Lunatic In My Head by Anjum Hasan

Published by Zubaan-Penguin Books  (290 pages)

Firdaus Ansari, Aman Moondy, Sophie Das are dkhars (foreigners/non-tribal persons) in Shillong, though it is the only place they've lived in all their lives. Their personal accounts form Lunatic In My Head, a novel about life in Shillong, the invisible line between Khasis and migrants and among others about conflicts external and within.

Firdaus, an English lecturer in her thirties, is trying to focus on her M.Phil thesis on Jane Austen, to break up with her boyfriend Ibomcha who seems to be worlds away. His is a world of deals, Manipur, business, his mother, and his boys. Hers is one of loneliness, she lost her parents in a train accident as an adolescent and now lives with her grandfather.

Aman Moondy, a 23 year old is preparing for his second at with the IAS exams, terrified about his future, holding on to the IAS which he now thinks is his only hope to get out of Shillong. Pink Floyd is the only thing he is clear about, what he really gets. Like many of his friends. He writes to Roger Waters regularly about his opinions of the band's albums, about his dreams - that are very alike the world in Pink Floyd songs- which he thinks Waters would understand.

Eight year old Sophie Das knows that she and her parents are very different, odd from the rest of the world. The only way she can go about with things is by making up lies for everything. She decides that she is adopted and can't wait to get to her real parents. She reads voraciously, she looks out of the kitchen window to a white house nestled in the hills, which is Anna's. Anna is her favorite character in a novel she's recently read, Anna - who Sophie wishes to be.

The novel constantly shuttles between these three main characters, each chapter has three sub-parts. It is through up-close encounters with them that we get different perspectives of life in Shillong, of life in a small town, of the common vein that runs through people who are dkhars but know no other place that could be home and about Khasis. The story has a rich cast of other characters too, a refreshing cast I should add. The climate of this hill station (like that of many others) also weighs down on its inhabitants, it's cold, rains incessantly. People are lazy, inactive, sometimes cooped in their houses for days and are waiting for something to happen. Sometimes waiting to get out of this small town, at the same time fearing a large city and its complicated ways, but always loving Shillong and missing it even when they aren't away.

Firdaus's constant indecisiveness about her relationship, her despair, Sophie's need to create dreamy versions of her life to spice it up for herself more than to attract attention, Aman's panic and depression while preparing for exams, his confidence while organizing the Happening are all realistic. As in, it's all written in just the way it would unfold, no drama, simply persuasive. Particularly liked the portrayal of bird's eye view of Shillong and the closing lines. The narrative is absolutely one that will stand out in my memory.

The story is hemmed in by literature (Firdaus, college setting, English lecturers), rock music (Aman and his friends are obsessed with it, to state it mildly). The latter is a steady undercurrent in Aman's world, references to Pink Floyd are aplenty. The title itself is taken from Brain Damage (The Dark Side of the Moon). Familiarity (read a shared devotion) with Floyd, I think, will definitely add clarity to Aman's story. I've listened to few songs by Pink Floyd (The Wall, Pulse mainly) and have only heard (as Aman would put it) some others and had to be satisfied with identifying thoughts like 'Goodbye, Blue Skies', 'Who needs information'. Only after reading this book did I come to know that Shillong is a self proclaimed rock music capital of India, also ran into this interesting article on the same in NY Times.

Anjum Hasan grew up in Shillong, so this is an insider's view of life in Shillong and a special one because little is known in general about North East India apart from the frequent reports of clashes, violence, border issues. Funny, serious, reflective, this book made for a spontaneous-read.

Quotes

If she could clearly articulate what she felt, if she could find the right words, if she could speak them forcefully into the world, she would be able to make an impress on reality.
Sophie took especial joy in her parents' happiness. A open-mouthed smile would break out on her face whenever her parents expressed delight about something, and, as if she were unconsiously contravening the rules about the function of smiling, Sophie's smile could last for long stretches of time..
She thought that the nicest thing, the nicest thing by far, even better than being adopted, would be if she could somehow turn into one of them, somehow become Khasi. 
With one, tiny, still-unaffected corner of his mind Aman realised that he would not and could not bring any of his Floyd tapes with him. It would be unbearble, listening to them in a new place.

'Neti Neti' is a sequel to this book and is about a grown up Sophie Das working in Bangalore and it's on my TBR list!

The Wall in the Head

'Virtuelle Mauer/ReConstructing the Wall', an interactive 3D installation of a stretch of the Berlin wall is on at Max Mueller Bhavan till Jan 24th.

The project recreates a kilometer of the Berlin Wall as it was in the 1980's in an interactive format where the user can navigate through the virtual world using a joystick. Tourists in the artwork, when approached talk briefly about the history of the Wall and its transformation from a wall running alongside buildings to a fence with barbed wire and some more reinforcements to become the concrete structure that it was in the 1980s. As the toursists talk, you can see the wall changing. From here on it's all up to the user to explore the area, one's curiosity is the limit. There is a Viewing Platform in West Berlin from where you can see the Death Strip (No man's land) with trenches, layered with gravel (so as to identify footprints easily) bordered between the East and West walls. A symbolic stark contrast in spaces so close. 

The West Wall is covered with colourful graffiti, which have been reproduced as was. At the section of the Wall over Waldemar's Bridge, right ahead of St. Michael's Church in East Berlin, the Wall is painted with the lower part of the Church which it obstructs. Thus giving an optical illusion of the full front view of the Church. Approach the Wall here and you're drawn into a dream sequence revealing how the section looks in the present times.

            

Screen-shot (from the project website) of the Waldemar Bridge on the Western Wall where artist Yadegar Asisi painted a trompe l'oeil image of St. Michael's Church in  1980s.

The Engelbecken Canal which was filled in during the time of the Wall to create the Death Strip is now back to its original water filled sight lined with neat gardens. From a nightmare to a dream in a second. 

Walking across the park to East Berlin we are back in the 1980s. One of the viewpoints in East Berlin is the St. Michael's Church from the top of which you get a bird's eyeview of how the world looked back in the 1980s from an East Berliner's perspective. Another is the East German Trade Union/Hospital Mitte building, which was one of the few buildings open to the public from which the East Berliners could see across the Death Strip and the Wall to West Berlin. The sight of dingy, dirty buildings, a colorful wall against a clean, barricaded wall enclosing the no man's land. 

Walking around one discovers many scenes and sounds, some mundane like that of the printing press, of sheep bleating at the Children's Farm. And some others like the sight of jeeps zooming by, honking, the Checkpoints and the guards who when approached 'interact' with you and based on your actions, you might even end up getting arrested.

The artist team is T+T, Tamiko Thiel and Teresa Reuter and the artwork is mainly funded from the Berlin Capital City Cultural Fund. Virtuelle Mauer is an ongoing project that's working on incorporating suggestions from personal memories of the Wall, and in widening the area covered.

The work is projected onto a big screen and while the virtual world is 3D, I'd expected a more 'real' experience when I read '3D' in the ad. It really was a thought-provoking experience, like stepping into a time machine, for, little remains of the concrete Wall in Berlin now. It resides in pictures, archives, in works like these and of course in the heads of the people. Most of us never will understand the 'Wall in the Head', taking a journey through a part of their world one can only imagine how it must have been to live "in the shadow of the Wall".

The installation is on till Jan. 24th from 9 am to 6.30 pm at Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan, Indiranagar. Guided tours can be taken between 5 pm and 6 pm till the 22nd.

More info about the event on the Goethe-Institut site. Do visit the Virtuelle Mauer website if you can't make it to the installation,  it includes  details on the making of the project, screenshots of the work. 

Things Fall Apart

By Chinua Achebe. Published by Anchor Books. Pages 209.

(There are books that I randomly pick, out of the blue and don't even bother to check with the librarian about. 'Things Fall Apart' falls into this category, much more so because the book doesn't even have a descriptive blurb and I couldn't have chosen a better first book on African culture if I'd gone looking for it)

In a narrative akin to folklore, the first half of the book dwells on the way of living of an African tribe, the Ibo, who live in Umuofia. The reader is slowly initiated into the different beliefs, rituals and traditions of the tribe - mainly through Okonkwo, a famous warrior in the clan and his family; though the focus pans across the society.

The Ibo live in a closely knit community, are governed by leaders who've earned their titles solely through hard work with inheritance playing no role. It's a patriarchal society that practices polygamy, men make major decisions and women just obey (yet it's men who pay the bride-price to marry a girl) They worship the natural forces - Mother Earth, Hills and Caves, rain, thunder .. yam, their staple food also has its patron. Democratic, practical .. and charming, what with all the native proverbs and phrases bringing the story alive.

However ... the Ibo believe twins to be evil and leave the newborns in earthen pots in the Evil Forest. People who suffer from certain sicknesses are carried away to the Evil Forest and left there to die, for it would be an abomination to Mother Earth to bury these bodies. They follow some more practices that can only be described as macabre.

This brutality is presented in a straightforward and matter-of-fact-ly way from the perspective of a native, it's so endearing at times that when in the latter portion of the book the English missionaries arrive, you begin to fear for these innocent natives whose actions you 'know' are barbaric. But you're also thinking, who is to say what is right or wrong and are these standards universal? And in times of conflict between cultures, which one emerges the winner? Like Okonkwo's uncle, Uchendu says, "The world has no end, and what is good among one people is an abomination with others."

The tribe tries to accept and cope up with the changes the missionaries bring forth. However things do fall apart. The last paragraph of this book packs volumes with a perspective shift.

The writing is extremely simple, portrays the Ibo culture for just what it is, with all its richness and faults. This is a story of a man trying to cope up with his fears and how his actions affect the tightly knit society that he's a part of. It's a story about the meeting of two very different cultures with one perceiving theirs to be the right and only right way of living.

And it's a very highly recommended read if you are simply looking for a well written book  and like to read about different cultures. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Only after reading the book did I look up on it and found that not only is this book considered one of the most important books about African culture, it also has a sequel 'No Longer at Ease'. Plan to read it sometime soon.

While on the topic of conflicts between cultures and on why one nation appears/assumes itself to be superior to another, I'd recommend reading Jared Diamond's 'Guns,Germs and Steel'. It is a pretty involved, lengthy read though and you can get a preview before picking the book by watching the NatGeo documentary made based on the book (the 3 videos are available online, as is the book)

In this Pulitzer Prize winning work, Diamond attempts to find answers to why the Eurasian civilizations emerged victorious over other races, why they conquered others and not the other way around, reasons for their 'superiority'. The videos present a good gist of the book and really ought to be watched!
'Things Fall Apart' also reminded me of 'The Gods Must Be Crazy' movies,  mentioning it here just so you get a better idea about the book.

The Origin of a New Genre

Attended a poetry reading organized by Toto Funds The Arts in collaboration with the British Council at a Crossword store last Friday. Ruth Padel, a British poet, great-great-grand daughter of Charles Darwin read from her book Darwin: A Life in Poems. Padel is in India on the British Council Darwin Now research grant to complete her next novel Where the Serpent Lives. The event started of with a poem she'd written two years back, verses on global warming, a Now-and-Then view on climate (with mentions of India - Sunderbans, Shiv no longer holding Ganga in his hairlock, etc)

It set the stage for poems from Darwin: A Life in Poems (published last year for the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth) What's special about this biography is that it is written in verses, a sequence of poems merging Darwin's own words taken from his autobiography, letters and notebooks, 160 pages in all!

The poems revealed the personal side of Darwin ... his childhood interest in collecting as a form of expression to escape his mother's death when he was eight, his thoughts on marriage (the famous 'pros and cons of marriage' made it's way into the book as an aptly named 'The Balance Sheet'), his beautiful relationship with Emma, the divide between them regarding belief in God (an important aspect in times of Victorian Christianity when it was believed that if either in a couple was not a believer, they would not be together in the afterlife)

Presented in Darwin's voice, the poems portray an intimate, everyday side to the famous naturalist. Take for instance his reaction on first seeing a tropical land (voyage aboard the Beagle to South America)

He’s standing in Elysium. Palm feathers, a green
    dream of fountain against blue sky. Banana fronds,
slack rubber rivulets, a canopy of waterproof tearstain
    over his head. Pods and racemes of tamarind.
Follicle, pinnacle; whorl, bole and thorn.             ...

Vegetation he’s never seen, and every step a new surprise.
    ’New insects, fluttering about still newer flowers. It has been
for me a glorious day, like giving to a blind man eyes.’
(Read the full poem Like Giving to a Blind Man Eyes)

Darwin's famous 'to marry or not to' was a laugh riot at the reading ('The Balance Sheet').  Emma's letter to Darwin when she was pregnant, voicing her fears and Darwin's 'reply' left to be found after his death, the poem in the voice of the carpenter who made a plain wooden coffin for Darwin just the way he'd wanted it and then some .. all beautiful.

I hadn't heard of Padel before I went to the reading,  knew nothing about her except the Darwin connection. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature AND the Zoological Society of London. Her dedication to conservation efforts is inspiring, awe-inspiring. Am mesmerized by the way she writes about science with the knowledge that only comes with much research and yet the writing is so very lyrical. Definitely want to read the biography on Darwin, 52 ways of looking at a poem, her novel on tiger conservation Tigers in Red Weather, and more! Watch this space.

Padel also read from her next novel Where the Serpent Lives which is about King Cobra conservation and is based in India. A discussion with Bangalore-based novelist Anjum Hasan followed the novel reading, to be wrapped up by an interaction with the audience.
You can read a collection from Darwin: A Life in Poems here.