Book Review: A Bit of Everything

A fine new novel I reviewed for Scroll, about Kashmir and much else:

 In ‘A Bit of Everything’, author Sandeep Raina travels with questions of memories and victimhood.

About ten pages into Sandeep Raina’s novel, the Kashmiri Pandit protagonist is asked if he would like to watch a film about the history of the concentration camp he is visiting. Rahul Razdan has just arrived in Europe after six despairing years in Delhi, and walking around Dachau has already filled his mind with thoughts of his homeland. Something about the Austrian stranger’s innocuous question jolts the usually subdued young professor out of melancholia into sudden rage. “I have seen it all, I have felt it, I have been the film. Why would I want to see it all again?” he snaps.

A Bit of Everything is punctuated by incandescent moments like this one, where the light – and heat – from a still-smouldering bit of memory suddenly illuminates the drab, papered-over present, sometimes threatening to set it on fire. But such sparks are rare, because they are dangerous. Most people, most of the time, prefer to view the past nostalgically, and Rahul is no different. In the nostalgic mode, too, the mental analogy is with a film – but a film one watches over and over because one yearns to inhabit it again. 

“The past could be recalled easily, it could be comforting. He could rely on it. He could replay his fondest memories. Sitting here in a cold lounge on a cold leather sofa, he could recall a summer garden, a breezy afternoon, a book aglow under a winter candle, the smell of a wooden bukhari, warm toes in woollen socks, the scent of apples in straw boxes, pine-needle charcoal smoking in a kangri, Doora’s fluttering sari. The past could be relived as he wanted. The problem was with the present.”

A Bit of Everything, by Sandeep Raina. Westland, 2020.

A slow souring

Raina understands the workings of memory from the inside out. His book is a self-reflexive take on how we craft the narratives of our lives: as individuals, as families, as communities, as nations. It is no coincidence that Raina’s fictional narrator, the mild-mannered Rahul, has the rare ability to accept himself – his bafflement, his grief, his anger – without denying others his empathy. That empathetic quality is particularly valuable in a paean to a lost Kashmiri Pandit homeland, because the granular personal memory of that loss is too often dissolved into a politically expedient history of collective Hindu victimhood.

After they were forced to leave the increasingly communalised valley in the early 1990s, the Pandits’ painful and legitimate grievances have been sucked more and more into a narrative not of their making. The community is now a crucial pawn in the Sangh Parivar’s game of whataboutery, a game which politicians benefit from keeping alive.

We live with Rahul and the others the wrenching violence of the Pandit experience, of having been uprooted from the only home they had ever known, with little notice and few avenues for return. But their fear and hurt and befuddlement is not marshalled into some easy post-facto rationalisation. Raina’s protagonists refuse to play the static parts assigned to them in that never-ending majoritarian game: Pandits are not perpetually wounded victims, Muslims are not perpetually ungrateful traitors. (Even those from the “forces’ families” are allowed complicated inner lives by Raina – though he makes it clear that India’s defence establishment is its own social category in Kashmir.)

Instead, Raina’s narrative burden is the slow souring of once-warm relationships – and like his professorial narrator, he takes it seriously. If he revels in the sights and smells and sounds of his beloved house and garden, painting a often-idyllic picture of the sleepy small town of Varmull (I had to google to realise it’s the Baramulla of news reports), Rahul is equally punctilious about recording the fault-lines beneath the surface. The cross-community connections of Tashkent Street are real, but they contain within them the seeds of discord.

On Tashkent Street

So, for instance, we learn that Rahul and Doora build their “Haseen House” on a spur of the fields belonging to Doora’s family. It’s a detail, but one that helps understand how historical resentments brew: Pandits own all the arable land for miles, while it is poorer Muslims like Firoz and his brother who know how to cultivate it.

Rahul’s relationship to Firoze lies at the core of the novel: their bonding over the garden; Rahul’s awkward silence when Firoze takes the blame for a theft that his brother may or may not have committed; his attempt to compensate by teaching Firoze English literature for free. The inequality once tempered by neighbourly attachment becomes unbridgeable as social distrust deepens.

Then there’s the story of Kris, originally Krishna, who lives in one of the derelict houses on Jadeed Street where most of Varmull’s Dalits lived, “no one knew since when”. After his father dies cleaning a gutter, he comes to work in Rahul and Doora’s house at 13, hoping to acquire some education alongside his domestic duties. But Doora catches him pilfering and sends him away, launching him on a series of adventures in religion. First disallowed into the temple on Gosain Hill, then offered a new name and a Koran but barred from the mosque as “napaak” (impure), the Dalit boy finally becomes a Christian at 14.

Tashkent Street enables unlikely connections, but also watches them with suspicion. If the relationship between Kris and the poor Pandit girl Ragnee raises eyebrows, so does the fact of Firoze’s and Asha Dhar’s mother becoming friends over their daughters’ weddings – and the Ramayan. “I can’t understand the trittam-krittam, trit-pit Hindi they speak in the show, and no one at home tells me anything,” says Firoze’s mother to her son to explain why she goes to Asha Dhar’s house to watch the Hindu epic on Doordarshan every Sunday. 

“Mother, focus on your Pashto, not your Hindi,” laughs Firoze, while telling Rahul privately that it’s the Dhars’ cooking she can’t stay away from. Asha Dhar’s husband Pt Dhar, too, is unhappy with the friendship, which brings the Khan family – including their younger son Manzoor – into unnecessary proximity with his teenaged daughters.

Coming home

Over and over, Raina catches cultural and linguistic undercurrents that are the waves of the future: Iqbal Bano playing at a Pandit wedding before being turned off for its Pakistani-ness; Arun Dhar averting his eyes when asked about his friend Manzoor, or Pt Dhar dropping his voice to a whisper when he talks about his son-in-law’s “Shankhi” leanings so that the shopkeeper can’t hear him, or telling Rahul that he should say “poshte” because Muslims say “mubarakh”.

Raina’s radar may be stronger in Varmull, but it is alert to signals of contradiction even in Delhi and London – the intra-Muslim divide between Pashto-speakers and others; his Babri-destroying cousin Chaman who assures Doora that Rahul won’t fall into bad habits abroad, while winking at him and talking about marrying a mem; the Trinidadian Hindus who toast “Raoul” with beef doner kababs and whiskey while enlisting his services as a pandit for their planned Sanatan temple in Tooting.

Rahul’s final return – to India and to Kashmir – is the only unconvincing part of the book, perhaps because Raina’s attempt to unravel all the knots of the past at once feels more like wish-fulfilment than reality. But this is still a book to be read for its closely observed, deeply felt sense of Kashmir: a world seen from the inside, and then sadly, painfully, from afar. 

In this, A Bit of Everything is the complementary opposite of Madhuri Vijay’s award-winning 2019 novel The Far Field, in which we travel into Kashmir alongside a privileged young woman for whom the place is just a name. It is her slow and revelatory transition, from clueless to tragically embroiled, that helps forge ours.

Unlike Shalini, whose understanding grows as she embeds herself in Kashmir, Rahul begins to understand many things as he is removed from them, once he is no longer a “god of education” in Varmull. Distance and time help recalibrate the familiar.

The British section of the book is powerfully evocative, offering a rare glimpse of the South Asian immigrant experience in all its trials and excitements. As someone who studied in England at an age and time close to the fictional Rahul, I found much that felt deeply recognisable: the insufferable white academic who generously “simplifies” his name for the brown person (while not even thinking to ask how to pronounce yours), the sad, desperate search for ingredients to cook your own food, and the unexpected intimacies with other brown people.

Sometimes these connections with strangers feel stronger than with one’s known people, like Rahul and the man who sells Kashmiri noon chai on a London street. In a world governed by whiteness, brown skin can stretch to cover the bones of class and caste, religion and nation. The differences magnified in the sameness of Varmull can shrink to nothingness in London. That, too, is a revelation.

Published in Scroll, 30 Jan 2021.

Shelf Life: Stitching the Past into the Future

 My Shelf Life column for November 2020:

What wartime women's fashion can tell us about the world

 

                  Christian Dior's 'New Look' was a massive departure from the clothes women wore in war-torn Europe
 

Elizabeth Gilbert's chatty doorstopper of a novel, City of Girls (2019), begins in the summer of 1940, when the narrator arrives in New York, “nineteen years old and an idiot”. Vivian Morris has just dropped out of Vassar College, judging as dull both the revolutionary young women in “serious black trousers” and the academic girls in shapeless wool skirts “that looked as if they had been constructed out of old sweaters”. While she knows nothing about the world, she knows clothes. And what makes the fashionable teenaged protagonist of 1940 different from one in 2020 is this: Vivian doesn't only wear cool clothes, she can make them.

Trained to sew by an exacting grandmother, Gilbert’s excitable heroine soon finds herself designing costumes the doddering theatre owned by her aunt Peg. It is wartime, and the Lily Playhouse is barely kept afloat by formulaic musicals: there’s really no budget for clothes. But the actors constantly need new outfits, so Vivian learns to improvise. She scours New York's cheaper garment districts and discovers the used clothes shops on Ninth Avenue, becoming a regular at a grand old shop called Lowtsky’s, owned by a Jewish family ejected from eastern Europe.

Vivian becomes adept at digging ancient dresses out of discount bins and transforming them into spectacular customised creations. From showgirls like her friend Celia, she moves on to designing for Edna Parker Watson, grand dame of British theatre stranded in New York by the war. 

 

Gilbert's narratorial preferences can try one’s patience, like addressing her novel to a young woman whose connection to Vivian is kept deliberately mysterious, to anticlimactic effect. But I enjoyed Gilbert’s enjoyment of fashion, a topic she addresses first with girly excitement and then subversive pleasure. The subversion begins with Edna who, though on first names with French couturier Coco Chanel, is no handmaiden to fashion. Her advice on how to dress—“if you dress too much in the style of the moment, it makes you look like a nervous person”, or “I want brilliant dresses, my dear, but I don't want the dress to be the star of the show”—is really advice on how to live.

 

But the book’s real subversion of fashion comes in 1950, when Vivian’s friend Marjorie Lowtksy, sharp young heir to the Lowtsky Emporium, comes up with a plan to cater to the post-war marriage boom. “[We] both know that the old silk and satin is better than anything that's being imported...” says Marjorie. “I can find old silk and satin all over town–hell, I can even buy it in bulk from France, they’re selling everything right now, they’re so hungry over there–and you can use that material to make gowns that are finer than anything at Bonwit Teller.” 

 

The USP? Their dresses “wouldn't be industry; they would be custom tailored”.

Vivian and Marjorie's business makes them rich.

The same era seen from across the Atlantic, in Eric Newby's drily hilarious memoir Something Wholesale: My Life and Times in the Rag Trade (1962) reveals a much more damaged continent. The family firm of Lane and Newby, begun by the writer’s father in the 1890s, is somehow carrying on against a backdrop of bombed-out cities and drastic rationing. Even the upper workrooms of its grand old London offices, writes Newby with brilliant British understatement, “went up in smoke in 1944”.

In some deep metaphorical way, the firm’s continuance into a post-war world now rests increasingly on an army of “outworkers”, elderly women in the suburbs. Meanwhile, their buyers still make orders conditional on unprofitable “Specials”: customised versions for women too misshapen or too snooty to wear the standard designs.

Like Europe itself, the continent's fashion business feels like a creaky old warhorse that can't figure out the new world. “Evening dresses, like the gatherings at which they were intended to be worn, were dispirited”, writes Newby. “[T]he world of fashion had ground to a standstill”. Young Newby tries to come up with new designs on his own. But just after he places his orders, in March 1947, the French designer Christian Dior shows the insanely feminine excesses of his new collection: what would make history as the New Look.

But at that moment, Newby’s creaking world isn’t quite ready. “It was thought to be absurd... a last despairing death-kick by Paris which was no longer to be the centre of the fashion world.” British wholesaler manufacturers, “[h]alf-throttled by clothes rationing”, and too afraid to implement Dior’s radical changes, just make what they have been making for seven years “with a slightly longer skirt”. Of course, nothing sells. The glossies for 1947 are filled with suggestions for women readers with wartime budget constraints, on how to drastically cut and reshape their old clothes.

European fashion, led by Dior’s bold move, slowly begins to recover. But where Europe can only move on by cutting away from its past, America—at least in Gilbert's telling—is already making money off it: repackaging the dead European past as nostalgia. The difference between alteration tailor and vintage couture is writ large onto the history of the world.

Published in The Voice of Fashion, 19 Nov 2020.

The context of power, the power of context

My Mumbai Mirror column:

The brilliant web series I May Destroy You opens up all the conversations we need to have on sexual assault, and its commitment to context illuminates a great deal about the contemporary moment

In a world where writing is unironically referred to as ‘content’, like some pre-flavoured filling for your social media sandwich, Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You (IMDY) feels not just rare but exceptional. The 12-episode series is actively genre-repellent. The awe-inspiring Coel, who is the show’s writer, co-director and lead actor, takes us on a semi-autobiographical journey through a Black millennial London world akin to her own, filling each riveting episode with enough emotional and intellectual energy for a whole show.

Coel plays Arabella Essiedu, a young British woman of Ghanaian heritage whose sharp Twitter voice made for a hit first book. But when we meet Bella, she has just spent a publisher-sponsored writing retreat in the arms of a dreamy-eyed Italian drug dealing lover. While pulling an all-nighter to produce a draft for her deadline, she takes a break to meet friends at a bar. The next morning, having delivered up a manuscript she can barely remember writing, she finds herself with a bleeding cut on her forehead and the choppy memory of a white man’s face.

IMDY has been described as a show about a woman processing the deeply disorienting effects of a sexual assault that she doesn't really remember. And it is very much that, with Bella's tale of slow recollection, relapse, recognition and eventual recovery offering us one of the most fine-grained accounts of what it's really like to live through something like this.

But it is also a show about a lot of other things: things not often seen on screen, things that have certainly never been treated with the sort of multiple POV complexity that Coel's writing achieves here. IMDY is such a powerful intervention because it embeds what others might have seen as an isolated sexual assault in a brilliantly thick description of its context. That context is illuminated by a nuanced politics of race, class, gender and sexuality, and yet the sociological irradiates without overdetermining, always allowing another possible reading, acknowledging the reasons for suspicion while pushing us to dislodge our fixities.

For instance, Bella is black, and all she really remembers of the man who raped her is that he's white. The show doesn't flag this, or at least not obviously – but IMDY is a powerful engagement with the politics of race in an ostensibly egalitarian society. There is, for instance, the flashback depiction of how white teachers in a mixed-race school instantly respond to a white girl charging a black male classmate with rape: “White girl tears have great currency,” says a younger version of Bella's friend Terry. Now, in adulthood, Bella's circle of friends is almost all Black and non-posh: an exclusivity that could be self-defence. That fear of white or brown or upper-middle class often turns out to be at least partially justified: the white girl who brings Bella into a vegan NGO turns out to have earned a commission on her Blackness, the Cambridge-educated South Asian boy gaslights his way out of an act no less horrific for being supremely common: stealthing (removing a condom secretly during sex).

For the non-Black viewer, watching the show often has the quality of being invited into a closely-guarded circle, offering much-needed perspective on what it's like to be Black in a society where white people still have cultural hegemony. Yet, and this is crucial: there is none of the ridiculous unidimensionality that plagues so much politically correct writing in our times. Being a Black person in IMDY is no more a guarantor of moral certitude than it is in real life. So within these twelve episodes, a Black man cheats on his Black wife with a secret girlfriend – also Black; another Black man forcibly humps his Grindr date – also Black; a publisher that Bella imagines solidarity with because of her being Black, proves just how instrumental the use of racial identity politics can be.

I've used the racial lens until now because it is one Coel foregrounds, her character's most strongly felt identity from which she must partially break in order to forge a sense of unity with other women. But the sharpness of IMDY is its ability to see that all solidarities are partial, often only extended until it suits someone to extend them. Coel's characterisation and subplots indict the gaslighters and victim-shamers – the Italian lover who blames Bella for carelessness when her drink is spiked, or the Black policeman who can't quite see beyond his heterosexual judgement of Grindr sex. But what makes the show so unusual and compelling is Coel's insistence on letting no-one rest in perpetual victimhood, to constantly show how the wheels turn, depending on context. So for instance, someone who is in a racial or sexual minority might still be able to have a certain gendered power over someone else – like Bella's best friend Kwame not telling a woman he sleeps with as an experiment that he is actually gay.

Equally significantly, IMDY unpacks the disturbing effects of call-out culture in real life: the addictive high of social media validation; the exhibitionism and distraction that allows people to not focus on the work they really need to do on themselves; and most of all, the unreflective high moral ground that can sometimes make the wokest people the most insensitive, because black and white allows for no forgiveness.

 

In the India of 2020, where we all seem terrifyingly keen to tag people as either victims or exploiters; where the display of fake victimhood has become the toxic malaise that defines our society, from our topmost political leadership to publishing to Bollywood; where even the best-intentioned wokeness often seems to merely insert itself into our centuries-old culture of hypocrisy, in effect overturning nothing – in this world, I May Destroy You might be the best thing you can watch to challenge your preconceptions.

 Published in Mumbai Mirror, 6 Sep 2020.

Out of the Closet with Kitty and Nan

The third instalment of my TVOF column Shelf Life, in which I look at literature through the prism of clothing, is about a book I have loved for twenty years:

In the 19th-century London of Sarah Waters’ Tipping the Velvet, clothes can help keep secrets—or reveal new selves. What looks like display might well be a disguise.

“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players,” runs the famous speech in As You Like It. It is fitting that history's most famous playwright made the theatre a metaphor for the unfolding of human life. But the stage can also be the perfect literary take-off point for stories of self-transformation—and the first step in becoming something—or someone—else is to dress the part. Sarah Waters' extraordinary first novel Tipping the Velvet, published 20 years ago and set in the Britain of the 1880s, begins on the music hall stage. That is where, in the Canterbury Palace of Varieties, the entranced Nancy Astley first sets her eyes upon Kitty Butler.

At first glance, Miss Butler is a girl dressed up to look like a posh young man: in a gentleman's suit, tailored to her size and lined at the cuffs with bright silk, with a white bow tie at her collar and a top hat on her head. But as Nancy's hungry gaze takes in more detail, she realises that though Kitty strides and sings like a boy, and stands with her hands “thrust carelessly into her trouser pockets”, her slender frame is unmistakably rounded “at the bosom, the stomach and the hips, in a way no real boy's ever was”.

What makes Kitty attractive is her changeability: now she seems like an exceptionally pretty boy, and now a slender, boyish girl. And much of that sense of changeability—for Kitty, and later for Nancy—is achieved in the novel through clothes.

Clothes are crucial, too, to the unlikely relationship that springs up between the upcoming music hall star and the Whitstable oyster girl. The adoring Nan begins to visit Kitty in her dressing room, folding up her stage clothes with quivering fingers, secretly pressing to her cheek “the starched linen of her shirt, the silk of the waistcoat and the stockings, the wool of the jacket and the trousers” —receiving from the clothes an erotic charge that their wearer has not yet acknowledged. Soon, the growing familiarity with the costumes becomes the route to intimacy with the person: Nan becomes Kitty's dresser, and her companion in London.

It is after this that the novel really comes into its own, laying out in scintillating narrative a world of performance, both off-stage and on it. Hoping to distinguish Kitty from a rising tide of male impersonators, her agent tells Kitty and Nan that they must “go about the city and study the men”, so that her act can broaden into a host of different male guises, each with its own song—and crucially, its own costume: “What think you of a policeman's jacket? Or a sailor's blouse? ... all that handsome gentlemen's toggery that languishes, at this very minute, at the bottom of some costumier's hamper, waiting, simply waiting for Kitty Butler to step inside it and lend it life!”

The Pleasures of Dressing Up

A still from the miniseries adaptation of the novel

But Kitty is not the only one to experience the magical power of clothes; the book's real heroine is waiting in the wings. On their first Christmas, Kitty gives the normally drably dressed Nan a “long, slim evening dress of deepest blue”, which Nan thinks far too fine for her. At Kitty's insistence, she wears it to dinner, only to find herself attracting more male flirtation than she ever has—followed by Kitty's inchoate jealousy, which finally lights the spark that turns them into lovers.

“The dress was so transforming that it was practically a disguise,” writes Waters in that passage, presaging Nan's future. For she will soon join Kitty on stage, their double act rising to top billing.

Among the book's most perceptive moments is the one where the shy, reluctant Nan realises that performing gives her pleasure. From that on-stage frisson “in the wearing of handsome suits, the singing of ribald songs” to recognising that the thrill of “display and disguise” only becomes more acute if the performance is live, off-stage—that is the journey that transports Nan first into London's lewd side-streets, then into its upper crust lesbian boudoirs, and finally into feminist-socialist circles. 

Kitty had resisted the pull of her masculine clothing, trying almost obsessively to keep her stage persona apart from her ordinary life. But the inner and the outer cannot be delinked so easily. Kitty’s fear of public censure (for being seen as a “tom”, a lesbian) is also a fear of her inner self.

Nan, in contrast, seems to revel in the inner possibilities opened up by changing her external appearance. And those possibilities—like her costumes—are unendingly changeable. Dressing as a boy in real life begins as a strategy for safety, but it is risk that keeps her hooked.   

Clothes are, in many ways, the driving force of Waters' narrative of sexual selfhood. New costumes seem to propel Nan into new selves. And yet somehow, simultaneously, it is she who animates them, her very physicality altering with each new avatar. Perhaps that, then, is the ultimate power of clothes: they can turn all of us into shapeshifters, performing ever-new roles on a real-life stage. If we can just enjoy the performance, it might no longer feel like one.

Published in The Voice of Fashion,  6 September 2019.

Bombay Continental

(A piece for Mumbai Mirror's 'Relative Value' section, as Gaylord Restaurant turns 60.)

It may be hard to digest for die-hard Bombaywallas, but the credit for what might be one of the city’s most iconic eateries goes to a Delhi-based family.

On November 16 this year, when Gaylord restaurant in Churchgate turns 60, Sunil Lamba and his sons, Dhruv and Divij, will have flown in from Delhi to play hosts at the birthday party. Gaylord is the sprightliest of sexagenarians: unafraid to flaunt its age, and yet wearing the years lightly.

Established in 1956 by the late Pishori Lal Lamba along with his friend and brother-in-law Iqbal Ghai, Gaylord was the second offering from the partnership that had already given India the Kwality brand. “My grandfather and his brother-in-law were living in a crowded dwelling with 20 people in Connaught Place. They had no background in food,” says Divij, “To make ends meet, they started a little outlet selling chips and eggs to people that came out of Regal Cinema (in Delhi).” From that single cornerstone of British working-class cuisine, the Ghai-Lambas (as they were known until they split in 1978) graduated to a more varied menu. The first Kwality Restaurant came up in the same spot as the shop, and was also where the duo first began selling ice-cream (often whole bricks of Cassatta and Tutti-Frutti) to Delhi’s population of American GIs: private soldiers in the US army stationed in Delhi during World War II, whose non-fighting duties afforded them both time and money for the pleasures of 1940s India.

The Gaylord brand was launched in Connaught Place in 1952, followed by Churchgate in 1956. It was pitched a notch higher than Kwality in style and expensiveness. “It was almost 5 to 6,000 square feet, it had that grandeur,” remembers Sunil. In both cities, it swiftly became the place to be seen for the sophisticated Indian diner, and it was only a short step to the creation of a Gaylord’s in London. The London branch served only the Indian menu, but its huge popular cachet — with visitors ranging from Peter Sellers to Ravi Shankar to George Harrison — soon produced an international Gaylord network, with outposts as far-flung as Trinidad and Kobe. “They didn't want us to invest money — which in those license raj days was impossible anyway. Just the name. And the recipes. And our chefs were sent,” says Sunil.

In Gaylord’s heyday, there weren’t many fine dining options. “So Gaylord was the gathering place for people in politics, business, arts and film, and for family events, the arranging of marriages, and so on. Also, it was a breakfast, lunch, teatime and dinner-time place, plus a nightclub — all bundled up in one,” says Divij, who handles the company’s Bread & More chain of bakeries.

“Nowadays, in the daytime, people probably don’t want to spend more than 300-400 rupees,” Sunil points out. “And there is also this idea of not eating rich food, especially in the day.” The Bake Shop, started about two decades ago, is the attraction for a younger crowd, but innovation in the direction of healthier, cafe-style dishes is essential, even with Gaylord’s loyal customers. “We go through our menu every year, remove nonsellers, and add on new innovative dishes,” says Dhruv, who handles Gaylord Mumbai in conjunction with its longtime Mumbai-based staff – CEO, AN Malhotra and General Manager, Noel D’Souza.

But Gaylord’s list of most popular dishes is still topped by the Butter Chicken (“North Indian food is less easily available in Mumbai than in Delhi; a lot of our Parsi customers come for that,” says Sunil). Continental classics like the Chicken Chasseur (chicken in a demi-glace sauce with mushrooms and green pepper, which happens to be Sunil’s staple order), the Pomfret Meuniere (a fillet of pomfret with lemon butter sauce, which is Divij’s favourite) and the Roast Lamb (serves with mint sauce and potatoes) also retain their loyal customers. Unlike many others of its ilk, Gaylord proudly retains its cream-based sauces (like the Chicken Cecilia), its baked cheese dishes (like the Lobster Thermidor, beloved of the legendary columnist Busybee) and the Chicken a la Kiev — whose delicious sinfulness has meant its unceremonious removal from more timid 21st century menus. Dhruv is currently excited about the 60 Year Nostalgia Menu, with popular favourites from the last six decades, including a Tawa Kheema Kaleji and a Banana Split that takes us right back to the GI era.

“We’re also launching a special 60 year label for Gaylord wine — a tie-up with Fratelli,” Dhruv says. “When the restaurant began in 1956, we didn’t serve liquor. It was only in the 70s that we could get alcohol licenses,” remembers Sunil, who returned from Cornell in 1974 and married his Bombaybred wife soon thereafter. “I didn't know this!” exclaims Divij, who trained as a sommelier alongside an early career in public policy. “Imagine all these people dancing to the Spanish band without alcohol. Conversing over coffee and patties! It’s amazing that an era like that existed.”

The cosmopolitan clientele to which Gaylord originally catered was an Indian elite that had come of age in a colonial moment, plus a generous sprinkling of foreigners who frequented what was then Bombay. “[Gaylord] was always this mix of Indian and Continental. Earlier there was also Chinese on the menu,” says Sunil, whose own youthful tastes ran to East Asian food (and who was later involved with the company’s Chopsticks brand). The restaurant’s Continental menu was meant to recreate colonial club food: in Divij’s words, “what the British would have had in gymkhanas all over India, stuff that reminded them of home, yet adapted to the local cuisine.”

Now, the company’s catering business (overseen by Dhruv) runs the kitchens of several old-style clubs: the Delhi Gymkhana, the Vasant Vihar Club and the naval officers’ clubs. The subcontinent has come full-circle.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 13 Nov 2016.

Found in Adaptation

My Mirror column: 

Sometimes what makes a narrative gripping is not what you don’t know, but what you do.

Basil Dearden's All Night Long (1962) is a finely calibrated adaptation of Othello 

A few weeks ago in these pages, I wrote about the Ramayana as ur-text, looking at how the filmmaker Altaf Majid combined documentation and enactment to explore the possibilities of the Karbi version of the epic. If the Karbi telling, Sabin Alun, meaning 'the song of Sabin' (Surpanakha), allowed new insight into the Ramayana, Majid's staging of parts of it — with modern-day actors playing a modern-day Karbi version of Ram, Lakshman, Sita and Ravan — was yet another glimpse into the inner life of the text.

Stories are strange things. The element of surprise we so value in the modern-day narrative is often the very thing that is missing from repeated renditions of any ur-text — and yet we are absolutely gripped by the story. Knowing what will happen liberates us from the tense prediction of plot. It means that we watch for the how, rather than for the what or when of it. Apart from all our traditional performances — Kathakali, Yakshagana, Ramleela, Alha-Udal — we, in India did this for years with mainstream Hindi cinema (even as smartalecky Anglophone folk felt superior by ‘predicting’ what would happen in films that were essentially variations on the same story, once you knew the genre).

Last month, at the India International Centre's annual cultural festival, cinematic variations on another sort of ur-text were screened: the plays of William Shakespeare. At one level, adapting King Lear or Macbeth could be perceived as being different from adapting the Ramayana or the Odyssey because the original text exists only in one accepted final form, and thus departures from it are more rigidly circumscribed – or at least must be more obviously authorly. Sometimes close adaptations, especially those that decide to use Shakespeare's own words, can seem to lack newness. Among the films I watched at the IIC was a Roman Polanski-directed 1971 Macbeth, which seemed to me to stick very close to the grain of Shakespeare's play in terms of the language, the approximation of milieu and the emotional register — the craven ambition and bloody intrigue and high dudgeon of it.

Reading about the film later, though, I discovered that Polanski had started work on the film soon after the Manson family's murder of his then wife Sharon Tate and several of their friends in Polanski's Beverley Hills home in August 1969, and that Pauline Kael, among other film critics, believed that the murder of Macduff's family in the film was a deliberately lurid take on that. The scenes with the witches, too, though they seemed to me exactly the sort of subversive outcasts that I imagined when I first read the Macbeth story in high school, might be seen as hallucinatory in a way that might easily be read as born of the psychedelic 1960s as likely lived by the filmmaker and his crew.

The IIC also screened Kurosawa's unfailingly chilling Throne of Blood version of Macbeth, and Grigory Kozintsev's 1964 Russian version of Hamlet, whose grand, craggy grey cliffs and general sense of desolation remain with me though I watched it nearly two decades ago. But the most unusual and interesting film of the lot was Basil Dearden's All Night Long (1962): Othello set in a 1960s London that is all rain-streaked streets and jazz, with Delia 'Desdemona' Lane being a white jazz singer who has abandoned the stage for a marriage to the loving but broodily possessive Aurelius Rex (the Moorish Othello here can actually be played by a Black actor, Paul Harris – rather than, say, 1951's Orson Welles in blackface).

Lest you imagine something smoky and seductive, let me say that this is a very British film in some ways – barring Johnny's (Iago) white-hot rage at the end, the characters project a strange wholesomeness even when they are devastated: something that can only be explained by the national stereotype of emotional reserve.

But Dearden has several other things going for him. Setting the film in that time and place allows him to delve into such twentieth-century inventions as psychoanalysis, or a very early instance of exploring recording technology as a falsifying mechanism that masquerades perfectly as truth. Dearden has the lazy English self-mockery of the moment down pat: a baffled young woman arrives at the cavernous Warehouse and asks why it's all the way out here. Comes the reply: “Haven't you heard, honey? Jazz is noisy. You can't have it in Mayfair.” There is also the beautifully lit double-level set of the jazz club, with its winding central staircase for melancholy romance, and closeted back terraces for secret intrigue and pot-smoking. Political correctness isn't a problem: “Jazz is appreciated by three groups: Negroes, adolescents and intellectuals,” runs one dialogue.

The film's biggest freebie is Dave Brubeck and Charlie Mingus appearing and playing themselves. With such atmosphere for the asking, it's amazing how tensely we still wait for the plot to unfold. It's definitely the how, not the what that matters.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 13 Nov 2016.

DJs, poets, dramatic desi loves

My Mirror column:

Ae Dil Hai Mushkil falls flat when it aims for high romance. So do any of our old languages of love survive?

In many ways, Ae Dil Hai Mushkil is a fairly standard-issue Karan Johar movie. First, it is a soppy romance about people who’re confused between love and friendship (and trying hard to sacrifice their feelings for the blissfully unknowing beloved) -- think back to Kajol and Shah Rukh Khan in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, or Saif Ali Khan, Preity Zinta and SRK in Kal Ho Na Ho. Second, it contains that classic K-Jo cocktail of oblivious upper-class-ness and self-conscious Indian-ness that emerges in full measure only when the protagonists are ‘abroad’. The first purpose served by this is in the aesthetic-emotional register: supremely well-off, well-dressed desis get to play out their overheated romances in picturesque cold countries. The second purpose is what we might as well call political: it is no accident that Johar has been among Bollywood’s pioneers of desi coolth, given his originary adeptness at turning not just firang locations but firangs themselves into mere backdrops for our Empire-writes-back moments.

Nowadays, Johar seems to have stopped enjoying making British characters stand for the Indian national anthem, and no longer even seems to get off having rude Hindi remarks made in front of foreigners who can’t understand them (admittedly, Kajol managed to make this reverse racism seem very funny in Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham). What ADHM offers instead, is a breezy world-is-our-oyster feel, in which South Asians on private jet vacations can bump into [also South Asian] ex-boyfriends DJ-ing at French discotheques (And just in case you were wondering about such prosaic things as visas, the film throws in two separate mentions of characters having British passports.) The resultant air of bonhomie is aided by the Empire choosing, whenever in doubt, to sing back: the oddly patriotic pleasure of watching white people sway to Hindi/Punjabi songs is amplified particularly in ADHM by having Parisians galvanised by the corny energy of Mohammad Rafi’s 1967 chartbuster An Evening in Paris.

Most of Johar’s romantic messaging is pretty spelt out in the film: such as Alizeh’s rather programmatic declaration, “Pyaar mein junoon hai, dosti mein sukoon hai (Love has madness, friendship has peace)”or her insistent idea (pretty much taken from Imtiaz Ali’s Rockstar) that only a broken heart can produce good art. Or the film’s avowed thesis, that unrequited love can be more powerful than a relationship: “you have full control over it... because you don’t have to share it with anyone”. How much any of these statements affects you depends partly on your mood at the moment you watch it spoken on screen, partly on who speaks it (Ranbir does best), and partly on your general propensity for dramebaaz mohabbat.

But it is more interesting to read Ae Dil Hai Mushkil for the things it does not spell out. Many of those filter through to us via language. The film seems, for instance, an expression of Johar’s desire to unite two very different landscapes of romance that I will go out on a limb and suggest he personally inhabits: the thumping rhythms of smoky nightclubs on the one hand, and the mellifluous Urdu that was for years the language of high romance in Hindi films. The film’s dialogue (by Johar and his long-time collaborator Niranjan Iyengar) moves constantly between a conversational Hindi peppered with English words — eg. “Tum mujhe seriously nahi le rahi, lekin yeh mera God’s gift hai” — and a high-faluting Urdu/Hindustani that is largely expressed in dubious ‘philosophical’ statements that neither Anushka Sharma nor Aishwarya Rai can carry off.

Rai, in particular, is saddled with the impossible task of playing what Johar in all seriousness calls a ‘shaaira’. The Urdu word for poetess is one I last heard in the 1994 film Muhafiz, in which too it was used as a self-descriptor – but it came accompanied by the devastating force of Shabana Azmi’s hauteur and pronunciation, and the context was mid-twentieth century Delhi. Having Rai, in a white airport lounge somewhere between London and Vienna, introduce herself as “Main shaaira hoon” elicits a hilarious but apt response from Kapoor’s Ayaan, who assumes that Shaaira is her name. “Main shaaira hoon, mera naam Saba hai,” says Rai, her eyes glinting dangerously.

The moment is, sadly, one of the very few in which the film takes on board the hilarious unbelievability of this uber-posh, uber-glamorous Vienna-based character being an Urdu poet. But at least Saba is meant to be a poet. For Alizeh, a hyperactive London-based dilettante recovering from her break-up with a Sufiyana DJ, the Urdu she speaks makes even less sense. The only way we can make sense of Alizeh’s language (and her 80s film obsession and her kurta-clad entry into clubs) is if we replace her supposed Lucknow origins with Lahore. Given just how much political fracas has been caused by the mere presence of a Pakistani actor (Fawad Khan in a thankless role as the DJ), I suppose it is not surprising that Johar decided to keep Alizeh’s real origins — like her legs —covered up.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 30th Oct 2016.

Bengali writers know that unless they reach London, nothing will happen: Sankar

My interview with Sankar, published in Scroll.

Sankar (Mani Sankar Mukherjee) is perhaps Bengal's best-selling contemporary writer. Born in 1933, Sankar has published over 70 books, including 37 novels, 5 travelogues, biographies, essays and stories for children. His most widely-read book is Chowringhee (1962), a slice-of-life narrative set in and around a fictitious hotel in central Calcutta. With its cast of colourful characters, Chowringhee was a perfect choice for big screen adaptation, and sure enough, the 1968 film starring Uttam Kumar was a huge hit.

Two more of Sankar's novels, Jana Aranya (The Middleman) and Seemabaddha (Company Limited), were made into films by Satyajit Ray. In recent years, several of his books have also done well in English translation, winning awards and new readers in India and elsewhere. Here he talks about his fraught relationship with the Bengali literary establishment, about being translated, and why English is the gateway to the world.

Did you start your fiction career writing for literary journals and periodicals, or did you first publish directly in book form? 

Since the 1950s, the practice in Bengal is to get serialised in magazines, and that is how my first novel, Kato Ajanare, was also first published. It appeared in instalments in the well-known literary magazine Desh, in 1955. Later it was published in book form.

Did your books become popular with Bangla readers quite early? Were your book sales connected to book reviews, press coverage or literary awards in Bangla? 

Bengali reviewers have been historically very mean-spirited towards me. (laughs) In fact, reviewers would spread canards of every sort about my books. Those who controlled the market were fond of dismissing me. Many of them said I was a one-book author. My books have only received one award in Bangla: for excellent binding.

But your books have always sold astoundingly well. I believe you did some marketing of your own books? I read on your Wikipedia entry that you sold collections of your books in blue packets under the name 'Ek Bag Sankar'?

I never did that. Ek Bag Sankar is just the name of my collection of stories for children. It is a bestselling book. I think it has sold some 100,000 copies, easily. It sold so well that I myself was embarrassed.

When were you first translated?

There was not much English translation in those days, when I started writing. At one point someone thought that the best of Bengal should be translated. But the editor of a Bengali magazine called Achal Patra, he was dead against it. He said, I will fast unto death, because if this English translation happens, then the world will find out from where Bengali writers have been stealing their stories.

Fast unto death!? Seriously?

It was a joke, but only partly. Bengalis, you know, they only talk, they do nothing. (Laughs)

But really, since Tagore's Gitanjali, Bengali writers have known that translation is the gateway to world success. Unless they reach London, nothing will happen.

But you didn't try to get your books translated?

Not really. When Arunava Sinha – he was my daughter's contemporary – said he wanted to translate it in English, I said, if he wants to waste his time, go ahead. And so he had done a translation but it was not published. Many years later, when Penguin Books approached me through my Bangla publisher, I said, there is already an English translation.

The Hindi translation of Chowringhee came out almost immediately after the book was published, and Vikram Seth and Khushwant Singh had both read the book in Hindi. They recommended it to Penguin. Vikram Seth is such a humble person, he was very nice when I met him in London.

In London also, they asked me this question: why so late with the translation? I quoted a Horlicks ad to them, which I once saw in the Statesman: “It is not available, but it is worth waiting for”.

What about the Indian readership for English translations? Do you think it has grown larger/ more interested in Indian language writers, in recent years?

Well, I can say that I got many readers across the country, and the critical attention also helped in getting new Bengali readers. In Generation Next, even the Bengalis don't read Bangla, so having an English edition that they can read is a great thing.

How was the media reception to the English editions of your books different from the Bengali press?

I was in London for the London Book Fair, and Chowringhee got raving half-page reviews in the British press. People say, this one book has given Calcutta a calling card. And good literature cannot survive on scandal value. Who Lady Pakrashi was is of no consequence. (Interviewer: Mrs. Pakrashi is an important character in Chowringhee, and apparently the publication of the novel led to some speculation about her 'real' identity.)

Critics in English write with an open mind. In Bengal, not so. And there is no advertising or marketing of Bengali books. Sometimes it's just a notice.

Could you give me a rough sense of the number of copies sold of your books? For instance, of Chowringhee in English versus Bengali? And if you have the numbers, of any of your other books that have been translated?

Chowringhee in Bangla has sold over 100,000 copies for sure. (Interviewer: The English edition it has sold 30,000 copies, according to Penguin Books India.) And as for Bangladesh, the pirated edition sold in huge numbers. I don't think there is anyone from Bangladesh I have met who has not read Chowringhee! Now, thankfully, there is a legitimate Bangladeshi edition, and that is also doing well.

More recently, there is a non-fiction book of mine on Vivekananda, that has sold 1,70,000 copies in Bangla. It has also been translated in English, The Monk as Man: The Unknown Life of Swami Vivekananda. Who knows why, he is a phenomenon, and I am just an old man. I get incredible phone calls from all over the country. Two days back a reader called from Gujarat, and said, tell me, why did Vivekananda choose to wear gerua colour? Was it because it takes long to get dirty?

Do you think having your writing available in English has changed things for you as a writer?

English is a storehouse of all the ideas of the world. People are reading in it and remembering a language that has not yet conveyed itself to the world. Once you reach English, you can reach even China. So why would you want to write something where the train will not move beyond Asansol?

I believe in Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, the whole world is one family. Hotel Shahjahan and its characters belong to the world, and not only to Calcutta. 

Book Review: Nebulous Narratives

She Will Build Him A City

Raj Kamal Jha

Rs. 599

Bloomsbury, 2015.

In the Jan-Feb 2015 issue of Biblio, I reviewed the latest Delhi novel:

Raj Kamal Jha's new novel is not an easy read. The prose is often lyrical, and the images vivid and strange, like dreams. But there are all sorts of factors that make this book difficult to enter into, and perhaps even to think of as a novel. For one, its structure is deliberately elliptical, starting somewhere in the middle and looping back and forth in wayward whorls. Then there's the fact that the central characters are deprived of proper names: we must learn to live with them under the annoyingly precious titles of 'Man', 'Woman' and 'Child'. Each chapter in the book is devoted to the world of one of these characters, with a subtitle – for instance, 'Man: Highway Mynahs', Woman: Lecture Notes', or 'Child: Traffic Signal'. If there is a chapter that doesn't feature any of the three, it comes with the tag 'Meanwhile'. (The 'Meanwhile' chapters are my favourite parts of the book, perhaps because it felt as if the author had freed me from the pressure to connect them up to a central narrative.) Given the number of characters and sub-narratives we're dealing with, of course, it's not quite clear whether there is a central one. And Jha's propensity for surreal flights of fancy – sometimes in the authorial voice, sometimes his characters' – doesn't make comprehension any easier. I would have described the book as a jigsaw puzzle—except that having reached the end, I'm still not certain that I've pieced it together.

Still, I shall attempt to provide what hazy outline I can. 'Woman' is the only character to speak in the first person, addressing not us but her absent daughter (who goes from being a breathless “eight years nine years old” to a taciturn young woman with a secret). 'Child', in true Dickensian style, is a baby left at the doorstep of an orphanage and named Orphan. The book's epigraph is from Oliver Twist, so one assumes this is homage. Orphan does not speak. The updated Dickensian cast of Orphan's carers starts off as the most convincing thing in the book (and they have real names, too). There's the poor trainee nurse Kalyani Das, the publicity-hungry orphanage director Mr. Rajat Sharma, the memorable media-anchor turned potential-adoptive-mother Priscilla Thomas. But I stopped going along when a street dog called Bhow joins the list, speaking like a human being. And later we must meet a ghost-like old lady called Violets Rose (her name is an anagram of 'Love Stories') who lives inside a multiplex, and after she takes charge of Child, it becomes unclear if Child is real, or a composite figment of different people's desires.

Finally, there's 'Man', who is introduced to us in this somewhat theatrical fashion: “He is going to kill and he is going to die. That's all we know for now, let's see what happens in between.” The “all we know” suggests a narrative contract into which the author-narrator wishes to bind us – except since he knows full well what's going to happen, and we (readers) don't, it feels rather precious.

Even so, Man is arguably the book's most arresting, because most shocking, figure. We first meet him on the Delhi Metro, making his way from Rajiv Chowk to Gurgaon, which Jha insists on calling New City. (Again, it's not quite clear what's achieved by mixing the named and unnamed: there is practically nothing about New City that wouldn't be true of Gurgaon. But more on that later.) Within less than a page of meeting him, we have been inserted into Man's disturbing, often inchoate fantasy world: “The station is crowded, he closes his eyes, sees everyone naked and bruised... He feels an erection coming. He opens his eyes, his heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains, John Keats.”

Over the next few pages, Man quotes Gieve Patel at us, reminisces poetically about a barium sulphate examination he underwent as a child, and describes the horrific Diwali murder of a dog, carried out by him and his friends. For the rest of the book, every time Man appears, the sense of menace is palpable. When he takes a street child ('Balloon Girl') and her mother back to his impossibly plush home in 'Apartment Complex, New City', we remain on tenterhooks, waiting for the violence we are sure will follow. But Jha will not fulfil that voyeuristic desire/fear so easily; instead he gives us a succession of sequences where it is never quite clear what is really happening and what is inside someone's head. The book thus steers clear of graphic violence. But it often seems in danger of aestheticizing it.

She Will Build Him A City comes with front-cover (Neel Mukherjee) and back-cover (Jeet Thayil) recommendations that describe it as revelatory about the “New India”. Certainly, the text is spiked with moments that are meant to reveal the yawning abyss between the rich and the poor, like a game played by the four young dog-killers, where they put the price of everything they see in brackets: “Arsh flicks his cellphone (Rs. 41,245), records the explosion, its aftermath.” Or later, describing the situation outside Man's apartment: “There are six security guards huddled at the gate, forced to wear long-sleeved shirts and ties in this heat. Two are from Bihar, the other four from Uttar Pradesh, all leaving behind fathers with cancer, mothers with TB, wives with uterine cysts, children who have dropped out of school, all waiting for Rs. 4,000 to come every month.” And all sorts of underprivileged people get their five minutes of fame, labelled with capitalised names by Jha, as if they were some strange sea creatures that have floated up out of the depths: 'Bandage Baby', 'Mortuary Man', 'Taxi Driver', 'Driver'.

In contrast to these gimmicky, flash-like glimpses into the heads of Others, our access to Man's interiority is total. The main thing we need to know about Man is that he's rich. He is so rich that he orders Chinese takeaway from the Leela. But the great sign of his absolute separation from the masses is his near-pathological inability to deal with the heat and dust and grime they must inhabit. Whole passages are devoted to his desire for freezing air-conditioning, his olfactory sensitivities, his compelling of unwitting future victims to scrub and clean and deodorise themselves. (And yet, we are also expected to believe that he “loves the Metro from the bottom of his heart”, so much so that on some nights, he deliberately abandons his car and takes it, despite the fact that people in it smell “like rotting vegetables, bread and bananas gone bad”.)

For a book so invested in newness, and in the depiction of the new, it is odd that what Jha's 'Man' most reminds me of is a figure of Victorian lineage. It was 19^th century London that produced the powerful myth of the really well-to-do man who went out into the city anonymously and committed unspeakable sexual, sadistic crimes against poor women and children. If WT Stead's journalistic expose, 'The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon', reworked the Minotaur myth to paint London as a modern-day Labyrinth in which thousands of “the daughters of the people” were “served up” nightly “as dainty morsels to minister to the passions of the rich”, the sensationalist speculative coverage of the Jack the Ripper murders a few years later cemented this vision: the purveyor of unnatural lust who preyed on the poor. This anonymous elite villain took fictional form in RL Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Stevenson wrote the book in the summer of 1885, soon after his friend WE Henley had eagerly forwarded him the instalments of the 'Maiden Tribute'.

The subliminal basis of Jha's book (both the Man and Child sections) doesn't seem that different from the one that emerged from that Victorian melange of tabloid melodrama and urban danger: a city in which the rich feed on the poor. And metaphorically accurate though it might be, somehow the execution of the idea left me dissatisfied. Neither the experimental quality of Man's grisly hallucinations nor Child's surreal surroundings could keep the central theme from feeling hackneyed. Similar effects have been achieved with much greater success by others, in the specific context of Delhi, the Hindi writer Uday Prakash's 'Dilli ki Deewar' and 'Mangosil' come to mind.

The Woman sections of the narrative feel fresher, evoking both her long-ago marriage and her relationship with her daughter with all the power of memory. Rendered mostly as incidents and conversations sharply recalled, there is plenty here that captures the irrational sweetness and bitterness of childhood joys and fears. Jha seems genuinely interested in children. Other than Woman's daughter, he gives us short but fascinating portraits of the lives of two very different eleven-year-olds, both old beyond their years: a boy whose extraordinary sensitivity reverses our pervasive fear of a new generation stunted by technology, and a girl whose responsibilities to family and work have forced her to stifle her own childish desires.

Jha's book adds itself to the growing list of volumes 'about' the Indian city, and especially, in recent years, Delhi. But what Jha attempts here with Delhi has been done much better with Bombay in Altaf Tyrewala's No God in Sight (2005): a slim, sparkling little novel that Kiran Nagarkar described as “an unsettling relay race, in which the baton is passed on from one character to another... till you come full circle.” It is clear that Jha's aim, too, was for his million little pieces to make up the shape of the city. But while there are plenty of 'scenes' that work, the whole does not cohere. Many elements, and the connections between them, remain indistinct and fuzzy. What we end up with is not a planet, but a nebula straining to be one.