Time Starts Now

 

St. Rati (14-06-22): My puppies are stuffed like potatoes in a white cloth bag dangling at the handle. I am standing on the deck the way I always do early in the morning when Sahana’s daddy takes us (grudgingly) to the ground where Sahana takes me for walkies. Only, Sahana isn’t sitting in the pillion now; this makes me a bit nervous.

 

I think of Sahana. Her caresses and brushes, her pats on my breeches; I think of the last treat I wheedled out of her: Duck and chicken chunkies! I think of all these things as it begins to rain. I can hear my puppies wheeze and whimper. And then, suddenly, complete darkness.

 

I begin to howl as I feel that something terrible is about to happen… It’s a deep lane, shuttered with branches. We reach the butt-end. We stop. I hear the clack of bangles. Then, Plop, Plop, my puppies roll like potatoes onto the road even as the thunder rolling in the clouds. Then I feel a kick at the small of my back. I yelp and yowl. Leap. And there she leaves us, Sahana’s mother. Abandoned.

 

Sahana (24-09-20):  I haven’t eaten for two days. I want to go back home. Grandma’s house is boring. Dad has lost his job. His company’s laying off. I’m sick and tired of taking online classes from granny’s. I want to get back to my friends. But these are not the reasons for which I have not eaten for two days: I want permission from my parents to adopt this beige little puppy that I feed milk and buns in the morning every day. I call her, Angel. And if ever you lay eyes upon her, you’ll know the reason why!  

 

St. Rati (15-06-22): As I dig into this wet cement mound our bed for tonight I am aware of a certain sheen falling off my face: deep, suspicious sunken eyes are in the offing as I measure out how many days I might still be able to give suck off my emaciated dugs. Will these two puppies die like the rest of them? Why are the other dogs so indifferent to us? Will I be separated from my puppies the way I was from my mother? What’ll I do then? they’re all I’ve got. I think of these things as, biting slightly at their tender necks, I lift my two puppies up, drop them into our freshly-made bed, and curl around them like a dragon…

 

At dusk, I’d fainted. I came to when my puppy (the black one: the beige one is always sleeping) licked me all over my face and asked for suck. I hadn’t eaten since Sahana’s daddy had had froth all over his mouth–his hands all frozen up–and was taken from home. We trudged a little distance and there waiting for us was nourishment, in the form of dry, no, congealed, cow dung.

 

Sahana (02-11-20): ‘Angel, Angel, come, good girl: here, have a treat: Duck and Chicken minis, good puppy.’ Dad has enrolled for an MBA program now that he is out on his ears. He’s been given six months’ notice. His Iranian boss didn’t have a very high opinion of him. Mummy is tense. ‘Our daughter’s still in seventh standard and my husband’s lost his job. We have no one for help,’ she says to relatives. ‘What rot,’ they reply, ‘He gets rent from two flats. Plus, there’s his savings, and your mother’s rich and you make a little something at that school where you teach.’ Mother  and  I go  to the  same  school. She  teaches maths  for tenth  standard.  Perhaps,  that  is  why father married her: free tuitions for his kids…

 

We took Angel to a vet. this morning: all double-masked and gloved and goggled up. The first wave has just ebbed and all we three–mum, dad, and I–have been fortunate to escape its maw. Anyway, we took Angel to the vet.: got her dewormed, tick-picked; had her little jacksie pricked with vaccines!  

 

Angel is such a clever girl: it’s been, what, two weeks since we’ve had her? and she’s already stopped peeing in the house! Mother watched some YouTube videos and drained towels with her pee and put these towels in the balcony and trained her! Now she whimpers each time she wants to pee and I just open the balcony door and she pees there and I clap and give her some treats: Duck and chicken minis.  Can you even compare her with Aashu’s dog Frodo who, though he is all of four months old, still pees and poops all over her house and Aashu stinks of it: dog pee. I remind her of this each time she reminds me of how  Angel   is   just  a  street-dog  whereas her Frodo is a Labrador. ‘Labrador he might be, Aashu, but he is incontinent. And sure don’t you smell of his pee? Doesn’t your mummy wash your clothes Aashrita?’ I asked her once and she stopped going on and on about it. Anyway, my other friends prefer playing with Angel because she is so amicable, whereas Frodo is a hyper.   

 

Animesh (19-11-20):  Twenty five years I’ve worked for that company. I’ve given it my entire youth. And what do I get in return, for all that loyalty? the sack? Anyhow, they’ve given me six months. Also, there’s the PF money: it’s quite huge actually: in the vicinity of 50 lakhs: but Jhanvi wants me to deposit all of it in an FD. ‘For Sahana’s education,’ she says. Personally, I was thinking of making a Blue-chip investment. Bank interest rates have gone down. Expenses have gone up.  What with this dog that Sahana insisted upon adopting… 1600 bucks for a couple of dog injections! 1600! ‘Animesh,’ I said to myself, ‘You’re in the wrong trade mate. What UPS system designing? what power quality engineering?...’ And 400 bucks for deworming! 600 for the collar and leash,  then   shampoo,  spa! And  food? day  light  robbery:

 369 bucks, for a 1 kg pack of dog food?  

 

Shruti (13-10-22):  Food, food, food, food, food, food, food:

For a beige little pup – that’s good

Enough. I’m just three months old

But am as tall–so I’m told–

As mommy. Daddy wakes us

At five, and then she takes us

Walkies: I’m the youngest pup

Out on leash; I chase grown up

Dogs across the street. I love

The playground at one remove

Where daddy bolts the gates so

We can leap like loons, and hoe:

Oh! how we like good, tilled earth!

Half an hour of distilled mirth!

 

Daddy’s a good girl, she is:

She scoops our poop, hides our piss!

Baths us. Her mom’s a problem:

She wallops me on my bum

When I pee on the marble floor.

I get depressed, and pee more.

But she feeds me a medley:

Corn, dates, and ragi idli!

And as I eat boiled vegetable

Straight out of the dinner table:

She calls me a sambhar deer!  

As I lick the sambhar clear.

Daddy works to earn our keep.

In the nights we piggy sleep.

 

Dogs are echt and cats are kitsch:

Our emotions are expansive;

Our air: that of Lake and Beech,

Our sense organs: responsive.

Daddy says my ears do form

The well know shape of ‘tilde’:

A Valkyries’ hat in a storm:     

Daddy thinks I’m Brünhilde!

Mother licks me on my cunt:

I think this a bad habit; [Sound of horn]

Perhaps she thinks: I’m the runt,

So I think I’m a rabbit!

If only humans horned to Intimate and not to Intimidate how much quieter would our lives then be? Let me rest my snout at the edge of this here sofa and snooze, like this here mommy. We observe you know, Mom and I, we know the names of everyone in the house who have their names called out. I have plenty of names: Potato, Pattu, Momo, Kutti; but Daddy named me Shruti. Mommy, has just one name: Rati. But when daddy calls mommy by her name I go too: why miss out on a treat? The person daddy calls Lakshmi (her mommy?) comes to me every so often and smothers me with kisses and makes clicking sounds. Daddy cuddles mommy more than she cuddles me. I bark to record my remonstrance. The person daddy calls Lakshmi thinks mommy is a saint because she’s ever so finicky about what she eats and is so quiet and, most importantly, she never pees at home. We, that is mommy and I, know the names of all the kids who come to our house to play with us, and the home-help’s.  But there’s this other person in the home who’s very kind but we don’t know their name because their name is never called out; sometimes this person accompanies us for walkies. They have a dent on the head… Oh! and daddy’s name  is

 Bavani.  

 

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II

(18-12-22 ) In the first ever attempt of such a kind, winner of the prestigious Cocker Prize, Bavani of Bangalore, in an exclusive interview with Audacter Calumniare, will answer questions posed by our subscribers! The thirty two year old writer had made her mark with her debut novel ‘Every Day is a Holiday’ that had won the landmark 50^th Cocker Prize in the year 2019, ‘The year after which every day would indeed become a holiday,’ as she puts it in an interview. The novel has been attached with such epithets as ‘prophetic’, ‘symphonic’, ‘incendiary’… and two years since it came to limelight, still enjoys an ever-expanding readership, perhaps because it continues to be as elusive as its writer, who never attends Lit-fests, talk-shows; has fully eschewed the Publishing Industry: publishing her stories instead only on her own private website: www.shortillas.com to which one has to subscribe to read her stories, and receive copies of them in the form of printed pamphlets… Bavani lives in Bangalore with her parents, and her two puppies: Rati and Shruti.

Asawari: How was your ‘Corona’ experience?

Bavani: Funny actually. Did you know that my mother and I were born on the same day so that I was mother’s birthday gift? I mention this is in one my stories: Anyway it was on this day–22/Mar/2020–that the government had announced the first ever lockdown: you must remember it: ‘Janata Curfew’ I think it was called; for five minutes at 5 o’ clock in the evening people were clacking plates to demonstrate gratitude for healthcare workers (some took it to the extreme: they turned it into a sort of pageant and the number of cases rose steeply: I don’t know about ‘The Test of Time’, but we Indians have certainly stood ‘The Test of Tamasha’. Ha ha ha.) Anyway, it was on this note that our Corona began, and it was in this note that it had remained. Hope that answers your question.

 

Niloufar: Could you talk a bit about your curious involvement with the coaching industry?

Bavani: It’s called the test-prep industry by the way, and there’s huge, huge potential in it, both in terms of remuneration and in terms of building readership. I feel that a young student who knows the difference between a Synecdoche and a Metonymy is far more likely to turn to Literary Fiction at a riper age, when s/he has got a job and has settled down: this is what I do: I train young kids (11^th and 12^th standard kids) for the LEX (Legal Exam) for entrance into the ILUs (Indian Law Universities). The examination is only a pretext, (of course, we at Iuris take it very, very seriously: we’ve been in the industry for just a bit over a year, and we’ve sent at least seventy students to India’s top ILUs)… but the real focus is on exposing the young to the mystery that’s language.

 

It all began last year, September, when I was approached by Mala aunty, mother’s former colleague from the Sociology Department, and asked if I could use my influence to help her start an Institute that trained kids for LEX. And I said, ‘Yes,’. Unfortunately, a month after we’d started visiting colleges Mala aunty died of Covid. But I found some friends on Twitter and have kept things going, quite satisfactorily: I think it’s high time writers stopped being so dependent on the munificence of others: corporate companies, publishing factories, Academia. We have to put our fingers on the financial pulse of the state.

Nidi: You were cancelled briefly, weren’t you? how did you take it? Is that what induced you to publish your stories in your own, private, paid portal? and to start your other entrepreneurial ventures?  Also could you talk to us a bit about how it felt to judge the Sunday Reader Short Story competition?

Bavani: I call 2020 the liminal peak of the Dynamic Dramatic Curve of the Human apparatus in my story Formication. In that story I also mention that I was sidestepped, even by such obscure poets as were only Left enough to be left alone. I have always been of the opinion that the chaos that we see around us in India – all this confabulation – will dissolve, without so much as a Modi-cum of Trace, in the fullness of time: the Universe cannot sustain this much entropy, for very long: so as a writer I’d much rather stick to my job: exposing young people to the mystery that’s language.

 

But yes, there was so much confabulation and if anybody, especially if he/she belonged to the majority religion, more especially if he/she belonged to a privileged region of the caste spectrum, wasn’t vocal in demonstrating remonstrance against the machine that was continuously alienating Muslims especially: he/she got instantly “cancelled” to use modern vernacular. But I have always believed that the right and most effective place to express one’s political views – is the polling booth.

 

And yes, by September 2021, when the regime had lost some of its menaces to Covid, and when the gory second wave had ebbed and people had got bored: things began to cool a bit. I was invited to be the inaugural chair of the Sunday Reader Short Story competition. There was much serendipity: it so happened that the third prize winner Ameya (she works with me now at Iuris) turned out to be the daughter of my friend Nikita Nambi: a dancer, nonpareil, through whom I got to introduce my work to many a gifted Indian dancer, expand my readership. This is also when I had established Iuris, if you remember. As I say somewhere else: I started my own paid portal where I publish my stories and from where my subscribers may order free printed copies of my stories because I want writers to stop sucking up to ‘Editors, Reviewers, Critics, because these come and go like fart.’

Afra Jamal: Those stories that you wrote before Covid: Are there parts of them that don’t fall pat when you look at them now in retrospect?

Bavani: I’ve adopted a dog and her pup! I’d been talking about wanting to adopt dogs for a while and my colleague WhatsApped me a Twitter post where a young woman had put up an invitation to adopt two doggies: a mother and her pup. Something about getting to act a minor role in the world old Drama of keeping mother and daughter together (which has been a constant theme in my stories) gave me the fillip to adopt both dogs, even though I had never had dogs before. And I became a single dog parent.

 

Thank god I had the support of my family. My own house, as I say in one of my stories, is of the dim and dour yellow of the inside of a grotto. My doggies didn’t like it. In the beginning I’d leave them at my parent’s when I went to work and then take them back to my house in the nights where we’d piggy sleep. They’d wake up, sometimes, in the middle of the night and leap at each other like loons, (on one occasion, they smashed down my showcase, and an old, red clock (that was gifted to us by our neighbour when we’d moved to our present house, fifteen years ago) placed at the top of it fell down, cracked to smithereens). Eventually I kind of moved back to my parent’s home, and we’re all a small happy family now. Even father–whom mother would call a walking cash register–a most practical man, has fallen. He massages their feet and sometimes he accompanies me in the morning for walks: he walks the little one, Shruti. My mother has gone back to her early teens, when she used to be a little milk girl. She holds long talks with Shruti as she trains her to pee in the balcony. We’re a small happy family. Touch wood…      

 

 At first I called the mother doggie, Demeter, and the puppy, Persephone: but these names never entered my very Tamil parent’s mouths and so we named them Rati and Shruti…

 

I’m an asexual woman. Every Day is a Holiday if you remember was a thinly fictionalised account of my bout with PCOS. I feel that my stories too were Asexual: too much moon, too little Earth. I remember this particular paragraph from my story Tom Tiddler’s Ground:

Every story is the same story. It’s the story of a cute baby growing up to look like a ‘terrible fish’, then turning up its toes. We could think of this in terms of relationships, movements… What makes one rendering different from another is: where the artist decides to stop; the way the artist decides on the major and the minor characters: is he/she going to keep footling with the baby or wonder why we have to reproduce like men at all, why not like pigeon? I’ve never thought very highly of an artist who doesn’t have a surreal imagination.

 

I seem to have hated babies. I seem to have hated Earth. Understandable. After all, at the age of 25 I had got a menopause because of my PCOS. Now that has changed. I feel there is more Earth in my stories now: more of the bodily fluids: all that scooping of poop, hiding of piss has definitely left an impact…

 

Kartik: Hi, Bavani! I’m a huge fan. Could you talk to us a bit about what you’re working on presently?

Bavani: Hi Kartik, and thanks for being a huge fan. The story I’m working on at the moment is yet to be titled. It was kind of inspired, no, informed, by my two puppies.

 

Shruti is the jejune one: she is Persephone, Spring, flower, fruit: glutted to the gut with joie de vivre: like my mother: the very buttermilk of girlish innocence. Rati is a misery guts: She is Demeter, winter: like me, spayed!

 

I’ve been looking at the mother-daughter scrum, which my stories have become so popular for, in fresh light: Can I retell the story of Shakuntala? Shakuntala if you recall is the daughter of a sage and a celestial diva. So, as Freud says, when the dominant parent is the father, the child might turn Apollonian; when it is the mother, the child might turn Dionysian. But what if both parents are equally dominant: will not the child turn–in the words of a better poet–into “a genetic calamity”?  In the story I am working on at the moment the mother is a single parent. She is flawless. Ahalya. She has all the features of an old fashioned masculinity: she is a master of several tongues: English (she is among the very few Indians who can pronounce the word ‘equanimity’ correctly), French, German, Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, Kannada, Hindi… and she is very rich and virtuous: all the characters of the sage; but she is also a diva: a dancer, and theatre freak; a fashionista. So what’ll the daughter do? If, as Freud says, you thought of a partner as a mother-replacement, how can you replace an irreplaceable mother? Will the daughter not turn into a “genetic calamity”?  

 

I am interested in this model.

 

Laasya: How does it feel to be a single woman? Do you sometimes feel the need for warmth?

Bavani: Actually, I’ve moved back to my parent’s home: the pups and I sleep in my room, mom in hers, dad in his. The cliché pelted at single women: ‘Go to your cold bed,’ cannot be pelted at me: for my bed is warmed by three!

 

Sara: Do you have a writing office?

Bavani: I’ve turned my own dim, dour yellow house into a sort of writing office: “An Office of One’s Own”! Many of my books had been devoured by my pups: I bid a few of them good riddance: but did buy some others – like the Collected plays of Wilde, which my aunty had gifted to me when I was thirteen, and which I had devoured with the nescience of a puppy, many a P.G. Woodhouse… And, I bought a new red clock! A pendulum clock! So quite literally for me, it seems, Time Starts Now! 

 

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