life.

Slowly we realise that the contrast isn’t so much between two countries but between the city and the countryside and the types of lives they come to represent – and by extension, the difference between traditional and modern values. Thus, the girl from London can’t find common ground with her new employer, the town’s wheelwright, but the American soldier, being the son of a woodsman himself, can talk endlessly with him about different varieties of trees and cutting methods. (“We speak the same language,” he tells the girl, “I know about woods.”)

At other times the dialogue comments on the differences in the level of communal spirit to be found in big and small places. A town spinster has long resigned herself to being “a maid” because the only man who ever proposed to her lived in a big, soulless London house on one of those streets where “different kinds of unhappiness are packed close together”. When Alison asks a local, “Do you know Mr Colpeper?” she is met with an incredulous stare. “You’re from London, aren’t you?” he says. “Well, what if I asked do you know who the Lord Mayor of London is?”

“But I don’t,” she says innocently.

Speaking of Mr Colpeper...
 
Showing them the light

Colpeper, played by Eric Portman, is the film’s other major character – the town’s respected local magistrate (and a bachelor who lives in an incongruously big house with his mother). When we first see him, it’s an imperial shot of him sitting at his desk, two plump lightbulbs on either side of his head – and indeed, the film consistently uses light as a motif and symbol. When a night guard calls out to Colpeper “You’re showing a light, sir”, the context is that the magistrate – working late at night – hasn’t fully drawn one of the curtains in his study; but given what we learn later, the line can be seen as having a double meaning. In another scene, we see his head – in silhouette – against a circular light cast on a screen (he is showing a few short films and giving a talk about cultural heritage) and the result is a halo effect; this could be the Buddha speaking to his disciples about the interconnectedness of all things.

This initially distant figure soon becomes the most visible face of the film's moral complexities; one of the things that made A Canterbury Tale so compelling for me was the tension in my attitudes to Colpeper and what he stands for. He is a traditionalist, deeply attached to a pastoral way of life that is under threat in a modernising world, and this can be an attractive quality – one appreciates that he is close to nature and that he has a genuine respect for history. However, the flip side is that his view of progress is not very far from that of the religious fundamentalist; some of the things he seems to approve of are deeply discomfiting (unless you happen to be the sort of person who thinks dunking chairs should be used to keep “transgressing” women in check – and of course, many such people do exist even in seemingly modern families in our own society).

“I felt as a missionary must feel when the savages come to him,” Colpeper says, speaking of the opportunity he has to lecture a whole regiment of soldiers about the region’s glorious past. These scenes are genial enough, but one can never lose sight of how easily this sort of missionary-aspiration can turn into something unpleasant, especially if he were to be given power over others. (In this context, consider that Portman, who plays Colpeper with grace and dignity, also brought a certain charisma to the Nazi leader in 49th Parallel!) The Glue Man attacks, which are intended to keep young local women from staying out too late with visiting soldiers, are a short step away from a full-blown sexual assault – of the sort that a repressed man overly preoccupied with women’s “virtue” and “honour” is fully capable of. But Colpeper would certainly approve of them.

Yet he is also shown to be a melancholy man, capable of introspecting and acknowledging his mistakes – and he is a figure of sympathy because we know he is fighting a lost cause. At the end of the story, the young people will move on with their lives but this middle-aged man will return to his house and his old mother; the war will soon finish, the young soldiers (his “savages”) will return home, there will be no one left to attend his lectures; the world will change, centres of control will shift, more pragmatic and hard-edged ideologies will take over. Nearly seven decades after the film was made, now that we know that the milieu it depicted barely exists anymore, Colpeper’s nostalgia becomes more poignant and he himself becomes less threatening.

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Colpeper’s nemesis within the narrative is the sardonic, probably agnostic Peter, and the two men have an exchange of words in a late scene set in a train taking the four main characters to Canterbury (where they will each experience a moment of benediction or self-awareness). There is a moment of Pure Cinema here that counts among my favourite movie scenes ever: the train pulls into the brightness of Canterbury station and Peter, sitting by the window, is ethereally lit up by the sunlight outside just as he says the words “I’ll believe that when I see a halo around my head.” This is such a magnificently conceived and executed shot that I feel stupid trying to describe it with bare words. It is also a lovely visual evocation of the idea that these people have entered a mystical realm; a place where “blessings are received, or penance done”, and where the usual rules don’t apply. (The best Powell-Pressburger films, such as A Matter of Life and Death, The Red Shoes and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, similarly combine an apparently realist plot with lovely otherworldly scenes.)

Peter is the least likely of the main characters to believe in miracles, and so it’s a nicely ironic touch that the halo effect is reserved for him - and also that he becomes something of an Angel of Mercy at the end. Of the four personal epiphanies shown in the film’s last 15 minutes, his is arguably the least dramatic - the story of a man who once wanted to be a church organist and ended up playing the organ in a movie theatre instead - but it’s the one I found the most moving. Dennis Price, who has the smallest role of the four main actors, comes into his own in this section, his flint-eyed determination to bring the Glue Man to justice slowly yielding to something more melancholy and introspective as he finds himself drawn into the church by a vagrant hymn sheet (a suggestion of mystical forces at work, or just the wind?) and towards the grand piano he has so long yearned to play. In contrast, the two “blessings” that await Allison and Bob were a little too pat for my liking, but they are treated with understatement.

A Canterbury Tale may seem to be a film that believes strongly in divine blessings and redemption (I don’t know what Powell-Pressburger’s own theological leanings were) but even the irreligious mind should have no trouble appreciating what Canterbury comes to represent for each of these characters. It can be seen as a place where one comes to make peace with oneself, finding solace by recalling the struggles of other people who lived centuries ago – and thus momentarily becoming part of something larger (something that doesn’t have to be supernatural). Seen this way, the towering cathedral isn’t so much a symbol of divinity but a venue for introspection and for the surfacing of finer feelings.

The cathedral is just behind the movie theatre, Colpeper tells Bob early in the film. He says it sarcastically – he’s bemused that the American is interested primarily in watching movies during his off-hours, rather than taking in the local culture. But I’ll plumb for a more personal interpretation of those words: going to a movie hall showing a good print of A Canterbury Tale would constitute a minor pilgrimage for me. In its unshowy way, this film is incredibly insightful about things that should concern any thinking human being: how we live with each other, what values we deem worth holding on to and what should be let go of. There is more depth and complexity in its many graceful passages than in most of those dramatic scenes of our heroes berating or negotiating with their deities in moments of crisis.

On Cyrus Mistry's Chronicle of a Corpse-Bearer

[Did a version of this review for Tehelka]

The narrator-protagonist of Cyrus Mistry’s new novel is born into a life of religious privilege but forsakes it for a much less reputable existence. Though the son of a Parsi head priest, Phiroze Elchidana quickly tires of “holy smoke, salutary fragrances and workday miracles” and develops a rebellious streak. “The older I grew the more absurd any requirement of pomposity or piety seemed.” Like the hero of a similarly plaintive novel, M G Vassanji’s The Assassin’s Song – about a Pir shrine heir carrying the burden of divinity – Phiroze dreams of escaping “the narrow, claustral world of the fire temple”. But escape comes in an unusual form: he ends up plying the trade of a khandhiah or corpse-bearer, meditating on the inscrutability of death and lamenting a lost love.

Properly speaking, Phiroze’s narrative spans eight decades (he relates it as an octogenarian in the mid-1990s), but the meat of the story is set in the years leading up to Independence, when the key events of his life take place. Having already disappointed his family by failing his exams, he falls for Sepideh, the daughter of a khandhiah, in a “lush arboreal kingdom” (the grounds of south Bombay’s Tower of Silence, to which Parsi corpses are carried for their final rendezvous with vultures). He marries her in defiance of his father, loses her a few years later when she is bitten by a snake (in their personal Garden of Eden, no less), and soon afterwards participates with his fellow khandhiahs in a non-cooperation movement that parallels Mahatma Gandhi’s Quit India call.

This is a wide-ranging tale and there are things to admire in it – not least Mistry’s feel for lives that are under-represented in our literature: the Parsi community’s marginalised members, facing social disapprobation, hypocrisy and unfair working conditions even as a modern city, with its “throbbing nervous energy”, comes up around them. There are moving passages such as the one where Phiroze, after yielding to the sexual advances of a loathsome contractor – hitherto presented as a stock villain –reflects that the experience wasn’t as odious as he thought it would be. “I felt, after a very long time, human again; grateful to Buchia that he saw me as more than just some cadaverous, unclean thing whose very breath it was undesirable to commingle with.”

Unfortunately, what at first appears to be a deliberately melancholy tone – suited to this weary man – soon comes to seem like storytelling slackness, as Phiroze rambles on about a variety of subjects without really dwelling on any. Many of the brief asides, such as the one about Hitler’s exclusion of Jewish athletes from the 1936 Olympics (not without relevance to this tale about discrimination), are not organically woven into the narrative but presented as discrete information. There is an unevenness in the writing too. Phiroze (or should one say Mistry) mostly employs the coolly elegant style one associates with much of pre-Rushdie Indian Anglophone literature, but every now and then there is an attempt to be chatty and informal. Thus, a chunk of text is put in parentheses as Phiroze interrupts himself to supply incidental information; a stray sentence begins “Can’t remember if I mentioned this earlier...”.

It might in fact have been better if this were the dominant mode – elliptical, hesitant, vulnerable. As it is, the refinement of the narrative sometimes becomes a barrier to grasping Phiroze’s feelings. (“Seppy, I do miss you very much,” he writes, “If only you were still here with me, I wouldn’t be afraid.”) The effect is of constantly being told about an intense, all-consuming relationship – and the effect it has had on a life – without actually getting to feel its depth. And it doesn’t help that Sepideh herself is practically absent from the narrative – an odd thing in a work described by its publisher as “a moving account of tragic love”. In fairness, Phiroze does attempt to explain this: “Seppy’s gone, and because she’s no more, I must rely solely on recollection to evoke what would surely have overblown into an impersonation larger than life. [...] How quickly it becomes difficult to remember a person who is dead with any sort of clarity.” This ties in with the book’s meditations on the nature of death and the absence of a larger pattern in our lives. And yet, to get a sense of Pheroze’s actions and imperatives, I felt more space needed to be given to the love that defined him.

The Author’s Note reveals that this book began life as a documentary on corpse-bearers, which Mistry had been commissioned to write. This may account for the fact that much of it reads less like a well-paced, internally consistent novel and more like fragmented socio-history, trying to say too much about too many things. In the process, the man at its centre becomes nearly as much of a stranger to us as those anonymous cadavers he carries through his city.

The 2012 Osian’s Cinefan festival

For movie buffs in Delhi, Cinefan is back after a gap of two years (or is it three? The last time I attended it was in 2008). There’s a schedule up on the official website (though it looks a bit disorganised at this point) – apart from the film screenings, there will be some interesting panel discussions as well as night-time music events at blueFROG. I’m moderating a session for the Rockstar team on August 1, and hope to catch a few films as well.

[Some posts about movies I have seen at Cinefan over the years: the Pakistani gore film Zibahkhana; the lovely My Father My Lord; Mizoguchi and the benshi; Greed and Bioscope; Driving to Zigzigland; Scream of the Ants]

Notes on Sudeep Chakravarti and Highway 39

A few days ago I moderated the launch of Sudeep Chakravarti’s Highway 39: Journeys Through a Fractured Land, a narrative about the troubled histories of Nagaland and Manipur. It’s a fine book, part travelogue, part social and political commentary, written as a series of vignettes and encounters that should make it very accessible to the lay-reader (including the person who thinks of “the northeast” as an amorphous blob, not realising what a tangled skein of relationships there is between the states, and within each state). Chakravarti travelled at length, collected a lot of information, and then put most of it together as a personal narrative. Throughout, he wears his emotions on his sleeve: when he meets Vidyarani, an 11-year-old Manipuri girl who was detained by police because they wanted her parents to come out of hiding, he mentions being overcome by emotion because she is the same age as his own daughter (who is leading a happy, secure life back home) – this gives him a more immediate entry point into her story. There are other such epiphanies in the narrative.

One of the things I found interesting about the book was that it accommodates two very different tones: there is the cool, dispassionate voice of a journalist wanting to find the truth and tell it as bluntly as possible, and there is the warm, troubled gaze of someone who cares deeply about his country and who is therefore all the more concerned about the things being done to preserve the “idea of India” at all cost. Reading Highway 39, I kept thinking about a popular meme, often circulated by those who are inclined to be unquestioningly patriotic – the gist of it is: “Throughout its history, India has never invaded another country.” This is, to say the least, a rosy and simplified view of things. In his Introduction, Chakravarti matter-of-factly likens Nehru’s treatment of the Naga territories in the 1950s to American intervention in Vietnam, and goes on to present a picture of a country that is hung up on maintaining an image of unity and benevolence.

Majaw’s guest launches into a harangue about the greatness of India. I can’t help thinking: there must be somewhere fundamentally wrong – or perhaps, fundamentally still raw – with the construct of India, if more than sixty years after independence from Great Britain we still need to try so hard, so institutionally, at patriotism.

(On a lighter note, Chakravarti uses the catchy phrase “the paternalistic embrace of IST” to comment on the bizarreness of there being a single Indian Standard Time despite the vast breadth of the country – perhaps another expression of the need to preserve an Idea, even in the face of common sense.)

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Not doing a proper review here, but an observation or two about Chakravarti (henceforth Sudeep), who is one of the sharpest people I know. He was my first boss in journalism more than a decade ago (this was at The NewspaperToday.com, India Today’s 24-hour news website) and anyone who worked under him at the time will confirm that he was a terrifying figure – the epitome of the steely-eyed editor with insanely high standards, refusing to clear pages even if production deadlines were racing by. The large glass windows of our plush Videocon Tower office would rattle whenever he lost his temper, which was often.

At the time, Sudeep had already been a senior editor at India Today for many years (it doesn’t get more mainstream than that in Indian journalism – for good and for bad) and it seemed likely that he would continue to work in the pressure-cooker environment of daily deadlines for another two decades at least. But then something unusual happened: still only in his early 40s, he stepped away from this life, moved to Goa and decided to concentrate on long-form writing. When I met him around 2004 (by which time all residue of the master-servant relationship had thankfully vanished), he told me he had many ideas for books he wanted to write, and that it was high time he got started. This is the sort of thing journalists/writers say all the time (before heading off for a spree of cocktail launches that are expressly designed to keep them from getting work done), but Sudeep put his typing fingers where his mouth was; Highway 39 is the fifth book he has published since 2005, and the range and quality of his work has been impressive. There have been three novels, starting with the very entertaining Tin Fish, and two works of narrative non-fiction (the other one was Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country).

This career trajectory should be inspiring to anyone who believes (and it’s surprising how many people in India do) that if you want to write books you have to start at a very young age. It’s also a reminder that good narrative journalism is not the exclusive province of energetic youngsters who haven’t yet started families of their own and who find it easy to lead itinerant, unsettled lives. I suspect that the research process for Red Sun and Highway 39 enabled Sudeep to return to his journalistic roots – to push himself out of a comfort zone and get back into the “field”. And these are larger canvases than he ever had as a full-time journalist. At the launch, he expressed gladness that Indian publishers today are more open to doing such books than they were 25 – or even 10 – years ago. And in his Intro, he suggests that he will do more books on the region, especially on Assam. That’s something to look forward to.

On wolves and humans, colony dogs, other beastly tales

[Unorganised notes on some things that have been on my mind in a post-Fox world]

I’ve been reading Steven Kotler’s A Small Furry Hope: Dog Rescue and the Meaning of Life (originally published in the US as A Small Furry Prayer) – this is an intimate, probing work that moves between the author’s experiences running an animal rescue shelter with his wife in Mexico and larger philosophical and scientific questions about animal intelligence, the difference between art and altruism, the human-animal bond and its ecological repercussions. Kotler covers much ground on these subjects and does it compellingly, interspersing them with his own personal growth as a dog-lover.

One very interesting passage is about the history of human cohabitation with dogs – or rather, with the wolves that eventually became dogs. Archaeologists once believed that humans and canids began living together only around 14,000 years ago, but subsequent DNA analysis (tracing the genetic split between wolves and dogs) suggests that the relationship goes back much further – to a time, more than 100,000 years ago, when our small-brained ancestors made their way from Africa to Eurasia and began hunting with wolves; and that this had a big effect on the development of both species.

Tracing the co-evolution of humans and wolves, the Viennese zoologist Wolfgang (yes!) Schleidt has observed: “There is something in the bond among wolves, and between dogs and humans, that goes beyond that between us and our closest primate relatives, the chimpanzees.” Recent research suggests that early man may have “learnt” much of his social behaviour from observing wolves. From Kotler’s book:

Scientists can trace intelligence, self-awareness and long-term planning to our chimpanzee ancestry, but as Schleidt points out in “Apes, Wolves, and the Trek to Humanity”, traits such as patience, loyalty, cooperation and devotion to both one’s immediate family and to a larger social group are not prevalent among primates. “The closest approximation to human morality we can find in nature is that of the gray wolf, Canis lupus,” he writes.

Kotler also quotes Jane Goodall:

Chimpanzees are individualists. They are boisterous and volatile in the wild. They are always on the lookout for opportunities to get the better of each other. They are not pack animals. If you watch wolves within a pack, nuzzling each other, wagging their tails in greeting, licking and protecting the pups, you see all the characteristics we love in dogs, including loyalty. If you watch wild chimps, you see the love between mother and offspring, and the bond between siblings. Other relationships tend to be opportunistic.

Some of this is necessarily speculation, but there are strong indications that some of the “human” qualities we most value today are by-products of our ancient interaction with this other species. Recently much good research has been done on the physiological benefits of being in a relationship with a dog, and as Kotler puts it, “we have evolved to co-habit with dogs. Their presence is part of makes us feel safe in the world. Remove them from our lives and there are bound to be consequences.”

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But of course, urban development is specifically geared to weeding out the natural world from human lives; it’s based on the hubris that we are exalted creatures, capable of leading autonomous lives in our concrete bubbles, never mind the consequences for the ecology and for our own health. Some years ago I did this interview with the author Vandana Singh, where she spoke of the self-absorption of human beings, our inability to “see” other creatures and our cosy certainty that our destinies are unrelated to those of “lesser” beings (except of course when they can be exploited for our benefit). Singh wrote eloquently about all this in her piece “The Creatures we Don’t See: Thoughts on the Animal Other”.

In recent times I’ve often had cause to think about the determination with which some people cut themselves off from other life forms. Nearly each time I took Foxie down for her walk, I had to ignore hostile stares from people in the neighbourhood: what should have been uncomplicatedly happy, quality time often became a dispiriting experience where I was constantly feeling defensive, constantly primed for a confrontation. Frequently, old people (people who may well have led decent, moral lives but who never in all their decades had the enormously uplifting experience of being close to an animal) looked at us darkly and muttered things under their breath; this when Fox was doing nothing more offensive than running around after a tennis ball. There were occasional fights with residents who didn’t want to see dogs in the tiny excuse for a park we have downstairs (this is a cut-off segment of a larger area that was a green park when we moved here in 1987, but which is now exclusively a car park). Even when I assured them that she never used this section of the grounds as a toilet, there were sullen expressions or pronouncements about how they would be forced to “handle this situation in our own way”.

Fox with one of the local boys

Our colony has had its street dogs for years now – their numbers have always been under control and a small but devoted group of animal lovers have taken responsibility for their vaccinations, sterilisations and food; these dogs are docile and a couple of them even spend part of the day in the garden or courtyard of a dog-friendly resident. Their ancestors were dominant inhabitants of this terrain as recently as 40 or 50 years ago – before the land-clearing and DDA construction boom began in Saket in the late 60s. But that scarcely counts for anything now; if you’re sold on the idea that man “has dominion” over all other creatures, you don’t have to be troubled by something as trifling as conscience. And for as long as I can remember, these animals – and their very few protectors – have faced the ire of the vast majority of households in the colony.

When we first moved here, my mother was regularly screamed at by the people in our building because she would put food out for a couple of dogs (who would sometimes sleep at the bottom of the stairway). A divorcee living alone with a 10-year-old son, she was seen as being essentially helpless, and some of the abuse that came her way (from the married women in the building, no less) had threatening undertones that I won’t spell out here – except to say that I was reminded of it recently when I heard that a young girl who feeds street dogs had been menaced with an undisguised sexual threat by the “humans” living near her house.

(My wife, when she was staying alone in a Mayur Vihar flat in 2006-07 before we got married, was subjected to similar hectoring – culminating in an episode where a group of at least 15-20 people were practically at her doorstep, waving their fists at her. Single women are ripe targets for this sort of thing, which makes one wonder if the animals are just a pretext for the playing out of socio-cultural bullying and other dark imperatives.)

It’s worth spelling these things out, because from conversations with friends who are indifferent (not hostile) to animals, I realise that many well-meaning people have no idea just how marginalised and hounded animal-lovers can become in these situations. A few months ago members of our Residents’ Welfare Association attempted to have the local strays taken away and destroyed by coercing children to put tick-marks on a paper with the questions “Are you scared of the strays? Have you been chased or bitten by them? Do you want them removed?” That includes the majority of kids who were not scared (because they had no reason to be). The matter was resolved – for then – when one of our dog-Samaritans got the children together, had a candid conversation with them, asked if there had been any disturbing incidents, and told them exactly what would be done to the dogs if they were taken away. Some of these children – displaying the honesty, compassion and common sense that appears singularly lacking in adult homosapiens – then went and politely asked their parents to back off. It worked for the time being, but we aren’t deluding ourselves that this was anything more than a tiny battle won.

There is a tendency, among those who don’t like animals, to get all bleeding-heart about “the many human beings who are in an equally bad state – shouldn’t we do something to help them first?” There are obvious logical flaws in this argument: is this a zero-sum game? Is human welfare unrelated to that of other life? And are they saying that we need to completely eradicate all human suffering from the planet – as if that is ever possible – before we turn our attention to non-human animals? But beyond that I find this self-serving argument funny because, in my experience, many of the people who use it are just as apathetic to other human beings - the ones they don’t count among family and friends, or at least “equals”. True compassion isn’t a quality that can be neatly rationed out by withholding it from one species (or social class, or religion, or caste – you pick the group). Those RWA goons who jump up and down when they see dogs in their precious manicured parks... I find it no surprise that they yell just as loudly when the colony’s ayahs, drivers and other domestic staff sit down to have lunch together in that park. So much for being more concerned about “human beings”.

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Flipping through the papers yesterday, my eyes fell on an advertisement for 3M Car Care. I initially misunderstood the tone of the ad, but it turned out to be a sardonic comment on “desi ways to keep your car new”, with accompanying illustrations. One of the stated methods was “Don’t allow pets in your car” and the drawing alongside showed what to my eyes looked like a little dog being flung out of a vehicle (a marginally kinder interpretation is that the admonishing hand reaching out from inside the car was warning the dog to stay away).

To put it very mildly, I haven’t been in a cheerful mood the last few weeks, and seeing an image like this was not going to get me feeling better. (Apart from everything else it reminded me of how, the day after we took Foxie to her burial site – in our car – I found myself in the back-seat of the vehicle, trying foolishly to gather bits of fur so I could store it in a little box. Whenever I’m in the car now, I feel a measure of irrational comfort from the knowledge that she so often travelled in it. The car – otherwise an ugly metal heap that I rarely use and have absolutely no emotional attachment to – has become more valuable because of its associations with her.)

A blurry, unintentionally arty camera-phone photo of Fox
in the back-seat, taken through the front mirror

Even so, looking at that drawing, an involuntary snort escaped me. The picture was such an apt representation of the cheerfully callous way in which many people treat their “pets” in this city. In the litany of abandonment stories one keeps hearing, a common theme is that of dogs being thrown out of moving vehicles when their “owners” decide they can no longer take responsibility for them. Such things happen dozens of times every day (and animal-welfare organisations like Friendicoes get flak because they don’t have the resources to deal with this quantum of cruelty) – it’s a transparently obvious manifestation of an attitude that considers non-human animals as disposable property with no feelings of their own - not “special”, like we humans apparently are.

[Some related thoughts in these posts: vindication of the rights of "brutes"; Temple Grandin's Animals in Translation; dogs and dog-owners]

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)