As I bid goodbye to the year gone by, I am thankful for the little steps of progress, k has taken, and for the lessons learned in life ( not the easiest of the lot though).
The family reunion in G was awesome with all the cousins getting together after ages. They were all very gentle towards and accepting of k but being around verbal, neurotypical children, also makes the distinctions that define k, more apparent.
It makes me sad that he is largely non verbal and he is so detached, in his own world mostly. People usually find themselves out of depth when engaging with him..not persisting enough to break the ice.
I am hoping this new year will allow me to develop better coping strategies, think about visiting a counsellor ( if need be), and pursue exciting, new stuff to keep me happy!!
Been a while since I last penned down. Visited an eco haat over the weekend with E. Had a harrowing time crossing the road near gvk. Non functional street lights and ofcourse no one has the time or patience to wait for pedestrians. E and I browsed around and picked up a couple of things for the sisters and then I chanced upon these really pretty diyas glazed in beige and earthy browns for a steal..10 bucks each. It was being sold by a local organization. Both of us wondered if they had priced it by mistake. Even the plain terracotta ones were similarly priced. It somehow seemed strange that they were both priced the same...
With Diwali approaching, I don't seem to have any memories of celebrating it here. I remember the ones during our stay in Sh and Gh, sooo well. Bracing oneself for the noise and tons of pollution..
Had gone for a play last evening, Ismat-Ek Aurat...three short stories by Ismat Chugtai, stitched together. It was fantastic...very entertaining..and all the three Acts were beautifully portrayed. A stellar performance by dg yet again.She is really awesome and she gets into the character soo well. It is a pleasure to watch.
It was fairly crowded for a Wednesday evening and lots of young faces too. An evening well spent!
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Ismat Chugtai, play, performance, satire, personal journey
The pujas are coming to an end today. And I have been seeing Aita appear in the early morning dreams. every single day since last week.
The last day would always signal the last "anjali" with the wobbly footed priest going about his "ambe, ambalike..."chants! And the piece de resistance in the ancestral pujas was the then miserly ( not so much now supposedly) helpings of "ponta bhat" ( fermented rice mixed with mustard oil, green chillies and onions) and "poora maas" ( fish char grilled) with homemade pickles ( Indian olives, red hot chillis). I miss that and the many opportunities to hang out with cousins and partake in the many rounds of family gossip!! Oh yeah that's the charm of the pujas..
I was supposed to pen down something else..but as I was browsing here and there..came across the synopses of the the shortlisted books for the Man Booker prize...I liked what I read of the brief of A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, so...I have just placed an order for it.
Steve Silberman's Neurotribes may have to jostle for reading space with A Little Life...both seemingly heavy on their emotional content ..
At the beginning of
Hanya Yanagihara’s new novel, “A Little Life,” four young men, all
graduates of the same prestigious New England university, set about
establishing adult lives for themselves in New York City. They are a
pleasingly diverse crew, tightly bound to each other: Willem Ragnarsson,
the handsome son of a Wyoming ranch hand, who works as a waiter but
aspires to be an actor; Malcolm Irvine, the biracial scion of a wealthy
Upper East Side family, who has landed an associate position with a
European starchitect; Jean-Baptiste (JB) Marion, the child of Haitian
immigrants, who works as a receptionist at a downtown art magazine in
whose pages he expects, one day soon, to be featured; and Jude St.
Francis, a lawyer and mathematician, whose provenance and ethnic origins
are largely unknown, even by his trio of friends. Jude, we later learn,
was a foundling, deposited in a bag by a dumpster and raised by monks.
For
the first fifty or so pages, as the characters attend parties, find
apartments, go on dates, gossip, and squabble with each other, it is
easy for the reader to think he knows what he’s getting into: the latest
example of the postgraduate New York ensemble novel, a genre with many
distinguished forbears, Mary McCarthy’s “The Group” and Claire Messud’s
“The Emperor’s Children” among them. At one point, after his acting
career takes off, Willem thinks, “New York City … had simply been an
extension of college, where everyone had known him and JB, and the
entire infrastructure of which sometimes seemed to have been lifted out
of Boston and plunked down within a few blocks’ radius in lower
Manhattan and outer Brooklyn.” Yanagihara is a capable chronicler of the
struggle for success among the young who flock to New York every
autumn, sending up the pretensions of the art world and the restaurant
where Willem works, which is predictably staffed by would-be thespians.
“New York was populated by the ambitious,” JB observes. “It was often
the only thing that everyone here had in common…. Ambition and atheism.”
Yet
it becomes evident soon enough that the author has more on her mind
than a conventional big-city bildungsroman. For one thing, there’s the
huge hunk of paper in the reader’s right hand: more than seven hundred
pages, suggesting grander ambitions than a tale of successful careers.
There are also curious absences in the text. Yanagihara scrubs her prose
of references to significant historical events. The September 11th
attacks are never mentioned, nor are the names of the Mayor, the
President, or any recognizable cultural figures who might peg the
narrative to a particular year. The effect of this is to place the novel
in an eternal present day, in which the characters’ emotional lives are
foregrounded and the political and cultural Zeitgeist is rendered into
vague scenery.
But the clearest
sign that “A Little Life” will not be what we expect is the gradual
focus of the text on Jude’s mysterious and traumatic past. As the pages
turn, the ensemble recedes and Jude comes to the fore. And with Jude at
its center, “A Little Life” becomes a surprisingly subversive novel—one
that uses the middle-class trappings of naturalistic fiction to deliver
an unsettling meditation on sexual abuse, suffering, and the
difficulties of recovery. And having upset our expectations once,
Yanagihara does it again, by refusing us the consolations we have come
to expect from stories that take such a dark turn.
The
first real hint of what we’re in for comes on page 67, when Jude wakes
Willem, his roommate, saying, “There’s been an accident, Willem; I’m
sorry.” Jude is bleeding profusely from his arm, which is wrapped in a
towel. He is evasive about the cause of the wound and insists that he
doesn’t want to go to a hospital, asking instead that Willem take him to
a mutual friend named Andy, who is a doctor. At the end of the visit,
having sewn up Jude’s wound, Andy says to Willem, “You know he cuts
himself, don’t you?”
The cutting
becomes a leitmotif. Every fifty pages or so, we get a scene in which
Jude mutilates his own flesh with a razor blade. It is described with a
directness that might make some readers queasy: “He has long ago run out
of blank skin on his forearms, and he now recuts over old cuts, using
the edge of the razor to saw through the tough, webby scar tissue: when
the new cuts heal, they do so in warty furrows, and he is disgusted and
dismayed and fascinated all at once by how severely he has deformed
himself.”
The cutting is both a
symptom of and a control mechanism for the profound abuse Jude suffered
during the years before he arrived at the university. The precise nature
of that suffering is carefully doled out by Yanagihara in a series of
flashbacks, each more gruesome than its predecessors. Jude was taught to
cut himself by Brother Luke, the monk who abducted him from the
monastery. Initially, Brother Luke appeared to be Jude’s savior,
spiriting him away from an institution where he was regularly beaten and
sexually assaulted. Brother Luke promises Jude that they will go and
live together as father and son in a house in the woods, but the reality
of their years on the road is much, much grimmer. Eventually, Jude is
liberated from Brother Luke, but by then he appears to be marked for
sexual violation. “You were born for this,” Brother Luke tells him. And,
for a long time, Jude believes him.
The
graphic depictions of abuse and physical suffering that one finds in “A
Little Life” are rare in mainstream literary fiction. Novels that deal
with these matters often fade out when the violence begins. The abuse in
“Lolita,” for instance, is largely off camera, so to speak, or wrapped
complexly in Nabokov’s lyrical prose. In Emma Donoghue’s “Room,” the
child narrator is banished to the closet while his mother is raped by
their captor. You are more likely to find sustained and explicit
depictions of depravity in genre fiction, where authors seem freer to be
less decorous. Stephen King’s “Lisey’s Story,” Steig Larsson’s “Girl
with the Dragon Tattoo,” and the torture of Theon Greyjoy in “A Game of
Thrones” all came to mind when I was reading “A Little Life” (though the
torture of Theon is more explicit in the HBO series than in George R.
R. Martin’s books). Yanagihara’s rendering of Jude’s abuse never feels
excessive or sensationalist. It is not included for shock value or
titillation, as is sometimes the case in works of horror or crime
fiction. Jude’s suffering is so extensively documented because it is the
foundation of his character.
One
of the few recent novels that’s comparable to “A Little Life” in this
respect is Merritt Tierce’s “Love Me Back,” a fierce book about a
self-destructive Texas waitress who cuts and burns herself, abuses
drugs, and submits herself to debasing sexual encounters. But that
novel, at a mere two hundred pages, is a slim silver dagger, not the
broadsword that Yanagihara wields. And unlike Tierce’s book, in which
there is little reprieve for the reader, Yanagihara balances the
chapters about Jude’s suffering with extended sections portraying his
friendships and his successful career as a corporate litigator. One of
the reasons the book is so long is that it draws on these lighter
stretches to make the darker ones bearable. Martin Amis once asked, “Who
else but Tolstoy has made happiness really swing on the page?” And the
surprising answer is that Hanya Yanagihara has: counterintuitively, the
most moving parts of “A Little Life” are not its most brutal but its
tenderest ones, moments when Jude receives kindness and support from his
friends.
What
makes the book’s treatment of abuse and suffering subversive is that it
does not offer any possibility of redemption and deliverance beyond
these tender moments. It gives us a moral universe in which spiritual
salvation of this sort does not exist. None of Jude’s tormentors are
ever termed “evil” by him or anyone else. During his years of suffering,
only once are we told that Jude prays “to a god he didn’t believe in”
(note the lowercase “g”). Though he is named after the patron
saint of lost causes—the name given to him by the monks who raised
him—what’s most obviously lost here is the promise of spiritual
absolution or even psychological healing. In this godless world,
friendship is the only solace available to any of us.
Of
course, atheism is not uncommon in contemporary literary novels; with
notable exceptions, such as the works of Marilynne Robinson, few such
books these days have any religious cast. But perhaps that is why they
rarely depict extreme suffering—because it is a nearly impossible
subject to engage with directly if you are not going to offer some kind
of spiritual solution. “God whispers to us in our pleasures … but shouts
in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world,” C. S.
Lewis wrote, in “The Problem of Pain.” In “A Little Life,” pain is not a
message from God, or a path to enlightenment, and yet Yanigihara
listens to it anyway.
In
addition to his law degree, Jude pursues a master’s in pure
mathematics. At one point, he explains to his friends that he is drawn
to math because it offers the possibility of “a wholly provable,
unshakable absolute in a constructed world with very few unshakable
absolutes.” For Jude, then, mathematics takes the place of religion, in a
sense. Later, during one of his worst episodes of suffering, Jude turns
to a concept known as the axiom of equality, which states that x always equals x.
It assumes that if you have a conceptual thing named x
it must always be equivalent to itself, that it has a uniqueness about
it, that it is in possession of something so irreducible that we must
assume it is absolutely, unchangeably equivalent to itself for all time,
that its very elementalness can never be altered. But it is impossible
to prove. Not everyone liked the axiom of equality … but he had always
appreciated how elusive it was, how the beauty of the equation itself
would always be frustrated by the attempts to prove it. It was the kind
of axiom that could drive you mad, that could consume you, that could
easily become an entire life.
Yanagihara’s
novel can also drive you mad, consume you, and take over your life.
Like the axiom of equality, “A Little Life” feels elemental,
irreducible—and, dark and disturbing though it is, there is beauty in
it.
Was not aware that it is Mahalaya today. But probably a sheer coincidence..I woke up today with the thought of Mahalaya, the Pujas in Uzan b and Aita.
Xewali flowers..the quintessential reminder of the Pujas
(image taken from http://weloveourbangladesh.blogspot.in/2011/05/night-jasmineshiuli-ful-or-shefali-ful.html)
Years ago, when we were still in Sh, I remember Ma tuning onto a radio station, at the break of dawn to listen to the Mahisasuramardini (The Annihilator of Mahishasur). For the maternal side of the family, the pujas only meant the almost century old family run puja in Uzan b.
With most of the older generation now gone...it has somehow lost its spark but the evening arti with the octogenarian priest, slightly wobbly on his feet, dancing in a trance like state..still manages to create quite a web of magic for all present.
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The mornings during the Puja would be frenzied for everyone at Aita's...her retinue of faithful workers, up in the morning, plucking the freshest flowers from the flowering trees...xewali, joba, khorikajaai, ixora and the ubiquitoius, bel leaves, heaped in a wicker basket or a khorahi. Aita, looked forward to the pujas eagerly year after year. It was as much a family reunion of sorts as a significant social event--reliving, fun, shared memories from her childhood with her cousins and siblings, liberally peppered with honest narratives of aches and pains, medicines and doctors, deaths..a telling reminder of how most of them were very close to bidding goodbye to the lives they lived.
How far can one go, when one thinks of the earliest food memory? I don't know...I really cannot recall that far back. But I can recollect some interesting memories around food when I was growing up. Most of them are to do with what Ma baked in her oven..for the innumerable birthdays (the siblings, neighbourhood kids and get togethers ) and the stuff she made when we fell ill.
The staple on our birthdays would be chocolate cake and jelly crystal. And if it was the season of peaches...then peaches in sugar syrup and cream. I still develop a craving every now and then for the latter but it is slightly hard to come by, here.It was almost considered a matter of privilege if Ma allowed us to lick the fresh chocolate cake batter off the bowls and the trusted beater. It was mostly done surreptitiously otherwise. She did a fair bit of baking for us. I remember her making swiss rolls, cookies, chocolates in that tiny little kitchen in Sh.
Melted cheese on a slice of toasted bread was the staple if you were down with fever. Or those many many evenings spent in darkness in Sh, when the curfew was on and the lights had to be put out.
The other thing I remember quite fondly is having a jam made of a reddish, strawberry shaped fruit locally called "tenga mora", in Gh. Its scientific name is Roselle (Hibiscus sabdariffa). There were tenga mora bushes growing in the wild near Aita's house and the table set up for breakfast during the winter holidays at Aita's would inevitably feature tenga mora jam and cream, to be spread on slices of toasted bread.
" Tenga Mora"
(Images courtesy Google Images)
And the many winter afternoons spent eating freshly plucked 'jalphai' / Indian Olives --chopped and seasoned with salt, green chillis and mustard oil. Or the sweet and sour pickle that was absolutely mouthwatering. Yum yum...
There is a lot more that I suddenly remember now..will write about them later..
