It is early evening in one of the villages in Delhi. Sun is there in full force, but they are sitting in a Buddha Jayanti park like park, an old favorite of repressed lovers, under the ample shades of trees. Rahul is sitting tensed with his head down, full of that nervous energy that indicates coming of a climactic event, and asks hesitantly, so, who is the boy, you love. She smiles, says, the boy is so stupid, does not even know she loves him, walks to a nearby tree and starts carving a name on it. Rahul gets up, sees his name printed as a solid proof, and a new lightness comes into his being.
A commonplace event that happens to countless commonplace couples every day. But it still moves you when brought to the screen with bare honesty by Dibakar Banerjee. It is truly disconcerting to realize the banality of our "most precious" experiences. But then, the experience, for all its' cliched nature, is still unique to us. And capturing it with honesty is perhaps also what lends it the special poignance of the sense of it being shared with others.
There are three stories in Banerjee's Love, Sex Aur Dhokha. Each told with his quirky, earthy sense of humour, connected very tenuously and perhaps having separate lives of their own. In all three stories, he plays off the intense sexual tension between couples, whose love hovers in a rapidly changing, uncertain world between the old and the new.
The first story is that of an artist, whose dream fails him. He is a lower middle class boy, who lives with his single mother, and nourished by bollywood love stories and a scholarship that allows him to pursue his film studies. Considering "Adi Sir" his Guru, he is paying homage to the iconic 90s mainstream love story, Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge in his own humble way. With Shahid Qureshi, whose father has a big shop in the Atta Market, as his Raj, and Shruti Dahiya, daughter of a big Jat businessman cum robber baron, as his Simran. Shruti is his muse, his Simran, with whom he falls in love irresistabily. The boy is dreamy, shifty looking, lies easily, and knows how to curry favor with the big men of the village. You look at him with suspicion, and may even have some sympathy with the big father, who looks hideous but honest. This is a story of puppy love, where bollywood logic is inverted with uncompromising failure and a denoument that is as horrific as it is unexpected.
While it is a great indictment of the tremendous damage which a movie like DDLJ may have brought to popular culture, it also left me dissatisfied. It seemed to play on the mythical rich vs. poor conflict of bollywood love stories. From anecdotal experience, the real conflict in Indian love stories is social - caste, region, religion - most often caste, in mofussil towns, with class usually playing a subservient role. This unsettling aspect of the closeness of the killers and the killed is what perhaps brings in the pathos, apart from just anger.
In "Maps for Lost Lovers", Pakistani writer Nadeem Aslam's telling of an honor killing in a small, sleepy British town, the killers are not some invisible henchmen of an impossibly rich businessmen. They are friends and brothers of the killed couple, who were apparently "living in sin" before marriage. You see the parents of the killers returning from jail after visiting their sons. Sons have been beaten up, racially abused and taunted not only about their crimes, but their origins. Their parents are unable to understand why their sons have to go through all this, when they probably did what was right. You also see the sister-in-law of the killed man, who loved him like a brother. She is grief-stricken, but has very ambivalent feelings about what he was doing and perhaps even considers his killing as a just retribution from the lordly powers up there. And this ambivalence is all around, unlike the screaming media headlines. You constantly feel something churning inside you, burning you, making you feel not just angry but deeply uncomfortable about yourself, your family and your society.
This ambivalence and duality of the situation is lost in LSD. We go back to the nostalgic images of the lost couple to reflect on what could have been, with anger towards the perpetrators, but never really to examine aspects of our selves that are part of both the killers and the killed.
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Thursday, September 16, 2010
The insubstantial life
Michael was born slightly disfigured. His mother, poor, single, looked at him as a burden, with his unlovely face and slow mind. Unwanted and unloved, he spent his childhood in a special institution, Huis Norenius. Most of us remember childhood fondly, suppressing the many cruelties that accompany innocence with the magic wand of selective memory. Michael is bereft even of that imagination, and Huis Norenius hangs on his head like a cloud that keeps on growing but never bursts. Derision of others, real and imagined, sits on him tightly, and he lives alone without friends or any companion.
In the thirty first year of his unobserved, unreflected life as a Gardener Grade B in Cape Town municipality, he discovers his sick mother, and with her, the meaning of his life.
"The problem that had exercised him years ago behind the bicycle shed at Huis Norenius, namely why he had been brought into the world, had received its answer: he had been brought into the world to look after his mother."
Michael resolves to fulfill her stated desire to leave the city to go back to her native village by building a makeshift barrow for her when they don't get a permit to leave the city. At that point, one may sense the onset of a new, redemptive, journey for the unfortunate man. Reader's hopes are to be belied of course. JM Coetzee does not provide easy journeys or easy answers to the mess of modern life. Particularly one that takes place in a war-torn, race-torn, country.
Quite charactertistically, his mother dies on the way cutting his life's meaning in the middle, and Michael's lonely journey takes unexpected turns subsequently. There is no great action that ever happens in his life, and his physical condition gets worse with struggle and malnutrition. There is complete absence of any romantic interest, and one charitable sexual encounter. Once, while locked in a camp of unemployed refugees, Michale is struck by a woman, who had lost her new-born recemtly. Michael feels compelled to wait and watch as she comes out of her room every evening, silent, tearless. He feels he may be falling in love finally. But then, one day, the woman, who remains unnamed, grows out of her meloncholia and merges with the crowd. Michael never notices her again. Coetzee describes life like this. As it unfolds pitilessly in a humdrum, but still unique way.
You are also struck by the pictures he draws of loneliness. Intense, deeply evocative, they remind you of Dosteyvsky and his embitterd, lonely, men. Men carrying deep grievances in their hearts, and running away from people. Men watching life pass by, without entering into it, without engaging with it. But the greatness in Coetzee is that he also makes one realize that, in a deeply rooted way, these are also the men who recognize, most acutely, the futility of struggle and existence.
The nature of Michael's rebellion also dawns slowly to you. He leads an insubstantial life, yes, but this inarticulate man also stands outside the ravages of history, refusing to join a camp, refusing to become a slave. He is attached elementally to very few things - his mother who refuses to leave his mind, a small farm he creates in wilderness. When he had to leave that "patch of earth", he felt that a "cord of tenderness" was being cut. Very affectingly, "it seemed to him that one could cut a cord like that only so many times before it would not grow again."
The exterior world is always like a shadow to Michael. As Robert, one of his camp mates, who was growing closer to him, comments, "I have never seen a man so asleep". And Michael instantly recognizes the truth in that. It is solely his interior life that feeds him and also cuts him. Even when his physical self dwindles to a skeletal figure with sustained malnutrition, there is still life in him that thrives and seeks to be free.
"Life & Times of Michael K" is a luminous novel, even if not Coetzee's best, that raises important questions on the notion of social progress and individual rebellion, of the supposedly irresistable march of history, and what it does to the people sitting at the margins. I have read only three novels of JM Coetzee, but can perhaps say this for him more than any other writer that reading him makes living worthwhile.
In the thirty first year of his unobserved, unreflected life as a Gardener Grade B in Cape Town municipality, he discovers his sick mother, and with her, the meaning of his life.
"The problem that had exercised him years ago behind the bicycle shed at Huis Norenius, namely why he had been brought into the world, had received its answer: he had been brought into the world to look after his mother."
Michael resolves to fulfill her stated desire to leave the city to go back to her native village by building a makeshift barrow for her when they don't get a permit to leave the city. At that point, one may sense the onset of a new, redemptive, journey for the unfortunate man. Reader's hopes are to be belied of course. JM Coetzee does not provide easy journeys or easy answers to the mess of modern life. Particularly one that takes place in a war-torn, race-torn, country.
Quite charactertistically, his mother dies on the way cutting his life's meaning in the middle, and Michael's lonely journey takes unexpected turns subsequently. There is no great action that ever happens in his life, and his physical condition gets worse with struggle and malnutrition. There is complete absence of any romantic interest, and one charitable sexual encounter. Once, while locked in a camp of unemployed refugees, Michale is struck by a woman, who had lost her new-born recemtly. Michael feels compelled to wait and watch as she comes out of her room every evening, silent, tearless. He feels he may be falling in love finally. But then, one day, the woman, who remains unnamed, grows out of her meloncholia and merges with the crowd. Michael never notices her again. Coetzee describes life like this. As it unfolds pitilessly in a humdrum, but still unique way.
You are also struck by the pictures he draws of loneliness. Intense, deeply evocative, they remind you of Dosteyvsky and his embitterd, lonely, men. Men carrying deep grievances in their hearts, and running away from people. Men watching life pass by, without entering into it, without engaging with it. But the greatness in Coetzee is that he also makes one realize that, in a deeply rooted way, these are also the men who recognize, most acutely, the futility of struggle and existence.
The nature of Michael's rebellion also dawns slowly to you. He leads an insubstantial life, yes, but this inarticulate man also stands outside the ravages of history, refusing to join a camp, refusing to become a slave. He is attached elementally to very few things - his mother who refuses to leave his mind, a small farm he creates in wilderness. When he had to leave that "patch of earth", he felt that a "cord of tenderness" was being cut. Very affectingly, "it seemed to him that one could cut a cord like that only so many times before it would not grow again."
The exterior world is always like a shadow to Michael. As Robert, one of his camp mates, who was growing closer to him, comments, "I have never seen a man so asleep". And Michael instantly recognizes the truth in that. It is solely his interior life that feeds him and also cuts him. Even when his physical self dwindles to a skeletal figure with sustained malnutrition, there is still life in him that thrives and seeks to be free.
"Life & Times of Michael K" is a luminous novel, even if not Coetzee's best, that raises important questions on the notion of social progress and individual rebellion, of the supposedly irresistable march of history, and what it does to the people sitting at the margins. I have read only three novels of JM Coetzee, but can perhaps say this for him more than any other writer that reading him makes living worthwhile.
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