Tale Spin - II

"I was so stupid as a kid you wouldn't believe it." 

Now you must understand the strange effect this statement had on me. After all I  was a kid and she was my mother. I wanted to believe that she was smarter prettier and brighter than me at my age but she wouldn't let me have that. That's why her stories always left me ruffled, disoriented, shocked 

"...always wanted to be a good girl never thought of anything beyond. After all my father, your Nana Papa, was a doctor and Nani was a graduate. In those days it was a big thing. Imagine, she had four kids when she did her B.Ed. 

She always asked me to note down answers on the question papers but I never did that. I dreaded the exams but what I dreaded even more was what happened at home after it. She kept everything aside, brought out her slate board and chalk took the question paper from me, solved the sums and calculated how many I had got right. She was really smart.

Once I lied to her. That day we had a test and I must have been talking to one of my friends. So the teacher took away my answersheet and when she reached her table she looked at me angrily and tore it to pieces. 

I came home and told Mama the story with one minor adjustment: I replaced myself with 'one girl'. So, in that version one girl had kept talking throughout the test and finally the teacher had gotten so angry that she had torn her paper to pieces. The poor girl was crying in the recess and we had consoled her that nothing would happen. Now what will happen Mama? I asked her innocently. That day my lie played out but the next morning a blabbermouth of a classmate let the secret out. So that day, later in the evening, when Mama was giving me my usual bath she picked up the laundry bat and applied it on my back: 'A cheat and a liar... hun? Cheat and liar?'

How I spent the evening after that I don't remember but the next day when the teacher gave back the corrected answersheets I also got mine. It turned out that she had not torn my copy but some other papers lying on her table just to scare us off."

It was as good as I had seen it, my naani, the teacher, the exam papers... and me in place of that one girl  whose answer sheet had been torn off.

LIFE AND TIMES OF A LONDON THUG I Lionel Asbo - Martin Amis I

In a street thick with smoke, looters smash their way into a local shop, steal whisky and beer. One man grabs a packet of cereal, another runs off laughing with four bottles of whisky. Out on the street many are pushing shopping carts full of stolen goods down the street.

London was woken out of bed with reports of such scenes on the night of August 7, 2011. The cops called it copy-cat criminal activity.
Local leaders dissociated their communities from the “hooligans and greedy criminals”.
As the dust began to settle, one thing became clear, these were unrestrained youth, as young as 10, with complete disregard for authority and fearlessness of the outcome.
Lionel Asbo, the central character of Martin Amis’ eponymous novel, is also the product of London’s underclass that became conspicuous in the aftermath of the August riots. Lionel gets his first restraining orders at the age of three and takes up ASBO (Anti-Social Behaviour Order) as his proud title, in place of the family name Pepperdine.
Shaven-headed Asbo is a 21-year-old violent criminal with a penchant for pitbulls and a complete contempt for the law; someone who takes pride in being stupid on purpose. He serves time off and on offences mostly related to extortion and stolen property.
Asbo’s prime concern is the “morals” of his mother Grace Pepperdine. Grace, who had a “mischievous” youth, was a mother of seven by the age of 19. Of all her children no two had the same father except Asbo and Cilla, who were therefore called twins. A grandmother at 39, Grace is having an affair and Asbo gets the wind of it. He wants to dig out who it is and “deal” with him. “Noises”, “groans” and “giggles” are reported from Grace’s apartment. One of the most frequent visitor’s to her house is her grandson, Cilla’s son and Asbo’s protégé Desmond and Asbo asks him to keep on a lookout.
Terrified Desmond is guilty of incestuous relationship with his grandmother. Asbo corners Rory Nightingale, a younger schoolmate of Desmond for having a fling with Grace. Rory goes missing and nothing is heard of him again. Desmond lives the rest of the story in fear of the day Asbo finds out about him and Gran, particularly when she slips into dementia and starts babbling about her various relationships.
Lionel Asbo: Sate of England is Amis’ 13th novel.
Set up in a fictional London borough called Diston where no one lives beyond 60, the novel is as much a satire on London’s underbelly as on the celebrity-obsessed society. Amis is best known for his 1984 novel Money: A Suicide Note which is about the debut film venture of John Self, a slob and constantly drunk director. Among other things, Self is a consumer of pornography and prostitutes much like Asbo who uses his Mac only for watching porn and tries to inculcate these “values” in his nephew: “With the Mac you can have three new bunk-ups every day — by using your imagination”. Sexual revolution, spiritual vacuity, physical and moral decay are some constant notes of Amis’ works. His last novel, The Pregnant Widow, received much acclaim after a success-deprived decade. In The Pregnant Widow Amis went back to Keith Nearing, who had appeared in his first and much loved novel Rachel Papers.
The story of Lionel Asbo gets a twist when Asbo, who is serving time in prison, comes to know that he has won a lottery of £140 million. With a fortune behind, this time he secures an early exit from the jail and checks into a high-profile hotel in Soho. While the lottery becomes his short-cut to class jump he becomes the mandatory front-page tabloid puller for his irreverent antics.
Gradually, as he gets wrapped in publicity concerns, he and his glamour-model girlfriend plan abortion as an exit-strategy to sell their break-up. His nephew, Desmond, however charts a different life altogether. From a boy who was thrashed for watching Crimewatch (as it asked people to tell on criminals) and encouraged to smash some windows instead of writing poetry, Desmond grows to become a crime reporter, gets married to his childhood sweetheart and becomes a father, much to the dismay of his uncle.
Martin Amis’ father, the famous writer Kingsley Amis had found his son’s writing “onanistic” and liked it “sporadically”.
Martin, who has not won the Booker yet, has often cited the “taint of heredity”. Following harsh reception of Yellow Dog (2003), Amis had moved to Uruguay for two years. He is currently located in New York for family reasons.
While Amis’ current novel draws an interesting array of characters, including Asbo’s girlfriend Thernody and Grandmother Grace, the story itself is severely emaciated. The use of language, styling of humour and satire are Martin’s strong points but he falters for the want of consistency as he expands his narration.
In an age when Asbo can easily watch porn on his laptop, the lottery notice is delivered at his home in a letter and milk is still delivered in bottles at the door step. Desmond’s journey to becoming a father is stretched like the Indian soaps programmes that pause and zoom in on expression with the sole purpose of delaying the climax. Though, Asbo himself is a master character, you only wish that Amis had not digressed.
However, what has particularly not gone down well with Amis’ London readers is the sub-title of the novel State of Nation.
Asbo is an anti-intellectual thug who breaks up weddings, beats up old men at pubs and traumatises the syntax of his native language. His family is severely dysfunctional and his life is without meaning or redemption. Clearly, calling that the “State of Nation” is not kindly looked upon, notwithstanding the fact that similar simplistic and touristy descriptions of India are usually hailed as insightful and often bestowed an award or two.

HOME I TONI MORRISON I

On Sunday afternoon, June 25, 1950, broadcasters in the US interrupted regular radio programmes to report the first fragmentary dispatches disclosing that the Communists had  invaded South Korea.  President Truman, enjoying a quiet weekend in Independence, Missouri, rushed back to Washington and committed American troops to combat in Korea. Over 36,000 US troops were killed in the Korean War. This number was however much less compared to the 58,000 who were killed in Vietnam over the next two decades. The Fifties is indentified today as the decade of Marlyn Monroe,   Elvis Presley, launch of Sputnik, and the civil rights movement. It is associated more with the exhilaration of a new era than the return of war-scarred soldiers. Toni Morrison goes back to her memories of the decade in her latest novel Home and her impression of it is neither nostalgic nor euphoric.

The protagonist, Frank ‘Smart’ Money is a black man who has returned shell shocked from the Korean battlefield. It is his journey home to Lotus, in Georgia, and a subsequent discovery of it that forms the slim yet very visual story. Home engages readers at several levels and in varying degrees of complexity through a richly variegated narrative. Frank wakes up tied in a “nuthouse” and makes a quick escape. His journey, marred by his frail mental condition, is aided largely by the kindness of strangers. It is the memory of his sister Ycidra (Cee) that keeps him going despite painful black-and-white flashes and “visitations” from a zoot-suited man.  He must reach Cee soon or as the note threatened him “She be dead if you tarry.”

Morrison’s works are characterized by her attempts to tap the inner dissonance and demons. When Morrison was very young her parents fell behind with the rent and the landlord set fire to the house in which they lived. Writing her 10^th novel at 81, Morrison continues to draws heavily on her experiences of loss, uprooting and love.

Morrison, wrote her first novel, the Bluest Eye at the age of 39. This was the story of an 11-year-old black girl wishing for her eyes to be blue that highlighted sense of self-loathing induced by the prevailing concepts of beauty.  With the Bluest Eye Morrison touched a new aspect of black writing. She wrote as an insider, not one standing with the white audience but essentially sticking to her experience. Over the years she disagreed with Ralph Ellison’s positioning of the race in Invisible Man, “Invisible to who? Not to me,” she maintained.

Her 1973 novel Sula and 1987 novel Beloved, received much critical acclaim. While The Bluest Eye drew upon the memory of days when black was not beautiful, Sula and Beloved focused on the experiences of black women. In Beloved a mother prefers to kill her daughter than see her become a slave and in Sula the story traces the bond of friendship between two women. In 1993 Morrison was awarded the literature Nobel for “novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.”  She was the first black woman to receive the award.

Home is Morrison’s 10th novel and her first book after the death of her 45-year-old son Slade, from pancreatic cancer.

Morrison’s novels work at multiple levels simultaneously. At one step you will find her characters living out a complex black existence. At another you find them struggling with their roles as women or men. Take a step ahead and you find them denizens of the American nation and at another they are but humans complete with common emotions and an uncommon sense of honour. 

While it’s hard to focus on any one of these aspects, it’s nearly impossible to read her novels without the sense of history with which she writes. So if you are not on your guard you might miss the fact that Frank has to find his way at the back of the bus partitioned away from the “white folks”; a sign at the public lavatory dissuades him from using it and he is forced to relieve himself behind the bushes; a stranger helps him with a list of right type of lodging from where he won’t be turned away. A kind pastor warns him: “Listen here, you from Georgia and you been in a desegregated army and maybe you think up North is way different from down South. Don’t believe it and don’t count on it. Custom is just as real as law and can be just as dangerous.”

While Frank makes his way to Cee, we journey backward and relive the troubled times with the family that is driven out by the landlord. Cee is born in a church basement and as Frank takes charge of her the first word she learns to speak turns out to be “Fawnk”. Over the years it is the elder brother who protects her from a vicious step-grandmother and deceitful boys. But as Frank and his friends enlist for war Cee is left on her own. She runs off and marries a “rat” named Prince who leaves her soon after. She gets a job at Dr Scott’s clinic and as we find her looking at books on eugenics in the doctor’s library we know that she’s going to get into trouble. 

Frank finds and carries Cee, who is bleeding to death, back to Lotus. While the story is about finding a home on one hand it is also about redemption on the other. While Cee has to move out of her scared, scarred past, Frank has to make peace with the terrible war memories. Both incur irreparable losses and yet they struggle to make peace with their lives.  There are two voices in the story, one of a narrator and the other of Frank who time and again corrects and converses with the narrator. It is almost as if the character was speaking to Morrison and taking it upon himself to add to or correct her rendition of his story.  

Tale Spin -1

Its hard for me to say when she started telling me all these stories. They have been just lying in my brain like the first words I must have heard. For a long time I thought they were my stories. They would materialise out of nowhere striking upon my memory like some lost songs.
Often they annoyed me as they were not simple tales of gods-goddesses, animals or king . They annoyed me more since they sounded like they were my stories. They were stories of a girl, not sad or happy or motivating, but just incidents that hung there in time, sounding like stories because she told them like that.
She had away of telling those "no-stories". Sleep-time made her garrulous. She would yawn, grind her eyes, pick her nose, rub some cream on her hands, and talk on with or without an audience. Her skin was clear but I could always see the pores. There was a slight pink on her cheeks that was missing on mine. I was pale, almost green with veins running down naked along my chin and over the eyebrows. She would stretch her arms  and blow an " Oh Hho" through her teeth and rattle off... 

Crushes on wrong people: LGBT and a questioning Q I IN ONE PERSON by John Irving I

In a town called Little Sister in Vermont a 13-year-old boy is taken to the town library by his soon-to-be stepfather. The young boy Bill, who has a secret crush on his mother’s boyfriend, asks the librarian for a book on crushes on wrong people.

This is year 1955. The visit to the library is a moment of awakening for Bill and Miss Frost, the librarian, becomes the centre of his awakening for the next seven years.
Spoiler alert: It is impossible to write about this book without giving away the best, early surprises. After all, the story hinges on a process of discovery and acceptance of sexual choices. John Irving is not the writer for those who blush at the word sex. Draped in Irving’s words, sex and desire are powerful, unapologetic and unrestrained. So watch your step!
In One Person is Irving’s 13th novel. The story, as narrated by a bisexual male, is as much about sexual differences and tolerance as it is about his personal life and experiences. From being the story of a boy and a transgender the novel takes the whole town and several boys and girls who are “different” in its wake. It grows further, crossing cities and continents, attempting to become the voice of a period and of a silent battle for recognition.
As a young boy Bill has crushes on several people: his stepfather Richard, his school senior Kittredge, his best friend’s mother Martha Headley and not to forget the librarian Miss Frost. Bill hasn’t seen his father and is dolled out conflicting stories about his birth. His mother, he learns in due course of time, is somewhat sexually naïve. His aunt Muriel and grandmother Victoria are prudes who feel everyone else is below them. (Aunt Muriel keeps fainting at every mention of the word sex). Bill’s grandfather, who is a lumberman, competes with his daughter Muriel for female roles in the town theatre productions. Surprisingly, he is often preferred over Muriel. Cross-dressing grandpa Harry’s performances are loved by many but also equally reviled.
The Favourite River Academy, is a boys’ boarding school with its typical homo-hating culture. School psychiatrist Dr Grau tells the boys they are in “a polumorphous-perverse phase” and that they were experiencing “pregenital libidinal fixations”. The much-hated Dr Harlow, on the other hand speaks to them about “treatable afflictions” including “an unwelcome sexual attraction to other boys and men.”
While Bill’s life at the boarding school is occupied by his conflicting crushes, it is also occupied, in equal measure by theatre. Bill is cast in the role of “sexually mutable” Aerial while his nemesis Kittredge is Ferdinand and grandfather Harry is a female Caliban.
Bill has a speech difficulty. While The Tempest is being played, he is unable to say “Thou liest” or later the word “shadow” in King Lear. Miss Frost helps him with these two effectively but his difficulty with the word penis stays till the end. Kittredge, the seemingly alpha male, is the cause of much distress to Bill. He is a great wrestler and an equally good actor but he is also a bully. He calls Bill “Nymph” and is effortlessly mean to both Billy and his friend Elaine.
Bill is forced to come out with his sexual differences after a scandal that follows Bill’s discovery of the one-time unbeaten wrestling champion Big El. Soon after, Bill also cracks the puzzle about his missing father Franny Dean. Bill is barred from meeting Miss Frost who is suspended from the library and forced to relocate. Miss Frost leaves, but not before teaching Bill a wrestler’s “duck under”, preparing him for the fight he was yet to face. In 1961, Bill’s school life ends after a brief Europe tour with Tom Atkins who constantly yearns for Bill’s attention. Bill never sees Miss Frost again. But Kitteredge and Atkins resurge later, both with their pack of secrets and tragedy.
The story branches out into Bill and Elaine’s numerous experiences. In the 80s, “the plague” strikes. Bill loses several friends to AIDS. While Larry, once his professor-lover, toils to help the ailing, Bill watches from a distance. It is only when Larry falls ill that Bill takes charge and owns up responsibility to those like him.
Irving gives it the perfect ending with Bill resolving the most crucial and yet unexplored aspect of his life. The story is told in a tragi-comic light. While it is not what one would call a “simple story”, the humour brings in the sense of simplicity in a complex world. The cliché-encumbered grandmother, the aunt who doesn’t want to be stared at, the Norwegian lumberman who has a passion for drama or the “damaged” mother who is easily seduced, provide the essential breathing spaces.
In the novel, sex is crucial and bold. While it is kept between two people; man-man, man-woman, man-transsexual; sex here is more about individuals and their specific requirements and responses. Irving is not short of words while writing about sex, but in each case his purpose is clear. Far from being either comic or gagging, the sex scenes make you sit up and savour, irrespective of who is involved.
The ending sees a somewhat heroic return of Bill. He does for a “work-in-progress” girl what Miss Frost had done for him. A revolution comes of age as the girl introduces herself “Gee will do for now… but I’m going to be Georgia someday.” Moreover, its not just LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender), but also a Q for questioning.

BEGINNING OF THE END

The shadows are becoming stronger, darker, angrier. So quickly the day is lived, from the time you gleefully stamp it under your foot till it expands and dwarfs you. It’s one of those mundane events that you never notice but you always know about. But there are other shadows that dwell in the mind. Malicious, vengeful, ugly shadows. Lurking behind every dream, every joy and every thought. You can see them but you will not know them. 
You can’t crush them, can’t tear them and you definitely can’t kill them.   
I can see the future. Not yours but mine. Most clairvoyants will tell you they can see 
your future, not me. I can’t see your future because I can’t see the shadows in your mind but I can see mine. I hate calling them "my" shadows. After all I didn’t build them or invite them or rear them. They’ve just been there encroaching into my space. But then they decide my future so they aren’t anything but mine.


I am watching the deserted shore. The water has receded several kilometers. The seabed lies naked, still warm from the night’s affairs. Someone’s scared voice is calling out to me to run away. Am I not scared of the end? Don’t I want to live? Of course I am. 
I watch the giant wave crease the skyline.  I want to see what the sea looks on the underside. I think the view would be worth my life. 

Singapore’s Inspector Singh lands in Mumbai I INSPECTOR SINGH INVESTIGATES: A CURIOUS INDIAN CADAVER by Shamini Flint I

A Sikh cop in Singapore police is bullied into coming to Mumbai by his Indian wife. Inspector Singh is a murder specialist and the minute he reaches the flat of his wife’s cousin he knows something is afoot.
Shamini Flint, a Singapore-based author of the well-known series Inspector Singh Investigates, brings Singh’s investigation to India in her latest book. Singh is a turbaned Sikh whose father had left the country years ago. Mumbai, with all its tell-tale squalor and con-men, is a shock to him. His Google-savvy wife is more at ease though. The Singhs, who have come to attend a wedding in the family, soon realise that they have stepped into the middle of a crisis: the bride is missing. Instantly, Singh, who had
resigned himself to Indian hospitality, is back in his elements. He says what everyone suspects, "Perhaps she ran away". The grandfather of the girl is furious with Singh as are her two brothers. But their prime concern is to keep the cops at bay, so Singh is assigned the task of finding the girl. Ashu Kaur, the missing bride, is the favourite grandchild of Tara Baba, a reputed industrialist.
While Singh investigates, the cops report a charred female cadaver. Ashu’s elder brother Tanvir identifies the body by its ruby earrings. The family breaks into mourning. As Singh investigates, several skeletons pop out: a Muslim boyfriend, Ashu’s work at a slum near the factory where she was employed and a mysterious ailment, a money trail.
The final blow comes with the post-mortem report that says Ashu was pregnant. By now everyone seems to have a stake in Ashu’s death and Tara Baba trusts Singh with the task of bringing out the truth.
Singh finds that on the D-day Ashu had secretly met her boyfriend Sameer, visited her boss about the factory and was picked up by her younger brother who was out looking for her. As the mystery deepens Tara Baba himself is killed on the day of Ashu’s funeral and Tanvir swears to boot out the meddling Singh.
Flint weaves an exciting story with its fair share of twists, turns and drama. Singh makes an interesting investigative officer with his wife as his self-appointed assistant. The husband and wife, identified only as Mr and Mrs Singh, also bring in the essential comic relief. Singh fails to understand why anyone will ask for a washing machine in dowry as his wife explains the tradition to him. He is also at a loss why a girl may be killed for marrying outside her religion. Despite his pot-belly Singh is smart and agile. He picks up clues and hits it off with the local policemen. Flint’s novel is a quick and entertaining read and for the romantics at heart, it has a happy ending too.