But Goans made time for matters that often went by the wayside in metropolises: for family ties, for the wider community that made up a village. The evening of the bus accident, the council of Panjim announced that they were cancelling the carnival procession, to join Calvim in mourning. Panjim and Calvim were far away from each other, by local standards; one was among the largest cities in Goa, while Calvim was a community of about 115 families.
The loss of the Dias girls was felt in every house and heart. My neighbour, Cecilia often came over to ‘help’, which was a euphemism for ‘rescue the outsider who has no idea how to fix leaking roofs, handle recalcitrant wells or chase spiders out of the kitchen’. It took weeks and months to start to understand how deep the collective grief went, or how the disruption and disaster visited on one family could also be felt in the hearts of fellow villagers. On my evening walks, I often saw the padre making his house calls, offering comfort to his small flock.
Back in Delhi, a friend heard the story and said, ‘You must write about this!’ He had in mind an investigative report, and there was much to say. The tragedy was used as a reason to press for a bridge to be built between Calvim and Aldona, though the village was divided on whether this would be good or bad.
Cecilia’s father was often ill. On one blustery night, in the middle of the monsoons, with the roads flooding and the electricity off all evening, an ambulance had to be called.
The procedure for raising the ferry at night, after 10 p.m., was simple: you stood on one bank or the other, and flashed your torch or called out until the ferry man woke. They took their duties seriously, never complaining about the lateness of the hour. The day charges for a ferry crossing was Rs 7 per passenger. At night, you had to ask for a Special Ferry. We called for the Special Ferry often when my husband dropped in to see how the writing and I were getting along, for which the charges were the magnificent sum of Rs 20. But on this night, the ferrymen had their windows and doors tightly boarded against the storm, and weren’t expecting anyone to be out in the middle of that furious rain. It took Cecilia and her brother over twenty minutes to raise the ferry.
Cecilia badly wanted that bridge to be built. She also wanted to feel less disconnected from the chatter, the evening dinners and dances that young women of her age could attend in Aldona. The ferry boat was a marker between Calvim and the rest of the world. It saved the village from being over-run by the changes that were sweeping across Goa, but it also kept it stuck in the past.
On some of my walks, I went past the village up to the new road that had been cut into the hills. It stood out like a fresh red gash, and went up to the mines. The trucks had to come around the long way, and Calvim remained untouched by the development that was changing the face of the hills themselves. One afternoon, idling on the ferry, watching the fish leap for mayflies, tracking the curve of the white egrets’ triumphant arc around the village, I saw the first of many mining barges go past. It was a long, flat, ugly platform masquerading as a boat, and it carried soil in mounds.
‘A quarter of a hill,’ the ferryboat captain said to me softly. ‘Each time it goes by, it takes some of our hills along.’ His voice was neutral. ‘The bigger barges can take almost half a hill at a time.’ We watched the red soil of the hills of Goa, floating down the river, until the hills and the barges rounded the bend.
When I went back to the city, my friend—a bright, ambitious editor—asked if I’d got started on the Calvim story. I said, not really. He said, impatient with me already: ‘But it’s such a great story! You should tape interviews with the villagers, talk to the families.’
I didn’t want to; they were becoming friends. I agreed silently with him that someone should ‘do’ the Calvim story for what it said about small communities binding together in the aftermath of a tragedy, for the subtext of development and the question marks over the virtues of progress. The price of keeping a place like Calvim pure and free of taint by the world of tourists, mining companies, New Age cafes, and visitors like myself was paid by the families who lived here, and there was a worth to talking about all of this.
But I didn’t want to be the one to write this, to intrude on the griefs and memories of people whom I could no longer report on objectively, because they were my neighbours and my friends. After spending twenty years as an adult content to read other people’s books, I wanted to write my own, and for some reason that I could not explain or fathom, I wanted to write about imaginary cat clans much more than anything else in the world.
I tried to write something more serious and literary. There was a story about a butcher who had come over into Delhi at the time of the Bangladesh war, but every time I tackled it, the butcher’s life stayed flat and dead on the page. I did not like people who talked about ‘the process of being a writer’ or said ‘Writer’ with a capital W, because storytelling is such a basic human skill—everyone has it, once they acquire language. But I was beginning to face the fact that while I knew my reading tastes very well, I knew nothing about what I might be like as a writer.
Ray Bradbury had faced the same problem as a young man, and tackled it by setting down a list of things that fascinated him: the Jar, the Cistern, the Skeleton, the Lake, the Dinosaur. He believed that by making a list of nouns and then asking, what does this noun mean, you would find out what mattered to you. I thought he might be right, but to my mind, this sort of work was what you did after writing something of worth.
I went back to the butcher’s book and butchered it some more for a miserable drizzly week, growling at the poor swifts every evening when I was done with my word count. One evening, the swifts came up and perched on the railing, gave me a severe look, and launched into what can only be described as a long complaint, presumably about my temper and growling and general bad manners. I left them some beetles and ants on a leaf the next morning in apology.
The next day, instead of writing, I tried to weed the garden, which had grown into a lush jungle during the monsoon months. The problem was that it was beginning to attract almost too much animal life; mice, snakes, mongooses, tomcats, squirrels and palm-squirrels, and my peaceful writer’s house in Calvim was competing with Jangpura’s traffic-filled lanes in the raucousness stakes. One evening, I thought I saw a civet slip out of the gate, its jaws bloody, but it was not easy to see in the dark. The jackfruit trees that overhung the property already attracted cows, who came in every day and held a self-important morning conference before marking the event with manure signatures, much like their human counterparts in the corporate world.
It was pleasant work, cutting down the undergrowth, until I reached a cluster of weeds with delicate stems and tough roots. It took me half-an-hour to dig down to the root of the tallest of the weeds and when I raised it out of the soil, it was astonishingly beautiful — a brown, light corm that felt and looked like a baby armadillo. I raised it up and like tripwires, taproots attached to the corm quivered, and then straightened, showering earth across the small garden. I yanked at them again, and weeds started to collapse and fall over.
When I gently levered each tripwire/taproot up, being careful not to break them, the roots led back to more corms; I had to dig up each one, walking around in a tangle of roots. At the end of the afternoon, I had levered up most of the corms. Then I started to gather up the taproots, starting with the ones at the centre, holding them up like a squarish net of wires, not dissimilar to a football net laid out horizontally. As I tugged, the plants came up, and then I tugged with more force. The weeds rose up around me, almost of their own volition; after that it was easy enough to collect them and place them in a wheelbarrow.
The neighbour was watching with interest. She was a taciturn lady who shuffled by every evening. We had developed an excellent nodding relationship. ‘Girl,’ she said, ‘that was a fine thing to see. Now you go wash off that mud and have a nice cup of tea.’
I still didn’t know why I wanted to write about cats, but the more I dug at the root of that thing, the more it sna
ked away, towards the childhood years of reading Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Satyajit Ray and Premendra Mitra, Arthur C. Clarke, Nancy Kress, Ursula K. Le Guin and other science-fiction and fantasy greats. When I lifted up those taproots, they went off into another direction; my teenage fascination with dolphin and chimpanzee intelligence, and with that first generation of Artificial Intelligence creations, from the Alicebot onwards. One root said simply, ‘Deep sea creatures’; one said ‘Neurons’; one said ‘Warg’; one said ‘Flacon’: none of this was either impressive or useful, but I took it as a sign. Late that night, I pulled out the printed pages of the butcher’s book, read it through, and dumped it without regret into the recycling bin.
Four days later, I had The Wildings fully mapped, in twenty-two chapters. The novel was a romp, and it did not aspire to be the literary heir to Midnight’s Children or To Kill A Mockingbird, but I loved writing it. When the rains stopped, I took my first drafts down to the river and read them to the frogs and the fish, who were a wonderful audience. They never corrected me, and they croaked and splashed at all the right places.
*
Handwriting, in the age of keyboards, is precious because it’s becoming so rare.
There’s a set of books that has survived the many house-shifts and the frequent culls of our overgrown library. I keep them near my writing table, which is still the dining table, and some days when the writing is stuck, or when I am wondering why I ever thought I could be a writer, they will be brought out.
Harold Pinter signed his collected plays for me at the Edinburgh Book Fair, and we took a moment to discuss our views on the Iraq War—we agreed, though he agreed more unprintably than I did.
Agha Shahid Ali printed out a poem because I said it was one of my favourites and sent it to me, his signature uncurling into an exuberant sentence and then wrapping around the next page.
My sister-in-law who lives in New York got Toni Morrison to sign Home for me, and didn’t tell me she had. When I opened the package, all I could do was to trace that name over and over again in wonder and disbelief: ‘Dear Nila, with pleasure, Toni Morrison.’ It is hard for me to act as though these are perfectly normal things, a famous author signing a book for you; I grew up reading Morrison and revering her. This is one of the most precious things I will ever own.
Another is the book with Salman Rushdie’s signature embossed in black ink across the page. When I look at that, it brings back the first heady rush of reading Midnight’s Children or Haroun and The Sea of Stories, a time when Rushdie was welcome in his own country. (Perhaps some day, that time will come again, soon.)
Others are signed by writers whom I grew to know through the slender thread of a mutual love of books, which widened into friendships that have in some cases lasted for years: Manjula Padmanabhan, Ruchir Joshi, Margaret Mascarenhas, Jeet Thayil and a host of others.
Many are much better writers than I could hope to be, but that isn’t the point. Making the transition from a lifelong reader into someone who is probably a writer because she spends most of her time writing has not been easy for me. At one time, dealing with an incident of old trauma, it felt as though I was riddled with tripwires and dark roots. Speaking out about one sad memory would immediately tug at a host of others, and it took years of patience before all the roots came up at once. But then, becoming a writer is not effortless for anyone. These signatures raise the bar for anyone who wants to write—calling yourself a ‘writer’ means you’re at some level placing yourself in this company, which is a terrifying thought. But they also remind me that of all the vocations and occupations you could choose, this is an amazing, magical tribe to want to belong to.
*
Reading is so easy compared to writing. A friend drops by one day, one of those wonderful people who leaves me awestruck with her multiple talents. She is an artist, a writer, a rider and sports fanatic, intensely politically astute and engaged. She’s stuck on her book. It’s close to the end, and she is immensely frustrated because she can’t explain how delicate this stage is; if she moves one thing in the structure that she’s been building slowly over a period of six years, everything could collapse.
She talks about the book as if it’s made up of bones and flesh—strong but also so fragile, permeable, breakable. Like this? I ask, and show her a YouTube video that I’ve been replaying obsessively.
The performer is Miyoko Shida Rigolo. Her props are thirteen dried palm branches. She moves with slow, focused concentration. The balance she’s working on, the Sanddorn balance, was created by Maedir Eugster Rigolo, who saw his act as a perfect example of Zen concentration.
Miyoko takes a feather, and balances it crosswise over the palm branch. Then she takes a longer branch and balances it at an angle on the first branch. Then another, and another.
All of her attention is concentrated at the point of intersection between the branches. By the time she gets to the fourth branch, she has to pick the rest up with her foot. The branches are not light; you can see the slight ripple in her biceps as she strains to hold the delicately filigreed structure together. It is as though she is building the skeleton of a boat that rocks in the invisible air. At four minutes in, I find that I am holding my breath. What rises from Miyoko Shida’s hands is as fragile as new-blown glass, and as strong as an iron frame, a dinosaur skeleton. At five minutes and forty seconds in, she raises the structure ever so slowly above her head, her face impassive. Then she balances the palm branch balance on her head. And then, using her right foot, she picks up one more branch.
What holds this impossible structure together is concentration and technique, nothing more.
The hardest sticks to place are the final ones. There are only two left to place, but if she gets them wrong, the whole creation, so odd, so beautiful, will tumble down. These last two sticks, coming at the end of the balance when her muscles are already straining and her focus has already been tested, are more important than the fifteen that came before. My friend’s book is like that: she has ten or twelve of its branches already placed, and the hesitation comes out of the recognition that she must get the last few chapters precisely right or risk it all tumbling down.
I don’t have the craft to write a book like this yet, but I have read books that feel like Shida’s beautiful, eerie structure. The keyboard fools you into thinking otherwise, but novels are physical hand-labour. You’re going sentence by sentence, a process that becomes apparent if you use index cards, or map out books in diaries and notebooks.
I cannot imagine writing a book without handwriting.
When I started reading, I spent years wondering how it was done. It felt like a conjurer’s trick—Oz, and Apu’s Nischindipur, the moon of Kahani, Shivpalgunj, all created out of twenty-six alphabets. After my friend has left, I watch Miyoko Shida again and again, understanding that all books are written the sa me way. You take a form that doesn’t exist, balance it on thin air, and pretend that it rests on solid ground. It is magic, and it works.
(Written in 2015-16)
Bibliography*
I’ve been heavily influenced and entertained by several books about books and reading. A very short list of some of them:
1.Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading (Penguin Books, 1997). The Library at Night (Yale University Press, 2008).
2.Amitav Ghosh, The Testimony of My Grandfather’s Bookcase (Kenyon Review, 1999).
3.Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998).
4.Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran (Random House, 2003).
5.Elif Batuman, The Possessed (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010).
6.Francis Spufford, The Child That Books Built: A Life in Reading (Faber & Faber, 2002).
7.Larry McMurtry, Books: A Memoir (Simon & Schuster, 2008).
8.Michael Dirda, Readings: Essays and Literary Entertainments (W.W. Norton & Company, 2000).
9.Nicholas Basbanes, A Gentle Madness (Henry Holt & Company, 1995).
10.Pradeep Sebas
tian, The Groaning Shelf (Hachette India, 2010).
Finding Dean
1.Dean Mahomet, The Travels of Dean Mahomet: An Eighteenth-Century Journey through India, ed. Michael Fisher (University of California Press, 1997). Shampooing; or, Benefits resulting from the use of Indian Medicated Vapour Bath, as Introduced Into This Country by S.D. Mahomet (a native of India), Brighton (1823).
2.Mookerjee’s Magazine, ed. Dr Sambhu Chandra Mookerjee (Digital Library of India, 1861 onwards).
3.Amardeep Singh, http://www.lehigh.edu/~amsp/2006/09/closer-look-at-dean-mahomet-1759-1850.html.
4.Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, The Illustrated History of Indian Literature in English (Permanent Black, 2003).
5.The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature, ed. Amit Chaudhuri (Picador, 2001).
6.John Timbs, Clubs and Club Life in London: With Anecdotes of its Famous Coffee Houses, Hostelries and Taverns, from the Seventeenth Century to the Present Times (John Camden Hotten, 1872).
7.Hicky’s Bengal Gazette: Contemporary Life and Events, ed. Tarun Kumar Mukhopadhyay (Subarnarekha, 1988).
8.Mushirul Hasan, Wit and Humour in Colonial North India (Niyogi Books, 2007).
How to Read In Indian
1.Farhatullah Baig, The Last Musha’irah of Dehli, Farhatullah Baig (Orient Blackswan, 2010).
2.Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (NYRB Classics, 1951).
3.Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, Rajmohan’s Wife (Rupa & Co; first serialised in 1864).
4.K.C. Dutt, A Journal of Forty Eight Hours of the Year 1945 (Kolkata Literary Gazette, 1835).
5.S.C. Dutt, The Republic of Orissa: Annals from the Pages of the Twentieth Century (Kolkata Literary Gazette, 1845).
6.The Dutt Family Album (first published Longmans, Green & Co, London, 1870).
7.Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, The Illustrated History of Indian Literature in English (Permanent Black, 2003).
8.B.S. Kesavan, History of Printing and Publishing in India: A Story of Cultural Re-Awakening (National Book Trust, 1985).
The Girl Who Ate Books Page 34
