The House with a Thousand Novels

- Aruni Kashyap

This is a house, L-shaped,
seven-hands high; soil-veranda—
with twenty-one novels in it.
Every evening, five daughters beyond the banks,
who rested like bees in other houses,
with higher lower or equal soil-verandas
and more or lesser novels,
lift a night-black iron cauldron
so that it squats on the hearth.
This is a house, with twenty-one novels,
forever spanning
in episodic form, like long yarns.
In the room facing the east, where the eldest son lived
an almirah stood, with termites battling against it—
every night, along with the odious I’ll-take-you-away-song
of the bespectacled inauspicious barn-owl;
proud, filled to the neck, with a thousand books.
Many of them were novels.
Popular, unpopular, pulp
erotic (hidden between old “important” newspaper cuttings).
This is a house with eight doors,
seventeen windows, no ventilators.
In summers heavy with sweat and skin
snakes creep in for coconut-water-cold soil,
coated cool with greenish cow-dung
the epidermis of the seven-hand high veranda.
Everyday someone comes in—
leaving rippling traces forever
like generational earthquakes:
A wailing woman leaves a story of oppression, licensedrape,
barrenness, adultery;
A married daughter, beyond the banks, comes back to
disrupt diaries;
A worker runs away, digging up hidden gold jewellery
from one of these story-ridden rooms.
This is a house, with
a thousand serialised novels
floating in the heavy air.
Someone shrieks everyday.
Someone reads the caws of the crow and expects guests.
Picks up a mosquito from the milk and prays that no one dies.
Lights a mustard oil lamp in the household’s prayer-room singing
pleading songs.
And children carry love letters for peanuts from here, from there,
leaving traces of story
to be ruminated forever:
with meals.
At night, around winter-fires,
the chewing and grinding of betel-nuts,
while lifting the iron cauldron
This is a house with a thousand novels
(or more).
Every window or a room that mourns for a vent
treasures a story in it, which
no worker can run away with;
more precious than gold
buried deep enough, deeper than
a spring, a well
so that it lives forever and grows
like tears, hair and serialised novels in journals;
inadequate to live anymore
in a wooden almirah eroded by termites.

Postscript (2007-08)

The following articles have been published in Postscipt, the Literary Society journal. This year as well, as with the last, we will solicit contributions to the journal, and from the eclectic variation of subjects in this edition, you may safely conclude that you could write about anything!

The Writers

- Amit Chaudhuri

On constantly mishearing ‘rioting’ as ‘writing’ on the BBC.

There has been writing for ten days now
unabated. People are anxious, fed up.
There is writing in Paris, in disaffected suburbs,
but also in small towns, and old ones like Lyon.
The writers have been burning cars; they’ve thrown
homemade Molotov cocktails at policemen.
Contrary to initial reports, the writers
belong to several communities: Algerian
and Caribbean, certainly, but also Romanian,
Polish, and even French. Some are incredibly
young: the youngest is thirteen.
They stand edgily on street-corners, hardly
looking at each other. Long-standing neglect
and an absence of both authority and employment
have led to what are now ten nights of writing.


Courtesy, the Observer.

Errorism

- Arjun Mahey

One of the few authentic terrors of walking unguardedly into a bookshop in these dark times is that one is almost immediately trapped by an enormous phalanx of thoroughly amiable Spiritual Books on the Inner Self which profess to alleviate all one’s worldly ills, in twelve steps or less, through a sort of spiritual enema: ills from piles to schizophrenia (and everything in between) to be fluently expunged while performing wonders, as a bonus, for one’s social, psychological and sexual life as well. With depressingly colourful covers, and even more depressingly cheerful subtitles (Every Man His Own Jesus, Around the Self In Eighty Days), they flood out of the presses like cheerily wrapped boxes of chocolate, and like chocolate they produce a temporary and illusory rapture while generating an impenitent and quite expensive addiction. One sight of these daft foot-soldiers of delirium is enough to drive any rational, red-blooded human to drink. A conspiracy theorist could argue, persuasively, for a dark compact between the Alcoholic Beverage and the Inner Self Book industries; speaking for myself, however, every time I hear loopy words like Reiki or Art of Living or Deepak Chopra my nerves dissolve in dread and will not revive unless soaked for extended periods of time in several long, cold bottles of beer.

If Blurbs by Famous People are one sort of weapon in this fiendish artillery - and blurbs, like mid-range weapons, seem to be manufactured at an industrialized speed in our globalized era - then the shock troops of this unilateral Errorism inflicted on a guiltless and oblivious populace is Prefabricated Buddhism. There are more books on Buddhism than Buddhists in these new Dark Ages; whole forests have been felled to continue to generate these pitiless purveyors of worldly Nirvana; and every journalistic hack tricked out with barely enough information to produce an essay on Basic Buddhism is writing a book which Norman Vincent Peale would have given both arms to produce. The future of humankind looks very bleak indeed.

As if things weren’t gloomy enough already there is every sign, in recent years, of a new and pitiless weapon becoming available in the market: The Buddhist Travel Book, a projectile designed to seek out and annihilate the slightest move toward accuracy or aesthetic sense. Would you like water with your whiskey? Mark Twain was once asked by a host of his; to which he replied, famously, that he didn’t because there was no point in ruining two good drinks. Defiling two perfectly good genres, however - books on Buddhism and books on travel - by concocting a revolting mélange, seems no less cardinal a sin, and one that gathers more sinners to its cause than either genre does by itself.

And they come with chummy, slangy titles, these Travel books, as if the writers were all personal friends of the Buddha. Enthusiastically announcing themselves with the overfamiliarity of pushy new acquaintances - Mindful Politics, The Accidental Buddhist, Hitching Rides with the Buddha, Beyond the House of the False Lama, Rogues in Robes - they crowd the imagination as eager if imprecise lay proselytizers of Buddhism Lite. Although what they sell seems more like Buddhism Vacant.

Perry Garfinkel’s Buddha or Bust (New York: Harmony Books, 2006; $ 24.95) is among the newest of such offerings and in its defence it ought to be said that it does possess a number of unexpected virtues. It sets itself a dual task: to rescue the author from despair, and to survey the new global phenomenon of Engaged Buddhism, a euphemism for communitarian nongovernmental institutions run by Buddhists. At a bleak moment in his life Garfinkel is rescued from desolation by a plum assignment for National Geographic and a one-way transglobal ticket to visit Buddhist countries. With great good luck he lands himself with Steve McCurry, the cameraman who was catapulted to photographic immortality with his stunning shot of the Afghan girl on the cover of NG, and his Buddhist wanderings, glued together by his observations and his clearly thirsty spirit, is thoroughly sincere: there is not the slightest hint that he is searching for something in bad faith, or that his discoveries are not deeply transformative. They are, and one feels pleased for him.

But sincerity is not a literary virtue. All bad poetry is sincere, said Oscar Wilde with his usual acuity, though he could easily have extended the observation to all bad writing. Sincerity notwithstanding, this is a dreadful piece of reportage. The tone is zesty in an I’m Trying Hard To Be Zesty kind of way, and Garfinkel’s jokey asides aim at piquant but arrive at flat-as-the-skin-of-a-deflated-balloon (Example: “I highly doubt Eminem would know a Bodhisattva from a bodacious babe”) although he does erupt into the occasional felicitous phrase every so often. If books can be measured by the wince-factor - how often one winces at the writing - then on a scale of 1 to 10, Garfinkel’s is a hefty 22.

The virtues first, however. There are some glorious moments in the book, and all of them need mention. The first is Garfinkel’s careful and sympathetic portraits of engaged Buddhists who seem to have wrought single-handed apolitical social change across the Asian world - men such as Dr. Ariyaratne of Sri Lanka, Roongroj of Thailand, and of course Thich Na Than of Vietnam. The second is his extraordinary and quite memorable chapter on China, in which scepticism is balanced with affection, in which he falls in love, and in which he describes a Buddhist China, usually invisible, with a wholly unfamiliar geography. This is stand-alone piece which is easily carved out from the book for separate publication; and it is, refreshingly, the first travel-essay from China I have read which ignores the Great Wall utterly. (“I didn’t have time to see the Great Wall”, Garfinkel tells us in an endearing aside.) The third is his focus on two unusual and extraordinary moments: his discovery and potted but generous history of the Shaolin temple-monastery in China, and his participation in the Holocaust meditation at Auschwitz, an authentic eye-opener, its ethics notwithstanding. There are some aspects of a book which do greater justice to themselves than a review can, and these are some of them.

But nothing is permanent. At a certain point in the book Thich Na Than, the Vietnamese master, recounts a Buddhist twist on a modern idiom for Garfinkel’s benefit: Don’t just do something, sit there, and one wishes Garfinkel had absorbed that wisdom as advice and not witticism. Whatever its virtues as a slight but interesting travel piece, the book calmly sets itself on fire every time it tries to say something sensible about Buddhism. Even the most basic thing.

Here’s a starting point for some magnificent forms of Errorism perpetrated upon our credulous sensibilities: We are introduced early on to the four noble truths, those stepping stones of Basic Buddhism. The first truth, we are told, is that there is suffering (Garfinkel gets that right). The second truth assures us that suffering is caused by ignorance of karma. Huh? Ignorance? Karma? Where did they pop up from? In point of fact the second truth says that the cause of suffering is desire; ignorance is never mentioned in the four truths even once, except (perhaps) by extended implication. Would you trust your spiritual future to a man who gets it wrong this early in the game?

It gets worse; the book graduates from wince-worthy to flinch-guaranteed. At one particularly telling moment Garfinkel tells us with a robust certainty that Buddhist meditation is much like Freudian psychoanalysis. The Buddha and Freud? What was the man smoking? Those two systems have nothing in common except a certain claim to psychological relief, which is also shared by (say) listening to music, or watching a quietening film or, for that matter, daydreaming. Freud’s is, famously, a talking cure: speech is crucial to benefit. In Buddhist meditation, on the other hand, speech is explicitly forbidden: the effort is what one scholar has called enstasy, silent self-observation. Then, as if this is not enough damage, Garfinkel uses the Buddha to out-Descartes Cartesianism, surely a first. I shudder to recount it; you’ll have to take my word for it. Jhana, a basic Buddhist method, is translated as “ecstasy” (jhana-dhyana-cha’an-zen are cognates, none of them ecstatic forms), and history is thoroughly rewritten: “Many, many centuries after Moguls had swept Buddhism from India…” begins one sentence and one doesn’t know where to begin to point out the grammatical, lexical and factual mutilations in those ten words. The Bodhi tree is called “the most hallowed hunk of wood” (that dreadful chumminess again); Quantum and Meditation are aligned once more in a hideous resurrection of the New Age Physics of Capra and his kin; and for all his attempts at insights, the Buddha is sanitized. Despite his visit to Auschwitz, for instance, Garfinkel nowhere mentions that the Buddha was the sole survivor of an ethnically motivated genocide which successfully exterminated all his people; or the political motivation behind several (failed) assassination attempts upon him, or his infrequent but pungent use of foul language. Just as the Christ who blasted the fig tree in Qumran in a fit of bad temper (for not growing figs) is either avoided or theologized, so too are the Buddha’s words which he unleashed at his cousin’s suggestion: “I would not hand over the samgha to a dog, Devadutta, how much less so to a globule of spittle such as you.” Fighting words, those, and Devadutta responded with stout attempts to kill the man.

Bad words and genocide aside, erroneous facts and poor quips aside, mistranslations and incompletion aside, well, all those aside, there is no book left, only three pleasant episodic gems which deserve to fight for independence from the gross mass of the rest. As weapons go this is a water pistol, and its only claim to attention is as a test-case of how much of it you can read before you hurl the book into the wastepaper basket. There are some books, as a friend of mine once said, that the author may have felt he had to write in order to ease a weighted heart, but there is no reason why we ought to feel compelled to read them. There is already too much suffering in the world. Even the Buddha (really) knew that.

How Green Is My Valley: Play Reviews and Writings from Old Blighty

- Arjun Rajkhowa

The journey around London and the West End is a long one. It’s a bit strange in a way. There are so many epithets for it: big, wide, polyglot, mixed, far-off. There are so many things one can say. It is a bit difficult for one to know the difference between something real and something in the mind. That difference is metaphorical. Each place carries its own metaphor. The metaphor of this one is compositeness. Many of the places are Classical or Gothic or Corinthian, many of the people “multi-exit”, many of the buildings new glass monsters. Yet all of them speak of a certain glory. One only has to look hard enough. It is said that in this mixed, often mad, world of ours, each thing that is gives up something of what it is, to let the rest become something that is bigger. Each thing halves in attrition, for the big things to become bigger. So, in so many of these warren-like places, one just has to find that something. You need a well roundedness to let things in. There is always something to get, from the smallest of places. Something from the laconic street-poser; something from the pithy, incurious daily-wager; something from the vituperative foreign businessman; something from the harangue of the left-out; something from everywhere. Things, of course, change. There have been so many changes here. The people are new, the ideas are new, the motives are new, and, I daresay, even the accents are new. What happened to the fully formed vowels? Who took away the second syllables? This damned mess-up of the new half-words! However, coming back to the topic, the playhouses are exempt from these. They live in a big, wide, surreal space, where nothing else can live. They live away from the outside. They are dreamier. In the outside, dreams are daily bruised. In the inside, dreams are daily dreamt. They whisk you away, far way; albeit, for that much time. What you do with it is wholly your business.

Equus
Gielgud Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue

The play Equus is made of many ideas. The writer, Peter Shaffer, has written a narrative that holds strongly at the axes. Richard Griffiths plays the narrator, a psychologist who tries to treat a boy, Alan Strang. The boy, seemingly inexplicably, blinds six horses at a stable in which he works. His case and his story are unlike anything Dr. Martin Dysart has seen before. The play is, in form, his own story – he seeks to investigate causes, find explanations, without any headway. The boy’s parents are divided. The father is an atheist and the mother a devout Catholic. The boy is torn between the two, both overbearing and erratic, in a home filled with innuendo. The boy becomes fixated on a creature of his mind and his obsession becomes a link of totems – the crucifix above his bed, television advertisements, fighting his father, a stable of horses, Christ, and an encounter with a girl. He worships that which he lusts after. The play is about the doctor’s fight, his inner tumult, his own sense of purpose and his own attempt to understand the madness of men and the big lies of normalcy. I can’t quite disclose everything about the plot, but the spaces and recesses that it has, and shows of a scalded psyche are immensely powerful. These performances are sterling: Richard Griffiths’ is an apogee by itself, Daniel Radcliffe is much liked and the actors who play Mr. and Mrs. Strang are tremendously strong. So is the ingenious use of minimalist sets, foreboding lights and the big horses with big hooves.

Billy Elliot – The Musical
Victoria Palace Theatre, Victoria Street

Everyone knows the Billy Elliot movie. The musical is one of the things one just has to do in the city. There are billboards and posters everywhere. ‘The Best British Musical In Years’ it says in Tubes, indeed, in Piccadilly, on the overhead flashing large-screens. It is seen everywhere and quite rightly so. The story is the same, snipped in bits and made more adaptable. The characters are the same, with some adjustment. The gay best friend in the movie, therein marginalized, becomes less so on stage. The father, the brother and the miners’ struggle become the leitmotif; the songs and sets and people all carry it forward. The characters are cast in their best fits: the grandmother, a surly woman, who delivers the best-served wisecracks; the sissy-bashing boxing-coach, who uses the choicest Irish on “them fags and twats, the like”; the ballet teacher and her razzmatazz. The women are hardy, the men misogynists, and both fight an endless struggle that is lost from the start. It has the sounds of realpolitik, too, what with songs like ‘Merry Christmas, Mrs. Margaret Thatcher!’ viz., bashful song about the PM’s privates! It makes its points on its toes and it looks right, too. Ian MacNeil’s designs – a rough, grey wall, a curved pub front, a pop-up, spiral pithead-shaped house – move the action along. Stephen Daldry tells his story so well, which is political and personal, loud and real. Outside the theatre, I heard an ashen-faced person say, ‘This being the best thingamabob in the years – not so much yam, innit?’ Thou sayest.

The Letter
Wyndham’s Theatre, Charing Cross Road

Somerset Maugham’s steamy thriller of 1927 is a great play to watch. The story is set against a colonial backdrop, in Indonesia. It has a set of old Empire characters and lots of intrigue. They belong to the usual circles – the district magistrate and wife, the estate-owner and wife, the attorney, the police officer – well ensconced, safe, and closely bound. One day, a round of pistol shots is heard in the estate-owner’s house. His wife has shot a man, a compatriot and friend, who, she says, tried to force himself on her. The police get involved and she details to them her imbroglio, why she had to shoot him, unthinkingly. She is charged and brought to trial and impunity seems furthest away. It is here that her careful lawyer discovers the secret of a letter, a letter that throws new light on motives and liaisons behind the contrite veneer of Seagrove’s character. He discovers the tale of a lover wronged, a Chinese mistress, and unrequited love. The play has a sharp tone. There is a wily ‘Chinaman’ as the lawyer’s secretary, who uses highfalutin English in long-winded sentences. A bit overdone, though it raised a few laughs. The cast has Anthony Andrews (David Copperfield) as the lawyer, and Jenny Seagrove as the wronged woman, who winces every time her lover’s non-white mistress is mentioned. The Letter is worth reopening.

The Glass Menagerie
Apollo Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue

“The two most important things in the life of Tennessee Williams were his work and his sister. In the Glass Menagerie, his first major success in 1945, we see the making of a writer and the making of his sadness, too, in the character of Laura, the writer’s sister.” I watched this play with Mr. Summerscale and his daughter. I think I might have rushed into the theatre, to take succour from the rain, but also because this was my first Tennessee Williams play. The writer, Tom Wingfield, is both narrator and participant as the play moves along. He says, in induction, that the play is about his family: his mother, an eager, hyperbolic, Christian woman, and his sister, who is young, coy and painfully withdrawn. She has a crippled leg. The mother wants to equip her with skills, make her more suitable for “gentleman callers”, her oft-repeated quip. When she discovers her daughter’s truancy, she becomes standoffish, or overbearing, or both. Her son becomes untoward and angry. Yet, in the midst of all this, they spend an evening with a “gentleman caller”. He, fortuitously, turns out to be her high-school hero and erstwhile love-interest. They strike a rapport. She shows him her glass menagerie, her tiny, glass animal collectibles. He tries to draw her out. The glass menagerie becomes a metaphor for caged-ness. Jessica Lange plays the erratic mother (“Everybody’s nagging mom”), Amanda Hale the shy Laura, Ed Stoppard the temperamental son, and Mark Umbers the infectious “gentleman caller”. Jessica Lange is a two-time Academy Award winner and her last West End production was A Streetcar Named Desire. The sets are special, in that they work on a round platform atop the stage, and from it, a spiral metal staircase leads upwards. Rupert Goold’s directorial work and Mathew Wright’s design have been ranked highly everywhere.

Fergus Lamont
Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh

This is my favourite play. It is the closest I have come to sensing that. Edinburgh is the Scottish city and Glasgow is thought of as the lesser cousin. The play is essentially about what it means to be Scottish. The setting is a Scottish village and Fergus Lamont is the illegitimate child of an earl. He grows up amongst a household of galley-men and lackeys and goes to school. There, he is taught by a revolutionary Socialist teacher. He goes on to join the army, where he must cover up his pidgin Scottish accent and speak English like the English do. He marries a fellow Scotswoman, who speaks English like the English do, a celebrated writer who lets him dabble in poetry, and, in the meantime, philanders away with all the high-profile men in her life. The war arrives and the political rift between them widens. Fergus Lamont, testy lieutenant, fights the way, yet renounces it. His childhood girlfriend from the village leads marches against it. She pillories his writer-wife, who, romantic novels aside, takes up the English hatchet. They fall apart. The wife marries her wealthy politician-lover and he goes off in search of an ancestral home in a faraway Scottish village. There, he marries an unschooled woman and writes his poetry. His friend continues, till then end, to rally against the war in distant, and civilized, Paris. The play puts many elements in perspective, but its unequivocal message, political and personal, hits you strongly in the face. I don’t know the names of any of the actors, but they are the most powerful I have ever seen. The cast has just a handful, who jump from character to character, from Scottish dialect to Bloomsbury English. Theirs are impossibly versatile and well-trained acts. The play has been adapted from the eponymous book by Robin Jenkins. The tone and the movement are so essential, so strongly Scottish. Local atmosphere is all!

Carthage Must Be Destroyed
Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh

Alan Wilkins’ Carthage Must Be Destroyed is set against the backdrop of The Third Punic Wars and is a story of political intrigue and double-dealing. The Senate is under pressure to make Rome rich again. Consul Cato is a practical man and knows Carthage is the solution. If the Senate hears a clamour of voices against the old enemy, order could be restored. Carthage has too much money. Carthage is stockpiling weapons. Carthage is a threat to Rome. Delenda est Carthago – Carthage must be destroyed! Cato thinks Senator Gregor is just the right man to put the wheels into motion. He’s practiced in the art of privilege without responsibility, who works his whims around Roman baths and bought-off boys with good complexions. As Cato, Tony Guilfoyle is a tightly-coiled moralist and Damian Lynch’s Marcus is a smart operator. Sean Campion’s Gregor, though, is a remarkable study of one man’s rise and fall. From privileged hedonist to a garbled, shamed war-general, his last grasp of morality becomes a symbol of how empires fall. Comparisons with today’s War On Terror are skillfully suggested rather than crowbarred in. The entire first act is done in the nude, in a steamy sauna, around which the audience are seated. When Cato makes his big speech, he moves through the audience as if romping through the people of Rome. This is a serious, meaty, astute political drama.

Othello
The Globe Theatre, Bankside

The republic of Venice employs Othello (Eamonn Walker), a self-made man and a Moor, to defend its overseas territories against the Turk. But for all his military prowess, Othello remains an outsider in the city, an object of racism, envy and mistrust. As the Turkish threat gathers and Venetian forces are despatched to Cyprus, Iago (Tim McInnerny), a junior officer secretly enraged by his lack of promotion, exploits Othello’s ingenuous nature, driving him into an uncontrollable jealousy. Performed for the first time at The Globe, this is the final thing I did before leaving the city. The theatre is a rebuild of the original (1599) where Shakespeare worked, flanked on either side by The Tate Modern and The Anchor pub (which the original actors used for change of costume), opposite St. Paul’s Cathedral. Sam Crane as Roderigo plays the jilted lover and dogged nemesis of Cassio (played by Nick Barber). Bianca (Zawe Ashton) and Emilia (Lorraine Burroughs) are each a suitably voluptuous presence on stage. Zoe Tapper is the clear-voiced and disavowed Desdemona. Eamonn Walker, as Othello, is fearsome but sometimes unclear dialogue-wise, when he says things sotto voce. Tim McInnerny as Iago is the ruthless, manipulative spin-doctor and a tremendous actor. The best tickets are the five-quid standing-tickets, where you stand through the performance in the “Wooden-O”, and cheer and holler like the Elizabethan “groundlings”. This is a truly momentous experience.

The Lion King
The Lyceum Theatre, Wellington Street
Covent Garden

I watched this West End production of the Lion King some three years back, before we produced it in school, but the memory lives forever. I thought I’d write about it here! For most of you, it should be revision and recall. Try and imagine it in a labyrinthine theatre: a magnificent, slow sunrise, the chanting of a bedizened shaman (Rafiki, as fulsome in girth as our resident version), fabricated animals trooping down the aisle, flying overhead and flocking across the stage. It is so well done that you wonder where they (the director, Julie Taymor, and her creative team) can go from there. The visuals, however, never swamp the drama. The storyline remains clear and compelling. Africa comes alive in the beats of the Serengetti Plains. The company have won innumerable BAFTA, Olivier and Tony awards, making it the superlative mega-musical in London.

Bombay Dreams
Apollo Theatre, Victoria Street

I watched Bombay Dreams the last time round too, and it is now no longer in London but perhaps on Broadway. An Andrew Lloyd Webber production, this is Meera Syal’s combination of the glamour of the movies, heart-aching romance and catchy songs. The story is about a big film director’s daughter, who wants to move away from over-used Bollywood formulae and explore real life in cinema. She falls in love with her lead-actor, a boy from Dharavi, and she pairs him opposite tinsel town’s super-heroin. Don Black’s lyrics and A. R. Rahman’s music sit well together to get many lively songs a la Bollywood.

The Old Wembley
Wembley

The first thing I watched at The Old Wembley stadium was Dancing On Ice, which is a televised series where select couples of professional and non-professional skaters (like Duncan of Blue, who looked familiar) learn to ice-skate in a rigorous regimen with Torvill and Dean, the 1984 British Olympic champions at Sarajevo, and finally compete on an ice-ring in front of a live audience. The performances were enthralling. Torvill and Dean’s return to the ring roused a huge surge of nostalgia in the British viewing public. They were magnificent and the tickets were tough to get. The second thing I attended here was a Deep Purple concert, thronged in large part by rockers and Londoners who grew up on that culture. The air was charged. Roger Glover, Ian Paice, Ian Gillan, Don Airey and Steve Morse were all there, working the crowd up for a round-the-hour recce of their best-know hits. I, of course, knew only Highway Star and Smoke on the Water properly enough, and so had limited screaming to do. But was it electric, and how!

The Blue Man Group
New London Theatre, Drury Lane

The Blue Man Group is an avant-garde, percussion-driven show in a custom-built theatre. The Blue Men are Phil Stanton, Chris Wink and Matt Goldman, a trio of mute performers who wear blue grease paint, latex bald caps and black clothing! Their performance incorporates rock music, percussion, odd props, audience participation, sophisticated lighting and large amounts of paper. The show starts long after midnight. The oddities begin as soon as you step inside the auditorium. An electronic message board prompts you to shout out birthday greetings to people you don’t know. Staff members walk the aisles handing out ponchos, encouraging you to wrap it around your head and extremities. The Blue Man Group combines the best of theatre, art, music and science, and puts it in package full of humour and energy. After the show, if you go up and speak to them, like I did, they shake your hand and daub you in blue paint. It’s a euphoric experience.

Nederlands Dans Company
Sadler’s Wells Theatre, Islington

The Nederlands Dans is a product of classical ballet and modern dance. The Company is regarded as one of the most shocking, innovative and distinct dance groups in Europe. At Sadler’s Wells, the Peacock Theatre (in Holborn) and at the Lilian Baylis Theatre, more than twenty-four other companies perform in tandem. The NDT’s premiere company performs a full-length ballet by Jiri Kylian, One Of A Kind, on a starkly beautiful set by Japanese architect Atsushi Kitagawara. The company I watched at Sadler’s Wells perform three compact ballets, where the dancers move with eerie, light steps that suddenly transform into lightening flashes and stupendous what-are-called “pas de deux”. The movements are intensely sexually connoted. They use exquisite lighting, giant props and dramatic costume. They blend technical precision and contemporary movement. The last ballet uses one of Prince’s songs as a score and is riotously fun.

As I write this in Oxford, a short way away from Blackwells, one of the world’s most important bookshops, one needs to say that there are many contemporary British writers who keep a sense of British-ness changing. The best of them are Kazuo Ishiguro and Zadie Smith. The earlier modern writers are timeless – Somerset Maugham, Aldous Huxley, G.B. Shaw (I don’t know if they call him modern), Bertrand Russel and George Orwell. There are John Keats, Virginia Woolf, Oscar Wilde, the Brontes, R.L. Stenvenson, right up to Shakespeare, Marlowe, Chaucer and Milton. There’s also Ben Johnson, who I didn’t know, until I saw his plaque in Westminster Abbey. As you can see, I’m bad with chronology.

A Drop Of White Paint

- Asha Kurien

First, a languorous slide off the tip of the paint brush
And then a fall into my glass
Now it uncoils itself
To writhe down the clear water
Unable to stand the slow descent
I pull the glass closer
Thoughts unstirred dissolve with the drop
In liquid clouds that rise
Till the bottom of the glass
Is curtained by a mellow whiteness.

Wind borne, the slender tamarind leaf falls
On the open page.
Quivering, it lies on the straight lines and scribbled words
Yellow and crisp, staring at the branch it left naked.

Me

- Aruni Kashyap

Even I have words.
I can clay-mould them
I have languages, literatures
forest songs.
They crawl back centuries,
earthquakes generational.

Grandmas circulated them; with betel nuts
on courtyards under honeyed moons,
like rains, they drench minds, and more—
When first-drenched ones are time-parched,
to the new ones who are parched for stories.
With time, they have descended
Like seasons and mists, to rest with us.
I have tunes too, books
written on bark with earthworm’s blood;
they are different,
independent, like these rivers
in my chest, legends- laden
mournful, yet swelling with energy furious
Love-lost like singing spring birds
Anonymous, beyond the hills
Where rivers and rains are born
To flow down as legends, life-blood.

My history is different, defined
by grandmas, rivers, hills,
singing spring birds behind green trees
and seventeen victories.
My words: they have legends in them.
The way tea-leaves run in my veins
instead of blood.
Stories, of new-born speaking from backyard graves
About dogs transforming into man
Man to sheep, goats
And a girl, singing through lime trees,
gourds and lilies from backyards.

And I still wait, for a warm embrace
My throat peacock-parched, in longing
All the rivers from my land
legends, rains weary
Cannot quench my thirst, I need your love
Don't you see,
I'm different?

Even I have words.
Languages, literatures
And stories to tell you
Are you eager to listen, at all?

Electra, not Oedipus – Psychologising Myth

- Priyasha Mukhopadhyay

Hardly anything is possible today without Oedipus, not family life, and not architecture.

When Austrian Novelist Robert Musil made this comment, it was, in all probability, from what we know of him, not meant to be a complementary one. But what it does, nevertheless do, is mark out for us how widespread and enormous the influence of Freud’s Oedipus Complex has had on modern thought and civilisation. The Oedipus Complex has become a term used and known even by people who have hardly any knowledge of psychoanalysis, and even less of Sophocles and Greece, which , though a statement perhaps of its popularity, is also emblematic of the way in which it has been reduced to its bare frame – Son desires-mother-and-therefore-wants-to-kill-his-father scenario.

However, it is Electra, rather than Oedipus who occupies centre stage in the latter years of modernism. After her initial popularity as a character in Attic Tragedies, her presence in literature has been rare, usually as silent helper to Orestes, until this re- emergence in the 20th century, in which there has been a large number of re-interpretations of the myth; Hoffmansthal’s Electra, Sarte’s The Flies, Sylvia Plath’s Daddy poems, even a Wagnerian opera based on Hoffsmansthal’s work.

This renewed interest in Electra could probably be attributed to two things. The first is, plainly, the Oedipus trope being done to death, she provided literary novelty. Secondly, and more importantly, the fact that she appears as a counter to the Oedipus Complex in terms of Psychoanalysis.

The nature of this opposition, however, is, at best, strained. The term ‘Electra Complex’ was first used by Jung, to provide a counter to the male sexual theory that the Oedipal complex of Freud was. However, Jung is vague about the definite nature of this phenomenon. He merely substitutes in the Oedipus Complex, the daughter for the son, and the father for the mother. His writings show no sustained engagement and involvement in the understanding of the phenomenon, which have lead to speculations about his creating this complex merely to counter Freud. Its ‘openness’ therefore allows for greater freedom for a literary reworking of it.

At this point, it would perhaps be wise to ask what the nature of the relationship between myth and psychoanalysis is, given the large number of complexes that are explained using mythic models. Jung, for example, said that Mythology, as a product of culture, attempts to elucidate the nature of that aforesaid culture, and therefore works with generalizations and universals that can be applied to all of humankind, leading to the creation of a cultural or collective unconscious. This produces what are known as archetypes, that, though from a alternative context, continue to have relevance today.

However, a close examination of the actual story of these myths and the manner in which they are rendered in psychoanalysis reveals that there is an inherent gap between the two. This is because these myths are divorced from the social contexts that they originated in. Take the Oedipus myth; whereas the complex definitely registers a sexual attraction between mother and son, and therefore the male desire to kill the father, the myth replaces what Freud sees as deliberate with accident. Oedipus is not incestuous by choice, but rather, his being incestuous is the result of a political situation gone horrible wrong, and this is supposed to make the play , as Alison Burke points out, the tragedy that it is, and not an arena for sexual secret fantasies.

The myths, therefore, instead of providing a universal common situation, provide a paradigm into which multiple meanings can be read, and this is why their relevance has persisted into modernity.

What I propose to do in this paper is look examine the gaps between the Electra Myth, and the manner in which it is reworked in modern drama, under the influence of psychoanalysis, taking O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra as an example.

O’Neill’s play does maintain the presence of a continuity between the past and the present, and therefore the modern day relevance of myth at several points. The setting of the play, for example, is during the American Civil war, an intermediate time frame between Classical Greece and O’Neill’s 1931. The fact that Electra’s story can exist in each of these different time frames could perhaps be seen as establishing a continuity in meaning, down the ages, a sort of universalizing agenda that psychoanalysists also have. Secondly, there is a constant feeling that the past controls the present, a statement made by more than one character in the play. This is best exemplified by the fact that they are always being watched by the eyes of the deceased Mannons, from the portraits of the wall. Their greatest dilemmas are always enacted in front of these portraits.

The use of an ancient Greek myth in a modern play did pose problems for O’Neill. In his Work Diary, during the early stages of his writing, he notes –
Is it possible to get modern psychological approximation of today, possessed by no belief in gods or supernatural retribution, could accept and be moved by?
His answer to that is a movement towards psychoanalysis, the positioning of a psychological realism over the idea of fate and determinism, a concentration instead on the actual actions and motives of the characters in the play.

What O’ Neill does, like Freud and like Jung is divorce the myth from its social and political positioning, and move it to an entirely personal one, reinforced by the domestic setting of the play, and the negligent importance of the Civil War present in the back drop.

The extent to which Electra and Agamemnon are sexually linked in the manner that psychoanalysis is responsible for is problematic. Her reaction to her father’s death is one that is ground in social convention, rather than repressed sexual desire. As his daughter, she is the inheritor of the oikos that is household of the sons of Atreus, not her mother, who is an outsider linked to them by marriage. It becomes a social necessity, therefore, to kill the mother, to balance the pollution that has occurred through her aberrational and adulterous desires.

In conjunction with this, there is very little reference to Electra’s sexuality, or femininity, in the myth per se, or in either of the Sophoclean, Euripidean and Aeschylean plays that discuss it. Rather, it is her lack of sexuality, her inability to live up to her gender expectations in terms of intercourse, marriage, children and public lamentation that is stressed. At no point is there any evidence that she sees herself as her mother’s sexual competitor.

The domestication of the myth in O’Neill’s play moves it into the personal sphere, and therefore the sexual. This manifests itself primarily in the use of the trope of incest in the play, and therefore of sexual desire. There is an attempt by Lavinia to justify the death of her mother and her lover Adam on grounds of justice, constant blackguarding of the mother, the reiteration on phrases like ‘It was for father’, putting herself on the same scale of social justice as the mythical Electra. However, it is not impossible to neglect the incestuous web that runs through the play and entangles, not just one character, but all. This is reinforced by the fact that all the male characters look similar, as do the female, making, in the sexual imagination of the play, one as a substitute for another. Ezra Mannon, for example, falls in love with his wife Christine, because she reminds him of the Canuck Nurse his uncle runs away with, Christine with Adam, the son of that relationship, because he reminds her of her son Orin. Orin and Christine thus share an Oedipal relation, which is then transferred to Lavinia, his sister, to whom he even suggests an actual physical relationship towards the end of the play. Lavinia too, sees her father, to whom she is ‘electrically’ connected, in Adam, which validates in her eyes, her love for him.

Sexual jealousy and desire therefore become the primary forces that drive the characters of the play, rather than the gods and social duty and fate. In this manner, unlike Electra, she becomes, very overtly, her mother’s sexual competitor, rival for the affections of both Ezra Mannon, as well as Adam Brant. Their interactions are stained with an intense, bitter enmity. Lavinia’s desire for her father – ‘You’re the only man I’ll ever love’, the fact that she rejects suitors on the grounds that she needs to be with her father, is a definite indicator of the sexualisation of their relationship. Her mother is aware of this as well – ‘You’ve tried to become the wife of your father, and the mother of Orin’. Lavinia’s electral jealousy of her mother leads to the murder of Adam, and subsequently, the suicide of Chrisitine.

After Christine’s death, Lavinia moves out of her grave and mourning image, clad in black, and becomes more and more like her mother; in life usurping her dead rival completely. Peter, her friend, notes this, with satisfaction, so does Orin, with accusations – ‘You stole mother’s colours’! Her lover Peter becomes literally, her mother’s lover, when she calls him Adam.

With this alteration, she also becomes like her mother in the futile search for true love. The text plays with what it calls ‘the right to love’, and sympathizes with the characters search for it. Christine’s rejection of Ezra is on the grounds that he has not been a sexually satisfying husband (although this fault is nothing compared to Agamemnon’s), she kills him to be with Adam and instead find an alternative source of tenderness. This is not rejected by the text. The mental idea is concretized through the image of the south sea islands Adam tells Christine about, which Orin does as well. All the characters who search for love are connected through this island – Christine and Adam want to run away there, Orin suggests that he goes there with his mother; Lavinia does go with Orin and discovers a love that is not a sin, as she puts it. What the text is advocating perhaps is an association between paganism and free love. If it is doing so, O’Neill’s intentions are displaced. Greek society, as a pagan society, rather than allowing for free sexual association, tightly regulated the sexual activities of its women. Clytemnestra, Christine’s counterpart in the myth, therefore, is condemned in a manner that Christine is spared. The two reasons for her murdering Agamemnon are the fact that he sacrifices Iphigenia before the Trojan war, and because of Aegisthus. The first is overshadowed by the enormity of the second. She is seen as an adulteress and not as a pain-stricken mother; sex as a motive delegitimises her actions.

Most strikingly, however, is the manner in which O’Neill’s play ends. Vinnie says –
I'm not going the way Mother and Orin went. That's escaping punishment. And there's no one left to punish me. I'm the last Mannon. I've got to punish myself! Living alone here with the dead is a worse act of justice than death or prison! I'll never go out or see anyone! I'll have the shutters nailed closed so no sunlight can ever get in. I'll live alone with the dead, and keep their secrets, and let them hound me, until the curse is paid out and the last Mannon is let die! (with a strange cruel smile of gloating over the years of self-torture) I know they will see to it I live for a long time! It takes the Mannons to punish themselves for being born!

The fact that Electra escaped without being punished in the Greek myth disturbed O’Neill greatly, and this ending can be seen as his correction of this myth, with Vinnie’s punishment being a correction of aberrational sexual desire, as the death of Clytemnestra was in the eyes of her children.

These gaps are also seen in other Electra plays which are not in the scope of my paper to discuss. The point that this paper has worked towards is that in spite of there being these gaps, myth has the ability to take on new meaning, in what ever context it is placed. Through the psychologisation of the Electra figure in his play, O’Neill is transposing the relevance of the myth into modern times, and giving it a new and alternative possible significance. And so in this manner, Oedipus will continue, and Electra will remain electric.


Bibliography

Burke, Alison. ‘From Aeschylus’ Oresteia to Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra : Text, Adaptation and Performance’.
Borove~ki-Jakovljev, Sanja. ‘The Oedipus Complex in the Contemporary Psychoanalysis’.
Scott,Jill.Electra after Freud – Myth and Culture. Cornell University Press, 2005

The Darkening

- Parnisha Sarkar

We were growing up
in an old seaside town.
There was talk of war
and killing
but the sunsets
still rushed up narrow side streets
and we swum out to sudden islands
far off the shore
and, on green beaches,
skin touching sand,
dreamt of the sea.
At night,
the moon rose
smelling of salt
and the water twisted rocks
into strange human shapes
and everyone
dreamt a little
of the sea.
We were growing up
and on quiet afternoons,
slowly, lazily,
the glow spread
this way and that
like birdcall
and we secretly watched
the light move
on each other’s backs,
watched it smell like the sea,
the dark womb smell.
We were young
and it knived through
and there was talk of war
and a terrible
rushing sort of sadness everywhere.

Woman

- Asha Justin Odathekal

Paint my sorrow with your indifference
And stamp on my ego with your rude manhood
Hunt me down with your male pride
There you lie
On the crumpled bedsheet
Fatigued by your hungers
Call it manly
But-
You will never know
You’re fonder to me
When it rains outside
When the orange sun melts in my evening tea
Than when I lie here beside you
My hair disheveled
My lips wet with your kiss
And a faint strain of lament
Lingers in the black vacuum between my naked thighs.

Reworking the Ramayana: Michael and the Myth of Megnadh

- Srilata Sircar

Paula Richman writes in her essay titled “Questioning and Multiplicity Within the Ramayana Tradition” that the corpus of legends, myths, folklore and other literature surrounding the figure of Rama has for long accommodated deviations, variations and implicit modes of questioning. She identifies two broad categories into which these, the ‘other’ Ramayanas, can be divided. The first is the category modeled by Sanskrit philologists, which regards the Valmiki Ramayana as the ‘ur’ or the ‘original’ version of the epic, thus implying that all other versions are derivatives meant to be regarded in hierarchical perspective. The other alternative model I, the second the one developed by A.K. Ramanujan, which may roughly be termed as the ‘Many Ramayanas’ approach. It is in this, the second model, that I wish to locate Michael Madhusudan Dutta’s signature creation, the Megnadh Badh Kabya or The Song of the Fall of Megnadh.

First published in 1861, Megnadh Badh Kabya is Dutta’s best remembered work. Spanning over seven books, like the Valmiki Ramayana itself, Megnadh Badh Kabya relates the climactic latter half of the epic story, in which a war is fought between Rama’s army of monkeys and Ravana’s force of demons. In this paper, I will take up an analysis of Book VI of Megnadh Badh Kabya, and attempt to argue that through his negotiation of the dynamics within the narrative, Dutta not only challenges the popular notions of Rama as the ultimate hero and Ravana as the ultimate villain, but nearly inverts the thesis of the myth by garnering the reader’s sympathy and admiration in favour of Megnadh (the son of Ravana), who most definitely is the hero of Book VI.

The Book on the fall of Megnadh opens with Lakshman reporting to Rama his encounter with the goddess Maya whom he had pleased with his devotion and ardour and won over her assistance in his mission to execute Megnadh. The theme of divine intervention is recurrent throughout the book, as if to suggest the injustice of the unfavourable situation that this places Megnadh in and the undue privilege that Lakshman enjoys over him. Lakshman in his opulent warrior’s attire, has a bright armour decked on his chest, a flashing sword beneath his radiant belt, a shield on his back and a quiver full of arms donated by deities whose favour he had secured. When he reaches Nikumbhil, where Megnadh sits lost in meditation, he finds him seated on a mat of holy grass, adorned by a silken cloth. His brow is marked with sandal and his neck is garlanded by fragrant blossoms. The contrast drawn by Dutta between the figure of the regal warrior and that of the unarmed, unsuspecting devotee is stark and unmistakable. The contrast takes an almost caricaturist turn when Megnadh assaults Lakshman with a jar of water and despite his resplendent armour, he falls and swoons “As down comes with a mighty creak and crash/A tree gigantic pulled out by the storms”. This is followed by an extensive conversation between Megnadh and Vibhishan who had accompanied Lakshman to Lanka. It is only after a sufficient lapse of time that Dutta allows Lakshman to regain consciousness and resume the lop-sided battle. The projection of this battle as a divine conspiracy in which various deities connived to bring about the fall of Megnadh is furthered by Dutta’s treatment of the role played by goddess Lakshmi.

Lakshmi is approached by Maya to assist Lakshman in entering Lanka unnoticed, in the garb of a god. Lakshmi obliges out of a reverence for Maya, but indiscreetly laments the fate of Ravana, whose family had faithfully served her. She regrets her move of betrayal and blames it on the irreversibility of the wheel of fate and the cycle of time. Having accomplished the task assigned to her, she steals away from Maya and weeps in grief and guilt. The pre-ordained nature of Megnadh’s death is repeatedly emphasized, as if to dispel any notions of a lack of valor on his part. Lakshmi justifies the inevitability of his death on the basis of the sins of Ravana.
Another device employed by Dutta to patheticize the fall of Megnadh is the metaphor of a hunt, that emerges time and again in his description of the entire exercise. In the opening lines of Book VI, Dutta describes Lakshman’s retreat to the tent of Rama as a “fowler”, “who hath perceived a lion in the woods”. He alternates between depicting Lakshman as the cowering escapist and identifying him with the figure of the sly, opportunistic hunter. Goddess Maya, herself complicit in the murder of Megnadh, calls the act a “coup-de-main”, stating that it would be impossible to subdue him in a free and equal battle. In his description of Lakshman’s surreptitious entry into Lanka, Dutta takes this metaphor to its most explicit and poignant form: “As in a forest dense/ The tiger, (when the beast perceives a fawn),/ Concealed in ambush makes a cautious move/ And bides his time; or as the ravenous shark,/ Unseen, perceiving from the river’s bed/ A person (bathing on its lovely coast),/ Advances to his prey like wheels of death/ So Lakshman brave, attended by his friend/ With guarded footsteps marched to slay the foe,/ Whose doom was sealed…” The simile is sustained in the passage describing Lakshman’s arrival at Megnadh’s chamber of worship. It reaches its culmination when Lakshman himself is made to adopt it in his dialogue with Megnadh. When Megnadh demands a fair opportunity to fetch his weapons before embarking on a confrontation, Lakshman retorts that just like a hunter never releases a tiger caught in his net, he would also be a fool to let him go and would kill him by “methods foul or fair”. He then cites the example of Abhimanyu, Arjuna’s son, who died in the great battle of Kurukshetra, combating seven opponents at a time. The consistent use of the hunter-hunted metaphor is a clear indication of the light in which Dutta views the mythical event of the death of Megnadh. His sympathies undoubtedly lie with the victim and it is this that he wants to evoke in his readers as well.

A similar inclination is betrayed by his characterization of Rama and Vibhishan. The one time that Rama is allowed to speak in Book VI, he comes across as a weak and cowardly man with wavering intentions. He bitterly laments the misfortune that had befallen him due to the scheming Kekai and the vows of his father King Dasharath. Revoking the parting words of Sumitra, Lakshman’s mother and Urmila, his wife, Rama refuses to shoulder the responsibility of any harm borne by his brother and is deeply skeptical of the outcome of this mission. He goes to the extent of saying: “Friend, let me exit back to Dandak woods./ For who can fight the son of Ravana brave, the terror of the demons, men and gods.” He shows no trepidation in forgoing his wife Sita and all plans to rescue her, to ensure his own secure return. In recollecting all the efforts he had made to reach this far, crossing the vast ocean, he betrays a sense of resignation. “In vain we crossed the boundless sea, it seems.” In addition to Bhibhishan’s assurance and Lakshman’s alacrity to go ahead with his task, it takes a divine command from “a daughter of the sky” to coerce Rama into taking on the gauntlet. It is therefore neither his love for his wife, not his instinctive heroism that inspires a gallant show from Rama. It is merely the undeniable word of god that compels Rama into a confrontation that he would have preferred to avoid.

Bhibhishan, in popular imagination, is crystallized as the sagacious brother of the demon-king, who defies the ties of blood to side with the good against evil. However, in his dialogue with Megnadh, Dutta essays Bhibhishan as a faint-hearted traitor. It seems that he deserted his clan more out of fear than out of moral righteousness. He terms his entry and acceptance in Rama’s camp as “safe asylum”, “For who would perish for his kinsmen’s faults?” In response to this justification, Dutta’s Megnadh quotes from the Shastras, saying that an evil kinsman is to be preferred over a good stranger and that ties of blood are to be respected above every other association.

It is the character of Megnadh that is most deified in his own treatment and the response of other characters to him. On numerous occasions, references are made to his military prowess, unblemished moral character and holistic greatness by various characters including Rama, Lakshman and gods and goddesses. When he first encounters Lakshman in the garb of the fire god in his chamber of worship, he approaches him with folded hands and kow-tows repeatedly. Even on being informed about Lakshman’s true identity and his sinister intentions, he continues to regard him as an honored guest. He appeals to Lakshman’s Kshatriya spirit to allow him a fair and suitably armed fight. On being met with scorn and rebuff, he faces his enemy boldly and derives strength from the justness of his stance. Dutta’s deification of Megnadh reaches its pinnacle when his death is compared to the departure of Krishna from Gokul and the immense sorrow that it spelled for the people of Vrindavan. Megnadh’s image in the public eye and the following that he enjoys are previously established in the text through conversations that Lakshman overhears amongst the subjects of Lanka. A parallel is also drawn between the death of Megnadh and the killing of Duryodhana by Bhim. The illegitimacy of the latter is widely acknowledged, even by ancient scholars of the Mahabharata, as Duryodhan was killed by the crushing of his thighs, while in lawful warfare, an assault beneath the waist is unacceptable. With this, Dutta’s verdict on the issue is sealed and his disapproval of the means adopted by Lakshman is made evident. While neither Lakshman nor Rama are demonized in his narrative, they are certainly shown to be smaller than their projected selves. Megnadh (a demon), on the contrary, and through him vicariously Ravana too, is glorified and portrayed as a tragic hero who was victim of a conspiracy that enjoyed divine endorsement.

Myth in this case, as in most others, is an agency for the expression of opinion. The historicity of the takes of the Ramayana is still hotly debated. However, as argued by Pargitter in “Ramayana: The Epic Tradition”, the Ramayana in course of its evolution has undergone the transition from ‘tale’ to ‘myth’. The larger than life cult symbol that Rama has now come to emblematize has been inspected, enacted and even denounced in various readings and writings of this myth. The plot has been manipulated, the events have been situated in different regional, social and cultural set-ups and they have always eluded specific plotting in terms of the co-ordinates of time. What is unique about Megnadh Badh Kabya is that despite being one of the lesser tellings of the myth of Rama, it is perhaps the only version that focuses entirely on reworking the inter-personal dynamics of the epic. Thus without deviating from the plot in any significant measure, it presents a wholly unprecedented interpretation of the myth that stands exactly at odds with its popular perception. Romila Thapar, in her introduction to the book Questioning Ramayanas has commented on the absence of the Megnadh Badh Kabya from the academic scenario pertaining to the Ramayana, for the last few decades. Gopa Majumdar, in the preface to her translation of Michael Madhusudan Dutta’s biography titled Lured by Hope mentions her admiration for Dutta for bringing the female characters of the Ramayana into prominence and giving them a voice of their own. Megnadh Badh Kabya therefore represents the synthesis of several strands of subaltern thought and maps them on to the Ramayana, the oldest epic of our land. Thus, in conclusion I would like to re-emphasize on the unique character of the reading provided to me by Dutta and the reversal of thesis that it brings about. Megnadh Badh Kabya continues to present us with a high measure of unexplored potential for academic and literary analysis.


BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Megnadh Badh Kabya – translation Ghulam Murshid
2. Lured by Hope- Ghulam Murshid, translated by Gopa Majumdar
3. Questioning Ramayanas- (ed.) Paula Richman

River

- Charulata Somal

I stand atop the boulder,
along the banks of the river
I watch the waters flow
the river comes and it goes
I long for it to freeze
to watch the constant waters
Realising it never will
lest I hold in my memory dear
a picture so serene
that the landscape freezes
holding the water so close to me
that I cherish it's every touch
and let it pass me through
till I appreciate the flow in nature
and let the waters go
to lend their touch to
lands faraway
that I will never know.

You are impossible

- Abhishek Bhattacharyya

Grape juices turned sour turned purple
Are coursing through my veins now.
But then they don’t want to pour out.
They want to burst free.
And the book I was reading-
got smeared with dark juice.
But it wasn’t satisfying.
I wish there were glass vials or wine glasses
before my eyes
I would love to hear them shatter.

The boy I pass every morning on my way to work/ If he would speak

- Varsha Upraity

I could kill the ice-cream man. I would enter his house and raid his kitchen. Eat drink smoke all the flavours in his fridge. Coffee Jamaican Vanilla Choco-butter. I don’t like strawberry. Rumraisin Cranberry Butterscotch. I take it all in till I throw up and take in some more. When I am drunk with it, I walk up the stairs to his bed, drag him out, and tie him up out in the garden.

I would take out the nails from his hand and legs and run hot tongs through the soft skin. Maybe run it through his organ.

If it was a girl, I would just stick it up her.

Everyday they walk. Up and down the street. They have their shoes, their short skirts, their bleached-dyed hair, their gadgets. They hold their computers, their wallets, their lives in their bags. The street is full of restaurants. Chinese Thai German Bakery Israeli Hookah Bars Tibetan. Icecream Parlours.

I see them, from outside the glass window panes of their lives. They eat with cutlery. Spoons for soups. Knife and Fork for everything else. Sometimes those two long fingers for noodles. And ice-cream for dessert. They have them with sauces and nuts and fruits on transluscent bowls with stands and tiny spoons. Mostly though, they have them on cones. Crisp, chocolate coated. The perfect two mounds over the slanted V, the shape of an imperfect heart. They go slow at first. Licking the tops, making sure nothing spilt over, creating a perfect circle before the first bite. And afterwards, just deeper and deeper, bite and lick till the tip. The perfect end to a wonderful afternoon out.

They walk out once they are done with the food. They usually have dessert on the way to their cars or while waiting for a taxi. They eat on the road. That is disgusting. To leave air conditioning for a road people piss on. This is when I have to go up to them.

Please give me money-

Motherfuck you

I’m very hungry, I haven’t eaten in two days-

You’ll get some back home,

Come on, share the love woman.

I’m ill, you’ve just eaten, please, please-

It’s your leftovers now or sifting through your shit later in the garbage, you selfish cunts. Pretend you care.

Sometimes, often, I don’t talk. I twist a leg, maul my arm, roll my tongue, smudge more shit over me. Reach out an arm through the glass taxi window, pull at a skirt, throw myself low enough to lick a shoe. If I am careful and good, I get some coins, rarely, some notes. These I keep carefully under my tongue, so I can change them for glue. Otherwise, all I usually get is a bitten cone of melting ice-cream.

It is very hot right now. Inside, people are eating steaming soups and smoking imported cigarettes. I don’t have money to smoke in summer. If it stays this hot, they are sure to want ice-cream. I am not going to get anything halfway decent.

There was one day, some months ago, I don’t remember when exactly. It was the late night-time. It was cooler. I think it must have been January, it was cold. I was outside the Italian restaurant. This tall man came out, with an ice-cream cone in his hand. He had just started to have it, I could tell. He hadn’t started smoothing it out yet. He had already had a huge dinner- soup salad meat and all- I saw him.

Please give me some food.

He stopped and turned to look at me. He was very tall, I must have reached his hip. I am quite small, but I will grow more. I don’t think I have stopped yet.

Some food. Some money. Please. I am hungry.

He had no hair on his head, only a beard. I wonder if he was a dopehead. If he knew I was lying and cold and needed to sniff.

Are you hungry?

They normally don’t talk. They want you as part of the street, like the bricks and the dogs. I nod. He beckons. I follow. He doesn’t say anymore.

He takes me to the third floor of one of the hotels further up the street. His room has his bags all over it. There is no dope. He has no computer but there is a camera. I don’t see a wallet.

He uses the phone. His ice-cream, still hardly eaten, he leaves standing on a glass, and goes out, locking me in. Sometime later, the door opens, and he enters with a serving man from the hotel, who has a tray of food.

I have never eaten from a plate. That was the only time. There are leaves and plastic bags, and sometimes paper cups, but they don’t last very longs The ones in the garbage are always broken into very small pieces and cannot be used.

I ate. I must have eaten a lot. I don’t know what exactly, but there was some red hot soup, some meat and green peas and potatoes, and some cold white carrot. It tasted strange, it smelt hot and cold. It made me tired. I felt sick.

I slept off for a bit. He put me on the bed and took off my pants. I think I dreamt or the food made me sick. I am not used to eating. I had a strange taste in my mouth. I kept moving, and was finally too tired to keep my eyes closed.

I woke up and he was out. I couldn’t see anything I could take from the room. I was still looking when he came back.

I’ve paid for your meal. Now go.

I left. I didn’t say anything. I was walking to the door, when he ran his hand through my head. I shuddered and turned to face him. He gave me his ice-cream cone.

There’s some left. You didn’t have anything sweet earlier. Take this.

It was the colour of his tongue. I didn’t want it, but I took it. He patted my head again and walked me down the stairs and out the door. I held the cone in my right hand. It began to drip, and the cone started to melt into my hand.

What? Don’t you like ice-cream. It’s life. Lick it before it melts.

I touched it with my tongue. Strawberry. Pink is a girl’s colour. I couldn’t tell him that.

He didn’t follow me once we were outside the hotel. I walked alone and turned at the corner. He wasn’t there, he had gone back inside.

I threw the cone on the floor. The pink oozed out of the orange and into the black. The sky would be that colour soon. It wasn’t there when I came back in the afternoon. A dog must have eaten it. I never saw him again.

A woman comes out, her black heels clicking to the rhythm of her swaying straight skirt.

Money. Please. Money

Come on sister. Give me some.

She looks at me. Her eyes are behind massive black glasses. I can’t see them. She wears no lipstick. I cannot see her bra-strap. The slut isn’t game.

She opens her bag and shoves an apple into my hand.

If I give you money, you will sniff glue with it right? Eat this.

She walks off. I wonder how she knows.

I look at the apple in my hand. It is red and shiny.

I bite it.

It is sour and crunchy.

The he she person

Pink she saw. The colour the moon takes when the stars want to hide and the night is still infinite. The moments when the universe are suspended to seem like a dream. The moment of the dream before eyes open to the ceiling. That shade of pink, the wisp of dream melted into a moment of unstable permanence.