Month: January 2006

Winter landscapes

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The first time I contemplated the beauty of a snow-covered landscape was when I read about the painting Hunters in the Snow. As the author of that essay beautifully writes:

What fascinated me initially about Hunters in the Snow is
that it made me feel cold just looking at it. Looking at this painting
is like standing in an open doorway and looking out at a wintery
landscape. You can see your breath when you look at the painting, you
can feel the bitter chill on your cheeks. The colors are harsh – black,
white, blue-grey – the colors of a world that has not seen warmth or
sunlight for a very long time. The sky is as flat and unforgiving as
the sheets of ice covering the rivers and lakes in the valley. The
trees, spidery and bare, jut lifelessly from the frozen ground, and the
wiry brown tendrils of the plant in the foreground are being smothered
by snow.

Such keen observation, I found, was possible only through a picture; standing in the cold I could think of little else but how to get warm. And photographing such landscapes turns out more difficult than I would like it to be.

Manwithdog

I spent fifteen minutes on the terrace of a restaurant we stopped at while on the road in Switzerland last month. The bleak wintery landscape seemed otherworldly. Like Hunters in the Snow.

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The blown fuse

A couple of days back an electric bulb burst in our apartment. We had just finished dinner when I switched on the main light and *pop* – the bulb burst, and threw the apartment into darkness. My first thought was not about what to do next – that would come later – but how lucky we were not to have been anywhere near the bulb. Pieces of shattered glass reflected light that filtered in through the windows; there were probably many more in the darker areas of the room.

Perhaps it was a blown fuse; I looked around to see if the fuses were located inside the apartment. This was a new place, not yet familiar. When the obvious places didn’t reveal anything, I went outside and scanned the common areas of our building – no luck there either. We didn’t know our neighbours yet, so the only alternative was to call the concierge phone number listed on the message board and ask for help.

“Hello, do you speak English?”

“er…just a little..” A woman’s hesitant voice.

“I’m calling from Avenue d’Ouchy 85. We have a small problem in our apartment -”

“Wait minute please – what is your number?”

“It’s the one I’m calling from.”

“Is it xxxxxxxx?”

“That’s right.”

“OK, one person call you soon. Bye.” She hung up.

A few minutes later, a man called and started in French. I interrupted him.

“Excusez-moi – do you speak English?”

“Non”

This was going to be tough. I tried telling him – in English – what had happened, stressing on the words “problem” “electricity”, and after listening to me he started off again in French, but it could as well have been Swahili. We take communication mostly for granted, which makes situations like these – where one doesn’t understand a word of the other – more surprising and disorienting than it should seem.

After struggling for a couple of minutes I gave up. I had his number, and perhaps a friend familiar with French could act as an intermediary. Before hanging up, he said “Bye, Bye” – the only two words that had made any sense to me.

Wife then called D, who called this man and got back to us: the man had reluctantly agreed to come over; he should be at our place in about half an hour. We lit some candles and waited.

The darkness, and the silence it brought along, took me back to childhood days in India where we faced frequent power-cuts in summer. I welcomed them – they gave me an excuse not to complete my homework due next day – but the mosquitoes and the heat would eventually have me cursing the local electricity board. I would rub Odomus – a mosquito repellent cream – over my hands and legs and sit next to candles, listening to the hollow sound of crickets in the dark. Sometimes, while with friends, we would exchange stories and jokes.

The man arrived after a while. He was short, plump and looked typically French – like one of those characters in a film depicting the Victorian era, if you chose to disregard his unkempt appearance. He shook hands in a brisk manner, and said something in French; I nodded, as if in complete understanding, and showed him the socket the burst bulb had occupied. Then he went outside and opened the “fuse room” – apparently each floor had one – and began to look for the blown fuse. I walked back and joined Wife inside our apartment.

“What’s he doing?” she asked.

“Checking for a blown fuse. Typically French, isn’t he?”

“Quite handsome, actually.”

“I thought he looked like Napoleon. To me most Frenchmen look like Napoleon – wonder why.”

“He’s probably the only Frenchman you know.”

“Probably the only Frenchman worth knowing…”

The man returned a few minutes later. Inside, he looked for a fuse and found it above the front door – the problem appeared to be with this one. He disappeared again for a while and returned with another fuse, which worked …. temporarily. The real problem was with the socket of the blown bulb: he unscrewed it, and left the wires hanging from the ceiling. Then, the new fuse worked: light, once again.

Before leaving, he explained something about the socket; we listened and nodded. We expected a bill, but he didn’t come out with any. I tipped him ten Francs, which he gladly accepted and wished us “Bye, Bye”.

Two Lives

In his work On the natural history of destruction, W.G.Sebald offers shocking statistics on the number of lives lost in the aerial bombing of German cities by Allied forces at the end of the second World War, and goes on to discuss how inadequate the German response has been to this calamity (in terms of discussing it openly and through literature). The essay consists mainly of generalizations, and one misses the details of how life in post-war Germany was, how people living among the rubble in the destroyed cities managed with those extreme conditions, both physical and emotional.

This detail emerged, in the form of letters written by people living in both East and West Berlin in the years after the war, in a book I just completed: Vikram Seth’s Two Lives. One West-Berliner writes in early 1946:

What have the Nazi criminals made of Germany? A heap of rubble, ruins and ashes. Destitution everywhere and indescribable hunger and misery… A frequently occuring case: two schoolchildren (brothers) have between them only one pair of shoes (torn, naturally). In the summer, they go barefoot. In the winter they take it in turns to go to school; only one can go, the other must remain at home….

But we are working at it; one hopes that the children will someday build a better, peaceful Germany…

And another:

This morning once again I had cause to be quite unhappy. A very clean little old woman, her face full of wrinkles, came to the door. She could have been your mother or mine. I gave her a small coin and a slice of bread, which one has to do many times a day, because there is great hardship, especially among the old…..What really shocks me is the fact that old people, grown helpless, have to suffer for the guilt of ambitious creatures…

Yet another makes a request to a friend in London:

If I am not abusing your kindness, I would say that Mrs.v.Gliszczynski would thank you very much if you could send her a pair of stockings, used of course, and some underwear (undies) also worn, if you have some. She possesses one single pair of stockings, in an awful state and no means to get any here – We unhappily lost all and everything by the bombs!

These portraits, obtained through the letters of friends of Aunty Henny (Seth’s great-aunt), form one of the many facets that make this double biography both illuminating and enjoyable. Historical relevance aside, Two Lives offers the reader an intimate portrait of two (three, if one counts the bits and pieces of the author’s life that emerge) individuals – Seth’s great-uncle and aunt – whose lives spanned most of the twentieth century. As Seth, reflecting upon images of their lives at the end of the book, says:

Behind every door on every ordinary street, in every hut in every ordinary village on this middling planet of a trivial star, such riches are to be found. The strange journeys we undertake on our earthly pilgrimage, the joy and suffering we taste or confer, the chance events that cleave us together or apart, what a complex trace they leave: so personal as to be almost incommunicable, so fugitive as to be almost irrecoverable. Yet seeing through a glass, howevery darkly, is to be less blind.

Seen through the glass crafted by a gifted writer like Seth, even trivial details acquire a quality of significance in the world that surrounds lives it illuminates. Seth combines memoir, biography and history with great skill, distancing himself in some places and bringing himself to focus in others, to add yet another genre to the incredible variety he has explored with his published works. What next, one wonders.