thenewdirectionoftime


A Visit to the Quattro Book May Book Launch

In Literature on 06/01/2012 at 18:30

“Dazzling and Tremendous” are the apt words of Whitman that might be used to describe the most recent Quattro Book Launch event.

There was standing room only last Tuesday night at what are becoming increasingly popular Quattro literary evenings. And rightfully so, since the line-up of readers was perhaps the most exciting in this year’s reading series. No less than five readers took the stage. Each of them was a reader and writer of considerable talent. If any criticism is to be raised it is that the event was on the whole too short.

The venue was back room of “The Supermarket” on Augusta – a bar that fuses an Asian restaurant with a standard trendy licensed establishment and represents the next phase of the probably inexorable Yorkvillization of Kensington market, a lamentable or welcomed development depending on your socio-economic outlook. Indisputably though, on Tuesday night Chantel Lavoie, Leah Murray, Tim Conley, Binnie Brandon and Ken Klonsky saw to it that fine literature has been ensconced in the neighborhood along with high end cheese shops, expensive candle stores and vendors of pricey cultural bric-a-brac. This could be what Marcuse meant by the phrase “ a dialectical union of opposites”.

There were two surprises that night. The first was that there were so many readers from Kingston. Who would have thought suspected that Canada’s former capital would be harboring such poetic talent?

The second surprise, the show-stopper as it were, was the reading of Leah Murray from her experimental novel “Romancing the Buzzard”. The reading came with what seemed a lengthy context placing by a representative of the Quattro editorial board. Such an account is typically annoying to the literary purist who wants the literary work to stand by itself. Having a work’s literary merit explained before the experience of reading or hearing is a sure way substituting literary strength with an ideological crutch. Yet in this case, the work stood up to the peroration it received.

Murray has gone through a terrifying experience. She was held captive by her delusional husband who attempted to brainwash her, indoctrinate her into his paranoid cosmological worldview. The act of writing was no doubt a therapeutic act for her. But she created a truly aesthetic object rather than a personal statement, even listening to a few short paragraphs of this book revealed its merit. Her words created an imaginary landscape reminiscent of the grotesque fantasies of Lautrement. And the sense of self being lost against the irresistible downward tug, drawing madness and the underworld, was similar to that the erosion of self De Nerval made an account of in his short, hallucinatory stories. There was strangeness to her comparisons that were suggestive of the world-turned-in-its-head nature of her experiences. She described “rain drops as big as apples”, and her husband being “rapid fire machine gunned into madness.” Murray made effective use of the experience of synesthesia, describing one sense in terms of another. Her husband himself is described as “one strange sound that never went away.” Something about the always impalpable quality of experience is unlocked by these surprising juxtapositions of different orders of things.

The poetry of Chantel Lavoie had opened the evening. It was clearly the work of an experienced writer. Her new book is entitled “Where the Terror Lies” a homage to the recently deceased Maurice Sendak. She showed the range of her poetic talent by reciting a sonnet that had been written as part of a project she had assigned for her class. It was a convincing anachronism complete with the correct archaic diction. This sonnet reflects her ability as a writer to breathe new life into familiar poetic themes. She takes up material from the Brothers Grimm, from the and from the New Testament. These are mythologies that are in fact every bit as bizarre as those written about by Leah Murray, except they have become familiar to us by constant exposure. Yet Lavoie has reintroduced to use through figurative language and her unique perspective something of the original interest of these mythological patterns. In “Lazarus Opened His Eyes” and “Death and Taxes” we saw our contemporary world being infused with the motifs of our traditional mythology. The ultimate moment of transformation was achieved in an image of the last supper when, as Lavoie wrote, “all that death was sucked out of the air.”

Tim Conley read from his first book of poetry “One False Move”. Like Lavoie he demonstrated his ability with traditional verse forms by reciting a limerick from a collection on the Harper cabinet – a humorous form that was appropriate to its politically satirical intention. Conley’s work was the most difficult of the evening. Of all the other readers that night, his work demanded the most thought and for this reason he was compared to J.L Borges (one of the patron saints of “The New Direction of Time”). Conley’s work does stand up to this comparison, though he himself modestly dismissed it as a wild claim on par with being compared to Tolstoy. But it may be not so meaningful to compare Conley to Borges, but to do something else, something that Borges was himself very concerned with, that is to see Conley’s writing as belonging to a genealogy in which Borges himself is an antecedent, going back perhaps to the Thousand and One Nights and the enigmas of the Book of Genesis. But Conely revealed himself not to be solely concerned with the involutions of myth and literature. He observed that one of his poems was inspired by his observation that we have become far too “used to living at war.” (Or the shocking thesis that our liberalism turns out, contrary to its ideological rhetoric, not to be incompatible with a constant with a constant state of warfare.) He writes of this condition in “Reaction to a Series of Inoculations.” Clearly, Conley is a complex poet who everyone should expect to hear more from in the future. It should be noted that his oratorical skill is considerable and stood out from all the other readers of the evening. He ended his set with the grim observation: “The truest lover of wood is fire.”

Binnie Brandon, Quattro’s best-selling author, was second last in line to read. Hers is the only collection of short stories currently published by Quattro. The selection she read was a short story of a series stories just five hundred words long, a project that she set for herself as a challenge. Her story was a humorous anecdote bringing together the unlikely elements of cherry pits and a beloved uncle’s wake. The story was notable for being convincingly written in the Maritime dialect. This is not an easy task to have carried out.

The last reader for the evening was Ken Klonsky. His reading was accompanied by a henchman who well complemented the compelling dialogue whose subject was a police interrogation. Ascher, the protagonist of Klonsky’s novel “Life Without” was being held for questioning in a police precinct office. By painstaking degrees, the readers revealed Ascher’s progress from a witness being questioned to becoming the prime suspect in the murder of his wife. Well rendered were the police tactics of physical and psychological intimidation, a process so effectively carried out as to compromise any chance of Ascher ever receiving a fair trial. It was with this piece of dramatic dialogue that the evening ended. Unfortunately, this is supposed to be the last of Quattro’s book launches for the year. Devotees of poetry can still, fortunately, look forward to the monthly Wordstage gatherings.

Comment »

,

A Review of Shiva Naipaul’s “North of South”

In Literature on 05/25/2012 at 14:10

Easily one of the hundred best all around documents of the 20th century, this book is a unique hybrid of a travelogue, a novel and a socio-political commentary. Naipaul, the younger brother of Novel Laureate V.S. Naipaul, journeys around sub-Saharan East Africa to find out what the abstractions “liberation”, “socialism” and “revolution” mean, outside the rhetoric of leaders and professional theoreticians, for the African masses. He is especially interested in the claims that, under leaders like Julius Nyerere, there has developed a synthesis of Marxism & traditional, egalitarian forms of social organization. From the prelude of the book, which recreates, in a hilarious tableux, the scene of his Air Zaire flight into the continent, the reader is convinced that Naipaul is uniquely gifted for the task at hand. His vision is as penetrating as his authorial voice is comprehensive. (N.B. The Penguin Twentieth Century Classics edition is the one to pick up with the book’s iconic black & white front cover photo, of a woman and her child reflected in a car’s side-view mirror, adding a thousand words of eloquence to the text.)

After a Blakean, airborne vista of the land: “We crossed the Rift Valley, a hallucinatory fusion of earth and light and space” Naipaul acquaints us with an Africa that has become a distorted version of modernity. He gives us vivid reproductions of the dialogues of blackmarketeering foreigners, bottomfeeders, who thrive on Nairobi’s corruption. And of the African inhabitants of the Nairobi itself, with constant references to the texts such as Blixen’s “Out of Africa”, which showed the austere simplicity of the Kikuyu and Masai people, we see that in late 20th century Africa social relations have an unrelenting, predatory character, the true nature of with is occluded by rhetoric – whether it is the hackneyed stylistics of the hardboiled novelist Naipaul meets, or the salesmanship of the shoeshine boy who attempts to cheat the author. Naipaul remarks that “Words…Words…Words. Africa is swathed in words.” And also that: “The words, attached to nothing, were mere noises plucked out of the ether. Language had been divorced from meaning.”

Part Two of “North of South” deals with Naipaul’s experiences in Tanzania. Going beyond the conventions of a typical travelogue, the first chapter of Part Two, “Taking the Socialist Road”, opens with a careful look at the central statement of Tanzania’s TANU party. This is the “Arusha Declaration” which Nailpaul describes as “about the size of the Communist Manifesto but lacking the latter’s stark apocalyptic feel.” His view of the declaration is that it is unusual for the way it at once tries to provide a constitution for the country, while at the same time moralizing about a purified way of life that hearkens back to a mythic African past. It lists the four bases of development as the people, the land, good policies, and good leadership, all of which are meant to support the aim of self-reliance. Undergirding all of this is the concept of “ujamaa” or familyhood, which remains a somewhat vague concept in Nyerere’s speeches, seemingly defined negatively in terms of what has corrupted it, exploitation of labour, class domination, imperialism and so on. Naipaul goes on to find the realities of Tanzania to be in sharp contrast to the rhetoric of the TANU ideologues. He reflects: “Words, words, words… They can, when handled promiscuously, gradually begin to take the place of reality. The can, in the course of time, become a complete substitute for it.”

The political reflections in the book are interrupted by a humorous interlude that takes Naipaul, in the company of an inadvertently comical, pompous Indian gentleman, into the unreal vista of Tanzania’s Ngorongoro Crater. It is described by the author’s sparse but effective prose: “Suddenly the crater opened below us. Its floor, yellow, white and smooth, was encircled by the purple mountain wall crowned with a band of cloud. It lay there like a dream spawned by the earth, defying the senses; a vast bowl floating among the mountains.” Much like the political developments that comprise Tanzania’s revolution, the crater turns out to be far more appealing from afar. When Naipaul descends down to its floor, he finds that it’s been reduced to something like an African version of Disneyland, swarming with Land Rovers and all but domesticated animals that swarm the visitors. We see that Naipaul was a man who was constitutionally incapable of playing along with the illusions that ought to have governed this or that spectacle – whether those spectacles be the highly cultivated scenes in Africa’s natural world – or those spectacles presented by the political world.

If a book of this kind can said to have a climax – the point at which everything hitherto is resolved in some form of collision – then that must be when Naipaul makes a visit to an important TANU party publishing house in Dar Es Salaam. In a “dialogue” with three party hacks he is castigated for being out of touch with the realities of the sugar plantation in his native Trinidad and then informed that “Pessimism always descends on writers like yourself. Your bourgeois ego reduces social reality to chaotic individual relations. You do not see what underlies these relations. For you the appearance is sufficient. Only authors representing the rising class, the proletariat, can see any future or meaning in life.” When Naipaul asks about what the plan for the intellectual development of the nation might be, he is countered by a claim that “intellectual development” is another bourgeoise notion. One of the party intellectuals crassly says “He wants starving people to like opera and ballet and read Proust.”

How should Naipaul have countered these attacks? What is clear is that the first claim against him is empirically false. Writers devoted to fully developing their interior, individualist vision of life have just as easily come out in favor of “the rising” class as they have against it in support of the elite status quo and fascism. There also seems here on the part of the TANU intellegentsia, an implicit lack of faith in reason itself – that if reason in the form of literary exploration is pushed too far there is no guarantee that the right political line will emerge. There is probably truth to that. To conclude, then, that it is far better to mouth platitudes and subdue reason with politicized dogma is of course to ensure the strangulation of the very aims of  movement towards a more humanized, reasonable world. Finally, what the party minion was forgetting was the distinction between the structural roles of propaganda and aesthetic art. Propaganda is necessary for political change, to make people aware of their conditions and to inspire movement. This doesn’t make it superior to literature. In certain desperate conditions, where people are enslaved and starving, propaganda certainly is more vital. So it is an unfair strawman to turn the aesthetic view of art into a myopic prescription of Proust for starving people Obviously, the stage of starvation is one that needs to be overcome as soon as possible – and should be, given that starvation is not a natural condition for a species that has a high degree of technical mastery. It is at this later stage that aesthetic art serves its role, with its deep reflections & critiques on the meaning of society and its accomplishments. “North of South” is by all means a chapter in that project.

Comment »

,

Special Feature: COMING HOME – The books of R. K. Narayan by Koom Kankesan

In Literature on 05/25/2012 at 13:56

I discovered R. K. Narayan sometime in the mid nineties when I was in my early twenties. I couldn’t believe no one had turned me onto his books before that, was upset even. Our family could not return to Sri Lanka due to the war and though we had distant relatives here, I was cut off from our family. Missing were the indulgent grandparents and avuncular uncles and aunts necessary to round out the harsh and often demanding experience it is to grow up Tamil. Living in England and then Canada, I had read British, American, and Canadian novels. I vaguely realized I wished to be a writer but had no clue how to go about it. Not just get published, but write itself. Loving literature and making it the centrepiece of your life is more than putting down prose on paper. One must put feelings on the page that people can read and empathize with, receive as sculpted fiction to resonate their own thoughts and experiences. I had a creative writing teacher in the last year of high school who mocked me and said I wrote like Edgar Allen Poe (he really meant Arthur Conan Doyle but did not know it) because I did not write in a relaxed or contemporary manner.

The first book I picked up by Narayan was the first one he published, a seemingly simple collection of episodes about a young boy during his school year, called Swami and Friends. It was published in 1935 and one of the episodes features young Swaminathan at a Quit India demonstration. Caught up in the tumult and furor of the Ghandian event, Swami pulls the hat off his head and throws it into the fire like the others protesting the Lancashire thumbcutters and their abuse of Indian weavers. When he gets home, Swami has to explain the disappearance of the hat to his father who is a strict patrician of the courts, and lies about the loss, saying that someone else grabbed the cap and ripped it into shreds. It was these little moments of awkwardness and humour, the comedy in the way Narayan perfectly understood and crystallized the relationships between Tamils, the way they spoke and dealt with each other, that blew my mind. Take a look at this episode during Swami’s school vacation when his father makes him stay home and practice some arithmetic:

 

            Half an hour later Swaminathan sat in his father’s room in a chair, with a slate in his hand and pencil ready. Father held the arithmetic book open and dictated: “’Rama has ten mangoes with which he wants to earn fifteen annas. Krishna wants only four mangoes. How much will Krishna have to pay?’”

            Swaminathan gazed and gazed at this sum, and every time he read it, it seemed to acquire a new meaning. He had the feeling of having stepped into a fearful maze…

            His mouth began to water at the thought of mangoes. He wondered what made Rama fix fifteen annas for ten mangoes. What kind of a man was Rama? Probably he was like Sankar (one of Swami’s classmates). Somehow one couldn’t help feeling that he must have been like Sankar, with his ten mangoes and his iron determination to get fifteen annas. If Rama was like Sankar, Krishna must have been like the Pea. Here Swaminathan felt an unaccountable sympathy for Krishna.

 

There is so much in this passage. First of all is the practice of the father making the son do the extra math, the curtailing of his freedom, the unnecessary unfairness of it all. It was so familiar to me and yet I’d never read anything like that in a work of fiction before. His father wants him to exercise a straightforward reasoning in arithmetic that Swami simply does not possess. He stews instead with the scenario, wrestling with the characters of the people in the sum, investing them with personalities and motives. He doesn’t even realize that the solution has nothing to do with just prices or the projected circumstances of the scenario. The characters are meaningless. Yet, for a person with a rich imagination and all too human sensibility, the dynamics between the characters, the power differential in that most fleeting and incidental of sums, is immensely more potent than the mechanics of the sum itself.

Swami goes on to ask his father if the mangoes are ripe, thinking that will be the key to figuring how much Krishna will pay for the mangoes. His father, though amused, will not answer him and punishes him by twisting his ear and guiding him through the steps of the sum until Swami arrives at the correct answer and then bursts into tears. Poor Swami. The pain and helplessness of the situation is mitigated by the humour and even in his early twenties, Narayan seems to understand how indispensable both qualities are to being Tamil. More importantly, he has a grasp on Tamil voices. Read this passage from Narayan’s memoir My Days about a successful uncle of his:

 

After dinner this drunken uncle settled down to a nice chat with the family and insisted on having everyone around him. He enjoyed teasing me and Seenu, but left alone my elder brother, who would spurn him at such moments. He would ask Seenu: “Did you buy betel leaves at the market?” which he would want for chewing after dinner.

            “Yes, Mama.”

            “How many leaves were in the bundle?”

            “One hundred, as you wanted….”

            “Did you count the leaves in the bundle?”

            “But the woman who sold it counted…”

            “You mean to say that you took her word for it? Ha, ha, very well. Count it now…. Go on.” Seenu would be bullied into counting the leaves, one by one, loudly, watched over by the uncle. If the bundle contained twenty-nine, he would glare at Seenu and say, “Now go to the market and get the remaining one”; or if Seenu counted one hundred and one, he would be ordered, “Take the extra one leaf and give it back to the woman. We must not cheat her.”

 

Narayan grew up in a privileged Brahmin household and for much of his young life was under the care of his grandmother. His father, a stern and remote headmaster, got Narayan a job as a schoolteacher in a village far from his house. By all accounts in his memoir, he gave up in frustration after teaching less than one day and returned home. This action seems incredible, seems to be the stuff of dreams. As Narayan states, he had no concept of himself as “an economic entity” and he was only able to come back home without plans because of the extended family model which granted him protection, allowed him to live day to day with only two cigarettes as a luxury, and to eventually write Swami and Friends, episode by episode, without really knowing where the story was taking him.

Somewhere in the intervening time, Narayan got married and he and his wife had a child. He had fallen in love with Rajam upon first sight but her father was greatly opposed to the match because Narayan’s horoscope contained Mars in the seventh house (the one pertaining to marriage) and indicated destruction for anyone who married him. The father reluctantly agreed after consulting a different almanac which gave Rajam marginally better prospects. Swami and Friends found no luck with publishers until a friend, travelling to England, got it into Graham Greene’s hands. Greene and Narayan would remain lifelong friends and Narayan, a strong adherent of astrology, later stated that their association was outlined in his horoscope, as was the death of his wife. Narayan’s wife died of typhoid a few years after the birth of their daughter. The event was devastating for him, halting his writing for a long time until he worked the experience out into the autobiographical novel The English Teacher. Narayan never married again but many instances can be found in his novels of spouses who constantly bicker and yet fiercely love each other.

While deep in mourning, Narayan visited relatives in a nearby village and was introduced to a man conducting experiments in automatic writing. The man would go into a self induced trance, allowing ‘spirits’ to write through him. This man claimed that Narayan’s wife had been contacting him. Narayan was understandably deeply offended and skeptical of the man’s claim. However, curiousity prevailed and over a series of meetings, Narayan writes in his memoir that the ‘voice’ knew things that only his wife could. He strengthened his contact with the voice on the other side during the sessions until Narayan could communicate with her without an intermediary, could sense her directly with his mind. The English Teacher ends on a lovely note where the protagonist returns home and can smell the jasmine in the garlands that his wife once wore, can sense her all around him.

I‘m not sure what to make of this religious-spiritual side of Narayan. Otherwise, he is so humbly skeptical, down to earth, and above all humourous in his work. And yet to be fixed on these two sticking points: one so old world, the other new agey: horoscopes and voices from the other side. I can’t criticize him for the strongly held beliefs, and I truly believe he experienced life through these philosophies, not out of foolhardiness or self-delusion. This was reality for him. In every other way, his storytelling is sharp with details of the commonplace – the items of clothing a hapless protagonist owns, the nail he hangs his dhoti on, the sewer that runs outside his house. For the most part, in his fiction, sannyasins and mendicants are quite suspect, even comical, characters. The architecture of his storytelling lies on very sensible groundwork but there is a shot of mysticism and the divine infused through it.

Most of the fiction is set in the made up town of Malgudi (a combination of Coimbatore and Lalgudi?), a small bustling town built on the fictional banks of the river Sarayu in Tamil Nadu. Narayan explored and paved out Malgudi in book after book during a long writing career spanning from the thirties to the nineties. This prompted Graham Greene to say that Narayan was an Indian Chekhov, a chronicler of village relations, a sympathizer of the lives of small people, and this comparison is often used on the Penguin editions of his books. As I read his books, I thought of Narayan more like a Tamil Woody Allen (without the improprieties that plagued Allen’s career). Especially when one looks at Allen’s earlier silly films and even the later ones which tell small but personal stories in contained worlds, and focus on relationships, the comparison seems apt. Most importantly, Narayan gets the voice of Tamils down pat: he understands their idiosyncrasies, their neuroses, their peeves and the rhythms of their patter in the same way Woody Allen was praised for bringing Jewish American voices to life in an otherwise gentile cinema. When Swami’s grandmother asks “Is it?” in the nineteen thirties while he tells her about his school day, impatiently waiting to jump in and regale him with rambling stories about their relatives, we instantly recognize this conversation from our own families. The intervening eighty years have not diluted the recognition or the faster-than-thought familiarity of these relationships. They are funny and wryly familiar at the same time. Whether this is because Tamil culture is largely homogenous and slow to change, or because Narayan was spectacularly, uniquely gifted with a prescient ear for Tamil dialogue, I am not sure. Probably both.

Though he was not simply a humourist, I think it is humour that most endears his legacy to us as Tamils, whether we are from India, Sri Lanka, North America, or The Transvaal. Narayan filled in a whole culture around the edges that was at once familiar and remote to me. Having no extended family close by, growing up under the pressures of an immigrant Tamil family in the early days when community was almost non-existent in Toronto, having little to no exposure of literature beyond the Caucasian tradition of school texts, Narayan was a godsend. Reading him was like coming home. Not like some religious homecoming but a human homecoming. His humour, his wry perception, makes the pains of Tamil life acceptable, understood even.

I tried to get my parents to read Narayan’s books but they were too busy working and managing the thousand little tasks that make up their day. I would always press Narayan on friends and talk about him whenever books came up but he remained a fleeting curiousity to other people, a sort of totem of Indian fiction’s nostalgic past. Rushdie and Ondaatje were much more fashionable subjects in the nineties and I never really felt any connection with their characters or their writing. I understood their brilliance and importance but connection is something else. Older readers remembered Narayan as a representative of Indian fiction during the middle of the twentieth century because he was the foremost Indian writer exported to the West in those days. He won every major award in India and it pleased me no end, secretly, that a Tamil and not a North Indian had won this place of prominence. More than the fact that he was Tamil, he was humble, a steady worker, and steadfast of character, qualities that seemed to me to be the best in Tamils.

Narayan wrote up to the nineties and sometimes his books reflected the political times, such as The Painter of Signs which takes place during the climate of Indra Gandhi’s policies to stem overpopulation in the seventies. The last novel that he published was the brilliant The World of Nagaraj, sharply funny yet incisive about family dynamics and generational attitudes. He fell out of favour for at least two reasons; people criticized his books for existing in a mythical small town, impervious to politics and history, and for writing in English when Indian pride demanded that writers write in their regional languages. Politics, whether it was British colonialism or the controversial effects of India’s prime ministers, were palpable if distant in his books and I don’t know of any other Indian writer so adept at capturing a culture’s voice and nuances. Narayan’s writing remained steadfast through changing literary fashions like a dependable uncle, one whom you could see the child that he had once been, and I loved him for it.

In 1994, my family went back to Sri Lanka for the first time. The fighting was very intense, the railway lines had been shut down, and my parents had to take passage in one of those illegal boats ferrying people up to Jaffna. Being a young Tamil man, they told me that I would be suspect and that if I were to come, would have to stay in Colombo as it was too dangerous for me to make the trek to Jaffna. They were right of course but I did not want to go all the way to Sri Lanka, not being able to make the final distance back to Jaffna, see my grandmothers (both grandfathers had died) and aunts, see the old family homes. I stayed in Canada while they went on the trip.

In May of 2001, my family made a trip to the outskirts of Chennai to Sai Baba’s compound and twisted my arm into going with them, stressing that it was an important bonding opportunity. I did not want to go as I had grave problems with Sai Baba and his divine claims, and I was in a full course of work and study at the time. I ended up going with the provision that my family would give me some time off to track R. K. Narayan down and get an interview from him. They agreed, not particularly enthusiastically but to get me to come, I think. We stopped off briefly in Delhi. On our first day in Tamil Nadu, my father and I were standing in a line outside of Sai Baba’s summer compound. My father got into a conversation with the man ahead of him and told him that I was interested in tracking down Narayan. The man told us that Narayan had died that very day. Indeed, the newspaper informed us that he had died in hospital after congestive heart failure and two weeks of life support. My mother, in her religious way, thought the coincidence auspicious, but I just felt empty. Compounding my grave doubts over my family’s fervour about Sai Baba was the feeling that I had just missed this author who was so dear to me, so much the opposite of Sai Baba, in the passing of generations and lives. He had been working on a sequel to The World of Nagaraj before he died.

Back at university, a creative writing professor who supervised an independent study with me advised me to be not so hung up on Narayan and to look to other fictional models. I went on to be inspired by Truman Capote, J. M. Coetzee, and others, and with each of these discoveries, my style and sensibility shifted. But I never forgot Narayan and there was no one who could replace him. I still recommended him to Tamils, especially as I became a teacher and sometimes had young Tamils in my classes. They either asked why they should waste time reading extra books, or if they borrowed a book from me, never found the time to read, too busy with basketball and TV and the flirtations in their young adolescent lives. In moves, some of my books got lost in boxes and I only have about nine of his books on my shelf right now. I pull one down from time to time, never reading the whole thing,  because the book will still be memorable to me, the pain fresh from a time when being Tamil was something to be suffered in isolation, and read a passage or two.

The voice is familiar to me like the substance of gray matter, DNA even, that lies embedded within my own skull. It’s a biological recognition, not an intellectual one and it’s like coming home.

Comment »
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.