Pardon my writing

"You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.” ~ Saul Bellow

That takes care of my writing resolution for 2012.

 Link

Ever so often I find myself in a tricky situation. When a person says or does something that is silly, I want to call them 'lame'. Till a couple of years back, I used this rather freely. And as the vocabulary of the people around the world gets more and more sensitive, using words like lame is no longer acceptable. Yet I find that people are pretty divided on this issue of which words are okay and which are not. Is it okay to tell someone to stop behaving in a retarded manner? Is it okay to ask someone if they are blind? Should one be politically correct all the time? Is it okay to use lame, when in fact, one means silly? Are we overthinking this? Especially if no malice is intended?

I prefer to avoid using words like lame. An upside of this is that since I am unable to think of synonyms that easily, I am just a little more sensitive and less hurtful. Who thought that not knowing enough words would make one a nicer person.

While on words and the different meanings, recently an uncle started telling a story about his younger days and began thus, I used to be a gay man once. Oh, well.

Since one loves them so, I decided to make a notebook with the cover of some of the most beloved books. Used sixty book covers in all. This will be my 2012 notebook.

This is another one I painted. An aunt found an old one in her attic and promptly had it sent over to my place. My family is very supportive like that.

Thinking of this. And now you are too. Apologies, world.

This.

"I held my nose and wrote the damn thing. Now I get to rewrite it with their help, and you, Small Writer, will find that if you hold your little nose for a while and revel in being pathetic that you'll finish too, and then you can take a deep breath and realize that you've stepped out of every fearful moment a writer endures and stepped into the knowledge that you did that Noble Thing.

Go ahead and be small. I hope you feel small and comforted."

For my small days. Of whch there are many. Which is only a little ironic.

Inspired by this, I tried to make my own version of a notebook cover. This one I made for a cousin and used photographs of her family, the holidays they went on and a collage of all her favourite things. Not so shabby for a first effort. I think they are great for giving away as gifts. Cheap and pretty. Pleased.

This latest diktat from the government, that has caused massive outrage on the Internet (not sure if this is an issue outside of it). Needless to say it is beyond ridiculous and even though every person and their uncles have become advocates of free speech in the wake of this, the point cannot be overemphasized. As far more articulate people have pointed out, what is the need for the state to interfere with what we think, what we say, what we watch, what we read?

The government's poorly thought out decision stems from an increasing intolerance for a point of view that is contrary to their own. This made me think about how, not just the state, but we too are not very tolerant of an opinion different from ours. The prevalence of constant sharing on the Internet means that now, more than ever I know what people are thinking. And quite often, I form dislikes based on very poorly thought out and knee-jerk reactions of people.

I find social media is tremendously cliquish. If the cool kids like you, then you get in. If you disagree with the cool kids, you are shown the door. Person A posts a mediocrely argued piece on his blog and everyone agrees or disagrees with it. There is nothing in the middle. There is seldom any real conversation. The world is completely binary.

This gag on free-speech is dangerous, but this lack of openness to listen to people who don't always agree with you is even more worrying.

Image Source: Here

Because that is how the damn heart is. Sahir Ludhianvi + Asha + Rafi + Dev Anand + Sadhana. What is not to love?

When I thought of daughters

I wasn't expecting this

but I like this more.

I like all your faults

even your purple moods

when you retreat from everyone

to sit in bed under a quilt.

These lines are from Michael Ondaatje's poem 'To A Sad Daughter'. It is one of my most favourite poems and I have written it down on a paper and pinned it on my soft-board. The paper will sometimes unhinge and float around the room until I rescue it and pin it back again. This time I add an extra pin. As a yearly ritual, I rewrite the poem on a fresh piece of paper and replace the old one. The poem flutters around in the wind, just a little below a photograph of my dad. I think of it as our thing, some strange and creepy way to keep our father-daughter connection. Our small victory over mortality.

I have mixed feelings about poetry. There have been times when I have loved it. Especially during those crazy periods of boy-angst in my life. And then there have been times when I have read poems and despaired that I don't get them at all.

There was always poetry around in our house. It was usually not in English though. For dad it was Saahir Ludhianvi, Ghalib, Faiz and Mir. For mom it was Bharathiar. In Calcutta, when I began to learn music, it was Tagore. Some lines were constantly bandied around at home, so much so that I began to assume that those lines belonged to dad and mom. I remember feeling cheated when I realised they were borrowed words.

I read all the poets who made it into my school and college textbooks – seldom understanding and often bored with them. Most of the great poems I discovered were during periods of great lows in my life. After sister's death. After failure. After dad's cancer diagnosis. Living alone in a city. Leaving a beloved city. And yet I was always far more attached to fiction. If I saw fiction as a way to explore the human condition, I somehow didn't feel that way about poetry. Which is kind of strange.

But I have always had a few beloved poems. Raymond Carver's Your Dog Dies comes to my mind immediately.

You feel bad for your daughter

because it was her pet,

and she loved it so.

you write a poem about it.

you call it a poem for your daughter,

about the dog getting run over by a van

and that poem turns out so good

you're almost glad the little dog

was run over, or else you'd never

have written that good poem.

Or AK Ramanujan's A River.

The new poets still quoted

the old poets, but no one spoke

in verse

of the pregnant woman

drowned, with perhaps twins in her,

kicking at blank walls

even before birth.

Or the Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali's Farewell.

At a certain point I lost track of you.

You needed me. You needed to perfect me.

In your absence you polished me into the Enemy.

Your history gets in the way of my memory.

I am everything you lost. You can't forgive me.

I am everything you lost. Your perfect Enemy.

Your memory gets in the way of my memory.

Or the sensational America by Ginsberg.

America when will you be angelic? 
When will you take off your clothes? 
When will you look at yourself through the grave? 
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites? 
America why are your libraries full of tears? 
America when will you send your eggs to India? 
I'm sick of your insane demands. 
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?

But here is the thing, at some point I stopped discovering new poets. Which is strange because I am always happy to read a new fiction writer. And so I began to trawl the Internet. Went to some of my favourite lit journals and began to read poets. Some of them very vapid, some too pretentious, but I was glad to see that several of them very brilliant. One of them I particularly liked was something I found in The Cortland Review. The poet is Alex Dimitrov and here are two gorgeous poems. As it happens often, when I discover something/someone new, I want to know more and more about that person/ thing. Googling Alex Dimitrov led me to the Wilde Boys Salon, which has been featured in The Paris Review, NYT, The Atlantic, NYBooks and pretty much everywhere. Here is the Times piece.

“I invited the cute gay poets right away,” Mr. Dimitrov said. “I sort of had a list of gays that I wanted to come, and some of them that I wanted to sleep with.”

Ha! He is my newest hero.

I also discovered that poets are no longer frumpy, waifish and poor. Okay, all writers are poor and I have heard many a poet lament that it is impossible to get poetry published. But if Wilde Boys is any indication then poets have far greater sartorial elegance than fiction writers ever can. Though, I should check if straight poets are as fabulous too. But my hunch is, Vogue would feature a poet rather than a fiction writer.

Darn! I wish I could write poetry.

You know that joke about how some people match the books with the colour of the curtains in their homes? I had that moment today. Except that I matched a book with my clothes. Entirely coincidental, of course.

These days I am trying to be a disciplined reader. With a million and one things competing for my attention, it is easy to ignore reading. Also, as someone who spends a lot of time reading book reviews, following litblogs, discussing books with friends, attending book events, listening to fiction podcasts and buying books, sometimes, I think I am reading, when in fact, I am not. What an awfully long sentence! But you get the drift, right?

Some months ago I signed up at Goodreads and set myself a yearly challenge of reading 100 books - doable yet somewhat challenging. The only hitch was that I set up the account in October and while I did add some of the books that I read in September, I am languishing at 35. It is unlikely that I will reach the hundred mark this year, but I have still read a lot more in the last two months than I normally would have. In that sense, like NaNoWriMo made me a more disciplined writer, Goodreads has made me a more disciplined reader. This makes me happy. Not because I want bragging rights, but because every book I read means that I am going to write at least one better sentence.

Currently reading Welcome to Americastan by Jabeen Akthar and enjoying it so far. Reading this book somehow reminded me of Granta Pakistan. I had read it earlier this year and while looking for one phrase, I began rereading it. One of the stories titled White Girls by Sarfraz Manzoor is one of my favourites from this series.

The last book I read was Teju Cole's Open City. The kind of exactitude in his writing, now that is what I aspire for. Given the plot and the stream of consciousness style of writing, the book could have easily become pretentious, but Cole keeps it real and honest. I recently discovered that Cole is also an excellent photographer and this reflects in his writing too. In Open City, New York is wonderfully vivid, almost like going through a series of moving images. Also, the protagonist Julius, is one of the most enigmatic fictional characters I have come across in recent times. It could be his passivity or his slight self-consciousness, but I felt great empathy with this character.

I don’t think you’ve changed at all, Julius. Things don’t go away just because you choose to forget them.

It took me a while to get into this book and inside the head of Julius, but once I did, it was very rewarding. Definitely recommended reading.

While on Teju Cole, whom I now follow on Twitter and am in grave danger of turning into his groupie, I read this one tweet from him recently where he compares photography and writing.

For writing to be any good, it only has to be good, but for a photograph to be any good, it has to be very good.

As someone who takes the worst photographs and is tolerable as a writer ( I think) (I hope), I have to agree.

The other day he also tweeted saying something that made me write it down on a little post-it note.

Quickly write down what you see before your mind begins to disbelieve it.

Talk about taking things literally. And oh, did I mention groupie?

My NaNoWriMo word count is at 44,341.

Tantalisingly close.

Even if I have this one very inspired day of writing tomorrow, I might not make it to 50K. And if I do, I will just be about halfway done. But it is still a big step for me, to have finally got some focus and discipline in my writing.

Hopefully I can keep up with this.

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I am trying to write a Statement of Purpose. Though that is far fewer words than NaNoWriMo, it has taken up a lot of my time. (And I am not yet done)

I want to sound honest and I want to sound, umm, you know purposeful. Tough, tough. But I managed to write a mostly satisfactory paragraph today. Helped greatly by the fact that tomorrow is my deadline.

**

Why must November have only thirty days?

**

With all these whooshing sounds of deadlines around me, it is a bit of a blessing to write something just because you had to. This morning, I did the unthinkable. Something that I did not think I was capable of – I wrote a poem. Free verse even. I had an idea for one while I was in the shower and when I got out I immediately wrote it down. Muse came in the form of an email from my former employer. It was all very liberating. Tomorrow when I read the poem I wrote I will probably cringe and want to hide myself, but today I am just happy.

Small victories.

Like most people who grew up in the 80s, I am a huge RK Narayan fan. I have read and re-read all his books and it will be right to say that I have not outgrown them. I hope never to.

I am sometimes alarmed at how easily people tend to herald the next such and such author as having the Narayanesque quality. I don't believe it is possible for any other writer to recreate a world like that of Malgudi or build such a body of work. And so I go back to this essay by Pankaj Mishra, titled the Great Narayan, it is everything that I want to say about Narayan, except that it is so much better.

For colonial writers who become expatriates in the West, the temptation is to play to the metropolitan culture’s bewildered and exaggerated perception of their native societies, and become retailers of exoticism: that inevitable self-distortion was what Yeats tried to put an end to when he reanimated his links with Ireland and attempted to create a local audience for Irish literature. But for writers like Narayan who stay back, immersed in, and often tossed around by, their fast-moving world, and who have no other world or audience, the problems of finding a personal literary voice and tone are much greater.

These problems are not always resolved intellectually. V.S. Naipaul transcribing the first sentence of Miguel Street, his first publishable book, from an old memory, and then abruptly inventing the second sentence; Narayan “nibbling” his pen and “wondering what to write” and finding Malgudi swimming into view, “all ready-made,” and then writing on, without any “notion of what would be coming”—there are moments when a writer ceases to be a performer to himself and others, and enters into an honest relationship with his experience, when he feels he is on his way, finds his characters and settings already prepared for him, when he doesn’t have to find his subjects, they find him.

Here is a quote from the story of Manmata from a collection of short stories titled Gods, Demons and Others. This was a story about Manmata, considered to be cupid in Indian mythology.

The indefinable hour between sunset and darkness, and between the dark night and dawn, full of whispers and suggestions, of outlines melting or emerging, is also known as Sandhya.

I have always felt an intense love for this quote. I had imagined that I would name a daughter Sandhya. Though that was likely to get distorted to something as terrible as Sandy. Not that I need to worry about any of that. Since there are no daughters to be named, but there is a book protagonist -- she became Sandhya -- indefinable, whispers, suggestions, melting and emerging.

Being a fangirl is a lot of work.

Working on the feminist flash fiction made me think of how weighty the word feminism sometimes seems to be. While there are more number of people who identify themselves as feminists today, I find a number of women also are a little discomfited by it.

I am a feminist, but not militant.

I am a feminist, but I take care not to be sexist.

Elsewhere on the Internet I come across some particularly astonishing terms, like 'fat feminism' for example. I am still trying to wrap my head around that one.

But then I also worry, perhaps I am humourless, after all sometimes the best way to get through to fellow humans is through shared laughter. To create an atmosphere where one is not negotiating, but having a conversation. Surely feminists can and must have used humour in their quest for equality.

And sure enough, while googling I came across a piece on Stanford's Clayman Institute of Gender Research website.

I told my friends I was writing an article about feminist humor. That’s when the wisecracks started. “So,” said a family member, “will it be a short article?”

Hah! Read this interesting piece here.

Image: Ms Magazine

I am a feminist, he had told me on our first meeting.

We were soon married.

We had demanding careers, but it was okay. He cooked, I did the dishes. I watered the plants, he ironed the clothes.

You are blessed, girlfriends cooed.

I agreed.

Our first baby was a boy, we named him Aryabhata.

Aryabhata needed a mother to care for him, but my husband pointed out that all he needed was a parent. He became a stay-at-home-dad, for his career could afford a sabbatical, mine couldn't.

You are lucky, the universe said.

I agreed.

We need a daughter, my husband said during a post-coitus cuddle, the world needs more girls.

Mmm.

When Aryabhata turned four, we adopted Advaita.

A perfect family, the neighbours said.

I agreed.

A few days after we brought Adavita home, Arybhata asked his father, Appa, shouldn't Advaita's room be pink?

I was in the kitchen, my eye on the simmering curry and my ear waiting for what my husband would say.

Yes, said the father.

Once we painted the walls pink, there was no looking back. Our world divided into pink and blue. And the colours never spoke to each other.

This is an entry for the Mookychick blogging competition, FEMINIST FLASH FICTION 2011. Enter now.

You know how as a writer you have this occasional inspired moment of writing? Sometimes it is a day. If you are lucky, it is a week. Mostly it is just a few hours. After almost a year, I had that kind of day today. I started work around nine in the morning and I continued typing away until it was eight in the evening. I wrote four-thousand words, each one of them that I am proud of. Accomplished by switching off the phone and the Internet. That is today. Tomorrow I will be back to watching youtube videos, reading passive-aggressive facebook status messages and pick scabs. Oh, well.

I am probably (certainly) hopelessly biased, but I loved this and this.

"...you want to write good characters with an unforgettable voice? In my experience it won’t kill you if you first figure out the character’s relationship with the telling, with the story, before you even think about what kind of words, what kind of languages, what kind of attitude these folks will be slinging."

"... every aspiring writer should read one book a week if they really want to be writers and not just people who want to be read."

This is something that every writing teacher/ piece on writing advice will tell you. Read, read and read some more. Read all kinds of writing. Read the kind of writing that you would normally not read. Explore other genres. Acquaint yourself with storytelling in all its forms. And most importantly, learn to read like a writer. Not to copy or even borrow style elements, but to have this conversation with the author and say, I see what you did there. Mostly read so that you know what has already been written and then write something else.

A few years ago my mother handed over a notebook to me. This was an exhaustive compilation of stories that she had heard from her grandmother while growing up. She wanted me to translate all of them into English so that she could give them to her grandchildren. I am terribly lazy most of the times and have been translating these stories for the longest time now. I have translated sixty-two of them and there are still hundred odd left to be done. Most of these stories are familiar ones, that we may have heard in this or some other version. Many of them are not even particularly good stories and are often preachy, moralistic tales. But, it is still one of the funnest projects that I have undertaken in the last few years. Some stories I realise, require minor tweaks, just to make it slightly more contemporary. Like this one about people in a village and monkeys involves financial transactions. Given current inflation rates, I can't go with the original one rupee, fifty paise and need to change it accordingly. Besides these kind of changes, I have never rewritten or reinterpreted any of the stories and have stayed as true to the original as possible. Fun.

Here is Story Number 63:

In a village there were many monkeys. In fact, there were more monkeys than people. One day, a stranger from the city visited the village wanting to buy monkeys. News spread that he was going to pay twenty rupees for one monkey and the villagers grabbed all the monkeys they could find and made a quick buck.

A few days later, the man returned, seeking more monkeys. This time he offered forty rupees for a monkey. The villagers were thrilled and went hunting for a few more monkeys.

The man returned again, this time offering sixty rupees. And after this, there were no more monkeys left in the village.

After a while the man returned, this time promising 200 Rupees. Sadly for the people in the village, there were no monkeys left and they visited a nearby market and bought monkeys for 100 Rupees. They spent all their money and bought all the monkeys that they could. The man never returned.

Turns out that it was the monkey-buying stranger who was the one to have sold the villagers the Rs 100 monkey at the nearby market.

The End.

I think what the story is telling us is this: be appreciative of the monkeys in your life. And also, you can never really get rid of them.