The opposite of Life

On one of the early days of my recently concluded India visit I showed my parents some old photographs I had recently scanned. They were pictures of relatives from the previous generations – my parents and their parents – and these were the first from a set of old photos I wanted to digitize. As always, the pictures brought back memories and father, who never misses a chance to tell a tale, had a story behind many pictures. After a while we came to a group photo – a picture with uncles, aunts, cousins and grandparents. When an initial round of identification was complete, father did something that astonished me: he began to count the dead. It took some moments, during which the count seemed to go on and on; the final number came to seven. “Seven of them already dead,” father said, as if it were the most natural comment that could result from a photograph.

Death has been on father’s mind since his younger brother was killed in an accident earlier this year. Although he has dealt with it in a practical manner – focusing mainly on the bureaucratic hurdles one has to cross in completing the paperwork following a death by accident – there have been moments when his psychological defenses have broken down. And this incident with the photograph showed that something in him had changed – it was as if he had crossed a border beyond which topic of death slowly expands its influence on the consciousness and invades the mind from within.

For most of us younger people thoughts on death occur mainly upon external stimuli – when we hear, see or read about it. It does not gnaw us from within – we are, for the most part, pre-occupied with dealing with the complexities of day-to-day life. So death, for many of us, is an alien concept. I couldn’t help thinking this while reading Joan Didion’s The year of magical thinking – a book that has moved millions with its account of the author coming to terms with the sudden demise of her husband and the terminal illness of her daughter. The book failed to strike a chord within me – never having gone through such an experience, I found it difficult to relate to her emotions following the death of a loved one. As I read on, I wondered what the hype about the book was all about – after all, there are millions who lose their families in more miserable circumstances, and here was someone living comfortably in the U.S. talking about the pains following the death of her husband due to cardiac arrest.

This morning I got the news – via SMS, which isn’t always a medium for frivolous communication – that another of father’s brothers had passed away, after a recent surgery. “Two wickets down,” was how my father later put it. I was at this uncle’s home last week in Hyderabad, and we had chatted as always, he commenting on my weight and I remarking that nothing about it would ever change. Today, in this distant country, I cannot comprehend the meaning behind this piece of news. My remarks expressing condolences and offering consolations to my cousins seem hollow – I am unable to glimpse their misery, unable to partake in their grief. Death continues to be an alien concept.

I realize that I had missed the point about Didion’s book. Grief following death is intensely personal. It does not matter if you are living in the suburbs of New York or the slums of Mumbai – the vacuum created by the death of a loved one is no different. Didion’s attempts to cope with her emotions represent a universal struggle, and her descriptions give us something to hold onto during such phases, something that aids our search for meaning in moments where the world around us seems to lack it.

Initial contrasts

I’ve been in Germany a few hours now, and it occurs to me that the silence will take a while to get used to.

At Hyderabad I woke up to the calls of street vendors announcing their wares: kaaela wallah, Paaeper, and other constructions I stopped trying to decipher after a while. Then, as the day wore on, noise from the neighbourhood filtered in through the walls: boys playing cricket, traffic moving by with honks and screeches, tempos with loudspeakers announcing something, housewives gossipping across balconies. At night, the watchman in the neighbouring building would switch on the radio to keep himself (and, consequently, the neighbourhood) awake, and the Gurkha patrolling the area would come by every hour and blow his whistle, indicating to us he was working so we had better keep that baksheesh ready. Then there was the gift of Diwali: crackers that assaulted all senses without respite.

Now, back in this small German town, alone in my apartment in a quiet neighbourhood, the silence is unnerving. Do people live here at all? I’ve switched on the stereo to generate some noise and energy (it is presently playing Dard-e-Disco from Om Shanti Om) but the pause of a few seconds in-between tracks creates a void so intense I feel I’m suspended in space – there is nothing around me.

It was in the train that the contrasts began to strike me. Three weeks previously, before I left for India, the leaves were just changing colour; now they had all fallen. The wintry landscape through my window was dominated by bare trees, grey skies, and people in long coats.

Then there were the cars speeding on autobahns, fast but disciplined. A relief to eyes that ached in the chaos of Indian cities.

The announcements in German brought to ears the sound of blunt syllables I’ve grown fond of over the years.

Back home, I found copies of Financial Times stacked neatly (probably by a kind neighbour) next to the post-box. Flipping through its pages, I found myself relishing the balance and maturity conveyed there, and yet, another side of me was missing the emotion and masala I’d experienced in the Times of India, with Bollywood and Cricket news extending their reach into the front pages.

Two different universes, really. It will take a while to make sense of all that I experienced and encountered in the last three weeks. Until then, here is a quote from Paul Theroux’s The Elephanta Suite, a collection of three novellas set in India:

…India was a land of repetition, a land of nothing new. You couldn’t say anything in India that had not been said before, and if you succumbed to India’s vivid temptation to generalize, all you could do was utter a platitude so obvious it looked like a lie – ‘The poverty’s a problem’ or ‘All these cows on the street’ or ‘It’s real dirty.

Like a living, billion-strong festival of futility, India was the proof that you could not do anything here that was not done before.

Hyderabad diary – The Homecoming

The day after I arrived in Hyderbad I drove with my parents to the university campus. It was a Sunday evening, and my father remarked that the traffic was moderate. “You should see it on a weekday,” he said, “The city is beginning to resemble the nightmare that Bangalore has become.” To me, the streets seemed to bustle with activity in a pleasing sort of way. Perhaps it was the effect of light: the last rays of sunlight that penetrated the maze of closely-spaced buildings conveyed a golden tint to everything in their path. I took pictures whenever we stopped at a traffic signal.

We had been invited by Professor Ujar, a friend of our family, to watch a play being staged by the university students. It was a play by Harold Pinter titled, coincidentally, ‘The Homecoming’. When I had learned of this opportunity last week while still in Germany, I had asked father to block our seats immediately.

Entering the campus was a bit like leaving behind a dusty desert for an oasis, green and quiet. Professor Ujar, who in his greying baldness and wide-rimmed glasses looks every bit the distinguished academician he is, welcomed me with a warm hug and introduced us to other friends he had invited. We soon found ourselves walking through the campus towards the auditorium. Along the way a few passers by stopped to greet the professor. One girl came up to him with a plea: the show was sold out and she wanted very much to watch the play – could he help?

The auditorium was small – which is always good for a play – and the props – a sofa set, some chairs and a table, a coat stand and a stack of drawers – were set not on but below the stage, right in front of the audience. (We were to learn later that the stage was in a state of disrepair, hence this shift in platform).We sat in the front row – a privilege offered to friends of faculty – but in the narrow space between us and the beginning of the actor’s area were a few rows of mattresses where students soon settled down, chatting and giggling merrily.

The play began fifteen minutes past scheduled time, and ran for two hours across two acts. Although the amateurism was evident in places, it was a spirited, enthusiastic performance. The larger problem, I thought, was with the theme, which didn’t seem to fit with the background of the actors; I’m not sure if a play like this – with characters from the working-class in London, speaking a tongue that was hardly respectable and having strangely disrespectful and inconsistent attitudes towards women – can be performed effectively by Indian-looking-and-speaking actors. It was a bold theme, and I was surprised at the ease with which these young students handled some intimate scenes. Consider this extract from the play (at this point LENNY and RUTH are in each other’s arms, kissing):

JOEY goes to them. He takes RUTH’s arm. He smiles at LENNY. He sits with RUTH on the sofa, embraces and kisses her. He looks up at LENNY.

……

He leans her back until she lies beneath him. He kisses her. He looks up at TEDDY and MAX.

…..

LENNY sits on the arm of the sofa. He carresses RUTH’s hair as JOEY embraces her. MAX comes forward, looks at the cases.

……

JOEY lies heavily on RUTH. They are almost still. LENNY carresses her hair.

…………..

JOEY and RUTH roll off the sofa on to the floor. JOEY clasps her. LENNY moves to stand above them. He looks down on them. He touches RUTH gently with his foot.

Sitting next to my parents, a part of my mind was dwelling on their reaction to all this on-stage intimacy from youngsters. In the end, father liked “the eloquence of speech” from the actors, while mother found the whole thing “strange”.

On the walk back from the auditorium Professor Ujar explained the reason for the delayed start: some students, mostly from the backward-caste category who had been admitted through the reservation quota, had insisted on watching the play even though it was sold out, while the students in the organizing comittee were wary of the trouble these students could create while the play was on. The Vice Chancellor of the university had to step in to resolve the matter, and after a caution the protesting students were let in. “The students who staged the play,” explained the Professor, “are from the more elite sections of the student population, and they are not too comfortable with the other sections.”

The local Times covered the event, and the article that appeared two days later had only nice things to say about the play (which is probably what the young students need, to motivate them further). It was a short piece, and one sentence instantly caught my eye:

“An existentialist play by Pinter would never be the easiest thing to stage. So, they decided to get it off the stage, and performed in the gallery!”

The coming weekend another group of students from the university is performing Girish Karnad’s Hayavadana. That sounds more promising, somehow.