The class clown

Being the class clown suited him. It was the only identity he had ever found in a class of 150 testosterone and hormone-laden boys. He was thin and lanky, his hair stood up near his ears and he had a slight hunch that made him look like a giant question mark.

He would leave school and take the long route home. He would pass the girls' school and wait by it till Mandy walked out with her friends, giggling and slowly pulling the ribbons out of her hair. Until a few months ago, she would barely smile at him, soon she started coming up to him and asking him about his day, before scuttling after her friends. Now, she waved good bye to her friends and held his hand while the walked to her house, about three buildings away. He had a girlfriend now.

Praveen sat ahead of him in class and was always turning around to talk to him or laugh at one of his jokes. He was the first one to notice the end of the fart jokes. The jokes about the anatomy of certain teachers, the sex jokes, the black jokes, the masturbation jokes, the dead baby jokes, the German jokes, the Muslim jokes, the gay jokes...everything was too offensive, racist or disgusting.  He had stopped speaking altogether.

Being in love suited him.

Unshelved Memories #3

Kafka on the shore


"Are you really Colonel Sanders?"
Colonel Sanders cleared his throat. "Not really. I'm just taking on his appearance for a time."
"That's what I figured," Hoshino said. "So what are you really?"
Since I don't have a shape I can become anything I want." "Huh…"
"This time I decided to take on a familiar shape, that of a famous capitalist icon. I was toying with the idea of Mickey Mouse, but Disney's particular about the rights to their characters."
"I don't think I'd want Mickey Mouse pimping for me anyway."

---

There are usually two kinds of book I avoid reading; books about mythology and anything that has talking cats or fishes falling from the sky.

Kafka on the shore by Haruki Murakami has all of the latter and more. It is the first book I read by Murakami. Mixing magical realism with fantasy blended with innumerable pop culture, literary and musical references  (Colonel Sanders, Johnny Walker, Radiohead, Yeats, Beethoven among others), Kafka on the shore is something you will read at break-neck speed.
A narrative so simple yet so captivating.

Kafka Tamura is a fifteen year old boy who runs away from his house to escape the prophecy that he will kill his father and sleep with his mother and sister.
Nakata is an old man who cannot read and is 'not too bright' but possess the ability to talk to cats.
As Kafka meets Oshima, the library assistant, Sakura who might be his sister and falls in love with the ghost of Miss Saiki, the story takes you on an unbelievable yet real journey, that slowly starts to merge when Nakata kills Johnny Walker  (the man who kills cats, eats their hearts and collects their souls) and on pure instinct travels along with a driver named Hoshima.

Rationally speaking, many questions (or all most all of them) aren't answered. 
Is miss Saiki really Kafka's mother? Does he really rape his sister through his dreams? Does he have anything to do with Nakata killing his father? What is that colourless salamander that Hoshino kills? How does the ability to speak to cats transfer to Hoshino? Who is the boy named Crow?

But you don't need these answers. At least I didn't.

In between leeches and fish raining from the sky and meeting soldiers unaged since WW II, Kafka on the shore manages to capture intense emotions that shake you up. Kafka's incredible strength, Nakata's simplicity, Oshima's theories and metaphors.... and when Kafka stays up all night to catch a glimpse of Miss Saiki's ghost, I came undone.
Murakami manages to capture a kind of resilient sadness without too many words.

Not the kind of sadness that makes you tear up and cry. Just the kind that makes you sit still, impassively and listen to your rapidly beating heart slow down to a dull thud. Even if those headphones you've jammed into your ear is playing a party anthem. A profound unhappiness, not as a concept or an emotion,  but as a physical thing you can carry in your palm; for eternity. It is small enough to let you do other things but heavy enough, so you are never truly without it. 

I cannot truly say whether the book bought this reaction in me or whether I projected my state of mind unto the book so much that I cannot tell them apart.

But Kafka on the shore will still be one of those books that made me head for the core of the labyrinth, giving myself up to the void.  

Black Eyes

She smeared the tip of her finger with kajal from the lakme pencil her mother had bought. She pulled each eye open and ran her finger along the tip and rubbed off the extra on her hair the way she had seen her mother an all the women in her house do. She opened her drawer and picked out the new silver earrings. The leaf-shaped ones went well with the floral motif on her dark blue kurta. She twisted a stole around her neck and looked at herself critically in the mirror. No, this won’t do. She pulled the stole around her head, almost covering her face. Yes, this was more fashionable. After fishing about in her large yellow cloth bag, she pulled out her Jackie-O shades. It was way too retro but she didn’t seem to have any other option. She applied the lightest film of foundation near her left eye to balance out the dark colour.  She slipped into her kolhapuris, put on a big smile and convinced herself. She looked happy.

Unshelved Memories #2

Snow

I always say the railway announcement on the Western Railway is the background score to my life. If I have to get a drink, get dinner, meet people, buy a cupcake, shop on the streets, attend a gig, watch a movie, whatever, it almost always involves me having to take a train.

So it kind of makes sense that I have started and finished a lot of books on the train. One of them is Snow by Orhan Pamuk. Only my friends will think it is fine to throw in this bleak and depressing a book as part of my birthday gift. Not that I’m complaining. (Ok, I’m complaining a little bit)

Snow is a story about a poet, Ka who loses his voice (not physically; as a poet) and returns to Kars in Turkey after many years spent in exile. A story of political unrest, a suicide epidemic and long lost love, all wrapped in layers and layers of melancholic white snow.  It is beautifully written, every page filled with silent misery and making even the excitement in the protagonist’s life seem restrained and muted.

This book has cast some pretty dark clouds over my days and I kept going back to it. I tuned out all the noise around me (that’s tough to do in a local train) and actually let Ka dictate my mood and take over my day.

I have Pamuk’s My name is Red still lying unread on my shelf. I’m almost too afraid to start reading it, but I think tonight’s the night. 

Somebody get me some coffee and a box of tissues please. 

Unshelved Memories #1

The Time Traveler's Wife

There are some books that don’t grab you by the ankles in the first 10 pages. They take more than that. Audrey Niffengger’s The Time Traveler’s wife took me almost three weeks to complete.

I struggled to understand Henry’s condition; I struggled to decipher which phase they were in each scene. Wait, she’s 13, so that makes him…no, wait, what? I read at snail’s pace. Which is why, this was the book I carried in my backpack when I climbed on to a bus to Pune. It was getting the slightest bit interesting, but it is difficult to read when your sitting next to five excited boys from IIT Powai who are having a passionate discussion on the most ‘faadu’ metal band.

But I trudged on and I was rewarded.  I don’t read romance novels (at least none without wishing an anvil would fall on the stupid girl’s head) but The Time Traveler’s wife was romantic and passionate in the most unusual way.

I was at a music festival in Pune that began in the evening. I spent the nights swaying, jumping and bobbing. The rest of the day, I spent in little coffee shops, drunk at a stranger’s house and my feet tucked under me on a mattress in an open park; reading. Everybody around me wore jackets, warmed themselves with cigarettes, scotch and momos while veils of white accompanied their breath and that is a vision permanently forged in my mind’s eye.

That is how I read the book. With mist all around, almost feeling Henry’s love in my frozen fingertips and in great awe of the delicious nefarious year I had lived.

Gender Writes

It pains me to even take this viewpoint into consideration, but recently Pulitzer-award winning author V.S Naipaul called all women writing ‘tosh’.
In the past I have heard women writing being called ‘sentimental’, ‘emotional’ and my favorite ‘chick-lity’

My first instinct is to protest at ‘women writing’. What, men can’t write emotionally?
But I know it is idealistic to believe that gender plays no role in writing. It plays a role in almost all occupations. Nobody says oh, look he is the first short guy CEO, but first woman CEO, first woman in space, first woman president…Almost like its simply shocking to the world that these women could achieve something. If a woman became CEO, she must really be something (Pratibha Patil is India’s first woman president. Simply by bestowing president-ship on a woman, must make us progressive, never mind her credentials or capabilities)

How much does gender really matter in writing? Assume for the sake of this argument that we accept all the stereotypes attached to women and men. Men are tough, like sports, business, science fiction, war…I don’t know, sex maybe. Women like men, feelings, girlfriends and the emotional aspects of things. If everyone must write about what they know, should women writers only have women protagonists and should men (male) writers only have men as protagonists?
A woman wrote Harry Potter, a man wrote Sophie’s choice, Steig Larson came up with Lisbeth Salander and Audrey Niffenegger created Henry DeTamble.

Chick-lit for me is light reading. I don’t consider it the genre all women read and I’m not going to belittle women’s intelligence by saying that most women only read chick-lit.  
But you would be hard-pressed to find a man who would willingly read chick-lit.
Personally as a woman, I have read war stories, sports stories, science fiction and equal parts ‘chick-lit’.
Is this because woman may want to read ‘men’ subjects but men will never want to read ‘women’ subjects?

Even as kids, we expect girls to of course watch movies and read books that are entirely about boys, but we also accept quite cheerfully that boys won’t read anything about girls. [ref]

Daisy Goodwin, author of the novel My Last Duchess, in an interview, said “If I read another sensitive account of a woman coming to terms with bereavement, I was going to slit my wrists.”
So what must women writers do to not be considered chick-lit?  

Author of Rites of Spring, Jessica Duchen says “Most women writers who want to be perceived as tackling themes beyond the buying of high-heeled shoes and the seduction of Mr Perfect loathe the concept of chicklit and don't want their work to be mistaken for it. 
Therefore we have resorted to the tactic of choosing themes that are as dark and miserable as possible.

As I read this, on a side note I think, why are women writers constantly trying to shrug off their gender to prove a point? Maybe it is the emotional factor that makes us who we are. It is what gives our writing and our characters a depth that creates empathy and sympathy from readers.
I quickly brush aside this thought because I dot want to be considered un-feminist and because this comes to my mind:

“I often hear people exclaiming that they're astonished that a particular book was written by a man. They seem stunned by the notion that a man could write with emotional intelligence and honesty about our human frailties.
Women, on the other hand, are supposed to be experts on emotion. I've never heard anyone remark that they were surprised that a book of psychological depth was written by a woman.
So men get points for simply showing up on the page with a literary effort.”  - Author Julianna Baggott

And it makes me mad. What must women do to be taken seriously by male readers?

While we continue to fight these infuriating nonsense, men have to fight their own stereotypes.
The general numbers prove that there are more women publishers and women a read a lot more fiction then men do. So, pitching a book targeted towards men is extremely difficult, because the chances of profits and popularity are marginal. [ref]

The percentage of all published fiction is for women is much higher than it is for men.
Ha! Poor men. If they want to read something 'manly' well, they have very little choice. They have to fight to prove that they read too.

Here is what I think. Fiction has no gender. There is intuitive, emotional writing and there is cold and dry writing. And both men and women can do either and both. As a serious writer, I can understand how being stamped 'girly' is an attack on our craft and talent itself. But the only way to write is to not bother about what genre or compartment of the marketing world our writing fits in. Because I honestly believe that its all messed up. Can't I write about finding love and still be a serious writer? If a guy wrote about his pursuit of true love what compartment would that fit? Is it chick-lit, is it dude-lit or Chetan Bhagat's two states?
Emotions/feelings are not the prerogative of a specific gender. It is just assumed that one gender can express it better. Its a generalization, not the rule.
The chick-flick, He's just not that into you, was adapted from a book written by a guy.
This proves absolutely nothing but the fact that we can either accept that all of these are exceptions and the usual 'girl writing v/s boy writing is a large and clear divide or we can accept that while there are assumptions, all these so-called 'exceptions' are simply writers, not defying stereotypes, but just simply writing.

I know this argument is incomplete, inconsistent and maybe idealistic but its just my opinion. I leave you with this : 

Sometimes I wish I had a more ‘visible’ creative outlet. Maybe if I was great dancer and I craved the stage, or a great singer who could sit in the evening light and sing along with that lone acoustic guitar. Or maybe painting.

Something that doesn’t require you to sit in a chair, hunched over a keyboard, gnawing at the dark and weepy bits of your head. You have a story idea.

It’s a blind date.

The guy picks a new cosy café.

She’s pretty, she seems pleasant.

It is going well. 

And now to think of a disgusting twist. Maybe she’s a dude, maybe she’s a cannibal or maybe that chain she’s wearing around her neck is made of toenails of previous lovers.

I’m not a big fan of rainbows or sunflowers and I have never found the appeal in unicorns even as a little girl, but there is a certain lack of the ability to ‘parade’ a thing like writing, that I’m staring to resent.

So when you are itching to do something new and put to use the cliché of letting your creative juices flow, writing doesn’t offer you the cool aspect of taking a camera out, taking pictures, putting them up on networking sites. People take 2 seconds to look at a picture. They comment if they like it. It is not the same as putting up a blogpost. The chances of people actually clicking on a link and reading anything that’s more than 4 lines is almost negligible. Appreciation or criticism in the form of comments is impossible if people won’t take the time out to read.

You don’t have a bunch of colourful pictures or paintings or drawings or the new skirt you stitched to show people. You have documents. Boring, insipid looking documents.