I’m having difficulties reading the sixth Potter book. The first few chapters were crisp, but once Harry gets into The Burrow things get repetitive: everyone gets together, discuss familiar topics, go to Diagon Alley for another round of purchases, and then get on to Hogwarts Express. Although the setting this time is different – they are “at war”, hence things are much more gloomy – and there is a bit of mystery sprinkled here and there, I suddenly find myself weary of the whole plot. The conversations lack lustre and are long-winded; descriptions of settings lack depth; the magic is somehow missing. So far.

I’m aware that the book I just finished reading may be behind this reaction. Jumping from Pamuk to Rowling is probably not advisable for a reader who spends a few months with each work of fiction. So for the time being I’ve kept Potter aside, and taken up an author I’ve wanted to read for a long time: Kazuo Ishiguro. I’ve just begun A pale view of Hills, and I find myself strangely enchanted, sinking into the mind of Etsuko. No, I do not miss the wizards and witches.

* * *

We were at Frankfurt airport last weekend…..

….. to pick up Sister who was coming back from India.

She brought with her loads of sweets (for Colours, who’s losing weight and needs to catch up), books (for me) and Stories-from-India (for all to share).

Back home, I opened the suitcase and took out the books. They were from my collection remaining in Bangalore, and among this set were those I wanted to bring during our last visit (but couldn’t, because books had to make way for masala packets and pickle bottles). I leafed through a few pages as I took out each book, and a few old memories came back.

Sophie’s World (Jostein Gaarder)

“As soon as Sophie had closed the gate behind her she opened the envelope. It contained only a slip of paper no bigger than the envelope. It read: Who are you?
Nothing else, only three words, written by hand, and followed by a large question mark.”

The Penguin Book of Modern Indian Short Stories

“We were not even acquainted. I wrote to you and you responded in the same impulsive manner. How shall I introduce myself to you? I hardly know myself how I grew up – motherless and close to Appa, who was always engrossed in work. The first thing I ever learnt was to forget myself.”
– from “Savitri” (P.S.Rege)

Ancient India (Textbook for class XI; NCERT)

“One of the most interesting aspects of the study of history is knowing the history of history writing itself.”

The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes

“Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantelpiece, and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case.”

Classics – a very short introduction

“The aim of Classics is not only to discover or uncover the ancient world; its aim is also to define and debate our relationship to that world. ”

The Penguin new writing in India

“Kushi straightens her wet sari, pulling it across her breasts and hunching her shoulders to hide the new, embarrassing curves of her body. Then reluctantly, knowing there’s no way around it, she comes over to her father, who grabs a handful of her hair and booms, “What the hell d’you think you’re doing?”
– from “The most beautiful picture in the world” (Sunil Gangopadhyay)

The writerly life (R.K.Narayan)

“Yesterday, at the self-service cafeteria, I made the mistake of waiting for someone to ask what I wanted. Today I know better. ”
– from “New York Days”

* * *

I’m reminded of a quote I’d read somewhere: “Solitude is a nice place to visit, but a bad place to stay.” Time to come out of my shell, and embrace community.

It has been a week since I completed My Name is Red, and I do not yet know what to write about this book, and how. I could describe it in a few words – a grand masterpiece – but that wouldn’t tell you anything. I could write a page about it, like some of the reviews I read, but it would still be unsatisfactory.

There are many ways to approach a review. A form I like – but one I’ve rarely seen, perhaps due to its limited applicability and difficulty of composition – is where the review mimics the structure and tone of the work being reviewed, thus offering the reader an essence of the work: a portrait much more intimate than the detached sketch one finds in most reviews. So, for a book such as this one, the review would follow the novel’s narrative structure: an independent narrator who illustrates a part of the painting the book symbolizes…

I AM CALLED A REVIEWER

Since the last few days I have had a strange, recurring dream: I am woken up at an early hour by persistent knocking at the door. Opening it, I find a man from the palace, with a message from the Magnificent Sultan himself. His Excellency Our Sultan would like to know if the review of the work commissioned to me has been completed. I lower my head, partly in shame, partly in fear. Not yet, I reply, and the man goes away, carrying with him my answer that is bound to enrage Our Sultan.

The dream wakes me up, and I sleep fitfully the rest of the night. When morning arrives – by way of a ray of light that illuminates the room with the same strange brightness one sees in the beautiful eyes of Shirin as she gazes at the picture of handsome Hüsrev, the scene painted by the great Master Bihzad – I decide to pick up my pen and finish, once and for all, the review I have been struggling to put into words.

But tell me, dear reader, how do I review a work of such beauty?

How do I review a book with pages where every sentence contains a story, and where, as you move from one sentence to next you leap from one magical world into another, until, crossing this maze of stories and worlds, you begin to wish it had continued forever?

From what viewpoint do I review a work that is conveyed not just through words of people like you and me, but also through the sermon of a Dog, the lament of a Tree, the adventures of a Gold Coin, the boast of colour Red, the lecture of a proud Horse, the tale of two Dervishes, and the revelation of Satan himself?

How do I guide you into a book that takes you back into the middle-ages, through the winding streets of sixteenth-century Istanbul inhabited by blind beggars who know intimate details of who crossed their path, with whom, carrying what; by clothes peddlers with a bundle of clothes on their back and letters tucked to their waist, carrying love-notes from not one but many prospective husbands to the woman they love; by moneylenders who identify counterfeit gold coins by biting into them; by storytellers who entertain miniaturists after midnight in coffeehouses tucked away in remote corners; by Janissaries, those Turkish soldiers feared by all?

How do I outline the encounter between two radically different cultures this book is about, an encounter that speaks of a time when the culture of Islam, at its heights in the Medieval Ages, is struggling to hold on to its beliefs threatened by the diametrically opposite culture of the West, of Christianity?

How do I describe a book that conveys, through the resignation of a master miniaturist who has toiled for over half a century illustrating works and teaching pupils the art of painting in the ways of the old masters of Herat, the sad truth that their era is now over; that their magical works of art depicting the world as Allah saw it would be eclipsed by the Western method of painting reality as seen by Man, and hence be forgotten forever after?

How do I reveal the hidden, sinful treasures in these pages that liken the male tool to a reed pen and compare a woman’s mouth to an inkwell, pages where a miniaturist uses his reed pen to paint while his wife clings to the reed of his manhood?

How do I classify a work that is both a story of murder – a murder by a miniaturist who reveals to you the shame, guilt, pride and envy that flows through him, invoking your anger now and sympathy then, challenging you to identify him among other characters who speak to you – and a story of love – a love that has waited in the lonely corner of a young man’s heart for twelve long years, a period so long and painful that he no longer can recollect the face of his beloved he dearly loves?

No, this task is beyond me, or anyone else. Such beauty can only be experienced firsthand. So what exactly are you waiting for?

I’m on a different journey these days. Travelling with Vikram Seth from Heaven lake, I’ve made my way through central China into Tibet, hitchhiking most of the way. It has been an exhilarating journey: across deserts, valleys, mountains and basins; encountering floods, extreme heat and cold, stubborn adherence of the Chinese to regulations, their curiosity towards a foreigner and their warm hospitality; experiencing the spectacular beauty of Chaidam Basin, the regal magnificence of the Potala and the melancholy ruins of a Buddhist temple in Lhasa; staring with wide-eyed disbelief at the ceremony where dead Tibetans are chopped, mixed with barley and fed to the eagles.

I’ve learned a bit about Seth too, on this journey. He’s a sensitive person, sometimes moved to tears by acts of kindness by Chinese folk. His knowledge of the Chinese language is enviable, and one cannot help admiring his capacity to negotiate and get what he wants from the regulation-bound Chinese authorities. His attitude – humble, compassionate and open-minded – makes him somewhat of an exception among writers (He does not denounce people or dismiss a culture the way Naipaul does, for instance. But that is perhaps an inappropriate example: Naipaul too is an exception, at the opposite end of the spectrum).

We’ve just left Lhasa, and are now making our way towards the Nepalese border. I look forward to this passage through Nepal – who knows what memories of the five childhood years I spent there will flash again before me.

… and did I tell you that I recently took up My Name is Red, the novel by Orhan Pamuk I’d heard so much about? It is an enchanting piece of work, and has many similarities with the last novel I read (Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose). Both have illuminators, masters, apprentices, religion (Christ and Anti-Christ in one, Allah and the Devil in the other), murder (surrounding a book), forbidden love … and both are set in the medieval ages.

Here’s a sampling of some memorable sentences so far:

“You know the value of money even when you’re dead.”

“To avoid disappointment in art, one mustn’t treat it as a career.”

“If a lover’s face survives emblazoned on your heart, the world is still your home.”

“Painting is the silence of thought and the music of sight.”

The multiple character narration point-of-view is something I haven’t come across in a long time (Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone was the last one I read that had this structure).

You’ll get to hear about Red, Black, Enishte, Esther, Dog, Tree, Murderer and other characters as I slowly plough through this book.

In the German class T asked us the meaning of the word ‘Ersatz’. I vaguely remembered having come across the English word in an article where A.S.Byatt had spoken critically of the Harry Potter series and those who read it. It had a negative connotation, but I could not recollect its precise meaning. “Alternative”, he answered, but that somehow did not seem fully appropriate for its English counterpart. Back home, I looked up Wikipedia:

Ersatz is a German name (literal meaning: “substitute”) for products, especially chemical compounds and provisions developed in war-times when shortage of certain goods was imminent. It is associated with cheap replacement, low quality and disgust. The word surfaced during World War I in Germany because the allied fleet cut off all transport to Germany by sea.

Ersatz products that were developed were, for example: synthetic rubber (buna produced from oil), benzene for heating oil (coal gas) and coffee, using roasted beans, which were not coffee beans.

Although it is used only as an adjective in English, Ersatz can function in German either as a noun on its own, or as an adjective in compound nouns such as Ersatzteile (spare parts) or Ersatzkaffee (coffee substitute).

The wartime experience of ersatz products is satirized in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which features a line of Victory products, such as Victory Gin and Victory Cigarettes, which are uniformly vile.

Later, I found the quote from A.S.Byatt where she used the word in the context I had first read it. Speaking of adults reading Harry Potter, she said that “they don’t have the skills to tell ersatz magic from the real thing, for as children they daily invested the ersatz with what imagination they had.”

Etymology offers a fascinating path towards cementing a word in memory.

I spent the afternoon catching up with one month of blog entries I’d missed reading. Vivaldi was playing in the background, and after a while all I could feel was music flowing in through all my senses. I was reading Abdul-Walid.

His writing reminded me of my English course in my second year at NCJ, where “Things fall apart” was one of our texts. Our English teacher – I miss his name now – was in love with the book, and I cannot forget the manner in which he swooned over each African proverb he came across in the text while reading it to the class. Like a fan intoxicated by the poetry in the air at a kavi-sammelan, he would go “wah-wah” each time, leaving us in no doubt – whether we understood it or not – that we were in the presence of genius. It was only much later – long after the exams were gone and I no longer had to think of conjuring up half a page of text explaining the relevance of the novel’s title – that I really enjoyed the book. And somehow, I now tend to associate Abdul-Walid with the essence of African wisdom I carried out of that book.

He writes:

“The hippopotamus does not attempt to school the crocodile in the art of swimming.”

” There’s a debt to pleasure. At times, the payment plan is tolerable. “

The recent edition of The New Yorker featured three “debut-fiction” writers, one of them an Afro-American of Nigerian origin. When I first saw the photograph of the three authors, I instantly turned to the contributors page to learn more about the young black male in that photo. Could that be Abdul-Walid? I wondered. The first sentence was about his origin (Abdul-Walid is also from Nigeria!) but the next one dashed my hopes: this man was a Jesuit priest, and I cannot imagine Abdul-Walid leaning towards any institution, leave alone an orthodox church.

But I should have looked at the story first – the prose offered clues that could not be mistaken. It lacked the sharpness (acerbity?) and melody of an Abdul-Walid sentence; I also could not find much poetry in that prose.

* * * * *

The Harper’s collection of articles I picked up last month from the library is turning out to be a collector’s item. Spanning 150 years of the magazine, this eclectic collection contains host of well-known American authors. There’s a letter from E.B.White to Henry David Thoreau, two diary entries (one from Adam, one from Eve) by Mark Twain, a justification for having dropped the Atom bomb, an argument in favour of art for art’s sake by E.M.Forster and many others I haven’t yet read.

The chronological order gives the reader an idea of the major themes or ideas passing through each decade: for instance, the 1940’s section has many war related entries.

It’s going to keep me busy for months, which means I’ll have to purchase a copy.

A few years ago we met an Iranian family in Frankfurt. My wife knew Ali through her work and had met him in San Diego; he was now on his way to Iran with wife and son. We spent a few hours together during their transit halt at Frankfurt.

Ali’s Persian looks presented an unmistakable contrast to his American accent and mannerisms; his wife and teenage son seemed to blend in better with the western surroundings. Over lunch we spoke of life in the US (good), cars in Germany (not as big as those in US), and other trivial matters. Towards the end Ali casually remarked that they would have to change into traditional clothes before their flight landed in Iran. I was surprised, and pressed for an explanation.

“Women there cannot walk freely in western clothes,” he replied, in a matter-of-fact manner. “She will have to wear a veil before she leaves the plane.” Then pointing to his son he said: “Even he cannot walk out like this, wearing shorts.”

They had left Iran for the US soon after the revolution in 1979. When the religious fundamentalists had begun to alter the culture through strict rules and restrictions, it had become difficult to continue. They now visited their homeland every few years, to meet relatives and to keep in touch with their roots. He would love to return home, but not until the fundamentalists and their ways were removed.

I was reminded of this meeting today as I read Persepolis, a childhood story of a woman who spent her early years in Iran through those years of transition. I borrowed the book from the library because it was based on comic-strips, a genre I’ve stumbled upon recently (and enjoy very much).

Telling the story of living in a repressed society through the eyes of a child gives Persepolis a force that would otherwise be difficult to convey through the graphic form. The innocence behind the perception and understanding of the revolution, the childlike fears of facing its consequences, and the helplessness of the little girl and her parents leave you feeling shattered.

This is only my second book in the graphic/comic-book form (I’ve read Joe Sacco’s Palestine), and to me it seems like a medium with immense possibilities. I’ve often wondered why I don’t see blogs that express ideas through graphics (It is hard to believe that so few bloggers can draw, and although the difficulty of scanning and uploading sketches may deter some, the serious ones should not find that an obstacle; a more likely reason is that very few artists are into blogging.) When this thought recurred after reading Persepolis, I made an attempt to draw the first image in the book (shown above). The sketch showed clearly that my talent lay elsewhere, but with some effort I believe one can “fine-tune” ones skills enough to draw something acceptable for a journal. Let me see where this takes me…

Mesmerized by the arresting beauty of the first sentence in a book he had started reading, he thought: Do not judge a book by its cover, judge it by its first sentence. The next instant he was at his bookshelf picking out titles and looking for first sentences…

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Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)

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Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.

The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)

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In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

The Name of the Rose (Umberto Eco)

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I used to have a cat, an old fighting tom, who would jump through the open window by my bed in the middle of the night and land on my chest.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Annie Dillard)

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My suffering left me sad and gloomy.

Life of Pi (Yann Martel)

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While the present century was in its teens, and on one shiny morning in June, there drove up to the great iron gate of Miss Pinkerton’s academy for young ladies, on Chiswick Mall, a large family coach, with two fat horses in blazing harness, driven by a fat coachman in a three-cornered hat and wig, at the rate of four miles an hour.

Vanity Fair (W.M.Thackeray)

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“TOM!”

Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Mark Twain)

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My mother asked me to go with her to sell the house.

Living to tell the tale (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)

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Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe in everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his.

Invisible Cities (Italo Calvino)

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Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s stone (J.K.Rowling)

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Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover (D.H.Lawrence)

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Ah, the merry month of May!… Spring, the sweet spring … Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!

Adventures of Tintin: The Castafiore Emerald (Herge)

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In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.

The Hobbit (J.R.R. Tolkien)

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Chandran was just climbing the steps of the College Union when Natesan, the secretary, sprang on him and said, ‘You are just the person I was looking for. You remember your old promise?’

The Bachelor of Arts (R.K.Narayan)

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The first Wednesday in every month was a Perfectly Awful Day – a day to be awaited with dread, endured with courage, and forgotten with haste.

Daddy Long-Legs (Jean Webster)

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May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month.

The God of Small Things (Arundhati Roy)

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He lives in a one-room flat near Mowbray railway station, for which he pays eleven guineas a month.

Youth (J.M.Coetzee)

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Except for the Marabar Caves – and they are twenty miles off – the city of Chandrapore presents nothing extraordinary.

A Passage to India (E.M.Forster)

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People here in Western civilization say that tourists are no different from apes, but on the Rock of Gibraltar, one of the Pillars of Hercules, I saw both tourists and apes together, and I learned to tell them apart.

The Pillars of Hercules (Paul Theroux)