Formication
It was of an evening like this that Megha might’ve been spotted cycling back home from the milk stall with a slab of paneer for the curry she’d promised to make for her mother that night. I say, ‘might’ve been spotted’ although I have no doubt she would’ve been spotted cycling at the centre of the empty street damasked with rain drops: but for that face-shield and mask and the silver Macintosh! and, what with the complete lockdown–nine hundred fresh Corona cases had been reported in the state; six hundred from the city of Bangalore alone; thirty odd people dead–what with the complete lockdown, if there had been someone out that evening, even on their balconies, having a spot of tea, to spot her.
Megha was a single daughter. She was now in her final year. B.A. Psychology. As a young girl she took to Zoology. She’d spend all her summer vacations at her mother’s college (where her mother was put on exam-duty) in the Zoology lab. where all sense of floor-space-index suddenly collapsed: jar after bell jar of reptiles, annelids, chitons, squids, cuttlefish and other creepy-crawlies extant in solutions of formaldehyde; so that later, as she’d help the attender, Hanumantharaj, pack and seal answer papers (all the time humming the rhyme, ‘Lightly row, lightly row, over the glassy waves we go!’ that Hanumantharaj would echo in a cheery country air!) she would wonder, lugubriously, if it might have been possible to preserve her dead father too in a jar of solution. From a very tender age she was informed in the art of not letting her thoughts through. Words reified.
Presently, she pulled up her bike, for by the kerb-side gutter, there lay two big Giant African snails and she could swear she saw a halo on top of their tentacles as a rain-beaten tabby kitten (people were now abandoning their pets for fear of Corona) tried to make a nosh of them one after the other and, one after the other, they slunk back into their shells.
.
As they had their dinner–the vegetable and paneer curry with tough, layered chapatti–her grandfather sketched out how the land lay for them, financially: not very good. The twenty lakhs superannuation pension he’d received when he’d retired lay stuck in a Life insurance policy; so that, he received fourteen thousand a month with which they ran the family. (In the event of his death of course the Principal would revert to his nominee: young Megha!but that wouldn’t do them much good now would it? their concern being how they might meet the expenses if, God forbid, they got Corona!) Much of their lifetime’s savings had been invested in buying the two storeyed home they were living in and which they’d been renting since Megha’s parents had got married. Megha’s mother hadn’tbeen paid salary for two months and all of her money– except for a stand-by fifty thousand–was invested in Fixed Deposit. She’d have to close it. There’d be a fine (1%). But after what had happened to–their neighbour– Usha’s family that morning (all of them had got Corona, and they had to pay an advance of ten lakhs to get hospitalised; hospitals weren’t even admitting patients without substantial down payments) Megha’s family decided, as they rose to wash their plates (a practice that Megha’s late father had introduced as he thought it extremely demoralizing to have another human being clean your dirties: the family had had the same home- help, one Sanchamma–who’d soon stop home-helping as her daughter’s got a job with Siemens!–for twenty two years!) Megha’s family decided that after the trip next day to the bank (where grandfather would put in a word or two of earnest request into the shell like ears of the manager, see if he could reduce the fine) after the trip to the bank, nobody, other than Megha was to leave home. Presently, they turned off the porch light. It was still raining. Megha helped her mother clean the grinder (they had just made idli and dosa batter for next week) and after swabbing the kitchen slabs clean, mother and daughter went upstairs, where Megha would spend two or three hours reading in the little library her father had left behind, as her mother would sleep after watching puppy videos...
It was she tells me when she was in the toilet and had seen an earthworm lay along the grout, two blocks further, another, and when she lifted them with a twig of the birch rod broom that she was reminded of a scene from my novel; she rang me and told me of her strange encounter with the snails which were presently in her room, dossing beneath a leaf on the dank of the pot of her turmeric plant.
.
Megha’s father was a dead ringer for Shakespeare. That gentle rondure of the pate; those deep sunken eyes red- olent of frivolous dreams for which no pair of pyjamas are thick enough. He died under mysterious circumstances. Doctors said it was Cardiac. But the family thought otherwise. He’d kept complaining that he felt the centre of his spine, which Woolf calls–in A Room of One’s Own– “the seat of the soul”, fizzing with a sort of spiritual yeast. He was a poet who grew up in London but returned to India and taught English at the same college as Megha’s mother because it worked out cheaper; also, Bangalore is perhaps the only city in the world that does not demand participation! and, it was the city of his forebears. A week before he died he’d sold his–5 kg of–sketches, drafts,correspondences, to the rag and bone man. But he’d left behind a library, and music! Oh my God, record after vinyl record, tape after magnetic tape of the finest of music–Hayden to Schoenberg with the occasional detour of Verdi, Rossini; Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev; the odd hairpin bend of Ravi Shankar, Bismillah Khan; cross roads and service roads of The Beatles, Led Zeppelin; the quiet and furtive gullies with overhanging branches of M.S. Subbu- lakhsmi–: the only ‘immovable assets’ he had left behind. That is, if you don’t count the pair of pyjamas, the grey cardigan and the checked half shirts and grey pinstripe pants that Megha wore on nights like this (when the Moon was full), when she was reminded of her body.
The scene from my novel Every Day is a Holiday that the wriggling worms had reminded Megha of is this: Two young women are having a bath, it has just rained, and they have just made love. They spot two leeches on the floor; one of them grabs a birch rod broom and smashes them dead and flushes them in the commode... After wespoke on the phone, I re-read the book and it was a very grim experience. I was reminded of anxieties I’d forgotten since I won the–landmark, 50th–Cocker Prize, 2019: ‘The year after which every day would indeed become a holi-day,’ as I put it in an interview. So, there I was, sat sitting, thinking of Arundati, whose mysterious death had sparked the novel, whose mysterious poem was the title of the novel, when at about 2:30 I got another call from Megha. The larger snail, with a scuffed shell, was still dossing beneath a fallen leaf, while the smaller one, with neat stripes on its shell lay looking at her with a dim yellow halo burning on its head!
.
I conducted a workshop recently where I spoke about how the Corona lockdown has taught us the differencebetween ‘Solitude’ and ‘Isolation’. Solitude is living with secrets in your hearts, waiting for the secrets to manifest themselves in a form that will always surprise you. No, it isn’t just the Conradian, ‘Being a writer who sails and not a sailor who writes,’: it’s... it’s like being a snail. You never leave your shell. After all, aren’t snails just slugs with a geometric burden on their backs?
I must’ve had Megha at the back of my mind because after that night she never called. It had been close on a year now and it was from her mother that I learned that she’d graduated, and had got a job as an English teacher with a coaching centre in South Bangalore... Megha and I go back years. Our mothers had taught at the same Ladies’ college in Jayanagar, and are very close. When I came back from Chicago, pale and cadaverous, having dropped out of the Master’s degree on which my parents had invested most of their lifetime’s savings, they were among the very few who visited us. Her mother cried when she saw me as mother smiled her martyr’s smile. Megha must’ve been in Tenth standard (this was in the June of 2016). I may have played some part in her choosing to study Psychology rather than Law, though she’d made it to some of the finest Law colleges in India.
Her mother had helped us out when we weren’t making any money. She’d got us a job at crib.com, an online student-help website where students post assignment and exam problems and experts like my mother (she is a retired maths professor) solve it for them! I’d do the photographing and uploading part–hardly a very suitable pursuit for a twenty six year old!–and the money would go to a joint account we had at a nearby bank at 4th block,with which I’d buy my books. So, when I won the Cocker Prize I naturally invited them for lunch, and exchanged numbers with Megha. I understood how hard it must be for someone with a mind like Megha’s in an age where the Arts in general and Literature in particular had become so–if you will forgive the adnomination–so abominably ad hominem. Hadn’t my own work been completely sidestepped in India–even by such obscure poets as were just Left enough to left alone–in 2019 when the centre passed majoritarian laws disparaging minorities? only a few Indian Classical dancers, and British academics remained interested... Then there was 2020, the ‘Liminal Peak’ as it were: the ‘Global Maxima’ of the dynamic Dramatic curve of the human apparatus. Suddenly, I was back in vogue! (at least in certain circles). I was asked to conduct workshops, give readings, submit fresh stories... The Sunday Reader (that had published my first story) had invited me to be chair of judges for their short story competition and I accepted hoping that some dotty reader of mine might write something cosseting! There’s a week to go for the deadline to finish, and for the sifting through to begin! I hope to get an entry from our Megha, and from one or two other dear friends I’ve made on Twitter!
.
‘Bavani! I need your help. Can we meet today? Like, now? A most remarkable thing has happened...’
I’ve just completed reading through the scribblings Megha had left behind. I would’ve raised an outcry if only I’d believed my eyes. But shock exists only for a single instance, after which the experience becomes perfectly commonplace! the memory-tree is jolted and the synaptic-snaps of older leaves leave but a faint sense of loss; but a more wizened bark!
It was four o’ clock in the morning and Megha was drooping asleep on her chair (she was apparently working on the story she was going to submit for me) when she found the snails (which apparently developed their halos only on full-moony nights like the last) sitting on her leg, when one of them (the little one, that lay on her right leg) looked up to her and, just as she was about to pet its shell as was her habit, said, ‘I wrote a novel once. In fact, itwas my last novel. I cannot believe it took me all those books, all those associations, all those disappointments, all those blunders; all those awards, to get to that last novel. Especially to that one scene about which I wish totalk.’ The diction was so slow (she says), she had to take notes even to keep with the flow, but gruff; a chant!
‘Two people are having sex. A middle-aged man and a middle-aged woman; and I describe in great detail all the paraphernalia around them – the furniture (bed, side- board, sofa) the wood old, patched, naked; the curtains, the material repeated in the sofa covers; the straw- plaited basket with neatly rolled cigarettes in it; the cigar box, the laughing Buddha beside it, with red matches sticking out of his bindle... At the end of it the woman is satisfied; and the satisfaction–that seems to come from far away–passes on to the man. What I was trying to explore was environmental psychology. The fact that we are surrounded by Forms. You could think of a Form as any product of the human imagination –’
‘Hold on,’ Megha interjected; ‘It’s nearly 4:15 and mother will be up anytime now for her pooja and will be cross
when she doesn’t find me by her side,’– the family had rented out the bottom portion of the house and so Megha had to muck in with her mother; she was presently in the library where the snails were kept–‘Let’s go to the toilet.
‘Go on then!’
‘All Forms–this toilet seat, that commode, that bum bidet, the rest of the plumbing, the pipes that lead to the septic tank, the condom bobbing there, the van the former owner of that condom drove to move your packets of paneer from the outlet, the paneer, the songs the sod hummed (and the radio) as he drove through all those electricity grids, all those electricity grids, electricity, grids, servers that store the videos you watched to learn to make the paneer dish, the paneer dish, the media platforms in which you posted photos of it: all things, all systems, the minutiae of the manifestations of human imagination–all Forms are built by making one central assumption: that (a certain way of?) fucking is normal.’
‘Are you trying to suggest,’ Megha interrupted, for she’d heard a pigeon croon in the toilet ledge, ‘that had therebeen a rock-pigeon thrumming on top of the wardrobe in their bedroom, your characters might not have been inquite the same “position”? what position were they in by the way?’
‘The Balinese style, if you must know, but that is neither here nor there – there is inner-space (the space in your head) and there is outer-space. The outer-space is the product of the inner-spaces of the more dominant; statues and street names; loudspeakers and roads; languages, and posters of vaunting heroes; all the systems of men shifting but from shit to shit, yet enjoying it.
‘Coming to the Arts. There are hardworking folk and there are folk working hard to amuse hardworking folk. Let us cast them to one side. Let us not be given to snootiness or snobbery; let us be just practical. Let us think of Kate’s last monologue. The Taming of the Shrew. I’m sure you’ve read it. And I’m sure you thought, How could a man like Shakespeare–whom Germaine Greer has called ‘The man of the millennium,’–go and write such absolute tosh? These were the classical times; where women’s bodies being ‘soft and weak and smooth’ were ‘unapt to toil and trouble in the world.’ Is it not fascinating how much our sense of toil has evolved? the hardware to software shift to which your generation has borne witness. But the idea of ‘toil’ interests me. Oh! to be able to go on remaining in stoic suspicion of ‘the Birds and the Bees’ the way we do in our early teens. Reminds me of Muriel Spark’s novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie where little Sandy wonders ‘surely people have time to think, they have to stop to think while they are taking their clothes off, and if they stop to think, how can they be swept away?’ Some five years later she fucks her arts master. By the time she realizes the enormity of the Universe, it’stoo late; she becomes a nun.’
‘You mean it’s like in that story by Davis where the narrator, a woman, says that when she was young she’d made the mistake of thinking that men were just like women and by the time she realized that this was wrong it was too late?’
‘Toil is kind of bellowed into us. (Or am I talking for myself? I used to be a man before I died and became a snail.) It kind of brings out the fire in you all that bellowing. It’s like cooking gas. It lights the hearths of these separate warm cells; but it could also blow up this bold imposing façade to Kingdom Come. Have you ever thought of how dangerous a place the kitchen is? That knife can slit. That fork can blind. That pestle can bludgeon. That gas-cylinder... All these are Forms. Products of man’s imagination, his Toil. Toil tames us.’
‘Many’s the night I dream of a man with nipples on the insides of his hands and feet; sticking there like barnacles they were. A clean-shaven slaphead with a slurp on his lips. Such a man would be incapable of violence.’ Meghasaid, and there was silence.
‘So he would. But “The non-existent,” as Kafka says, “is whatever we have not desired sufficiently.” and the more Dominant would not have been capable of desiring such things, (this is not a conspiracy: rather simply a problem of mediocrity, one that only Death can repair.)’
‘So it is, as Levy says in her latest, “We don’t have to conform to the way our life has been written for us –”’
‘All Forms are subject to decay because all Forms are built by making assumptions, signing treaties–like the fact that the sounds one makes by placing the tip of one’s tongue at various positions in one’s mouth, to various degrees of roundedness of one’s lips, now voicing one’s vocal-chord, now not, mean something to the other: these are treaties, assumptions–that are subject to decay. The rock pigeon is a Form. Created maybe in the first ages of Time, where we were free of Toil; where Light and Dark played sinusoid and reproduction was more equitable. Forms that stand the test of Time are Forms that make no assumptions. It is impossible for mortals like us (again, maybe I am talking for myself: a former man, now a voice) to create Forms comparable to those created then in the first ages of Time; the best we can hope to do is ‘to emulate’; to acquire ‘the wisdom of Humility’ as my poet friend here puts it.
‘My dear friend here who’s been so quiet all this while is a Nobel Laureate. Like me. Unlike me he has not been forgotten. Not that it makes any difference because we dead writers are either deified or reified because people either lean on the walls we built or try to pull them down whereas what we wanted was your help to help us helpyou build something more ‘sempiternal’ (as my poet friend might’ve put it) like ‘trees’ to shade Beauty from the arrows of Time.
‘All of us are going to be tamed like the shrew (young women like you who’ve marked the ease with which yourmen go topless of a warm Sunday afternoon know what it is I talk of?): the question is what aspect of masculinity are we going to allow ourselves to be tamed by: the Atlas, or the Hercules?’
‘Oh! it’s like in the novel Weight by Jeanette –’
‘The Atlas aspect of masculinity involves turning information to music. It’s a drive towards greater harmony, balance, equanimity; unmoving love. It’s truly androgynous. It doesn’t require you to possess a penis. Anyone can conduct Beethoven, sing Tyagaraja. (Fiona Shaw is my favourite Richard II.) Of course, I can’t deny that anyone cannot play cricket or wrestle or shoot or jig wearing loin cloths of a gingham pattern, but you must agree that it is bound to seem contrived: these demand sexually dimorphic differences in Fo–’
‘Freud calls it the Eros and –’
‘The Inevitable man. The one consolation of being Human is that every generation is different from the previous in a way the previous could not have imagined. That we are a species given to boredom! So that, there can be noDrama without ‘Conflict’. And the inevitable man is the source of ‘Conflict’. Now you might ask me, Can we turn the inevitable man to an inevitable woman? why not? as long as it doesn’t become just women’s wrestling. But what if we turned him to a snail?’
‘I get it, Black Vodka! where the hero’s got a burden on his back – he’s a hunchback you see – and the heroine chooses to date him over her boyfriend –’
‘Ever since we died we’ve lead a peripatetic life. We’d met in a reunion at Kensal Green where I live and where he’d visited me and asked me if we should take a ship to India. We both loved cats a lot you know, (he even wrote an anthropomorphic book on cats! ha ha ha) but cor! we weren’t half relieved when you saved us that evening from becoming ‘Wallah Wallah Catsmeat!’ And eh! We’d like to thank you for the names you’ve kept us! So warm! Albert and Harold! For what is writing but totting?
‘We’d like to thank you for all that delicious nosh and for keeping us so secret. And please take care of our children (as you can see, they’re just snails, there won’t be any halos, formication, I promise: we’re the last of our kind, and we’re going back –’
‘What you’re trying to say is, like Freud says –’
‘You think! what if the Inevitable Man was a snail? someone who can help alter, augment the story of your past with dialogue alone – without the need to vaunt sexually dimorphic differences in Fo–’
‘Could you please jack it in while I talk? It’s blokes like you whom Levy calls “The Big Silver”. I could always toss the pair of you out of the window you know. This time it won’t be cats – can you hear the stray dogs? they’ll make mincemeat out of you!’
‘Someone who can drive you acrobatic: up the wall and round the twist! without any dimi–’
‘Cheese it!’ the other snail snarled, pigeons started crooning, Megha shut her Diary, triumphantly.
‘Aah! Freud says in The Psychology of Love that sexuality is impossible without fantasy. So, every time I feel that monsoonal ferocity of need, I think, Where is the fantasy coming from? Who is spinning it into my mind, pelting platitude? What castration anxieties are they trying to muffle with this, their kettledrum agitations? When will our bodies stop excreting images in the form of groin juice? How will we reproduce then in a world like this? like pigeons, plants... snails? Don’t mention it!
‘Let’s go back to the analogy of the plumbing, (let me put you on the bath-stool – I need room to make my gestures): I think of the body as a plumbing system: there are orifices, and pipes: as long as you allow the right fluids to flow in and out of the right orifices, everything will seem ideal. Put a stopper to one of them and the system begins to wobble, leek, lesion; in the most untoward of areas.
‘Again, as you said earlier, let us not be given to snootiness, snobbery: variety is the life-breath of civilization: I cannot imagine living in a world where everybody is a prince Hamlet, and I cannot imagine living in a world where everybody is a teenage tearaway! Go away! We need balance! Our roles are chosen for us; by what I like to call the collective unconscious desire, to which we gain access only when we accept the constitution of silence –
‘No! I don’t think that I should take that tack: this whole “O there’s more to Love than just that inguinal shudder”!So, boring! I can see myself quoting from Church Going by Philip Larkin sooner or later down my narrative but at the moment I’m thinking of This Be the Verse, its coarse first line, “They fuck you up, your mum and dad.” From a tender age do we not think of our “mum and dad” as a part of this ‘Darby and Joan’ heterosexual fairy tale?Reminds me of something my friend Bavani says in her book Tom Tiddler’s Ground–’. Presently, the Morning Prayer call. Then a crazy rap on the door. It was Megha’s mother. She wanted to know just what Megha meant by staying up all night! Megha left the toilet with a (recoiled) snail perched on each hand and said she was working on the story she’d told her about – that there were just five days left for the deadline to finish and that she hadn’t even started – her mother asked her if she’d seen the photos of the Queen of the Night blooms she had WhatsApped her – she hadn’t – there were two flowers and she’d just given one to their neighbour for their morning pooja – the morning prayer call ebbed with a dying fall – Megha thanked her mother for the tea, latched her door, and got back to work.
‘It’s growing dawn ain’t it? I’d better hurry. Look, if you decide not to go back and to stay here with me I’llintroduce you to Bavani. She is a great writer you know [sic], I thought so. Suit yourself! I’ll read out that portionfrom Tom Tiddler’s Ground!
‘Google Tiresias, and you’ll find that he had had a wood nymph for mother and a shepherd for father. My story. I know that shepherd. You had to wait for at least as long as you ate for him to finish. (Then, ask him to wipe that bit of curry, sticking at the back of his left ear.) I know that wood-nymph. She’d fast on the sixth day of every
waxing lunar phase for one god, Mondays for another, Thursdays ... ask the pigeons to wait while she prepares their nosh, gasp when the red-cheeked warblers sang by the lily plant where she’d cut them papaya pieces... I couldn’t do what daughters in happy families do – let the idea of their mothers die with the idea of their fathers that is getting old, outmoded, in PG’s words. In other words and not to put too fine a point on it, I couldn’t fuck.
‘Who’s PG? He’s a lad you see; his mother’s a poet! Both characters from Tom Tiddler’s Ground (but I feel they’re based on real folk); he writes this review of Bavani’s debut, from which she quotes in Tom Tiddler’s Ground –
‘... like Freud says we always marry (= fuck) updated versions of our mothers; is that not another way of saying, When we marry... we allow for there to be an updated version of our mothers and society makes this ‘matricide’ seem perfectly normal? is that not also another way of saying we can marry... only if it’s possible for there to be an updated version of our mothers?Bavani’s is the story of a mother and a father who aren’t a part of the same ‘Darby and Joan’ heterosexual fairy- tale. The mother isn’t a part of the idea of the father that is getting old, outmoded... If Oedipus was the tragedy of the Old World, is Bavani the comedy of the New?
‘I’m glad my father died before he could turn churlish. I’m glad you both died before we could have this, our little Formication! Come, sit on my lap! you are one of my favourite poets and you’ve been so quiet all this while! You know, I have most of your poems, recorded in your own voice, on my phone! please recite something for us! Do you want some tea?’
‘Well, this cold clay clod/ Was man’s heart/ Crumble it, and what comes next?/ Is it –’ ‘God?’ they all cried in one breath! and laughed, as they’d all read the Robert Browning poem.
‘One has to imagine,’ Megha went on ‘an erect penis and draw a Free Body Diagram: tie a spring balance along it, hooked at its tip, cause it to erect, record the reading. Multiply this answer by 9.8, the gravitational constant, as spring balances are calibrated to measure hanging masses. Call this force Fk,n (that is, the Erective Force corresponding to the kth erection of the nth penis). Consider its vertical projection (the component that counters gravity); i.e. Fk,n sin(θk,n) [where θk,n is the angle of slant between the penis and the horizontal: i.e. the angle at which the penis lances]. Now consider the force Ftot = Σ Fk,n sin(θk,n): the force exerted by all erections of all penises in the world: and I dread to think what this force might be equal to: because after all sexuality is a product of fantasy. Is this force equal to the Herculean Horsepower that drives the world: all the pneumatic drills, metro rails, mining blasts, steamrollers...: Forms that man creates to evolve himself?’
‘Reminds me of something I say in my fourth–also my breakthrough–novel: I say this towards the end of the second chapter, “My encounters had taken me beyond the stage when a girl seemed something of a tender loveliness, and it was a marvel that any creature so soft and refined might welcome the attentions of tight, tough men.’’ ’
‘If you weren’t a snail I would have recommended the story Cave Girl by Deborah Levy but as it is –’
‘“Make sweet some vial;” as the Poet puts it “treasure thou some place, With beauty’s treasure ere it be self-killed:/ That use it not forbidden usury,/ Which happies those that pay the willing loan;” We have paid the “willing loan” and we are able to access “beauty’s treasure”: Cave Girl, Levy, Deborah; noted, please go on.’
‘If you think in terms of stored energy of course the equation becomes more eerie don’t it? Let’s start, for the sake of simplicity, by associating each penis with a spring constant, Kn. Tabulate the various Fk,ns and the corresponding Δxk,ns, that is, the extensions caused by erection. Then, Kn = mean of [quotients of Fk,ns÷ Δxk,ns]. If you were to model the penis as a spring–a ‘gross’ approximation! because really it is a cantilever of sorts ain’t it? so one has to take into consideration the ‘Strain Energy’ as well: I’ve been wondering how I might restructure this problem so that I may get my mother (she’s a Physics lecturer you know) to solve it!–if you were to model the penis as a spring: then the mean energy stored in the nth erect penis, En = mean of [0.5 (Kn)(Δxk,ns)2]: again I dread to think what the sum total of this energy Σ En across all the penises of the world might be equal to! But I think it’s equal to the heat given by the Sun. And that without this the Sun would be just a puling ball of delicate light, and Time, without its battery would stop and Persephone will return to Mother, forever, with arms full of ripe mangoes. And what will be the ‘source of conflict’ (for there needs must be one) in this idyll? We’ll cross that bridge when we get there!’ ‘Ha ha ha!’ they all laughed. ‘But as it is,’ Megha resumed, adjusting the saucer on her lap gingerly, as the snails were sipping tea from it, ‘I am interested in the return of Persephone. It reminds me of something my friend Bavani says in her novel – “My mother is summer, I am winter, my father is on his fahrt”!’ they laughed again. (In order to appreciate that joke you need to know that the word fahrt in the German tongue means ‘journey’!)
 |
| Want to purchase a beautifully printed chapbook version of this story? Contact us now on WhatsApp |
‘The world is always journeying. Fathers are always on their fahrt. “Shifting but from shit to shit,” as you put it, “yet enjoying it”! But as for mothers, two images come to my mind: One, the image of Thetis (the poets Carol Ann Duffy and Jo Shapcott have written very evocative poems on the subject: I should fish them out of beauty’s treasure if I were you). Thetis, wood nymph and shapeshifter, tamed and turned into the fixed Form of a mother (again, as you put it earlier you know, it is not a conspiracy, just a case of mediocrity on the part of the more dominant, one that only Death can repair); but the injustice meted out on her ‘bursts out’ in the form of Achilles: war, calamity, death, repair. Is this what Shakespeare had meant to convey through The Taming of the Shrew? (something I understood only after I got my present job as a teacher and was tamed out of my adolescent apathy for the inartistic; now I teach kids reading comprehension and vocabulary and grammar and my phone is full of hard words they message me daily! I have introduced them to Virginia Woolf and the rest of the pantheon and I am sure the injustice meted out on me–the terminal invisibility, the ridiculous salary, the typing in of answer keys–will burst out, in the fullness of Time, in the form of Art.)
'The second image is–it is beginning to grow dawn isn’t it? I’d better hurry! I want to be done with this, ourformication, rather sooner than later, and I do think it is a good idea that you both leave! no offence youunderstand! it’s just that one wants to be left to one’s own devices and having two-two Nobel Laureates around can be a bit of an intrusion! I am glad you agree! And I also hope you understand that it is hardly likely that I get this intimate with another breathing soul! So thanks!– the second image is The picture of Dorian Gray; but no, I can already see myself write a story exploring this image, and I suggest you fish it out of Beauty’s Treasure, if it getsthat far! but you see what I mean don’t you? replace the ‘Picture’ with the image of the mother...
‘It’s really eerie... A Form formed of four Forms: Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time, all bunged together alone is stable. The ‘Formal’ difference between this Form and the Form that we represent is what flows out–almost as if in accordance to Ohm’s Law–as groin juice. A Form like this, being so ‘ephemeral’, as elusive as the waxing sliverthe second night after New moon is bound to be philoprogenitive. It sprays Forms–the way you snails spawn, all of them its own images: but with minor shifts in alignment making them ten times happier! ten times more gifted, graceful, garrulous!–it sprays Forms until it is perfectly concealed, and irrelevant, served, by those who chose it, and those who oppose it.
‘Your characters were serving too (in the–what was it?– Balinese style! ha ha ha!) you could think of us as floating on a lake; all around us, bobbing like lilos: these Forms, that the more dominant spin in to the limpid waters; we need to hold on to them, or we’ll drown into the depths; you’re characters were serving by easing the Toil that has gone into creating the Forms they were holding onto so that the Forms that will come, (because lilos lose air and those holding on to them sink, with them; the spirit of holding on, of easing toil, of dominance, is passed on) will involve less Toil: the hardware to software shift to which, as you said, my age has borne witness.
'When you hold on to Forms, when you allow them to keep you afloat, you automatically subscribe to the‘assumptions’ on which they’ve been built: that is, as you put it, (a certain way of?) having sex is normal; (a certain way of easing?) Toil is normal, because if you don’t, again, as you put it, the kitchen will become a dangerous place! All the violence that the Forms were built to veneer, so that it might slowly drown and pass off unnoticed, will begin to show up. The solution then, is not Hermitage! No, the idea is to learn to move in measure like a Dancer. To stop holding on to Forms but rather to learn to use them like the five year old Krishna dancing his tillana on the hood of the five headed serpent polluting the waters of Yamuna with his soft, lotus-pink feet – fleetingly.’
‘Remember me, aah... ’ the poetic snail sang, in the air of Dido’s lament, but it was the novelist, little, striped, that
Megha kissed bye-bye as a tear left her left eye.
‘I see you in dreams blubbing in Metros, listening to sad string quartets, asking people who come to offer succour to scram as you are in the midst of a crucial experience! I see–as Deborah Levy puts it (I am not the Big Silver!)– you’ve made it your professional business to understand that no one respects ruddy-faced happiness. I see in you a female Kurtz. Someone who broached “beyond the bounds of permitted aspiration” becoming “an animated image of death”, and I see what an improvement this is going to be. I see you, sipping tea of an evening, cocking your little finger in the air as you hold your tea cup as the dim dynamo-bulb that all the wheels of Time Civilization spins to channel its violence keep a-lit. I see in you all the better parts of me. And I see what a poor father I am, with nothing–ؘ like power, money, title, or wit–to leave behind, save Friendship.’
.
‘Halo Bangalore!’ was the headline the next day. 25/May/2021. (You can check if you like!) And that was what made me doubt the possibility that she’d dreamed the whole thing up! because according to her, by the time she’d finished compiling up these papers, (they’re pretty neat!) the smaller snail was nowhere to be seen and the larger one was shinnying down the drainage pipe; its halo was dimming the way it always did as day broke; this was when she rang me; came home, left these papers with me; it must’ve been, what, nine thirty? Then she had a doss, and it was I who rang her at about one when my mother’s phone was full of the Monday morning miracle! of the circular halo like rainbow all around the sun, that had excited all of Bangalore! I could not help putting two and two together and I asked her if she could join me for lunch. I live in a dim, dour yellow house–I own–in theapartment adjacent to my parent’s and after we ate at my parent’s, we left there. I asked if she wanted some help sorting the stuff into a story. No.
‘That’s Marangoni effect!’ she said, swooshing her finger towards the wall lit yellow by the table lamp where my wine glass–with the red, cheap Chilean wine in it–cast fantastic patterns over the leaves of the Elephant bush.
‘I want you keep the papers, I just want them out of my hair!’ she said, ‘I don’t have any duplicates.’
‘Maybe I’ll use them,’ I said, I was trying to test, for surely, if she wasn’t labouring under a delusion and if she had actually put in the literary labour to come up with all that dialogue, it was hardly very likely that she’d let such a famous writer as me take possession of these papers. Or, were there wheels within wheels? was she trying to trick me into something? how to know? ‘I’ll give you some fictional name of course; I’ll call you Megha or something like that! And I’ll use just the nub – but I’m curious, when did you say the snail first “spoke” to you?’
‘At exactly five fifteen: When I put the snails back on their pot and left to make myself a pot of tea, and then Icame back, and started to fill up the blanks I’d left in the first bit for the things that I had said (which isn’t much as you noted: but I was astonished to have had total recall) and then I got to the second bit, my monologue, and again, I seem to have felt... possessed! like some kind of an oracle, I felt the spirit of my father thickening down my spinal column, I just put pen to paper and – ’
‘What music were you listening to?’
‘You mean, while I was preparing these notes? John Coltrane of course; My Favourite Things; on loop... Anyway, I made myself some five pots of strong black tea, and it took me about two hours to compile this whole thing, and by the time I was done the little snail was nowhere to be seen and I saw the poet, shinnying down the drainage pipe. The pang was brief.’
‘There are seventeen pages of notes here. The first bit– that you say went on for an entire hour–is seven pages long, how many words do you make that out to be? Roughly–ten words a line, and–one, two, three...–twenty five lines so–two fifty words a page: so that’s–zero, thirty five, seventeen–thousand seven fifty words, lets round it to thousand eight hundred, and your bit–here, here, here, here, here; here and here,’ I said, circling said portions with pencil, ‘they can’t be more than three hundred – so that’s thousand five hundred words your snails “spoke” in an hour... twenty five words a minute?’
‘Yes! They spoke in a long-long-short-long-short-long pattern: ‘twooooo pee-ee-ple are hææææving sɛɛɛx’: that’s how they spoke: more like a chant. I had to write down what was said, even just to stay with the flow!’
‘Your bit is about ten pages, so that’s two thousand five hundred words, spoken in fifteen minutes?’
‘I told you, I felt like an oracle, it was a most bacchanalian experience.’
‘Would you care for a noggin?’ how affected had these words sounded? reminding me almost of the time I’d had tea with Arundati, at Chicago, two weeks before she died of asphyxiation, in Bombay, leaving me feeling alone, and friendless. ‘Do I draw out the tibia liquida then?’ I saw her rifling through her phone and presently, she said she didn’t want any alcohol, as she had to drive back home and the police were stopping almost everybody, what with the lockdown. She left the notes with me and kissed me so hard and so suddenly that after two years of being a non-smoker I smoked and my legs wobbled.
I was not sure until today morning as to whether or not to have this story published because I felt convinced that she was having me on. (Though why?) I am glad I left very strict instructions with the twenty member sifting committee (that includes me too) of the Sunday Reader short story competition. ‘Okay,’ I said to them ‘we’ve received 31,257 entries! let’s give ourselves full freedom to reject, disqualify, but I want to read the first line, only the first line, or the first fifty words, whichever is shorter, of all the 31,257 entries! So let’s populate a spread sheetwith the following fields: 1) Title of work, 2) Word count, 3) Epigraph 4) First line, and 5) web-link to access the file. I’ve started working on my portion, I’ll mail you all a sample!...’ I say I’m glad, as it was in the rejectedsection, that I found a first line–‘Snails, (like all things hermaphroditic?) are philoprogenitive! (like you perhaps)they are also home birds.’–a first line that made obvious who its writer was! I downloaded the file, read the story, shortlisted it; though there was much cavil.
‘I thought we should disqualify it,’ one of the other judges, a spry old lady who was also the editor of the magazineOff Print that had published one of my earlier stories, said.
‘But the writer hasn’t displayed their name anywhere, isn’t that your own only criterion for disqualification?’
‘But he mentions –’
‘How do you know it’s a “he”? the narrator is male, and the story deals with male sexuality, but-uh –’
‘I don’t think it matters, the writer mentions your name, and also the name of the competition; he/she could – ?’
‘You know that, I know that, but does the Language know that?... look Indirakshi,’ that was her name, ‘Indira,judges, critics, editors, like you and me, we come and go, like fart, we are here to serve something much larger – we are here to serve Literature. Of course he/she has broken all rules, but don’t you think that he/she has worked up to it? Does any part of it seem contrived? Does it not have the readability of a P.G. Wodehouse? Does Plato not name his contemporaries in Symposium? Surely, the writer is a young person, still unformed, still forming – a formed writer would hardly use words like ‘philoprogenitive’, and be so preoccupied with snails and pigeons and their breeding habits, so, Indira, let’s not be such old fogeys, besides, it was to me that all the 31,527 were writing, only she,... (I think it’s a “she”) seems to have–gone a bit further on and–written for me! No, I think I should stick to the technicalities, Indira, if I were you: in two thousand eight hundred words the writer is able to present to us an–Indian variant of–Oedipus! and the Drama is self-contained! it truly is a miracle! In fact, I have put it down for the first prize!’
.
Second prize actually, but I haven’t told her though she is now my colleague at Iuris: Bangalore’s top institute–started by me–that trains students for LEX! Legal Exam. (If you know anyone taking the exam vying for admission into India’s top Law colleges do contact me won’t you!)
I’m thirty one, and it’s about time I thought, I put my finger on the financial pulse of the State!
We started last month (24/Sep/2021 to be exact) when the corona cases had gone down substantially but the rents were yet to go up, so that, we were able to rent a 3560 square feet office, right adjacent to Ganesh Darshan, Jayanagar 4th block, for just thirty thousand a month; two years rent paid in advance. We–that is I, Megha and S whom I met on Twitter: she’s an Indian Law University Gujarat, graduate, and a postgraduate from MISS–we have seventeen students enrolled with us at the moment, and about fifty we are hoping to convince to get enrolled with us. I’m sure we’ll do well!
S is a young woman (she’s two years older than I am) of great appetite, and she’s had a great influence on Megha. I’m glad this is so. I don’t want Megha to turn into a wet blanket like me. Sometimes on Friday nights they comeover to my place and we split a bottle of Mother’s ruin between us, listening to jazz and pop, and after this they take a taxi down to their digs, and what debauchery goes on there the Gods only know!
On nights like these–is it the alcohol, the fried fish S orders and we all eat so vaguely, the lighting: the dim eternal yellow of the inside of a grotto: I don’t know–I find myself pent in a bourn of blue funk, as I am reminded of my days at Chicago, with Arundati: of how the thin string that joins the two worlds making them much like one another, changed hands between us: two young, dotty women in their mid-twenties. For that–2014/2015–was surely still the last of the other world: the storm was still in the offing... It kind of reminds me of something mydancer friend, Nikita Nambi, says in her personal blog– her daughter’s folk tale by the way has been nominated for third prize! I, of course didn’t know of this until yesterday (all entries were judged anonymously, it only so happens that I was able to recognize some of them: like Megha’s, and a minor poet’s which has won the first prizeby the way!)–my dancer friend says this in her blog:
... I’d be thinking of a beautiful line from the poem Church Going by Philip Larkin (which defines my fraught relationship with Hinduism): “But superstition, like belief, must die,/ And what remains when disbelief has gone?” I’ll tell you what remains after disbelief has gone. A new kind of belief and superstition. That is more accommodating?
The storm will destroy belief, superstition. Strip veneers, expose. Then disbelief will go and wonder alone willprevail, and we’ll think, ‘How nice and effete the World’s become!’ and thank all those who shed blood for it.
.
I am going to publish this piece on my private blog only so that only those of you, my best of dearests, who’ve come this far into knowing me, might apprehend it! Please let me know how you feel about it. In other news, I’ve taken a huge bank loan (specifically for tax rebate) and have purchased a farmland at Nelamangala, and we’re thinking of moving there! I am on the wagon again! Megha has left to the UK for her masters, and my mother has taken her place: she teaches maths and reasoning at the Iuris, which now gets two hundred odd enrolments! S, left too. She’s now an editor with a leading Hourly! (ha ha ha! what else do we call these digital news platforms?), we keep in touch on Twitter. It’s only mother and me now on the academic team, my father helps with the logistics (we are an all India institute now and there are course modules that need to be shipped!) and Shanti–Malathi’ssister (their grandfather if you remember reading in my chapbook Tom Tiddler’s Ground was my grandfather’sboss! and had given us a cow and her calf on which much of my grandparent’s fortune was made–Shanti is head offinance! it was she who’d suggested taking the loan!
As I conclude this piece, I find myself looking at Arundati’s poems; the drafts her sister had mailed me; weeks before she died. All the poems are struck out, except the one after which I named my debut novel – Every Day is a Holiday... The one line I keep coming back to is from a poem titled Menarche where she says, the idea is to be a bridge between Moon and Earth. How very cheeky? I mean, you could think of Moon as Style and Earth as Plot. You could think of Moon as Coherence and Earth as Complexity; or think of Moon as Universality, Earth as Localness; or even Moon as Architecture and Earth as Interior Design. Moon as Public Declaration, Earth as Private Love Letter...
Young people will be trained generation after generation to produce anything for which there is a demand. I am just a minor cog, but maybe the purpose of my life is to help create a demand for the arts. Push the arts into the market. You say, I am beginning to sound churlish? Maybe I am, but are we not living in a world that is arranged for churlishness? a world in which Arundati had to die for me to live?
So, when I conduct workshops and am asked that most pertinent question – ‘For whom do you write?’ I say, ‘Iwrite for the language. Writing is never just writing. You are making your stories, the stories of the people you represent, a part of the story of the language – a part of the anfractuous course, of the diachronic journey of thelanguage; it’s like they say in Artificial Intelligence,’ I tell them, ‘they call it “Training the Algorithm” – you have to train the language – make the language recognize new faces, voices, circumstances...’ I know that’s just a load of academic rhubarb, but how should I tell them that everything I write is a private love letter for Arundati?
.
Comments
Post a Comment