Nationalism, displacement, memory, loss, arrivals and departures

Sanjay Talreja is among the many people from Bombay that I got acquainted to only in Toronto.

I find that incredibly strange – living in the same city, moving about among the same circle of friends, and yet remaining strangers, and then serendipitously discovering each other in Toronto.

Gavin Barrett, Jasmine D’Costa, Syerah Virani, Teenaz Javat are among the Bombayites I befriended only in Toronto.

Sanjay is an award-winning filmmaker who has directed a number of issue-based films in India, edited many independent documentaries in Canada, and has also been associated with the US-based Media Education Foundation as an editor and producer.

I haven’t seen any of Sanjay’s film work. I know him as someone who has a unique ability to evaluate creative work and transform it by suggesting the smallest of changes.

Among the many friends who gave me invaluable feedback to enrich my manuscript, his comments were among the most perceptive. After incorporating his suggestion, I succeeded in transforming a particularly blandly written scene into a something that was rancorous, alive, and almost frothy.  

Sanjay was selected for Diaspora Dialogues for its mentoring program in 2012. And was among the readers at Toronto’s the Word on the Street (TWOTS) in September.

He read an evocative passage from his story Love is All There is. The story is about a triptych of characters (none of whose lives collide) who are affected by the things that shape much of our contemporary lives – nationalism, displacement, memory, loss, arrivals and departures.

A few days later, Jhumpa Lahiri, speaking about her new novel The Lowlands also spoke in a similar vein about the effects of immigration, a multiple sense of belonging and perpetual displacement.

Sanjay’s collection Postcards and other stories (a working title) is a collection of short stories set in India and Canada. The obliquely interlinked stories in this collection explore how immigrants find themselves in the in-between stage of their lives – feeling as if they will never be at home, despite jobs, children, passports, houses and investments.

“This condition of homelessness, of border crossings, of leaving without having fully left, of arriving without a sense of ever being fully settled, forms the underpinning of my stories,” Sanjay says.

Downward This Dog looks at a Yoga teacher who faces a dilemma; Postcards (a two phased story) looks at a man who has become obsessed with prayer even as his wife and father juggle with factors facing their own lives; The Kick is about a bright young woman who believes her dentist may have touched her in the wrong places.

The stories in the collection narrated sardonically and yet compassionately attempt to depict immigrants neither as victims nor agents but as ordinary, complex, contradictory people fumbling and struggling to make sense of their new lives.

About the story he read at TWOTS, Sanjay observes, “Tonally and stylistically, this story is different from the rest of the collection and I am still trying to figure out if it will be part of the final collection but I was trying to use TWOTS to gauge a response. I read Part 1 of the triptych.”

Images: First image: http://diasporadialogues.com/writers/profiles/2012/08/27/sanjay-talreja.png

Taras Bulba

My grandfather Harischandra Bhatt’s obsession – there really is no other word to describe it – with East Europe perhaps stemmed from his relationship with Wanda Dynowska-Umadevi (1888–1971). (The link is to a Polish website, but can be automatically translated).

To me, Umadevi has remained a mystery. Only recently (in Toronto) I discovered a couple of website (http://www.theohistory.org/description-of-issues/descript_of_issues_v5.html) that not only describes her work in some detail but also mentions about her friendship with Harischandra. The earlier link to her name is another one.

Amazon lists a book Scarlet Muse co-authored by them, which is an anthology of Polish poetry.

A couple of years ago, thanks to an opportunity provided to me by Mira Vaidya – my aunt and Hariscandra’s daughter – I wrote an article on Hariscandra’s knowledge and understanding of the region for a book edited by Niranjan Bhagat, an eminent Gujarati poet to commemorate Harischandra’s 100th birth anniversary.

Harischandra’s enormous library comprised a large section on books about East Europe in general and Poland in particular. Besides writing path-breaking poetry and introducing Gujarati literature to the works of European poets, and in general quietly revolutionizing Gujarati literature, Harischandra’s only work on the geo-political situation of the early 20th century was Joesf Pilsudski’s biography in Gujarati.

This large collection of literature from the region (including Russia) also had two books with the most exquisite wood-carvings as the cover design – Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons and Nicolai Gogol’s Taras Bulba. I never got around to reading Turgenev, but Gogol’s Taras Bulba I did read, and loved it for the larger-than-life character of the protagonist.

An aside: For some reason, whenever I've tried to visualize Taras Bulba, actor Prithviraj Kapoor’s face comes to my mind. Hollywood made Taras Bulba in 1962 and Yul Brynner enacted the role of the Cossack chieftain. I think Prithviraj Kapoor would have made a better Taras Bulba.

Taras Bulba is now available on the internet on Project Gutenberg. If you haven’t read the story – and it’s quite short – read it at this URL: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1197/1197-h/1197-h.htm. I read recently on Wikipedia that Hemingway has called Taras Bulba one of the ten best novels of all times.

Be that as it may (borrowing the phrase from Rohinton Mistry’s Family Matters), Gogol is more famous for his Overcoat; the short story immortalized by Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s classic quote: “We all come from Gogol’s Overcoat.” The lead protagonist in Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel The Namesake names his son Gogol, played with fine distinction by Hollywood actor Kal Penn.

In the last few months, I’ve got to personally get acquainted with several people whose parents immigrated to Canada from East Europe and Russia. Among them is the angelic octogenarian Mary Spiegel. Her parents came from Ukraine – Gogol’s “Little Russia” that was home to Taras Bulba.