Bhog and Other Stories

In Ankur Betageri’s debut collection of short stories, Bhog and Other Stories, the last story, Malavika, is about a Bangalore-based materialistic girl. The eponymous character, Malavika, is befriended by the narrator—a writer and a friend of the young college-going student. The writer shows that Malavika is confused about life.

Once Malavika and the narrator go to a hospital to donate blood. The doctor does not allow Malavika to donate her blood because of her having a low count of red blood cells. Malavika turns sad at this rejection and the narrator reads her a poem to cheer her up. She cuts him off in the middle of the narration and tells him that he should publish books and seriously consider writing novels. The narrator muses: “Only when a person’s capacity is expressed in the form of a product or a service can one give it the value of money—only things having money value can have any value. I realized that this philosophy was behind all her talk and action.”

Moreover, Malavika advises the young poet to exercise ‘emotional discipline’, implying that one should express oneself at the right places only, where ‘the expression’ could be monetized. In this story, Ankur is alluding to the marketisation of feelings and their commoditized modes of expression in our world.

Later on in the story, Malavika seems to suffer from a nervous breakdown. She can’t understand her own suffering. She meets up with the narrator. “Look, there is a deep lack of love in this world,” he consoles her. “Like most people who have adjusted themselves to the dehumanizing conditions of the capitalistic system even you have lost the ability to love someone with all your heart; to accept someone with all your being. While a small portion of your brain shows a little love and sympathy, the rest of your brain becomes busy calculating like a businessman.”

“Feeling is not our weakness—it is a sign of our humanity,” the narrator reminds Malavika. Obliquely, perhaps Ankur wants to tell us all about our materialistic madness and paranoia—our undesirable sufferings, the postmodern crisis of meaning in life. And Ankur should know it—he has a Masters degree in clinical psychology.

Like Malavika, most of the stories in this collection are about the dilemmas of life that characters in cities and villages face, until a transforming moment comes in their lives that imparts them a rare insight. The characters, and through them the readers, woven by Ankur in these stories are rewarded with epiphanies that somehow lessen the burden of life, for life invested with meaning becomes less painful.

Psychology, philosophy, and ancient wisdom form the framework for the screen on which Ankur throws his beam of imaginary characters that fashion his curious world. The resulting tales sometimes take strange, allegorical forms and depending on her taste, a reader could find it interesting or boring. In essence, his stories demonstrate the fight between the spirit and the matter. In The Source of the Stream, a character thus summarizes the modern man: “Modern man … (is) nothing more than an animated corpse—he has become a zombie. He is spurious, narcissistic, shallow and this has forced him to become sensational, for he can be nothing else…Sensationalism is the artificial spirit of the dead age. And if no one wakes up from this slumber of cynicism there is the unthinkable possibility of forgetting the very presence of Spirit, the Spirit in which is found the depth of our true joys and sorrows.”

Insights flow from one story to another in this collection of 14 stories. But all stories are not realistic. There are some fantastic stories too such as Atmaram Harbhaji and The Armour. Atmaram Harbhaji is particularly interesting—the main character is a man who was born in five bits and was lovingly brought up in a sack by his mother. This is a tragicomic story with the dark shades of Kafka and the linguistic inventiveness of Rushdie.

Ankur’s piece de resistance in this collection is the title story—Bhog. The story has been told in an old-fashioned narrative style which slowly grows in its power. It’s about a poor old man who prepares for the Bhog celebrations. Bhog is a ritual festival celebrated on the first Saturday after Deepavali to mark improvement in the family’s affluence and prosperity.

The old man, the story’s protagonist, has nothing to celebrate actually but he has to live up to the expectations of the villagers. As he painstakingly hews a dead tree to make firewood for the celebrations, he is met with the news of the death of his family’s dog. He uses the wood to make a funeral pyre for his dog, instead for his Bhog celebration. He gives in to feelings at the cost of his perceived prestige in the village. The story somehow reminds us of Hemingway’s The Old Man and The Sea (the struggle between the fisherman Santiago and the giant marlin vs. the struggle between the old man and the date palm tree). The image of the old man hacking at the unyielding date palm tree reminds me of a scene in Anusha Razvi’s Peepli Live in which an emaciated old man digs soil in an open crater. Given the setting, I had the feeling that a story like should have come from the pen of Munshi Premchand—it is so powerful.

Bhog is the most accomplished story in this collection of many insightful stories. Though the stories here are of uneven quality and they could have been better edited, each one of them leaves you with a thought or an insight. Overall, Bhog and Other Stories could be a rewarding read for those readers who want more than mere entertainment in their reading material.

An edited version of this review appeared in The Financial World, Tehelka’s sister publication dated 5 May.

The new volume Colonialism, Modernity, and Literature: A View from India is a response to Ananthamurthy’s call. It provides close readings of a uniquely representative work of modern Indian literature and develops its analyses in a resolutely comparative framework. That work is Fakir Mohan Senapati’s late-19th century Oriya novel, Chha Mana Atha Guntha, the most recent translation of which, Six Acres and a Third, appeared in 2005 (Indian edition by Penguin in 2006). Focussing on literary and cultural analyses, this collection of essays presents one distinct and complex view from the Indian context, but it is a view with wider implications.

The first theme this volume addresses is the relationship between colonialism and socio-cultural modernity in the colonised world. The recent scholarship on ‘alternative modernities’ strongly suggests that fine-grained historical, cultural, and philosophical analyses will show how distinctly modern values such as individuality and radical egalitarianism were articulated in contexts other than the capitalist West. Since the so-called pre-modern societies have been looked at through speculative and ideologically distorted lenses, it is likely that a more rigorous, empirically based analysis can drastically revise our understanding of them. Literary and cultural texts — both high canonical and popular or ‘folk’— can play a major role in this revisionary analysis.

The second major theme of the volume concerns the forms in which social critique is articulated in literature, and in particular how they define a literary view from below — the perspective of the lower orders of society, the subalterns — as expressed in literary styles and modes. Comparative analyses reveal, for instance, that the narrative forms Senapati develops, extending some indigenous oral and written traditions, are similar to the forms used by the Latin American writer Gabriel García Márquez, who was challenging — some sixty years after Senapati — the dominance of neo-colonial power in his own society in Colombia.

Finally, the volume’s comparative method itself points to a significant theme: the strategic political value of comparison in the study of Indian literature. These essays may suggest to readers non-ethnocentric — and, in the modern Indian cultural context, non-chauvinist — ways of studying Indian literature. They de-emphasise regional literary histories, especially the construction of hoary pasts and glorious traditions, to focus instead on cross-regional clusters of historical and cultural meaning. They attempt in-depth interpretations instead of merely celebrating authors and their works.

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AUTHORS from India, China and Japan swept the shortlist for Asia’s top literary prize last Tuesday, with a debut novelist and Nobel Prize winner among those vying for the US$30,000 (RM92,000) award.

Manu Joseph grabbed one of five shortlisted spots for the Man Asian Literary Prize with his debut Serious Men, while Japanese author Kenzaburo Oe, winner of the 1994 Nobel Prize for Literature, was also among the finalists for The Changeling, a story about one man’s investigation into why his brother-in-law killed himself.

In a video conference from Britain last week, Brick Lane author Monica Ali, one of the award’s judges, called Joseph’s story set in the slums of Mumbai “seriously funny” and “ingenious”, while praising Oe for his “rich and complex work”.

Acclaimed Chinese author Bi Feiyu’s Three Sisters, a portrait of contemporary Chinese culture, The Thing About Thugs by Tabish Khair, and Japanese writer Yoko Ogawa’s Hotel Iris rounded out the five finalists.

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The ambition of a person defines him. If it is quixotic, it becomes a source of entertainment for his friends and relatives. While they would cheer on Don Quixote in the pursuit of the nearly impossible ambition, they would snigger in the sleeves, waiting for the moment when Quixote puts his feet on a banana peel. When Quixote reaches within the striking distance of achieving success, their cheering would turn into a skeptical form of disapproval: ‘Is the goal worth all the trouble? Why is he even doing this?’ and so on. Once he enters the portal of success and steps into the hall of fame, the success would be conspiratorially begrudged and daggers of jealousy would come out in the open. That is more or less the trajectory of a person with an literary goal in India unless you happen to have gone to Oxford or Stanford, or at least, to Delhi’s St. Stephen’s College.

When I first came to know Monideepa Sahu through Francis Ford Coppola’ forum for writers, Zoetrope, she was a former banker looking for a future in writing. We soon became friends and exchanged emails (we still do), supporting each other in our literary journeys. Unlike me, Monideepa had gone to Delhi University’s Lady Shri Ram College and had studied literature. She displayed a good grasp of literature and had a sharp eye for nuanced writing. I always valued her feedback and suggestions and earned a friend in the process.

Over the years, Monideepa grew as a writer and had success with some stories published in journals outside India. More success followed with her stories getting into anthologies in India and Malaysia. When her novel was picked up by Zubaan, out of an open pitch competition at Kala Ghoda Festival in Mumbai, I was as genuinely excited as her. In the following months, I got to read some chapters of the novel and when the illustrations for the book were ready, she sent them to me for my feedback. When the book came out, I was sent a copy. Yet, out of her natural grace and goodness, Monideepa never asked me to review her book (I rarely review books for others). I took it upon myself to write a review of her novel voluntarily.

What I said about ambition and jealousy springing forth out of success with one’s ambition does not apply in Monideepa’s case. She deserves all the success that she has got and deserves more. Given the odds in her life, which I have been somewhat privy to, her achievement is praiseworthy. In this whole journey, from writerly frustration to success, I have never felt even a tiny tinge of jealousy or nurtured a speck of ill-will toward her. I am sure she will achieve more success with many books that she plans to write.

I don’t have much experience in reading or reviewing literature for children in English (except for the classics that I read in school, from Panchtantra to Aesope’s fables and Arabian Nights and so on). I didn’t know how to start this review (I hate false starts) so I thought a note on our literary friendship would be an apt beginning.

Also, the topic of ambition and ill-will seems pertinent in the discussion of her first novel, Riddle of the Seventh Stone. Rishabh the rat, the novel’s protagonist, magically metamorphoses into a human form and enters the realm of Indian childhood. In this new world, he has a similarly transformed spider companion Shashee, and human friends, Deepak and Leela and their grandparents. While Rishabh grapples with tough geometry lessons in school, he grows up to like the new world and solve its problems; he is also given the ambition to become a doctor. The character of an Indian child without acquiring an ambition would be like a fable without a moral lesson—a universally important element of literature for children or young adults.

The ill-will part, the menace in the story, comes from a property developer, the Shark, who, just like one of the thieves in Home Alone, has glinting titanium teeth. Monideepa sets up the conflict early on in the story. The Shark wants to takeover the shop of Deepak and Leela’s grandfather, Venkat, and turn it into a shopping mall. What follows, in terms of a plot, is a thriller-like account of how Rishabh thwarts the plans of the bad guy, and at the end of the tale, emerges as a winner. He discovers a treasure but his real prize is more than that, which comes with a moral lesson for all the characters in the novel.

Apart from its fascinating storyline and moral lessons (important achievements never come easily to anyone; We mustn’t allow sorrow and disappointment to darken our world, and so on), what drew me into the novel is Monideepa’s language. The narrator’s voice is adult-like, with a sharp eye for detail, and a playful display of a facility for describing tastes and senses (a gang of crickets playing Mozart’s symphonies, stale rotis stiffer than shoe uppers; dustbins overflowing with gourmet delights, and so on).

Monideepa evokes the city of Bangalore and its history and geography with a deceptive ease. But what I loved most in the novel is her use of metaphors and similes in the story which often comes from the point of a view of a vermin (a voice sweet as a carrot halwa, a girl’s eyes has been described as a pair of lovely burnt frying pans). She also shows interesting parallels between the human and the vermin world by using imaginative devices such as V-Mail (for Vermin Mail) and WWW (Wonderful Wide Web). What fun!

Monideepa’s first venture into the world of vermins and humans is a delightful read. If I as an adult couldn’t put down the novel, I am sure children and young adults would find it a most fascinating read.

Riddle of the Seventh Stone, by Monideepa Sahu, Delhi: Young Zubaan, 2010. The book can be ordered online from Flipkart, Indiaplaza, and Crossword within India.

I think that decision really came abruptly because just all of sudden I found that I just really loved writing and I wanted to give it a try. So I sort of just gave up my science career to try. And it worked out well. I only write in English, I never write in Chinese. I had never written in Chinese, and so when I started writing, I used English. So English actually is my first language in writing, so there’s just that, I don’t think I can write in Chinese, because I’ve never done that.

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The 15-day celebration of South Asian writing and arts – DSC South Asian Literature Festival – will see a galaxy of authors from the sub-continent reach out to the Asian and British communities across the country to celebrate the diverse culture and literature of South Asia.

The festival, hosted by the DSC Limited, will open at the prestigious Shakespeare’s Globe at the London Bankside and move to an eclectic mix of venues across Britain with 30 events.

The venues will be spread across British Library, British Musuem, Rich Mix in Bethnal Green, Free Word Centre in Farrington and ‘Q Books’ in Soho.

Related events are scheduled in Brighton, Oxford, Leicester and Sheffield, Surina Narula of the DSC Group said.

The festival will announce the shortlist for the $50,000 prize for literature from a longlist of 16 titles.

The highlights of the festival are literary sessions like ‘India and Pakistan: Literary Worlds Apart?’, ‘Twin Dynasties’, ‘From Fatwa to Jihad’, ‘Cricket, Commonwealth and Country’, ‘Power of Pen: Resolution for Kashmir’ and ‘Journey to South Asia’.

‘The idea for the festival came from children’s book writer Bhavit Mehta and Jon Slack, former chair of the Society of Young Publishers’. They came to me nearly nine months ago with the idea and we decided to help them. The Jaipur Literature Festival team comprising William Dalrymple, I, Namita Gokhale and Sanjoy Roy provided them logistical support,’ Narula told IANS in the capital.

According to Narula: ‘The festival is more of an outreach project that will go to places like Birmingham and Lester to involve students in South Asian literary movements.’

A familiar face in the literary fraternity, Narula has been the adviser to the Jaipur Literature Festival.

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While world literature has found its way into China, Chinese literature is still fumbling to find its feet in the world, writer Liu Zhenyun says. He made this somber observation at a recent Chinese literature translation symposium. It gathered more than 30 Sinologists, translators and writers from 13 countries to share their experiences, problems and suggestions.

Michael Berry, American translator and associate professor with the University of California at Santa Barbara, agrees with Liu, saying: “A literary work has no footing among world literature without a translation, however excellent it is.”

According to Wu Wei, director of the China Book International (CBI) Promotion and Planning Office, 348 translated titles were published in the United States last year, of which only seven were from China although more than 15,000 works are published in the country every year.

Julia Lovell, British translator and lecturer in Chinese history at the University of London, believes this situation has a lot to do with publishing and teaching trends in the Anglophone world since the 1950s.

She points to the response to Japanese and Chinese literature during the Cold War, to explain why substantial numbers of British readers are familiar with names like Yasunari Kawabata and Haruki Murakami from Japan, but barely have a clue about the Chinese authors Shen Congwen (1902-88) and Qian Zhongshu (1910-98).

According to Lovell, American publisher Knopf carefully marketed selected works of modern Japanese fiction in keeping with the broader US project of reinventing Japan as a regional ally.

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I am one of those people who think a novel should be as long as Camus’ The Stranger. That novel is of an optimal length, a benchmark for me, apt for our attention-deficient generation. Look at some of the best loved novels by J M Coetzee, Hanif Kureishi, Bruce Chatwin, Junichiro Tanizaki and Ismail Khadare. They are not heavier than a Starbucks bagel. But they are great literature, good stuff to read. A good story is like a life well-spent: not how long it is but how good it is what matters.

You think I am just making some catty remarks, leaving my prudence in the basement of my foolish mind. But the fact of the matter is that I am trying to be honest. This brief detour of my toe-deep knowledge of literature, or my approach to reading, was warranted. I am no James Wood. Accepting one’s shallowness is humiliating but at the same time it’s liberating.

Now you know why I was so skeptical. Also, in an age when Joyce’s Ulysses is being read in twenty tweets flat, how can one save one’s brain from not developing a schizophrenia of sorts, attention divided between work, email, multimedia and social media (if you don’t believe me, read Nicholas Carr’s Is Google Making Us Stupid?). To tell you the truth, before this internet era, I was able to read Tagore’s novels. In translation. There, I have said it.

Coming to Paper Boat, my expectation was for a saga in the pre-Independence India, set in the undivided Bengal of the early 20th century. It already sounded boring because so many novels have been written tracing family histories in different parts of India. However, the novel’s title was intriguing. Paper Boat! Hmm…it sounded like a mini Titanic.

The novel claims it has been written in the Uppanyaas tradition of vernacular India—a novelty in this time of cheap thrillers and quick metro reads (though they have their own market, I admit). Clearly, here is an author with some gutsy ambition, I thought. The guy does not want an easy walk into the sunset, a rite of passage for many well-read and well-travelled Indians who find time to pen a novel or a memoir in their post-retirement days. Nothing wrong with that. Nirad Chuadhuri published his first novel when he was in his 50s.

So, with some expectation and with some trepidation, I began to read Paper Boat. I dipped in and out of it over weeks, even months (I am a slow reader and I read 3-5 novels simultaneously). What blew me away was the passion and hard work with which Rajat had put together this sprawling story. Even the language and diction that Rajat has employed in this work are in tandem with the era with which he is dealing in the plot—a pre-television era story with a pre-television era writing style. I could see his blood, sweat and sinews in the work.

In terms of plot, the story is about Nalini, a strong-minded feminist, who lives in Birat Gram in undivided Bengal, now in Bangladesh. She is a beauty, a brilliant student, a fine debater: she is a perfect specimen of womanhood, flawless (that makes the character less realistic). There is a school romance, a near romp in the classroom and lots of talk among aunts and cousins about finding suitable grooms or brides. Then tragedy strikes and Nalini is on her death bed. But her daughter Rani tries to save her mother by performing an unusual feat. The story goes back and forth in time, narrating the tale of Nalini, and at the same time, noting the social changes that take place in and around her in Bengal.

This is a quintessentially Bengali novel: the author makes gentle observations, the characters are chatty, sometimes naughty too and there is enough intellectual banter to engage the reader.

What the novel suffers from is over-description. The novel starts with the description of the setting, the village of Birat Gram. It reminds me of Balzac. But Rajat’s Birat Gram is more complicated than Balazac’s Paris, in say, Old Goirot. Clearly, Rajat has overdone it and that richness of description, though beautiful, mars the flow of the story. The storm scene in the first part of the novel is marvelously written, but it tests one’s patience as it has been written in great detail.

This problem persists throughout the book. At one place, Rajat takes two pages to explain Bengali cuisine, and how it is different from European cuisine and so on. And here is an example of how meticulously Rajat describes a cottage: “The property was square-fenced, by razor wire in front, by brickwork at the back. The fence had horizontal rows of wires a foot apart. Columns of wooden poles, placed at intervals, took the weight of the fence. On the left, the fencing ended perpendicular to a sidewall; and on the right it ran six feet away from, and parallel to, the other side wall, ending further down at a wall that formed an L shape with the sidewall” (page 119).

Reading this passage, even a Martian would know what the writer is talking about. This level of description shows Rajat’s eye for detail but somehow it disregards the reader’s imagination.

Perhaps deliberately employed but the choice of Rajat’s narrative style makes readers like me go slow on the reading. We are used to reading novels in contemporary idioms. Read this: ‘Somnambulating to a washbasin at a far corner of the room, he splashed cool water on his recoiling face. He straightened up, to eye himself in the mirror hanging by a reluctant nail…’, page 55 (italics mine). Somnambulating? A reluctant nail? How about a shot of a reluctant tequila?

Another example: ‘To an informed, particularly from close range, mind, this gobbledygook palace was a cacophony in architectural noises,’ page 73. This stuff is deep fried in metaphors.

And this one is almost funny: ‘This aspect of her personality put the school’s code of discipline under pressure it hadn’t the hind experience to parry,’ page 92.

The novel is not just overwrought; it could have hugely improved with a healthy dose of editing (For example, ‘This lot was for those could not read…’, page 54; ‘He came to because rain, goaded by ferocious winds, was splashing his face’, page 57)– typos in the book that distracts one from the reading experience (Here is more: ‘But he not that someone’, page 59; ‘Her giggle was the single excess did not irk him spontaneously,’ page 115).

Nevertheless, despite its heft and turgidity, Rajat’s first novel is a remarkable work of fiction—it takes you on a tour of a time and a place that reads like a legend, with a cast of characters whose gentleness seems surreal in our insensitive times. Only you have to have the stomach for it.  — Zafar Anjum, Editor, Kitaab

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