Reminiscences, ruminations, remembrances

Death has taken away a number of my friends and dears ones. In March, my cousin Madhavi’s husband Bhushan suddenly passed away. He had just crossed 50. Then, in May, my friend Satish Thakkar’s wife Rimple passed away after a brief but valiant battle against cancer. But August was just a ceaseless march of death. Deepak Obhrai, whom I met on 5 July (his birthday), passed away on 2 August. He was a pillar of the Indo-Canadian community, and an important Canadian politician. My dear friend Satish Kamath, with whom I spent some of my best and worst years during my career in journalism, passed away on 7 August. Pradeep Khurana, my friend Mini’s husband, passed away on 21 August. I met him just once, and he came across as a jovial person; and then on 25 August, Keyoor Shah, an affable, affectionate man, who I wished I’d known better, passed away. In life, we see death frequently. It’s easy to philosophise about death, but it is devastating for members of the family. 

My cousin Belu lost her husband several years ago, when her children were young. In her personal essay, she remembers vignettes of her life – right from the carefree rides behind a horse cart to the deadening responsibility of bringing up children as a young widow. English is not Belu’s first language, but the essay brings out her cherubic character. From her I have learnt to keep smiling irrespective of the circumstances, and especially in adversity.

Guest Post by 

Bela Patel

One day I just thought of writing about my life. And thanking you all for being there for me. And I ended up writing this.

Today, when I am going to be 60 (though I can't believe it) I would like to evaluate my life. Gains and losses.

To begin with I was born in rich family. My grandfather was a film distributor. But he was not happy to see me since I was second girl child after my elder sister. (And the family's riches didn't last).

He passed away when I was one. We have grown up in joint family, my siblings, my half brother and sister, my cousins, and their children who are almost of my age. Though we were deprived of many things none of us had (or have) any regrets, since we were enjoying whatever we got; knowing our family circumstances.

When I was of the age to join school, I was admitted in The Unity High School, in Khetwadi 10th road. With me Kartik (his mother passed away at young age so both brothers Kartik and Jatin stayed with us for few years) my nephew (my cousin’s son) was also coming to same school. We would walk to school, as it was not very far. But sometimes we would hang behind horse carts to cut our walking.

For 5th std I got admission in the Chandaramji Girls High School. Where my elder sister Meena was already going, since My aunt, Meera Masi, was teacher and it was a girls’ school we got admission there. (I think).

It was supposed to be best school for girls.

When I was in 8th std. Our father suddenly passed away I was 12 at that time. I think because of living in a joint family and being young, his passing away didn't affect me much, or so I think, though I missed him especially when I saw children my age with their fathers. Our relation was not close but I missed him then and I miss him now.

In school, I made friends with Jaya Lata Harshada and seven more, we formed a nice group. I got 65% in my 11th std. After finishing school, I went to K C College.  I got admission in Siddharth College of Commerce but since my friends took admission in KC I went in to Arts.

In second year, was known as Inter, I flunked due to two or three reasons, one of which was obviously, that I didn't study. I had taken Psychology as major and History as second subject for BA exam.

In my family, all sisters including cousins, got married in second year of the college, but I am always different from all I didn't find anyone. So, everyone in family was worried about me. 

After graduation, I applied in employment exchange, from there I got a job in Bombay Telephones. I worked in the testing department where I was testing certain numbers which were not in use, we were around 10 of us in that department. I had fun in that place. While checking those numbers I would call my family in Baroda and Surat.

My grandmother passed away on 17th December 1977. That was again a big loss for me. I would read religious books to her. She called me (wagto ghunt - clanging bell) because I was lively, and if I was at home, everyone and even neighbours would know.

I worked as apprentice for a year, and when I was about to get confirmed in job I got engaged to Rajiv – it was 1978 March 21st when I officially got engaged. And marriage was planned for 14th July.

Those four months were magical.

And the day arrived - I was going to stay in joint family. Father-in-law, mother-in-law, brother and bhabhi.

I got best gift from God in August 1980 in the form of my lovely daughter Chandni. After four years our Prince Charming came in our lives; we named him Chirag. Both my kids were (and are) well behaved. Chandni has always been quiet and sincere in everything she does; Chirag was talkative and hyper.

Belu and Rajiv with Chandni and Chirag

We stayed with my in-laws till August 1989; thereafter, they went to stay in Andheri West.

Then we four were staying in that house. We made new furniture, and a new fridge, mixer, ghanti, everything. including crockery.

Those days flew past fast. We would visit Ba Kaka (my in-laws) once a week. They would come to our house. 

And suddenly we got a shock on 5th of August 1990. 

My husband Rajiv suddenly passed away, it was raksha bandhan day, we were to go to tie rakhi to my brother, 

I was ready and Rajiv went for shower after having a cup of tea, I went down to do puja in the temple in our building, I came in less then 15 minutes. 

I opened the safety door, and entered in the house, and what I see, Rajiv was flat lying in the bathroom. I was thinking fast what to do as I was alone in the house. 

I ran to neighbours to seek their help, they came running, we brought him out of the bathroom. Other people from building came to help me. I called my family doctor Sushilaben, and my mami Durgaben, but before they all came game was over. 

Doctor declared he was no more.

I was blank – no feeling, my neighbours called my family. They all came running, to find that Rajiv had left this world. He was 42 and was a healthy person. It was unbelievable for me and for everyone in family or who ever came to know.

Chandni was 10 and Chirag was 5 at that time. They were my pillar of strength and reason to live.

Days went by, I was busy with my kids, family and friends. Everyone was trying to support me in their own way. 

I thank them all to be with me during those days, where without support of everyone it would have been difficult for us to survive.

Chandni gave her 10th and 12th and got good marks. She got scholarship from Singapore government for her further studies. And she went there to pursue computer engineering from one of the best colleges there.

After finishing graduation, she had to work as it was part of the bond we signed. She took up a job in same university to start with. And she wanted to do masters, so she joint evening college.

We went for her graduation. We all were proud of her.

Chirag did his graduation and post graduation in statistics. While doing post graduation he also stated working.

They had to fill form where I was assigned as their dependent. I was thinking how time flies once they were dependent on me, and now I am. I think that is life.

While studying in Singapore Chandni found her soulmate Rohit. They decided to get married. They got married in 2007 June.

I’m past 60 now, and I am thinking how time went by, with all its ups and down of life.

When Rajiv passed away, our children were young and I was busy with them all the time. Now, nearly a quarter of century later, they are busy in their lives and I don't have to help them as they are mature enough to decide about their own lives.

I hope rest of my life will pass by smoothly with help of family friends and of course God.

Thanking everyone once again to come in my life and support me in my 60 years of life.

Lots of love. And hugs to all.

Jaipur Literature festival - Toronto

The Jaipur Literature Festival came to Toronto with a day-long program at the Young Centre in the Distillery District. Of a dozen or so panel discussions and chats, I participated in three and missed one.

Meenakshi Alimchandani interviewed MG Vassanji on his novel A Delhi Obsession (2019). His ninth novel is an exploration of history, memory, and identity, the broad themes that are integral to everything that he has written.

Vassanji has a rare skill to mask his piercing observations on contemporary society with a wry sense of humour. In his new novel (which I haven’t yet read) he returns to India and to Delhi. His part memoir, part travelogue, part ruminations on identity, religion and culture, A Place Within: Rediscovering India, won the Governor General’s Prize for non-fiction (2009).

He is both an insider and an outsider in India. A product of the syncretic culture, where identities are not rigidly defined, he is forever abhorrent of the Indian obsession to compartmentalise everyone into religious and caste categories.

He describes his unease with identity thus: “I find the labels ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ discomforting because they are so exclusive. They have not defined people for me in Africa (where we were simply called ‘Wahindi’ Indians), in the United States (where I lived for some years), or in Canada. I refuse to use them this way, perhaps naively and definitely against a tide; but I am not alone. I use the distinction ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ only in the context, and especially when it has been used by people for themselves or others, as in the Gujarat violence.”

Despite being a two-time winner of the Giller and several prestigious awards, Vassanji is an undervalued and underappreciated Canadian master. The Jaipur Literary Festival organisers did the right thing by having Vassanji talk about his book; they could not have thought of a better way to kick-off the Toronto edition of the festival.

John Ralston Saul is another underappreciated genius. Among the most vocal votaries of the rights of the indigenous people of Canada, Saul’s latest book Comeback argues that Canada would be a better place if it acknowledges and respects the rights of the local people.

In a freewheeling conversation with Daniel Lak (Al Jazeera), Saul spoke about the revival of the indigenous civilisation and culture and how it will be beneficial to Canada’s future, if only Canadians don’t interfere with the natural growth trajectory of the indigenous people.

I’ve read Saul’s A Fair Country (2008), in which he argues that Canada is a Métis nation (as opposed to a ‘western’ nation) that has been shaped by aboriginal ideas of egalitarianism and nonviolence.

The book successfully explains the absence in Canada of the dilemmas of identity, the existence of the ‘other’ in a society of multiple minorities that dominate other western societies.

Finally, William Dalrymple, Suketu Mehta, Pico Iyer and Andre Aciman read passages from their travelogues. Mehta read about the onset of the wonderous Bombay monsoon (from Maximum City, 2005); Dalrymple read a passage From the Holy Mountain (1997), that deals with the affairs of the Eastern Christians; Aciman read about the permanent nature of exile, where an exile continues to search for home and is never able to find one; and Iyer read a passage from his book about the Dalai Lama’s visit to Japan.

I was keen to listen Farzana Doctor speak to Shree Paradkar in Dictionaries of Desire, but it was too late in the evening and I’m now too old to spend an entire day out, even it is for contemporary literature.

Recently, I also went to the Munk Centre to listen Ramchandra Guha speak about the four faultlines of the Indian Republic. Guha is a secular scholar who has written on a number of Indian subjects including the environment, cricket, Indian history and, of course, Mahatma Gandhi.

According to Guha, the four faultlines are:

• Deepening religious division
• Persisting social inequality – caste, gender, tribal
• Environmental degradation
• Degradation of our public institutions

Bombay Rose - Gitanjali Rao

Gitanjali Rao’s Bombay Rose is a melange of quintessential Bombay – people and places, and sights and sounds – in all its cosmopolitan, egalitarian miasma. Both the city and the film are a place where distinctions between good and evil blur because they don’t matter.

Love is a momentary fantasy, an all-too-brief interlude between the grim certainty and the crusty, caked grime that covers the city and the lives of its people. The Bombay of Bombay Rose is a place where there's hope, but it has to be stolen from the sweeping and melancholic hopelessness of utter destitution.

Set in a traditional gaothan, that small, defiant village that refuses to change with time, and is unconcerned of the bustling megapolis that surrounds it, the film has a rough hewn authenticity to it because the filmmaker has hand-painted all the scenes. Computer animation would've turned this soulful tale kitschy. 

Bombay Rose is a bunch of stories of people who have been left behind. They belong to the dark underbelly of the City of Gold that prefers to focus on glitz, glamour and wealth. Bombay Rose is the world of hand-pulled carts, slave children, wasted men, and demure yet defiant women.

A homeless immigrant family comprising a grandfather and two granddaughters exist on Bombay’s pavements. Kamala, the older granddaughter, makes and sells mogra gajras (jasmine garlands) on the street, outside their shanty. The grandfather is disguisedly unemployed. He has a makeshift shop where he repairs watches that people stopped wearing a long time ago, and so just whiles away his time smoking beedis and sipping cutting chai.

On the other side of the road is a paan-beedi shop owned and operated by Mishraji, another immigrant to Bombay. Salim, a newcomer, has come from Kashmir (it’s no longer a paradise, he says, it’s somewhere between jannat and jahanum – heaven and hell).

Kamala toils hard to ensure that her young sister Tara gets the opportunities she deserves to get ahead in life. Tara goes to a local convent school and gets coaching in English from Ms. Shirley D’Souza, a cat-loving, idiosyncratic Catholic spinster, who lives in the past, and adores young Tara.

Shirley spends her time reminiscing about her days in cinema, when it was more colourful perhaps because it was black and white. Anthony, an antique shop owner doubling up as a pawn dealer, buys useless (but not valueless) knickknacks from Shirley, and flirts with her in the hope of getting her piano.

Tara befriends a young boy who is on the run from the local police, tasked with preventing child labour. And there is Mike, a local tough, who wants to be Kamala’s saviour by pushing her into the sleazy world of dance bars, and promises to take her to Dubai.

Then, there is the Bollywood megastar Raja Khan. His chiselled body, larger than life screen persona and the masala-themed movies, provide the only escape from reality for immigrants to Bombay such as Salim. He drives a red-coloured sedan and casually drives away from an accident scene with impunity (just as Salman Khan did some years ago).

Salim & Kamala

Inevitably, Kamala and Salim fall in love in the middle of Bombay’s famed monsoon; both know the odds are against them but have the will to fight prejudice and destiny. Mike, the villain, is willing – almost eager – to kill Salim to prevent their love from flowering.

Along with the hand-painted scenes, the imaginative music – both background score and the songs – gives the film its strong and distinct identity and texture. The endearing Konkani ditty played intermittently throughout the film, and especially when Shirley cavorts around Anthony, enlivens their otherwise dreary lives.

Cucurrucucú Paloma, a refreshing, surprising choice, playing in the background is an apt finale to Shirley’s unfulfilled life. Kamala humming of a dirge-like love song about the Rewa (Narmada) river reflects her deadened desires, and the raucous, rhythmic drum beats, when the city celebrates its many festivals, form a constant, angry backdrop depicting the latent rage of most of its inhabitants.

Thematically, Bombay Rose is no different than a Bollywood masala, with all the staple ingredients such as song and dance, romance, and a heavy dose of melodrama. And yet, it transcends these formulaic barriers and rises to touch the crimson sky that envelopes the city everyday as the sun goes down.

Bombay Rose was shown at the Contemporary World Cinema section at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival



Credits: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8435324/fullcredits/?ref_=tt_ov_st_sm

Thinking like an Oulipien

Guest Post

Review By Fraser Sutherland

Wishes: Georges Perec

Translated and transmogrified by Mara Cologne Wythe-Hall

Wakefield Press 2018, 229 Pages, $17.95, ISBN 9781939663337

The day my review copy of George Perec’s Wishes arrived I had spent part of the time wondering what a Shakespearean sonnet would look like if it had been written by a sheep.

I sheepishly admit that I naturally didn’t get far with my woolly speculations. Other than the indefinite article a (“ah”), Shakespeare’s lines tend to lack the short a, and anything resembling “baa baa black sheep” is nowhere in sight. Unwittingly, though, I was thinking the way Oulipians like Georges Perec do. They make up rules and obey them, come what may. As Jacques Roubaud says, “An Oulipian author is a rat who himself builds the maze from which he sets out to escape.”

As a group, Oulipo (an acronym for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, “workshop of potential literature”) was co-founded about 1960 by the prose polymath Raymond Queneau and included Perec, whose most famous, or perhaps notorious, work is perhaps the book-length lipogram La Disparition, translated by Gilbert Adair as A Void. The novel entirely dispenses with the letter e, the most frequently used alphabetical letter in French (and English.)

Oulipo rebelled against a heavyweight literary movement, surrealism.  In Perec’s words

At the OuLiPo

We prefer

The cocktails of Queneau

To the quenelles of Cocteau

If playfulness sometimes descends into sheer silliness, unlike surrealism or automatic writing it never becomes so mired in depth psychology so as to become humourless. Like surrealism, it specializes in opening doors to the unexpected. To that end, one of many Oulipian subversive tactics is “N +7”: each noun is replaced in a specified text by the seventh noun following it in a specified dictionary. Thus “To be or not to be: that is the question” becomes via Random House College Dictionary (1979) “To be or not to be: that is the quibble.”

Most of Oulipo’s members, except for the American expatriate Harry Mathews and the occasional elected luminary like Italo Calvino, have been French. France may be the only country ever to honour a merry band of literary jokers by issuing a postage stamp, which it did for Oulipo in 2002.

Oulipo’s predecessors or anticipators can be said to include Lewis Carroll, with his crazed logical consistency, and Alfred Jarry with his “pataphysics,” his so-called “science of imaginary solutions.” And one may as well throw in James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, who share Oulipo’s devotion to puns. For an Oulipian, as for them, a pun is not just the source of a cheap laugh, but the repository of a complex truth. No wonder Oulipians adore the creative mishearings (to which personally I’ve always been prone) called mondegreens. In one of his works Perec tells of an elderly Russian Jew who arrives at Ellis Island. He’d been advised to choose an Americanized name to offer the immigration officers. Unfortunately for him, he nervously forgets Rockefeller, the name he had chosen, and stutters, “Schon vergessen” (“I’ve already forgotten.”) The officer puts down “John Ferguson.”

Between 1970 and 1982 Perec sent about 100 or so people New Year’s greetings in the form of short texts which, as Maurice Olender says in his Foreword to Wishes, raise “the pun to the level of punishment.” Especially, one may add, punishment of a hapless translator. Mara Cologne Wythe-Hall bravely copes with the abundant challenges posed by the texts by producing two versions, one a “semantic” translation focussing on meaning,” the other a “transmogrification…that renders the play (rather than the meaning) of Perec’s text into English.” Added to them are tables that list the words or phrases generating the text.  But, as Wythe-Hall admits, “to present direct homophonic renditions of Perec’s tables into English along with their semantic meaning is simply impossible.” She gets high marks for translating what are in effect translations of names, titles, proverbs, and clichés, like trying to solve a crossword puzzle with maddening clues.  Reading Wishes demands a lot of consulting back and forth.

One example: a table gives “Rare est rire aux rues” (“Rare is the laughter in the streets,”) which Wythe-Hall translates as  “A passerby remarks how exceptional it is to hear people laughing in the street.” “Les choses (the things), in a table is transmogrified to “Lay shows” in answer to the question “What should one say to a girl exiting a bedroom, her face flushed, her clothes wrinkled, and her hair disheveled?” Les choses is also the title of Perec’s first novel. Oulipians are prone to in-jokes.

Historically free verse came about as a liberation from imprisoning, rule-based end rhyme and metre. For the Oulipian the greater the constraints, the more fruitful can be the results: a complex verse form like the sestina is more productive than rhyming couplets. So is the cento, a poem composed of other poets’ lines. Oulipian procedures and processes can lead to wonderful imaginative discoveries. The Canadian poet Christian Bök won the 2002 Griffin Poetry Prize for his Eunoia (“beautiful thinking”) that includes five chapters, one for each vowel: “Awkward grammar appals a craftsman,” “Enfettered, these sentences repress free speech,” and so on. Still, the pursuit of literature would be tiresome, trivial, or ultimately sterile if it were confined to wordplay and language games, entertaining or rewarding as they often are.

Harry Mathews, author of the marvellously inventive and hilarious novel The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium, came up with one of many Oulipian innovations, the “perverb,” a cross between two proverbs, e.g., “A rolling stone leads to Rome.”  

Which may be true. Nonetheless, all roads need to roam.

***

Biographical Note: Fraser Sutherland is a Canadian poet and lexicographer.  He’s published 17 books, 10 of them poetry collections, this year forthcoming Bad Habits (Mosaic Press.) He lives in Toronto.