He brushed away questions of identity, playing the label game with me as he’d played it with so many interviewers: ‘I, Agha Shahid Ali, could be a Muslim-American poet, an Indian-American poet, a Kashmiri-American poet, an Asian-American poet, and what country does poetry belong to? What does it say on poetry’s passport?’
His view of history was similarly vast; Jezebel, Ishmael, Rumi, Lal Ded, Melville, Begum Akhtar—he claimed the world, and was at home in it, wherever he might have been. He stored the memories others might have discarded, or refused to explore because they were too painful; his mother’s illness and death in America became a way for him to return, through loss, to early happiness, never forgetting that the path back was through unbearable grief. At one point, the post offices in Kashmir ran out of postage stamps, and Shahid collected that image too, bags and bags of unopened mail piled up on the floor, letters written with urgency, carrying news or love or hope that would never be delivered.
Everyone has their favourite Shahid moment. Mine happened when, during the course of a half-hour interview that transmuted into a six-hour conversation, it became blindingly obvious that: 1) Agha Shahid Ali did not believe in false modesty, 2) with his skills, modesty wasn’t an option.
We were discussing his poetical progress: akin to a mountaineer’s determined ascent of the toughest peaks, no blind follower of free verse, Agha had written ghazals in English, attempted sestinas as well as sonnets, and, to crown it all, had written a canzone.
This is a deceptively light and graceful piece of verse, founded on a rhyme and scansion scheme dreamt up by a sadist in a bad mood. ‘No one’s done it for YEARS!’ Shahid exulted. ‘It’s supposed to be too DIFFICULT! They all said it couldn’t be DONE!’
And then this man in his late forties, clad in an impeccable kurta-pajama, danced a triumphant jig around the room, singing in melodious Henry Higgins fashion, ‘But I did it, I did it; I did it, I did!’
In an age when most writers mimicked either the mannerisms of seasoned diplomats or exuded the bratty sulkiness of pop stars, Shahid was an original, his nearest possible rival Oscar Wilde. The flamboyance, the voluptuous savouring of words, the ready wit—all of these helped create a persona for him that almost, though not quite, obscured his work. The poetry was too compelling to be ignored, in its clarity, its beauty and its anguish, as he chronicled the descent of his homeland, Kashmir, into endless years of war and occupation, among other subjects.
Those who made the journey from the poems to the man often floundered (‘Agha Shahid Ali is a strangely cheerful man . . .’ said one interviewer, flummoxed by this writer of deeply thoughtful verse who coined comic epigram after epigram); to make the journey in reverse was oddly reassuring.
Of his writings, only The Country Without a Post Office, originally published by Ravi Dayal, was available in India for many years, though now The Collected Poems can be easily found in most bookshops. This is one of the most acute, most haunting and most passionate love songs to Kashmir ever written. Rooms Are Never Finished was nominated for this year’s National Book Award in the US.
It includes ‘Lenox Hill’, a screed of mourning for his mother who died of a brain tumour in 1996 (‘. . . they asked me, So how’s the writing/I answered, My mother/Is my poem’), and for her beloved Kashmir where she was carried after her death by her family. By the time the NBA ceremony was held, in October 2001, Shahid was dying, also of a brain tumour. He had made his preparations, written his death poems, read them out to his friends in the US.
I heard of his death on a Saturday night, in the middle of a party in Delhi. Lines from one of his poems cut for a moment through the buzz of people enjoying themselves:
Stone, grass, children turned old:
The dead have no ghosts.
I knew Shahid only slightly: four unforgettable meetings and a few phone conversations aren’t enough to explain the intensity of the grief that came over me. Several of the people in the room knew him better; we didn’t say much about it, just turned the party into something resembling an Irish wake.
Shahid, who was so vividly alive and to whom being maudlin was a deadly sin, would have appreciated that.
*
It took almost four years for Agha Shahid Ali’s first collection of poems to make its way to India, where it was finally published in 2001. Ali’s country, in The Country Without a Post Office, has no borders, no official sanction, no national anthem. In The Blessed Word: A Prologue, he traces Kashmir’s lineage of grief and mourning back to the time of Habba Khatun, sees in its present ravaged state the trials Osip Mandelstam wrote about when his country went through its darkest times.
Few contemporary poets can claim as much mastery over form as Ali. Ghazals and sonnets are handled with equal deftness, and Ali writes prose poems and blank verse with the ease that comes only to those who have mastered the rules of formal poetry before venturing away from them.
Most of the poems here lead inexorably back to Kashmir: its history, its paisley patterns steeped in blood, its legacy of grief. Ali’s images are unwavering, mirrors held up to reality: ‘a shadow chased by searchlights is running/away to find its body . . .’, ‘The houses were swept about like leaves/for burning . . .’, ‘Death flies in, thin bureaucrat, from the plains—a one-way passenger, again . . .’
Underpinning the elegies is a hard appraisal of the stories behind the headlines. The most frightening element of the violence that seeps into most of these poems is its impersonality. Sample Death Row: ‘Someone else in this world has been mentioning you,/gathering news, itemising your lives/for a file you’ll never see.’ There are comparisons to bloodbaths in other parts of the world—Sarajevo, Armenia (‘O Kashmir, Armenia once vanished’), ancient Greece—as if to emphasize the continuity and remorselessness of the process whereby people and their histories are obliterated.
In 2009, eight years after Shahid’s death, activists and journalists began to write about the unmarked graves, the mass graveyards, of Kashmir. Basharat Peer wrote about meeting sand-diggers who found body parts in the river Jhelum, about the mass graves in villages near the Line of Control that concealed thousands of the disappeared.
And before the fact-finding teams, there was Shahid’s poetry, his dispatches sent from the war zone that was Kashmir in the 1990s. ‘The city from where no news can come/is now so visible in its curfewed night/that the worst is precise,’ he wrote, giving Peer a title for his own memoir of Kashmir, as though the two authors were fellow soldiers sharing the same battlephrases. He wrote of the shadows running away on Zero Bridge, the boys tortured in the interrogation cells of Gupkar Road, the friend whose ghost whispers to him, ‘Each night, put Kashmir in your dreams.’
Along with the paisleys and the chinars, he set down the stories from the country without a post office, of son after son taken away, never to return, of the bodies tortured, dismembered, dumped in mass graves, from where they mutely tell their stories, so many years after Shahid and others first started writing about them.
(Based on reviews and interviews written and conducted between 1999 and 2001.)
5
Kamala Das
Belong, cried the categorizers. Don’t sit
On walls or peep in through our lace-draped windows.
Be Amy, or be Kamala. Or better
Still, be Madhavikutty. It is time to
Choose a name, a role . . .
— An Introduction, Kamala Das
A name, a role, a religion, a language: all her life, Kamala Das questioned and rejected belonging even as she longed for it. By the time of her death this weekend, seventy-five and still settling into an identity, Kamala Das stood for certain things in the public imagination: she was the short-story writer, the woman who wrote of sexuality with a freedom unthinkable for the times, and then retreated into purdah, an apostate turned convert who rejected Krishna for Islam.
Few of this generation’s women writers know her as more than a name—sometimes a caricature—and to some
extent, Kamala Das left behind a mixed legacy, too much rubbish thrown in with the good stuff. Those who read in English knew her chiefly as a poet, and she could be a very acute one; but she was also overly prolific, and many of her poems suffer from a lack of revision. She was far more interested in capturing the perfect emotion than the perfect line.
Those who read in Malayalam knew her as a short-story writer whose work reflected the frustrations of a generation of women who were just beginning to question marriage and the domestic life, just beginning to embrace their own sexuality and need for freedom. Many knew her only by her autobiography, published as My Story, which was an often intense, often rambling account of her loves, her writing, her need for something larger than the world of tradition and the hearth.
. . . No, not for me the beguiling promise of
domestic bliss, the goodnight kiss, the weekly
letter that begins with the word dearest,
Not for me the hollowness of marital vows and
the loneliness of a double bed, where someone
lies dreaming of another mate, a woman perhaps
lustier than his own . . .
— Annamalai Poems
Kamala Das grew up in a house where literature and writing was the order of the day—her great-uncle was a writer, her mother, Nalapatt Balamani Amma, was a respected poet, and her father was the managing editor of Matrubhumi. She wrote as a child, but only began to write professionally after marriage and motherhood. Her views were shocking in that time, her frankness about female desire revelatory and unsettling.
Gift him all,
Gift him what makes you woman, the scent of
Long hair, the musk of sweat between the breasts,
The warm shock of menstrual blood, and all your
Endless female hungers . . .
— The Looking Glass
Today, it’s hard to fully understand the impact these lines would have had for a previous generation. Writers like Catherine Millet (The Sexual Life of Catherine M) and Charlotte Roche (Wetlands) now examine their sexual history in detailed laundry lists that leave nothing, from hemorrhoids to orgies as meticulously planned as a nineteenth-century tea party, to the imagination. But for women—and men—trapped in a multitude of roles that stressed the centrality of the family, Kamala Das’s passionate evocation of desire, her demand that women be given lives, and rooms, of their own, was revolutionary.
In her sixties, Kamala Das discovered a need for a different kind of submission, to faith. It was a choice that turned in another direction from the freedoms she had so often longed for and fought for. Her conversion to Islam created yet another identity for her; as Suraiyya, she abjured many of the things that had defined her as a writer. Hindus, especially the liberal fold, were shocked at this late-life change of faith. Nor did it please those who had studied Islam in depth and felt that Kamala Das/Suraiyya had woefully misunderstood the faith.
Kamala Das had become, she said in an interview, a ‘puritan in all senses’; she was seeking a kind of safety after the years of rebellion. In the process, she lost the ability to define herself, except in the most fluid terms—she remained, till the end, a seeker who never quite knew what she was looking for.
(Based on pieces written in 2004 and 2009.)
THREE
Writers at Work
1
Allan Sealy, in Dehradun
Like most fans of his work, I assume I know Allan Sealy: through the five previous books, through the readings he’s done over the years, the occasional journalistic writings that my generation of students used to discuss late into the night, from the interviews and book signings. Allan has his fair share of the usual paraphernalia of a writer’s life, especially when that writer comes from a generation so often analysed and written about: the same generation as Amitav Ghosh, Shashi Tharoor and company. His peers in college were Ghosh, Mukul Kesavan and Rukun Advani—all four have made their mark on literature, Ghosh and Sealy as novelists, Kesavan as an academic and writer, Advani as an independent publisher.
The Trotternama, Sealy’s first novel, is a mock epic that replaces the grand historical figures of the old ‘namahs’ with Justin Aloysius, the Great Trotter, officer and inventor who lives on the sprawling grounds of Sans Souci in Naklau. Like one of its predecessors, G.V. Desani’s All About H Hatterr, The Trotternama is both elusive and immortal—reports of its death are usually proved to be exaggerated, though it’s only a handful of readers in each generation who respond to the slightly manic history of the Great Trotter and his seven generations of family.
Running through its exuberance is a sadder and now almost-buried history—the story of the decline of the Anglo-Indian community, the carefully culled biographies scattered through the book no match for oblivion. ‘I wish to show you how History is made,’ a character says. ‘Understand first, good adept, that there are no sides to it . . . Front and back there be, certainly, which the vulgar call past and future . . . But sides, no.’
First published in 1988, The Trotternama stands at a crossroads. For the next two decades, Indian publishing (if not all Indian writers in English) would be in the grip of the marketplace, which exerts a kind of dictatorship of success on writing today. The Trotternama was also the last true successor to Hatterr and Midnight’s Children—with a few scattered exceptions, the Indian novel in English took a much more conventional and far less experimental narrative direction in the 1990s.
Sealy has always written against the grain of the marketplace, giving up early on commercial success, looking instead for the freedom to experiment—in a recent novel, Red, he includes poems, for instance, mingling with the prose. Landscape is crucial to his books; just as a writer like Annie Proulx sculpts the raw material of a place like Wyoming into her stories and novels, Sealy works best with places like Dehradun, making occasional forays into Delhi (‘a good lover,’ he says of the city, ‘but a bad wife’).
From Yukon To Yucatan was an early example of what he could do in other genres—Sealy turned a sharp eye on America, allowing himself to see the US as an exotic, unknown country, in just the way most travel writing outside of Europe and America explains the unfamiliar. His novels overlap without ever returning to the same terrain; The Everest Hotel, set in Dehradun, explored political and personal fault lines, betrayal and friendship; Red comes back to a fictionalized Dun, but is an interrogation of art and creativity. Nestled in between the two was The Brainfever Bird, an unusual love story that brought a Russian expat together with an Indian artist, in Delhi, a city defined by puppets, theatre and the relentless pulling of strings.
It’s only now, breathing in the crisp air of this afternoon in Dehradun, standing in the garden of his house—‘look for blue gates and trees, lots of trees’—that it strikes me: I have never seen Allan Sealy in his own element. This man moves with exuberance around the garden as he shows off the trees he planted ten years ago. (‘Brazilian coral bean [scarlet], Mexican silk cotton [pink and yellow], Chinese golden shower [dread dominatrix]’, as his narrator names them slyly in Red).
He talks of broadband connections—will they deliver him from the agony of crawling speeds on the Internet, the tyranny of Dilawar Singh, the local linesman? And of his hatred of phones: we spend six serene minutes eating an excellent lunch cooked by Allan and his wife—steamed vegetables, baked fish, strawberries and jaggery and cream—ignoring the shrill summons of the baleful instrument on the side table.
We exchange poetry, a Borges collection for Craig Raine, and Allan discusses his early infatuation with painting, his wary infatuation with Delhi, his lasting love for Dehradun, which appears in Red lightly camouflaged as Dariya Dun. The difference between the quiet man I’ve seen in Delhi, the one who says he would like to return to Doon because his garden is coming up and that’s much more important than longwinded seminar questions, and this confident, open writer is startling.
His other books are explained in chronological order as a journey (From Yukon to Yucatan)
, a chronicle (the vast and capacious The Trotternama), a fable (Hero), a calendar (Everest Hotel) and an illusion (The Brainfever Bird).
But Red carries no colon, no explanation. It starts with Aline, a woman we meet in a museum who sees the world through colour, and ends with Zach, a musician who understands the world as sound. Their stories are connected by N, the narrator, a writer who lives in the foothills of the Himalayas. Presiding over their lives is Matisse (‘he’s the patron saint of my book’), whose The Red Room and The Painter’s Family tower over the novel. The alphabet offers the reader a kind of guide, taking us from A for A line, to Z for Zaccheus, Zeebytes.com, Zipphone, Z-zzz and Zom. Artists rule the book: Aline paints, Zach serves his music, N writes, and a gang of Blackshorts in the Dariya Dun valley, unable to enter the world of museums or music ateliers, make a fine art of thieving and creating truck paintings.
‘In The Brainfever Bird, I tried to do something that probably doesn’t come naturally to me: narrative! It’s a terrible confession, in a conventional sense, because a novelist is supposed to tell stories,’ says Allan. ‘But I don’t think that’s a novelist’s sole or even primary duty. With Red, I just gave in to my notion that you should go off: I’ve always done that, from The Trotternama onwards.’ Each chapter of Red plays on a different letter of the alphabet. ‘It keeps you on the straight and narrow, but it also allows you to branch off. You should be able to jump in at any point. I love that bitty approach.’
The inspiration for Red is right behind me, in the glorious, singing, bright red paint that covers the shelves of a tiny pantry. Allan explains how the drawing room used to open into a doorless bathroom: his mother had intended to use the space as a schoolroom for small children, and the absence of the door was deliberate. The bathroom gained a door, the kitchen a small pantry, and we acquired a new Allan Sealy novel—all through happenstance.
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