She was not like the witches in some of the grimmer Russian fairy tales, which did not soften their violence. I read many of these, including one about a brother and sister pair, Sister Alyonushka and Brother Ivanushka. The brother was changed into a little goat by black magic, and as for the sister: ‘One day the Merchant went away from home and all of a sudden a Witch appeared out of nowhere. She stood under Alyonushka’s window and begged her ever so sweetly to go and bathe in the river with her. Alyonushka followed the Witch to the river, and when they got there the Witch fell upon Alyonushka and, tying a stone round her neck, threw her into the water and herself took on her shape.’ When she realizes that the goat knows her secret—he sings to his drowned sister—she decides to kill him. The goat sings to Alyonushka:
Sister, dear Sister Alyonushka!
Swim out, swim out to me.
Fires are burning high,
Pots are boiling,
Knives are ringing,
And I am going to die.
She sings back to him:
Brother, dear Brother Ivanushka!
A heavy stone lies on my shoulders,
Silken weeds entangle my legs,
Yellow sands press hard on my breast.
I was seven when Sanjay and Geeta Chopra left their home in the tidy military enclave of Dhaula Kuan to go to the All India Radio offices. They were supposed to take part in a Yuv Vani programme, which was to start at 7 p.m. At 8 p.m., their father, Captain Madan Mohan Chopra, switched on the radio and heard an unfamiliar voice, not his daughter’s, compering the programme. He left on his Bajaj scooter earlier than usual to pick up his children at 9 p.m. They weren’t at the studios; they had never reached.
At different times that evening, two witnesses saw a struggle take place in the back seat of a mustard-coloured Fiat—it looked as though a boy and a girl were fighting with the driver and another person. One of the witnesses, a junior engineer with the DDA, said that he caught a glimpse of the boy’s shoulder; it was bloodied. He saw the boy wave his hands, ‘beseeching help’.
Two days later, on 28 August 1978, a cowherd, Dhani Ram, followed his cattle across the Ridge and found the dead bodies of a boy and a girl. The bodies were decomposed, and in the medical report, the list of injuries sustained runs a full, and heartrending, page. They had been tied down, tortured, hit by blunt instruments and their murderers, Billa and Ranga, had hacked at them with a kirpan so viciously that their skulls and spines had fractured in several places.
Billa and Ranga were hanged for the murders of Sanjay and Geeta Chopra in 1982. They had kidnapped the children for ransom, and grew frightened when they learned that their father was a naval officer: that was an explanation for the act of murder, but not for the hours of torture those two children had been made to suffer.
I remember how the picture of the murderers on the front pages had smudged and blurred, the carbon spreading on the cheap newsprint to create a second set of phantom nooses around their necks.
The murder of the teenagers was tragic, but not sensational in the way it would be today. There were no 24x7 news channels, no Breaking News headlines, no panels to talk it to death, no outrage cycles on Twitter, and perhaps crucially, Delhi was a smaller place. Their deaths and the bottomless grief of their parents hit home for many families in a way that might no longer be possible. Our neighbour wept, holding her own, younger children close. The news of the injuries were not flashed in photographs that violated the children’s last mortal privacy; it spread slowly across the city, becoming a focus for the many, nameless fears that had spawned in the Emergency years.
After August 1978, we could no longer go out and run around in the same way. Mothers called their children home, fearfully, and the habit of travelling only in large groups seeped slowly into our bones, until by the time I was nineteen, it seemed abnormal to go out in Delhi alone or with just one another person. The violence of mobs, or of the state, or the cruelty of rogue politicians, was in many ways, part of the centuries-old history of the city. But the understanding that you could no longer trust strangers who would stop to offer children a lift in their car on a hot day was a new and painful idea to assimilate. It was violative in a far more personal way, and it warped and shaped Delhi’s future growth.
But so much else was changing. On a June morning in 1980, two years after the killings of Sanjay and Geeta Chopra, we heard the familiar, brash batatatatatabatatatata of Sanjay Gandhi’s plane. It was a cherry red plane, a Pitt Special stunt model, showy and responsive. My mother was chatting with the neighbour; I had successfully found some excuse to stay at home and read The Firebird instead of going to school.
Then the sound of the engines stopped, abruptly, and we all looked up, but there was nothing in the sky.
My memory of Sanjay Gandhi’s death is not visual but aural—the absence of a sound, a pause lengthening unbearably. Then we heard the shouts and calls of alarm, cries for help, from people who lived in the houses closer to Safdarjung airfield. Later in the day, the gaunt, elegant woman who had been prime minister came in her car. She was accompanied by very little security, aside from her personal guards. Mrs Gandhi stood briefly on the side of the road, looking out towards the spot where her son’s aircraft had fallen from the sky, and the grief on her face was indescribable. None of us, children or adults, approached her; we stood back and some people quietly turned around and walked back to their homes, to let her mourn her dead in peace.
In a few months, the memory of Sanjay Gandhi’s death faded; some whispered that it was a conspiracy hatched by faceless men. But in our colony, we felt it was an easily explained accident. He had been reckless in the air. Those who had seen the plane go down said he had been trying one low loop too many, and that the engine had stalled.
Soviet books still flooded the market, but Enid Blyton had been joined by Puffins from the UK—wonderful books like Stig of the Dump by Clive King, The Battle of Bubble and Squeak by Philippa Pearce, Watership Down by Richard Adams, recolonizing our impressionable minds, the West claiming us back from the Ruskis. We didn’t really care whether the stacks of Puffins and Radugas or Mirs represented attempts to influence the mind of the Indian child by missionaries, the Soviets, or the Western neocolonial establishment: we just grabbed whatever stories came our way. In my house, Bengali children’s books, my grandmother’s panjikas, Premchand and a chirpy Hindi magazine called Champak and quantities of Amar Chitra Kathas formed a tiny phalanx of defence between us and these ‘phoren influences’, and most of my friends were similarly bilingual, if not trilingual.
By the early 1980s, the children who’d been my closest friends left as their fathers were transferred elsewhere. The new kids who came in liked Archie comics, which I despised, mistrusting their bubblegum boy-girl love stories and the profligate way in which burgers and ice-cream shakes were consumed instinctively.
The new kids wanted to watch Krishi Darshan and the new shows on television in the evenings instead of climbing trees or racing around the roofs playing that bit from the Ramayana where Hanuman sets fire to Lanka. The new kids didn’t care one bit about either Long John Silver or Tibul the acrobat and Dr Gaspar Arneri, and after a while, I left them to their own repetitive Archie-Reggie-Betty-and-Veronica games.
I spent those months in a comfortable nest halfway up the champa tree in our back garden, with the Puffins and the Soviet books balanced on alternate branches, and it was one of the happiest summers of my life.
(Written in 2014-15)
FIVE
Booklovers:
Five of the Best
1
Ravi Dayal
Publisher
The most impressive aspect of Ravi Dayal’s drawing room is the stern order that he’s imposed on the books that inhabit the house. They do not overflow from their shelves onto the floor; manuscripts remain in their allotted cupboards, instead of doing duty as dust traps in corners. This, for a publisher, is highly unusual (I know one who has achieved equilibrium between bo
oks and furniture by doing away with the latter and piling up the former in vaguely sofa-and-table shaped formations).
So when Dayal, one of the most respected independent English language publishers today, looks slightly sheepish, I don’t get it. Then he comes out with the dark truth; his books aren’t in order, they’ve merely been redistributed into other houses—his daughter’s, into the family home, anywhere that can house them and stave off the rising tide of disorder that dogs bibliomaniacs.
‘I discovered why elephants migrate in a forest—they create such a mess, what with leaves, and dung, and broken branches, that they have to go off twenty miles away,’ he says by way of explanation. ‘That’s what publishers do. When the mess becomes too large, they shift offices.’
Not that Ravi Dayal has ever had an office, in the conventional sense, to shift. ‘There was a roof over my head,’ he says of his Sujan Singh Park flat. ‘One was very lucky.’ (That particular phrase recurs often: when he speaks of the authors who flocked to him, Amitav Ghosh among them, of still being in business as an independent publisher after so many years, of his years at Oxford University Press.)
He began with no staff; he still has none, except for the assistance of family and friends. His savings, carefully garnered over the twenty-six years he’d spent at OUP, were respectable for a generation accustomed to taxation at 70 per cent of income, but not enough for even a moderately sized operation. ‘If I had started off with my limited capital—a lakh and a half, another four lakhs saved in fixed deposits which I thought was a fortune, really—even a five-people office would have foundered in a few months.’
Ravi Dayal was lucky, though, in that the imprint that bore his name offered him ample scope to display his talents. He’s always been commissioning editor, copy editor, designer, accountant and on occasion, sales and marketing department rolled into one. The Ravi Dayal imprint created quite an impact when the first books rolled out from its presses—Amitav Ghosh, Ranga Rao and Khushwant Singh (who happens to be Dayal’s father-in-law) were among that first batch. Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan, now hailed as a minor classic, was virtually rescued from paperback extinction. ‘People were mildly intrigued,’ he says with some understatement. ‘This is what one had turned to after years spent among good and godly learning at OUP. I was very lucky. The manuscripts started arriving thick and fast.’
They still do. He reads, on average, two to three manuscripts a day—‘I really can’t pretend to look at a lot of them for a long time’—and still doesn’t consult anyone’s opinion other than his own. This allows Ravi Dayal, the imprint, a glorious eclecticism that few other independent publishers can lay claim to. In the recent past, for instance, the house of Ravi Dayal has produced a collection of essays on the fiction of St. Stephen’s, a collection of poetry, a book on plants, debut fiction and Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace. The output is necessarily small, limited both by Dayal’s natural fastidiousness with regard to manuscripts and the physical constraints enjoined by a one-man publishing outfit. ‘I wanted to be slightly footloose,’ he says with the air of a man aiming for the impossible, ‘not to be engulfed by work. I’m afraid I am—engulfed, that is.’
Opinions differ about what makes a Ravi Dayal book so special. There is a handcrafted feel about most of his titles, a diligent perfectionism that ensures few if any proofing errors, an attention to detail that is almost extinct these days. There’s the quirkiness, too, that accompanies the Ravi Dayal owl logo—you never know what it’ll be perching on next, just that whatever it is will be impeccably chosen.
And he holds a rare distinction, in both Indian and Western publishing terms—you’ll never hear a Ravi Dayal author complaining that he was inadequately or insensitively edited. The levels of loyalty Ravi Dayal commands can be measured by the example of Amitav Ghosh, who has never shifted publishers—while rights to subsequent editions and international editions are often with other publishers, Ghosh remains essentially a Ravi Dayal author. The only exception was The Glass Palace, which was jointly published by Ravi Dayal and Permanent Black. (The latter imprint was floated by Rukun Advani, who spent many years at OUP while Dayal was there—and whose only novel, Beethoven Among the Cows, was published by Ravi Dayal.)
The launch of The Glass Palace also marked the only occasion when Ravi Dayal, Inc., has actually hosted a book launch. ‘Rukun and Anuradha (Roy, co-founder of Permanent Black) did most of the work, it wasn’t hosted by me in my solitary incarnation,’ Dayal points out gently. While several other publishers today harbour a deep scepticism about the actual value of a book launch, most go along with the diktats of the times. ‘Launches are wonderful places for people to meet, but I dislike the set format, the pallid drinks, the stale pakoras. It takes quite a lot of bandobast, besides. I don’t have the time for it.’ It’s a policy that ensures that very few manuscripts from the Page 3 world arrive at Dayal’s doorstep, which is little loss to him.
Though most of the books in the house are related to his work, in one way or another, Dayal is an avid reader, discussing the books he’s known the way another man might reminisce about old acquaintances. In his college years, the pattern was to read a great deal, but not to buy much—both because of the lack of availability of books and because of limited funds. The books he retained were an eclectic lot—Isaiah Berlin, books on fine art, Lampedusa—and most, he says with a trace of regret, have crumbled under the onslaught of years of dusting and cleaning.
His experiences in Oxford were similar. ‘Oxford in those days: the library was very good. One read enormous amounts, but there wasn’t enough to buy books. You’d pick up some remaindered thing that was off your subject—Matisse prints, the like. In your room you had three shelves—most people had two books, I had twenty-five. I remember that the ban on Lady Chatterley’s Lover was relaxed while I was there, so of course everybody went off and bought the book. One’s bookshelves were empty without that book.’
The sun looks overbright when we finally move outside, away from the bookshelf-lined rooms and the faint plunk-plunk of a piano still more or less in tune and Dayal’s gentle, precise conversation. It’s hot and humid, but he intends to take his daily constitutional around the small park in the centre of the colony. Lodi Garden is a stone’s throw away, but Ravi Dayal doesn’t go there very often these days. I ask why and he breaks into an impish smile that makes him look years younger, almost like the Oxford graduate he once was. ‘After forty years of publishing, it’s full of rejected manuscripts,’ he says, and is off, doing his rounds with brisk enthusiasm.
(Written in 2004. Ravi Dayal died in 2006.)
2
Prof. Meenakshi Mukherjee
Critic
The Prospectus of the nineteenth-century Mookerjee’s Magazine declared that, ‘Our Magazine will be a receptacle of all descriptions of knowledge and literature, Poetry, the Drama, vers de société, Criticism, Prose Fiction, Sketches, Philosophy, Politics and Sociology’ and so forth for another two ambitiously inclusive lines.
Prof. Meenakshi Mukherjee, scholar, critic and writer, who died in September 2009 at the age of seventy-two of a sudden heart attack at Hyderabad airport, enjoyed quoting the Prospectus; in some ways, it reflected the contents and broad scope of her own formidable mind. (She gave vers de société a wide berth, but was open to the rest.)
Criticism of Indian writing in English suffers from two major problems. Much of it is unintelligible, especially criticism as practised by followers of Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, and requires the skills of an expert in linguistic forensics to decode. Much of it is invisible, relegated to obscure academic journals or to the thriving but insular seminar circuit. Very little of it is actually influential, or lasting, but Meenakshi Mukherjee’s contributions are likely to fall into this category.
She taught at several universities in India, from Patna, Pune and Hyderabad to JNU in Delhi, as well as at the universities of Austin, Chicago, Berkeley, Macquarie, Canberra, and Flinders. At the centre for langu
age studies and literature in JNU, Prof. Mukherjee ushered in a kind of golden age of reason: she encouraged questioning from her students, and expected debate and inquiry from her colleagues.
She wore her scholarship lightly, though it was formidable.
She received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2003 for her book The Perishable Empire: Essays On Indian Writing In English—it marked the only occasion in the history of the Akademi that this award had been given to a critic, not a writer of fiction, literary non-fiction, or a poet. Her other books include The Twice Born Fiction (1971), Re-reading Jane Austen (1994), The Perishable Empire (2000), Considerations: Twelve Studies of Indian Literature in English (1977), Midnight’s Children: A Book of Readings (1999), Early Novels in India (2002) and an anthology, Another India (edited along with Nissim Ezekiel).
*
Engaged with the world of books and letters to the last, Dr Mukherjee was on her way to Delhi for the launch of An Indian for all Seasons: The Many Lives of R.C. Dutt, which was to be her last work. When we heard that she had collapsed at Hyderabad airport, ripples of shock and sadness eddied out from Delhi and Hyderabad to places as far away as Melbourne, Chicago, Dhaka and Purulia—to name just a few locations from which emails mourning her sudden death were received.
There was no sense, in Prof. Mukherjee’s presence, of reading literature as dead texts from a distant past. Her years in research, and her long partnership with her equally distinguished husband, the late translator and academic Sujit Mukherjee, gave her a holistic view of Indian writing in English that few other practitioners possessed. Meenakshi Mukherjee could trace the lineage of IWE much further back than Bankimchandra’s Rajmohan’s Wife—considered the first true novel written by an Indian in English. Through her scholarship, she offered a much more interesting history than the accepted one of a novel, imitative of its Western counterparts, that sprang out of nowhere from Bankim’s mind.
The Girl Who Ate Books Page 28
