The true-crime chronicles

[From my Forbes Life column: some favourite literary treatments – non-fictional and fictional – of true crime]

“Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it,” the 19th century historian Henry Thomas Buckle observed, and indeed if you cast a quick eye over the daily news it's easy to see the many links between a societal framework and the crimes that occur in it. Thus, a series of child-murders takes place in a suburb of Delhi, and shortly afterwards it is revealed that one reason the killers got away for as long as they did was the mutual antipathy between the poor people of the area (whose children were mainly the victims) and the local police; the slum-dwellers, living on disputed land, were wary about going to the authorities to register missing-person reports, and when they did they weren't taken seriously, or were hounded.

Such fissures and barriers to communication exist in any society, and many fine books about real-life crime have dwelt on them. Among my favourites is Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, a reconstruction of a famous 1860 killing in an English country house. A three-year-old boy – the youngest son of the large Kent family – was found murdered, his little body stuffed into an outdoor “privy” (toilet); the killer was almost certainly one of the 12 people staying in Road Hill House - three servants and nine family members, including a woman who had once belonged to the servant class but had, controversially, become the second wife of the patriarch.

Fascinating though the case is in itself (especially for anyone who enjoys a good locked-room mystery), the power of Summerscale’s book lies in its detailing of a society and the subtle changes it was undergoing. On the one hand, the milieu was a conservative one: the violation of a “respectable” family’s privacy (necessitated by the investigation conducted by the first generation of Scotland Yard detectives) was seen as a crime in its own right; a woman’s discarded night-shift, which may have been important evidence, remained unmentioned by the police because they believed the blood stains on it were menstrual and they didn’t want to have to deal with the garment. But at the same time this was a world that enjoyed peeping into others’ private lives. Little wonder that tabloid journalism was in its infancy, holding up a mirror to the hidden prurience of this society.

A century after the Road Hill murder, that prurience was echoed in a different setting. Gyan Prakash’s marvellous book Mumbai Fables includes (among other stories from Bombay’s past) an account of the 1959 Nanavati case, when a cuckolded husband shot his wife’s lover dead. The story, as related by Prakash in his chapter “The Tabloid and the City”, began on an almost genteel note – Commander Nanavati walks into the office of the Deputy Commissioner, confesses to the murder and is offered a cup of tea – but soon it acquired a more unsavoury tinge. Almost single-handedly responsible for turning the case into a long-running soap opera was the tabloid Blitz, helmed by the dashing Russi Karanjia. “The Nanavati case’s life as a media event is a quintessentially modern story of the entanglement of the city, mass culture and law in a single circuit,” observes Prakash.

A striking detail in his account involves the voyeuristic participation of “ordinary” people: the city’s teenagers, for instance, put new words to the tune of a popular song – “You’re not going to hang, Nanavati/You don’t have to cry.” Similar ghoulishness has pervaded other cases of high-profile crime. After the unmasking of the killer/grave-robber Ed Gein in 1957, local kids chanted variations on Christmas carols (“Deck the halls/with limbs of Molly”). Stephen Rebello’s Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho is about the classic film (loosely based on Gein’s crimes) but it includes a very creepy account of the arrest of the middle-aged recluse whose gruesome escapades shocked a cosy Wisconsin community - and an equally disturbing insight into the underpinnings of the American dairyland. “The Gein farmhouse,” writes Rebello, referring to a house of horrors filled with disembowelled human cadavers, “offered testimony not only to man’s fathomless capacity for the barbaric, but also to the ability of an entire community to deny its existence.” Anyone acquainted with Gein had more than enough evidence that the man was not right in the head – yet they had chosen to disregard the obvious, even in light of the many mysterious disappearances in the neighbourhood.

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Nearly 50 years after the Nanavati incident, another crime of passion involving three people caught Mumbai’s imagination. But it was a less refined age, a time of much more extensive media coverage, and this was a post-liberalisation society made up of people straining for more glamorous lives. The protagonists were a young TV executive named Neeraj Grover, a wannabe actress, Maria Susairaj, and her naval-officer boyfriend Emile Jerome. In Meenal Baghel’s Death in Mumbai, the intersecting stories of these three people becomes a commentary on modern India and its multiple divides: between towns and cities, celebrities and celebrity-aspirants. It also extends beyond the immediate details of the case and covers such disparate material as film director Ram Gopal Varma’s appetite for kinkiness and Ekta Kapoor’s teenage fascination for American soap operas, which eventually spawned a giant dream industry.

“This shop, it was his. Isn’t this world enough?” Such is the lament of a murder victim’s father trying to understand why his son needed more than the life he had in Kanpur. Death in Mumbai is a cautionary tale about what might easily happen to people for whom the world is never enough, and yet it passes no facile judgements. It also refuses to get unduly sensationalistic about topics that seem to demand sensationalism. And so, it’s interesting that at a literature festival in Mumbai, Baghel reflected on Janet Malcolm’s remark about the “moral indefensibility” of journalism and recalled a time when she found herself chasing a distressed old man down a spiral staircase in a courthouse, then stopping to ask herself “WHAT am I doing?”

Malcolm’s book The Journalist and the Murderer had sharply raised issues of ethics in reportage, using the work of the non-fiction writer Joe McGinniss as a focal point. While researching the 1970 killing of a pregnant woman and her two children, McGinniss spent time with murder accused Jeff MacDonald, husband and father to the victims; he gained MacDonald’s confidence, convinced him that he believed in his innocence, but eventually published a book – Fatal Vision – portraying him as a psychopath who was well capable of the murders.

One of the most celebrated of all true-crime books – Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood – has a comparable back-story. As a high-profile member of New York’s literary circles in the late 1950s, Capote became deeply interested in the Kansas murder of the Clutter family, and ended up bonding with one of the arrested killers, Perry Smith. Over a series of meetings Truman won Smith’s trust, even helping him find lawyers to appeal his case. But later, he worried that the murderers might not get the death penalty – and that this would prevent his book from getting the dramatic ending it needed.

This makes In Cold Blood a work of deeper violence than is contained in its subject matter; beneath its narrative is a story about a man sacrificing his humanity at the altar of his art. And yet – this is a function of Capote’s immense talent – it is an empathetic, moving book, as in the passage where Mr Clutter genially gives a group of people permission to hunt pheasant on his land. “I’m not as poor as I look. Go ahead, get all you can,” he said. Then, touching the brim of his hat, he headed for home and the day’s work, unaware that it would be his last. And the final scene, where a detective meets one of the victim’s friends near the four graves, is as elegantly novelistic an ending as you can imagine.

Also novelistic – if not quite as skilfully constructed – is S Hussain Zaidi’s Mafia Queens of Mumbai (co-written with Jane Borges). Zaidi is best known for his Black Friday, a meticulous reportage-oriented work about the planning, execution and aftermath of the 1993 terror attacks on Mumbai, but even more engrossing from the human-interest perspective is this book about the forgotten women of Mumbai’s underworld. It weaves together 13 stories, beginning with a profile of the iconic Jenabai Daruwalli, the “wily old woman of Dongri”, who was like a sister to Haji Mastan and a surrogate mother to Dawood Ibrahim. Jenabai’s role in effecting a compromise between “Mumbai’s warring gangsters” in Mastan’s bungalow is a key passage here, and the narrative includes minor stylistic flourishes, alternating from a reporter’s detached perspective to first-person accounts by such figures as Abu Salem’s moll Monica Bedi.

In such works of non-fiction, we see how the line between journalism and dramatic embellishment can get blurred. But true crime has also been given insightful fictional treatment, as in Julian Barnes’s Arthur and George – the story of two men whose paths briefly crossed in a case that made headlines in early 20th century Britain. George Edalji was convicted (on flimsy evidence) of mutilating farm animals and spent three years in prison; on his release he appealed to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, who proceeded to turn detective himself and helped clear Edalji’s name. In Barnes’s hands, this story becomes a thoughtful examination of the ambiguities that govern human actions, the interior lives of two very different men and the conflicts between faith and knowledge. What can one ever truly know? – this is a question that rears its head repeatedly in this narrative; Barnes contrasts the facile workings of detective fiction with the many uncertainties of the real world. (“Holmes was never obliged to stand in the witness box and have his suppositions and intuitions and immaculate theories ground to fine dust...”)

In True History of the Kelly Gang, that master of voices Peter Carey creates a thoroughly believable portrait of a person, the times he lives in, the world he comes from, the rituals and inner workings of that world. In the process, he takes a figure from misty legend – the 19th century Australian outlaw Ned Kelly – and brings him alive in a scarily immediate way. “God willing I shall live to see you read these words to witness your astonishment and see your dark eyes widen and your jaw drop when you finally comprehend the injustice we Irish suffered in this present age,” writes Carey’s Kelly, addressing his daughter. This is a story about a social setting that becomes a springboard for crime, about modernity cautiously brushing against the law of the jungle, and apathetic authority figures who are unwilling to provide even-handed justice. But its real achievement is the breathless, unpunctuated, colloquial style used to suggest how the barely literate Kelly might have told his story.

Something comparable is achieved by Robert Graves in I, Claudius, about crimes that are somewhat different from those in the books mentioned above – crimes that were, in fact, committed within the aegis of authority. Graves takes a magnifying glass to the violent excesses and decadence of the Roman Empire – the homicidal megalomania, the almost casual poisonings and betrayals – and provides, among many other brilliant touches, a riveting portrait of the monstrous Caligula, aspirer to God-status. Like Mario Puzo did in The Godfather, this book places us right in the midst of a violent family’s life, making it intimate and easy to relate to, even when we disapprove of the characters’ actions.

But my favourite fictionalised take on true crime is the sprawling graphic novel From Hell, written by that giant of the form, Alan Moore, and masterfully drawn in sooty black-and-white by Eddie Campbell. From Hell is nothing less than an examination of Victorian society through the prism of the notorious Jack the Ripper murders, which held London in thrall through the second half of 1888 (and created urban legends for decades more). But it is also a commentary on the complex history of London, the vast class divide and the exploitation of women. Moore’s knack for linking events through time and space allow him to throw in fascinating, multilayered asides involving Joseph Merrick the Elephant Man, Queen Victoria, Oscar Wilde and even Adolf Hitler (who was conceived around the time that the Ripper killings began, and who would become the poster boy for a century of very different horrors that lay ahead). 

"The Ripper murders, happening when and where they did, were almost like an apocalyptic summary of that age,” Moore said once. In his view of things, the murders were also a dark, mystical foreshadowing of the 20th century – an age that was expected to be more civilised but in which incomprehensible crimes would continue to be committed, and a variety of books - introspective, gratuitous, mournful, sensationalistic - would continue to be written about them.

[An earlier Forbes Life column about popular-science books is here]

'See the tree, how big it's grown...'

This young tree, with cars supplicating in front of it at most times, is growing by a natural mound in the park just outside my mother’s flat. It was planted sometime last year, and for several months the park maali had it covered with a cylindrical wire mesh to keep animals from destroying the leaves while they were still within reach. During that time the plant was quite inconspicuous, it was easy to pass it without really registering its presence – which is what Foxie and I routinely did on our daily walks. So we were both taken aback when we saw it the first day after the mesh was removed and the tree stood revealed as a strapping, six-foot-tall thing with a personality of its own, a distinct new presence in the terrain we knew so well.

In her last two years, after her chronic medical problems began, Fox was ravenous all day long and the only thing she was interested in doing when we went down was keeping her nose to the ground, searching greedily for scraps of bread or roti or other food. (Our walks had become a little stressful by this point: I had to monitor her every move closely, pull her away when she headed for things she wasn’t supposed to gulp down, and I badly missed the old days when we spent all our downstairs time playing ball.) But this was one of those very rare times where she showed real interest – for more than a few seconds – in something that wasn’t self-evidently connected to food. She circled the tree lightly, first in one direction and then, without breaking step, in the other. She got up on her weak hind legs for a closer look. She opened and closed her mouth repeatedly in that goldfish-like way that always seemed to us like she was muttering to herself. And she took the end of her leash in her mouth like she often did when she was nervous or shy around something or someone new. Finally, after a few soft growls she decided the tree could be permitted to stay, and shifted her attention elsewhere.

Just two or three weeks after this, she was gone herself.

At the Sai Ashram, where she is buried, we have planted a peepal sapling just behind the gravestone: it seemed to be doing well when I last visited a few days ago, though it isn’t tall enough yet for the protective mesh to be removed. I only see that plant every couple of weeks or so, but I see the one outside my mother’s house every day. It’s strange to think that in another year or two it will be a full-grown tree with a thick trunk and a life of several decades ahead of it. And it may one day be comforting - in a vague, pointlessly sentimental sort of way - to know that its long life intersected briefly with my Foxishka’s very short one.

P.S. here are two pictures from the pre-tree days. The little bench you can see in these photos – at the top of the 1st one and near the centre of the 2nd one – is where the tree now grows.

Aural storytelling: Resul Pookutty on film sound

[Did a version of this for Business Standard]

It is an oft-repeated dictum that the technical elements of filmmaking should be placed at the service of the narrative and must not draw attention to themselves. “If someone comes out of a film saying ‘Art design brilliant thi’ then it means we have failed,” the production designer Vandana Kataria told me recently, and I have heard similar views in many conversations with cinematographers, costume heads and other film technicians.

I get the broad point – that these things should work on a sub-conscious plane; they mustn’t stand out and distract the first-time viewer – but I also think a one-size-fits-all proclamation on this subject is naive. Much hinges on the type of film one is talking about (is it advisable or even possible to watch a late-1960s Godard movie, or a Peter Greenaway movie, in such a way that you’re completely submerged in the narrative?), as well as the type of viewer (a professional critic wouldn’t be doing his job if he didn’t consciously register some of a movie’s inner workings).

Also, the idea that technical crew should be invisible worker ants often becomes a pretext to neglect discussion of certain elements of movie-making. In a celebrity-obsessed culture in any case, most “casual” viewers discuss a film primarily in terms of its actors, or perhaps the music; this is unavoidable. But there is always a small stratum of engaged movie-buffs – keen to examine the filmmaking process at close range without necessarily getting involved with it professionally – who can benefit from accessible film literature about relatively esoteric subjects.

It’s pleasing then to come across Sounding Off, a memoir by the sound designer, sound editor and mixer Resul Pookutty (written in collaboration with Baiju Natarajan in Malayalam, and translated into English by K K Muralidharan). Pookutty is only in his early 40s and hopefully has most of his career ahead of him, but it isn’t hard to guess why this book has been brought out by a big-name publisher at this time: to cash in on the publicity from his Oscar win for Slumdog Millionnaire (indeed the gold statuette features prominently on the front and back covers). But it’s possible to ignore that little detail and focus on the content because this is an engrossing mix of reminiscence and information, and a useful primer to the thought that a good sound man must put into his work.

When Pookutty discusses the relationship between sound and imagery, and how the two things work in unison to create a particular effect, he almost comes across as an amateur psychologist; unsurprising, because his job entails understanding how the human mind works, how it makes connections and fills in gaps for us while we are watching a movie.

“The sense of reality that sound creates in cinema is a manufactured one,” he notes:

The visual provides the clue for the sound – the sound you hear is based on what’s happening on the screen. The visual hitches you to a certain sense of reality, and once you are hitched to that film reality the sound man can take you through many avenues. Then the possibilities become huge. This is the opportunity to lead the audience to another level or to another image track. People like Tarkovsky are known to be masters at it.

Thus, sounds can be triggers for images, but they can also be driven by the visuals. “You can mimic the sound of rain by making sugar fall on a piece of plain paper; but if you hear just the record of such a sound, it might not sound like rain. Only along with the visual footage of the rain can you feel that it’s raining.” Reading this, I thought about intensely atmospheric movie sequences set on rainy nights (for some reason The Road to Perdition came to mind first) and how convincingly they create a required mood, allowing the viewer to stay fully immersed in the world of the story. The idea that the pattering sound one hears in the darkness of the hall might be grains of sugar hitting paper casts a new light on conventional notions of cinematic “realism”, and on how we subconsciously interact with the movies we see.

Pookutty also makes special note of other film artistes who are especially attuned to the nuances of sound, such as Amitabh Bachchan, who once asked for a “reverb” effect in a dubbing studio because he wanted the setting to approximate the acoustics of the hall where the scene was shot; or Mani Kaul, who he reckons may have been the only Indian director who was informed enough to demand the use of a particular type of mike for a particular shot.

Each company’s mikes have a different timbre to the sound they capture – they differ in their frequency responses [...] it’s your call as to whether Sennheiser or Neumann is to be used in a romantic scene – your decision would be based both on the nature of the sound in the scene as well as on the quality of the actor’s voice.

Some of these passages may seem highly specialised, but the book’s chief mode is personal and friendly; there are many insights into the sort of person Pookutty is and the combination of qualities that led him to his field. His affectionate description of his time at the FTII conveys a sense of a well-rounded film education as well as a sense of a man from small-town Kerala discovering a wider world and even facing the shattering possibility (voiced by the visiting Polish director Krzysztof Zanussi) that there are more important things in life than cinema. As he relates the effect that a childhood memory of a rotating fan – during an intense illness – had on his sound career, or discusses the Malayali way of eating in terms of sound effects, “from guttural grunts to violent gargling”, one sees how he has brought his own experiences into his work.

I was particularly struck by an early chapter – not, on the face of it, directly relevant to Pookutty’s career – where he describes, with much affection, his close relationship with and empathy towards animals. Some of his most vivid childhood memories, he tells us, are the sound of cows’ hooves “scratching the floor on a quiet night; the sound of them getting up; the distinctive rhythm of their breathing”. “I have pondered over animals a great deal,” he unselfconsciously says, before embarking on a series of musings about donkeys (“a docile creature that has seen the world”), pigs and goats.

It’s a short section, and apart from an early reference to being cued in to the sounds made by animals and what they might mean (“sometimes the goats suddenly cried together and then would fall into an equally sudden silence. That meant one of them was gone”), there is no tangible connection between this aspect of his life and his profession. But when he attributes “humility, soulfulness and a sense of depth” to donkeys and later discusses the spiritual qualities of Robert Bresson’s cinema, it puts me in mind of the magnificent use of sound in Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar, where (among other things) we respond to a donkey’s bray in a dozen different ways depending on what is happening in a given scene. Pookutty doesn’t mention this film specifically, but I’m sure it had an effect on him. In any case, by revealing things about himself (his personal life, his ideologies, inspirations and misgivings, his eye and ear for the natural world), he organically reveals much about his attitude to his craft too, and how the work he does subtly affects the viewing experience for millions of people. This makes his memoir a more useful window into his subject than a jargon-heavy textbook could be.

Tinkle tinkle little store

[A nostalgia piece I did for Kindle magazine's issue on book-stores and book spaces]

The first bookstore in my life – and the only one I can claim to feel really nostalgic about – had two wheels and a nasal voice that called out “Maga-zine! Maga-zine!” late in the evening. This was a thin man on a bicycle, bearing an improbably large selection of glossies tucked into a small space behind his seat. He would come to our house in south Delhi’s Panchshila Park each day – my mother being a compulsive renter of movie magazines – and it was through him that I discovered Amar Chitra Katha’s Tinkle comics. I was five years old; I know this because the oldest of the comics in my carefully maintained stack is dated July 1982.

Tinkle was a fortnightly then, and one could expect the latest issue to arrive anytime between 12 and 15 days after the previous one. I suspect my earliest understanding of the passage of time developed during those days. On most evenings I wasn’t too interested in the kitaab-wallah uncle’s comings and goings, but a little calendar in my head told me when nine or ten days had elapsed since the last Tinkle, and then the next few evenings were filled with anticipation. The sound of the bicycle bell, the dash to the door, the disappointment when I realised that today wasn’t the day, or the thrill when I saw the cover of a fresh issue for the first time (and quickly flipped through it to check if the final story was Kaalia the Crow, which I loved, or Shikari Shambhu, which I only mildly liked) – these things became a part of the daily routine. He sometimes played teasing games, claiming with a sad face that the latest issue was going to be delayed and then unveiling it just as I had turned away balefully.

It may seem like pushing things to designate this slender herald a “bookstore”, but I should stress that we bought every one of those Tinkles. I was just starting to learn that the books one found interesting were to be kept and hoarded and revisited and fussed over, not merely read once and returned (like the magazines that my mother exchanged every day). It’s a lesson I have never unlearnt; as I write this, a number of bookshelves, makeshift bookshelves, tables, racks, bed-boxes and bed surfaces in my house are creaking in confirmation.

It didn’t take me long to learn that Bicycle Uncle was the mobile arm of a tiny shop – more like a stall – in the nearby Malviya Nagar market. Today this market occupies a low-rung position in a south Delhi filled with mall complexes, but even back then it was mainly a muddy, winding maze of vegetable stalls, shops selling groceries and trinkets, artificial jewellery and countless packets of bindis – most of this of very little interest to the child that I was. However, at some point during our walk through the back-lanes, we turned a corner and there the book stall was with its egalitarian display: Amar Chitra Kathas sharing space with Archie comics and digests, Jataka tales in one corner, Jughead Jones in the other. I have no idea now what the stall was called, if it was called anything (quite possibly it was only informally referred to by the owner’s name) or if it still exists. But I recall many happy times spent there on cold winter evenings and on rainy days when one had to wade through slush to reach it.

The Malviya Nagar byways wouldn’t have done for the “proper” books, though – the sophisticated publications by Enid Blyton and suchlike. For these, one had to travel what seemed to my child-self a very long distance – a 20-minute drive to South Extension, the home of Teksons.

It feels strange now to think of how central Teksons was to my early life: the shop is still around, in the same location, but I haven’t been to it in years, or felt the slightest desire to do so. In the same way that one doesn’t get to choose one’s relatives or one’s earliest nursery-level friends, it became the bookstore of my childhood by default, only because my family so often went to South Extension. As a young adult my preferred haunt would be the Midlands in Aurobindo Market, mainly for its round-the-year, unadvertised 20 percent discount on all IBH prices and its efficient display. And there would be many other fortuitous encounters: locating a much-sought-after graphic novel in London’s Foyles, for example, and picking it up despite its price and weight only because I knew there was no hope of getting it in India. Or a clearing-up sale in a shabby Connaught Place store, where I chanced upon a rare film book that is still one of my most prized possessions: Danny Peary’s Cult Movies, a collection of warm and informed essays that had a huge influence on me as a writer and movie-watcher (and which, incidentally, is not available anywhere today, even online).

But it was in Teksons that I formed most of my early reading habits, moving over the years from Blytons to Agatha Christies, and thence to Maughams, Wodehouses and Hemingways. Each visit was an encounter with new possibilities and changing tastes: becoming aware of a world outside that of the Famous Five’s macaroon-and-scone picnics; working out what type of book to turn to next; reading descriptions on back jackets, flipping pages to see if a stray passage of text struck a chord or revealed an interesting conversation or idea. It was here that I bought my first Christie, Murder in Retrospect, which would chill the summer afternoons I spent in Ludhiana during a family trip. Here it was that I felt indescribably proud lugging a copy of Maugham’s Of Human Bondage to the cashier’s counter: it was such a bulky book with such a grown-up title, it was so much more respectable to be seen buying something like this rather than another in the Hardy Boys Case Files series (which I may also have smuggled across to the counter). It was at Teksons too that I bought my first proper dictionary, a pleasingly heavy Oxford publication that made me feel much empowered as a reader. (Today, in the Internet age, physical dictionaries seem laughably unnecessary – but that only makes the memory even more precious.)

All this said, I am not sentimental about book-stores as physical spaces. Certainly, I don’t fetishize them like some of my friends do. This might seem odd coming from someone who has been an eager reader since a young age, worked professionally on the literary beat for years, never used an electronic-reader to date, and been a late convert to online buying (my first Flipkart purchase was as recently as early 2011). But perhaps it has to do with the fact that for much of the past decade my job has entailed receiving unmanageable quantities of books, more than 90 percent of which I will never read. I can understand the attraction a good bookstore holds for a keen reader who doesn’t work professionally with books – and who perhaps only gets to indulge the reading habit for 20 minutes at the end of a tiring day – but take it from me: when one’s own room starts looking like a particularly messy publisher’s warehouse, some of the romanticism associated with entering a store and smelling thousands of new books (or thousands of old books in a second-hand store) wears away.

What doesn’t wear away is the memory of early discovery – of the browsing rituals that become a gateway to new knowledge about the world and about oneself. Or simply hearing the sound of a bicycle bell tinkling and knowing that 30 pages of fresh stories await a reader's immersion.

Swearing in Swahili, living in Canada, rediscovering India... a conversation with M G Vassanji

[Did a shorter version of this profile-cum-interview - of a writer whom I hold in high regard - for the Hindu Literary Review]

More than halfway through M G Vassanji’s new novel The Magic of Saida, the protagonist Kamal Punja is horribly unwell in a small hotel in Kilwa, Tanzania. Having lived in Canada for 35 years and unused to the more pliable standards of hygiene in the country he is visiting – the country of his birth and childhood – Kamal has been fortifying himself with vaccinations, insect repellents and prophylactics. However, a single, unsterilised glass of water has done for him and now he is gripped by fever, ailments of the stomach and nervous system. “Africa invaded him, reclaimed him once again,” the narrator – a publisher named Martin, who has just made Kamal’s acquaintance – tells us.

By now, though, the reader knows that Kamal has been invaded and reclaimed in more than one sense. A middle-aged doctor with a family and a successful practice in Edmonton, he has been drawn back to Africa by the memory of a girl named Saida, whom he knew and loved decades earlier. Arriving in Kilwa, it is almost as if the intervening years of his life fall away and he is pulled into time’s vortex: into his own personal history as the son of an Indian father (who vanished when Kamal was a child) and a Swahili mother, and the complex history of Tanzania, populated by an assortment of local and immigrant communities. The result is an intricate, moving – though also meandering – narrative, as Kamal’s recollections run alongside stories about his great-grandfather Punja who had journeyed to Africa from Gujarat in the 19th century, and an old poet named Mzee Omari who may in a moment of weakness have betrayed his people to the Germans who invaded East Africa in the 1880s.

These movements across space and time should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Vassanji’s earlier books. To read the work of this graceful, perceptive writer is to be constantly reminded of the famous last line of The Great Gatsby: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne ceaselessly back into the past.” In the last two decades Vassanji has written novels set in Tanzania, Kenya, Canada and India and featuring characters with a range of life experiences, backgrounds and personal compulsions; but in some way or the other all his books deal with how the past operates upon the present.

Frequently this theme manifests itself in an examination of how childhood experiences can define, and sometimes petrify, a life. In The Magic of Saida, Kamal feels like his childhood “had been some conjuror’s creation, with the ability to change shape, parts of it to disappear like smoke” – and yet, it’s notable that the childhood sections here (as in other Vassanji novels such as The In-Between World of Vikram Lall and The Assassin’s Song) have more clarity, more fearful vividness, than the adult sections do. A boy’s sense of wonder and mystery are adeptly expressed in such passages as the one where little Kamal thinks he is being harassed by the old poet’s invisible djinn. (“Did Mzee Omari keep the dreadful Idris in a bottle?” he wonders, “Did he come out of it like a blue puff of wind like in the storybook?”) So is trauma: one gets a tangible sense of how devastated he is when his mother sends him to Dar es Salaam to live with his father’s relatives (“But I’m an African” he protests, “I don’t speak Indian, I don’t eat Indian! They eat daal and they smell!”) and by the consequent sundering of his relationship with Saida.

In my own favourite Vassanji book, the “in-between” Vikram Lall – an Indian who grows up in a Kenya torn by anti-colonial insurgency – is similarly haunted by memories of his childhood friend Annie, a British girl who was murdered by Mau Mau rebels. Through Vikram’s reminiscences we come to understand how his character has been shaped by that distant tragedy (the book’s epigraph is T S Eliot’s line “Who is the third who walks always beside you?”) but we also see how his becoming a political power-broker later in life affects – even if in a small way – his country’s destiny. Time and again, Vassanji shows how cultural and national conflicts knead individual lives, and how the subsequent actions of those individuals in turn shape larger histories.

The circularity of events is an equally important motif of his work – history as tragic farce, destined to coil back on itself no matter how much you try to stop it. Those who don’t learn from the past are doomed to repeat it, goes the familiar aphorism, but one of the strengths of Vassanji’s writing is how he demonstrates – not in a gratuitously cynical way but through insightful stories about specific individuals – that even sensitive, self-aware people can become trapped in a web of historical wrongs. Without giving too much away, a climactic revelation in The Magic of Saida implicates Kamal in exactly the sort of moral inaction that had adversely shaped his own life.

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“In my work, the present is always interacting with the past,” Vassanji agrees when we meet at the India International Centre, Delhi. A beat of silence and then a little chuckle: “But maybe that’s the physicist in me!” (He specialised in nuclear physics at the University of Pennsylvania before embarking on a career as an editor and writer.) “There is a feeling of entrapment by history – one little decision and a whole wave comes crashing down on you. This is especially true of Africa, but even in India one thinks of all those who are trapped by the violent memories of Partition.” He is so soft-spoken, I am briefly concerned my recorder will be ineffective. Yet, as I soon realise, the gentle voice has a steady firmness.

Descended from the Khoja community of Gujarat, M G Vassanji grew up in Kenya and Tanzania, and went to the US to study at age 20. His first novel The Gunny Sack (set in the East Africa of his childhood, with a protagonist of Indian ethnicity, Salim Juma, delving into his ancestral past) was published in 1989; there have been nine more books, including two short-story collections. Two novels – No New Land and Amriika – are set largely in Canada or the US, but Africa has been the subject of much of his best writing, including The Book of Secrets and The In-Between World of Vikram Lall, both of which won the prestigious Giller Prize. Clearly, that continent exercises a powerful hold over his imagination even though he hasn’t lived there since 1970.

“It’s hard to explain what Africa means to me,” he says. “Tanzania was a more or less tolerant society and there were so many people from Indian-origin communities; we had our identity, but at the same time we grew up with their language.” Though his characters tend to have very complicated childhoods, he speaks fondly of his own youth, of the revolutionary movements in Africa in the 60s and the politics of equality and non-alignment – a heady, optimistic time for an impressionable boy.

This perspective – of an insider, fully steeped in a culture – differentiates his work from that of the most famous Indian-origin author to have written about Africa, V S Naipaul. As Vassanji himself puts it, Naipaul in Africa is an observer. “He visits it and writes about ‘them’, which is fine – it’s an ancient tradition in travel writing. But I cannot write like that about my part of Africa, or even about India, because I identify directly with them.” Even today, if he visits Tanzania and someone calls him a foreigner, he points to his skin and asks: do I look white to you? “Being able to do that confidently, despite having been away for decades, is a big thing. The language has a certain lilt to it, which allows you to banter” – perhaps I’m imagining it, but Vassanji’s voice takes on a new cadence here; he seems to croon rather than speak these words – “and when you can talk like that you know you belong. I still tend to swear in Swahili!”

There is a passage in The Gunny Sack about the many shades of dark skin. “Yes, he was dark. Not the dark of charcoal, the mweusi of the African from the interior, the Hehe, the Ngoni, the Haya; or the light dark mweupe of the Chagga; or the red-dark of the half-naked Masai, his arse showing firm and proud as he walked; but the dark of the Indian, the persistent brown-dark of sedimented coffee that refuses to whiten.” Such depth of knowledge necessarily comes with being an insider, but Vassanji knows well that the complexities of places like Africa and India begin to get lost as you move further away from them. Those who view them from a distance see amorphous places with an all-embracing identity.

Which makes it notable that despite being based in North America throughout his writing life, he has found a warm and receptive readership for his work. “Canada has given me a generous environment to grow as a writer,” he says, “it has a mature and tolerant view of itself, it recognises that people come from different places and bring with them traditions and cultures, languages and idioms.” While he is comfortable being identified as a Canadian national, it’s understood that he has roots and tentacles elsewhere. “Cutting them off would be like cutting off an arm, or your soul.” Of course, he admits with some amusement, this attitude might get him into trouble with “cultural nationalists”, who expect him to plant a flag in one or another place. A Canadian who is also an African as well as an Indian? Surely that’s as unacceptable as being both Hindu and Muslim.

But Vassanji has a case for adopting that improbable duality too: in his travelogue-history A Place Within: Rediscovering India, he describes a founding legend of his ancestors, the Khojas, wherein a Muslim holy man came to a village in western Gujarat and joined Krishna devotees in the traditional garba dance. As a child, Vassanji was enthralled by ginans – verses and songs from the Sufi tradition – and learnt much about music and mythology from them. Though he is agnostic, there are strong elements of mysticism in his work: the story of the poet Omari’s petulant djinn in The Magic of Saida, for instance, or an episode where a magician plays detective, handing out “truth-telling” medicines to people. “Mysticism is basically the meaning of life,” he says, “it’s like theoretical physics, it asks the same questions about life and death, and I’m empathetic to it; when I see a woman at a temple, I see my mother.”

His syncretic upbringing – built on Hindu and Islamic streams of thought – must have made it especially disturbing when he visited the land of his ancestors for what was effectively the first time in 1993, and found he had landed right in the midst of the post-Babri Masjid communal riots. “Yes, that was bothersome,” he says with typical understatement, “I didn’t see why I had to deal with this scar of the Partition, which was never my experience – when my grandparents left India, there was no Partition.” It’s a side of India that he hasn’t been able to accept. “These divisions get forced upon you. If a Gujarati who practices Hinduism thinks he’s more Indian than me, I say no, the Vedas and Upanishads belong equally to me. We come from the same place.”

A Place Within is one of his two India books – the other is the novel The Assassin’s Song, about a Gujarati man turning his back on his legacy as the keeper of a Sufi shrine and moving to the US. Both helped him come to terms with an identity that had lain dormant for decades. “The discovery of India completely altered me – it awoke things that I thought would be numb after a couple of generations.”

“Rebirth” might be an apt word. Right from the moving first chapter where – partly due to an Indian Airlines strike – he travels from Delhi to Bhubaneshwar by the Puri Express, the writing in A Place Within has a distinct quality: it’s as if the middle-aged Vassanji is viewing India through the eyes of a fascinated child, on a train for the first time, but when he gets around to recording his impressions the wise adult in him – mindful of his own susceptibility to simplifications – takes over, supplying a measured perspective on events and experiences, constantly checking himself when he might be about to make a sweeping statement. And yet, the wide-eyed sense of wonder is never lost: “There is so much of India, I tell myself. How does one get to it? I would like to reach out and touch it, it feels so close and familiar, yet there seems a glass cage around me.” This searching tentativeness makes A Place Within one of the most singular India books of recent years, very different in timbre from confident narratives about this or that aspect of the country.

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Though the discovery of India is an ongoing project for him (A Place Within ends elliptically, with the line “But for now I must stop here, conclude this token of pilgrimage”), there is no lack of other things that he can engage with and write about; he is currently working on a similar travel book about Tanzania. “The texture of that country is often lost in snapshot reportage and I want to depict it as a real, human place – not an AIDS, war and hunger place.” And of course, he will be a part of the narrative.

Writer and physicist; Kenyan, Tanzanian and Gujarati; Indian, African and Canadian; Hindu and Muslim; agnostic and interested in mysticism. With all these identities informing each other, it is easy to see why Vassanji prefers to use his initials rather than the names Moyez Gulamhussein, which might mark him as belonging to a specific community or region. It is no surprise too that a recurring theme of his work is the difficulty of knowing where we are from and what forces have combined to make us what we are. (Perhaps this makes it piquantly fitting that he keeps gravitating back towards Africa, which – in the long view of history – is where all humans originated.) His best writing builds on the knowledge that people and communities – along with their allegiances – shift continuously over time; for all the Indians in his novels whose families moved to Africa, there are equally reminders that the Sidis of Singpur are the descendants of Africans who made a journey in the opposite direction centuries earlier.

There is a throwaway observation in The Magic of Saida, one that might have come from any of Vassanji’s books: under the Idi Amin regime, we are reminded, people like Kamal would be viewed as foreigners, not “real” Africans – and yet, Kamal’s great-grandfather Punja had called himself “Sawahil” and fought the Germans for his adopted country, while Idi Amin himself had once fought for the British against the Kenyans. “Nothing was straightforward.” In a world that appears to be shrinking but where distinctions between “original” dwellers and “outsiders” continue to be made, Vassanji’s body of work is a gentle reminder of the fluidity of history – and of the ability of an individual to belong to many places and be many things at the same time.

Art, craft and orange tones: a mouthful of Pao

[Did this review for the Hindu]

In the Q&A session that introduces this dynamic comics anthology, Parismita Singh – one of the five members of the Pao Collective – gives a wise answer to the question of how one should “read” a comic: “Quickly, greedily, racing to the end. And then a slow return: go back to the beginning, savour it, read only the orange or the grey tones. The next time pick another element...and so on.”

Any comic buff will know how rewarding this process can be – assuming that it is applied to rigorous, well-integrated graphic stories, as opposed to literal-minded comics where each panel is a drab illustration of the text accompanying it. Pao, which brings together many skilled artists and writers, is anything but drab. And so, after you have raced greedily – to use Singh’s formulation –through each narrative, it is possible to scrutinise the stories more closely and appreciate how text and visuals inform or bounce off each other. You might pause to take in the striking use of the colour pink in two unrelated stories (one about anonymous “helmetmen” in a world afflicted with terrorism and suspicion, the other about an insurance agent who transforms into a flamingo). Or the sinister patches of red amidst black-and-white drawings in the gorily deadpan “Hindus & Offal”, credited to Ambarish Satwik and Pia Alize Hazarika but just as likely the result of a partnership between Hannibal Lecter and a theology student. Or you might note, in a panel where a distracted mother fails to register what her son is telling her about his US trip, that the brand-name on the matchbox in her hand is “Tube Light”. Little delights like these ensure that this book has plenty of repeat value.

Understandably, some of the best work here comes from the “Paoists” themselves. Orijit Sen’s “Hair Burns Like Grass” – a story in progress, done mainly in charcoal – is a gorgeous-looking account of the life and work of the poet Kabir, interspersed with the memories of an old man living in our times; on this evidence the complete book should be one of the major achievements in Indian graphic novels. Singh’s “Sleepscapes”, with its shape-shifting forms, is equally mesmerising in a different way, as an emaciated dog resolves itself into a cloud and the laws of physics are made subservient to the logic of a nightmare-world (where a blabbering, Arnab Goswami-like newsreader threatens to “protect” viewers from jihad with his news-channel).

In his inventive take on cultural confusion in “RSVP”, Vishwajyoti Ghosh uses a classical, sepia-like style to depict a milieu where cellphones and gramophones coexist, and where the workings of a colonial mindset are revealed through the use of quaint, old-world spelling and phrases (“Fab Indies”, “Hindoo”, “Nayi Dehli”) in an otherwise modern setting. Sarnath Banerjee brings another form of nostalgia – and infectiously droll humour – to “Tito Years”, an account of a boy growing up in pre-liberalisation India and hankering for foreign-brand shoes. Banerjee makes characteristically funny use of mixed media: an image of Subhas Chandra Bose performing a salute represents the much-anticipated arrival of a US-based cousin on an India visit; a Nike is obscenely superimposed on Bruce Lee’s feet in a page-length photo; a boy unwrapping a box of precious shoes is depicted as a surgeon gingerly wielding his tools. But the last panel, which has the narrator drily calling his dad a “cheap bastard”, also has a poignant quality – what the father is doing should be instantly relatable to anyone who has ever known a middle-class parent trying hard to meet a child’s impractical wants.

Some stories read like fragments torn from a more sprawling project: Sanjay Ghosh’s “Print Screen”, about a dreamy wannabe artist with Van Gogh on his mind, has an incomplete feel to it. Others work as stand-alones: the minimalist but effective “Tattoo” (Lakshmi Indrasimhan, Jacob Weinstein) has men opting for primitive tattoo designs like snakes and scorpions but soon graduating to plush multi-storeyed buildings in what may be a sly comment on the egoistic and competitive urges that build what we call civilisation. And though “The Afterlife of Ammi’s Betelnut Box” (Iram Ghufran, Ikroop Sandhu) is laid out as a text-driven story with smatterings of images, it would be a mistake to only read the text and dimly register the drawings; Sandhu and Mitoo Das’s artwork, some of the most intricate in the book, is vital to the full effect of this tale about an old lady and her djinns.

Finally, what would an Indian graphic-story collection be without a retelling of a well-known mythological tale? In “Chilka” (Vidyun Sabhaney, Shohei Emura), the Mahabharata war is filtered through some of the more hysterical tropes of manga, such as characters yelling dramatically at each other (if a revered artist like Osamu Tezuka could do this successfully with the Buddha’s life, why not?). There are lunatic twists in the tale: grand epic tragedy meets slapstick comedy when Karna’s chariot wheel is undone not by an ancient curse but by a vagrant banana peel. However, you won’t find many other slip-ups in this wide-ranging book.

Thoughts on Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana

Sameer Sharma’s charming film Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana might be described as a love letter to life in rural Punjab (or a romanticised version of rural Punjab) but it begins in London with a montage of stereotypical images: the London Eye, Westminster Palace, a nightclub populated by gawking Asian men and white seductresses. Punjabi lads alternate between their own language, which they are clearly more comfortable with, and the facile slang they have learnt to speak (“It’s my dream, bro!”). Chinese men named Chang go “Beeyootiful” at the dancing girls. Then the cocky Omi Khurana (Kunal Kapoor) falls on the wrong side of a mean gangster, also of Punjabi origin, and is promptly packed back to India so he can collect the money to pay back a hefty loan.

All this happens in the first five minutes. Post-credits, the gloom of the nightclub – along with the edgy fusion music we were hearing all this while – gives way to the bright, sunny colours of the Punjab countryside, presented here as a vista of lovely fields, dotted with family-run dhabas. The visual change from the London sequence to the rural India one is startling, but what hasn’t yet changed is Omi’s watchful, knowing expression, his face permanently on the brink of a triumphant grin – it’s a pointer to the sort of life he has probably been leading all these years, surviving by his wits and smooth charm, sponging off the easily deceived.

This is clearly what he intends to do when he returns to the native village he had “escaped” 10 years earlier. Learning that his “daarji” (grandfather) is in hospital, he makes a perfunctory dismayed sound and the news-bearer is quick to assure him that the old man is alive and will be home soon; but we can tell that what really disturbs Omi is the realisation that this might make it more difficult for him to get the money he needs. He’s thinking of the “pound ka pedh” (tree of money) that is presumably growing here. But with no such pedh in sight, he finds himself staying on for longer than expected, and slowly becoming involved with the lives of the people he once knew, including Harman (Huma Qureshi), a resourceful doctor who is now engaged to his cousin Jeet. And he learns that his family is not so well off: the grandfather is now senile and the family dhaba had to be closed years ago.

This is of course a version of the prodigal-son story; in a way the whole film is a movement towards erasing Omi’s self-satisfied smile and teaching him about responsibility by reintegrating him into family and community life. And Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana sets out to do this with a determinedly feel-good tone and a highly idealised view of pastoral life. Once you accept this, it becomes difficult to nitpick too much about the film’s unwillingness to engage with the less savoury aspects of small-town existence. In Harman’s mindfulness about not letting Omi be seen too near her house when he drops her home late at night, one gets a sense of how the dictates of tradition might work even on an educated young woman leading a fairly “modern” and independent life. But showcasing such things is not the film's main purpose, and so they are glossed over.

What is constantly underlined is the merit in being rooted, being part of a benevolent family (and it is therefore a useful plot conceit that despite having survived reasonably well in London for a decade, Omi has absolutely no roots there – one gets no sense that he has left anything of value behind). Even a metrosexual young thug who travels to India to threaten Omi and remind him that time is running out then remarks that he will stay on for a while and head to his own village: “Bebe ki bahut yaad aa rahi hai.” (“I’m missing my mother.”) There are jovial nods to the uninhibited bonhomie of Punjabi families, as in a scene where a middle-aged woman blithely discusses men’s “kachcha” sizes and types, even as most of the household drones buzz around her. There are dialogues such as “Heat of the emotion mein keh diya” and sight gags like an agarbatti tray being waved in front of “Hunk” underwear packs in a shop; the flashbacks to past events in the village – including Omi’s youth – are in soft-focus, as if yearning for a more innocent time when the boy might yet have taken the “right” path.

Given this generally upbeat and nostalgic tone, there is never any danger of something really unpleasant happening to these people. The Khurana family has a dysfunctional side and squabbles a bit, but you know that everyone is good at heart and that all loose ends will ultimately be tied up – even if it means the ready acceptance of a widow with a young child as their bahu, in lieu of a much more socially desirable match. In one of the story’s sub-plots, we are initially led to expect that the dreamy-eyed, effeminate Jeet – reluctant to tie the knot – will turn out to be homosexual (something that might really have shaken this community up), but a very different revelation is made (in a wacky but also slightly cringe-inducing scene that toys with the notion that the gayest thing a red-blooded Punjabi man can do is to sing a Bangla love song). And the story ends on the rosy view that you can take a man out of Punjab and turn him into a gangster, but you can't take the colourful good-spiritedness of Punjab out of the man. All this adds up to an allegory about the all-conquering strength of family bonds and basic human decency. Even if you don't have complete faith in these things, you might well buy into the film's take on them.


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Much of the pre-release publicity has centred on Luv Shuv being a “food film”; the dish mentioned in the title is the piece de resistance of daarji’s days as a leading dhaba-owner. As the narrative progresses, lovingly prepared home food becomes a metaphor for deepening relationships (as a corollary to this, consider an earlier line about the merits of communal flatulence: “Apnon ke saamne gas chhodne se pyaar badhta hai”) and the “lost” recipe of Chicken Khurana seems to stand for the loosening of ties in a world where youngsters are eager to get out and start anew somewhere else. During a brief montage, shot in the faux-documentary style of people speaking directly into the camera, Omi asks a number of people about their Chicken Khurana memories, and the variety of responses include one by a married couple whose “proposal” happened over the dish, and someone else who remarks that daarji used to put his own mitthaas (sweetness) into his cooking.

Omi and Harman (whose tentative relationship, very nicely played and paced, balances out some of the cutesiness and tomfoolery) bond over food too, as she helps him negotiate the basics of cooking, including cutting onions and tomatoes. This may beg the question: how did he survive those 10 years in London? By munching on canapés in nightclubs? But why be churlish and dwell on such comparatively irrelevant plot details?