Silent Helpers

Most of the time I prefer to lead a silent life, away from the public glare. Which is not to say that I consider myself to be some kind of celebrity who needs to keep away from media scrutiny. It is just that any kind of attention makes me uncomfortable and awkward. I have never been able to convince myself that I could deserve it and, failing to do so, I feel naked in my own clothes. So much so that I often avoid the company of close friends just because they happen to be the center of everyone's attention and curiosity. This tension is undefined and yet to so real that I prefer the garb of fiction in order to disguise my private emotions, lest someone see through the facade and I am unable to hit the eject button in time. This brief detour seeks to convince the reader that what I am about to say does not come easily to me. For it dwells somewhere in the vicinity of that vague line which distinguishes attention-seeking from story-telling.

Books have always proven to be faithful companions to me ever since the time I gained a conscious control over my interests. I credit my father for developing this habit early on by indulging my rather expensive taste for hard-bound Reader's Digest volumes (much to the consternation of my mother) and the rather affordable affinity for Tinkle Digest comics. And even if old editions of National Geographic from the libraries of Geological Survey of India were initially poured over solely for their breathtaking photographs, I know now that conditioning, positive or negative, does not happen overnight and almost always leaves you clueless when it finally reveals its true form. Thus, suitably introduced to the private intellectual life, that I had often heard and still fantasize about, beginning to take shape inside of me, I made my peace with this imaginary, albeit a little lonesome, world. With age and years, several gracious mentors have guided me in the direction of new pathways and, although apprehensive at first, I have always felt obligated to them in my lonely hours for encouraging me to explore uncharted territories. That being said, I have never considered myself to be a very well-read person — I often binge on books and then enter a long lean period where hardly any reading gets done. My conscious/rational mind has proffered several reasons for indulging this delusion/reality. “Perhaps I am surrounded by readers who are much more voracious than I am. Maybe I am genetically hardwired to be self-deprecating”. I don't know. Conceivably, all one needs to do is hark back to what I said earlier about being afraid of attention in order to make sense of this anomaly. The truth is, that is not what I wish to write about today.

As another brick silently and vehemently slides into THE WALL, I look back at the last two years and realise how completely I have come to depend on these silent helpers every time I desperately crave for a moment of peace in the turmoil that threatens to engulf my life even as I write these words. Whenever I have ‘felt’ severely depressed, due to reasons real or imagined, I have picked up a book as a last resort for the sole reason of wishing to lose myself in the mythical land of cancerous cells and malignant tumours. In the recent past, words, both written and read, have helped me escape the pungent realities of my life, even if it is for a few days or hours. In the absence of a warm hug, a loving kiss, or a reassuring pat on the back, they have been the only solace on the darkest of days. Trying to hack away at the myriad layers of the cosmic onion or grasping the implications of seemingly innocent synaptic connections across neurons, I have felt a sense of calm descend over me. Through these vicarious quests and in the comfortable seclusion of my solitude, I have explored unknown worlds and felt myself grow just a tad wiser. With the insignificance of my existence illuminated as a blip on the cosmic timescale and my comprehension of ‘the self’ subjected to a ‘paradigm shift’, I have felt myself drowning in that holy water, content and calm.

Ironically, even though my closest and dearest acquaintances have pledged their blind support in helping me fight this protracted war, it is these random strangers who have made any kind of headway in accomplishing that task and helped me find some semblance of peace and respectability. If I were completely honest, I owe it to them for sharing my deflated hopes and mutilated desires. And though my aversion to divulging details of my personal life on a public forum rankles greatly, I also know that to deny my helpers my gratitude and respect for helping the lifeboat stay afloat would be akin to a form of dishonesty I am even more uncomfortable with. Of course, there is hardly anything here that you haven't heard before through the medium of similar metaphors and similes. But I had never claimed I had anything original to share. All I needed to do was say my piece. Were my ship to sink tomorrow, I would know my conscience to be clear.

The Death of Vishnu

Vishnu, an odd job man in an apartment complex in Bombay, lies dying on the first floor staircase landing. Within the space of a few hours, the life in this microcosm of urban Indian society slowly unfurls around his impending death. So while Vishnu experiences an out of body phenomenon in which he confronts the possibility that he has become a god, the God, Vishnu, the other residents of the building go about their lives in a mindless fashion, bickering, hallucinating, ruminating, eloping. While he swims in and out of reality, his experience almost spiritual, thinking in retrospection about his hopes, fantasies, and a kaleidoscopic past, the characters of the other building dwellers come into colour, painting a rich portrait of everyday life in middle class India in Manil Suri’s debut novel, “The Death of Vishnu”.

Suri, in a remarkable fashion, blends in the lives of the people living in the building with the unearthly experiences of a dying man. These vignettes of the social, cultural, and religious melodrama that is a part of everyday existence in India are brought to life through four families inhabiting the building – The first floor Hindu neighbours, Asranis and Pathaks, the Muslim Jalals on the second floor, and the recluse living in the penthouse, Vinod Taneja. The titular character, Vishnu, is a hopeless drunk who lives on the first floor landing and makes his living doing menial tasks for the residents of the dysfunctional building. His imminent death, however, is at the heart of a horde of issues that surface as his life ebbs away.

Mrs. Asrani and Mrs. Pathak seem to be perennially trying to get the better of each other, making each other’s lives miserable, while their spineless spouses just hope to get to the end of the day without being yelled at. Middle class and fiercely competitive, the foremost concern of the belligerent housewives seems to be the fact that the ghee is mysteriously disappearing from its container. Even when they finally do agree to help Vishnu out, it is more out of their suspicion of the Muslims upstairs (and elsewhere) than concern for the wretched fellow. Their superficial concerns seem to be in sharp contrast with the touching retrospection of Vishnu, or even the ruminations of Mr. Taneja.

The Jalals, on the other hand, are involved in their own quite personal battle, none of which is apparent to anyone else but them. Mr. Jalal, having previously declared himself to be an agnostic, is now determined to understand the hysteria surrounding faith. He goes about doing so by first embracing physical suffering and then, when it turns out to be too painful, abstinence – reason enough for him to shun his doting wife in favour of intellectual/spiritual enlightenment. The situation comes to a head when Mr. Jalal declares Vishnu to be Vishnu, The God, and himself to be his prophet, after dreaming about a divine revelation in which Vishnu, the drunkard, features prominently, and assuming it to be a sign.

As if the drama were not enough, Kavita, the Asranis’ daughter, and Salim, son to the Jalals, are a couple of lovesick, impractical teenagers who plan to elope in the dead of the night. They do so, only to realize later how ill conceived their entire romance was. Mr. Taneja, the only endearing soul in the building, is a hollow one at that, having given up on life and most of its trappings sometime after his wife’s sudden death due to cancer. He now silently awaits his own demise, no longer capable of either anger or compassion.

However, the foibles of the human life are only half the book for we are offered a glimpse into Vishnu’s world through flashbacks in the past. It is interesting to note that though the author uses the past tense to narrate the current goings on in the apartment building, he cleverly shifts to the present in order to describe Vishnu’s dying memories. As Vishnu looks back in time and recalls, in almost poetic fashion, his life, several colours and memories splatter themselves across the pages. These interspersed reminiscences – mostly poignant, often heart rending, and sometimes fearfully explicit – impart a dream like quality to Suri’s writing. As Vishnu longs for love from the lusty prostitute Padmini, imagines himself as an avatar of Vishnu in his mother’s stories, looks at Kavita with a fatherly affection that’s mixed with lecherousness, and recounts the tales of his childhood, we realize how every human being has dreams and aspirations, no matter however impoverished or overlooked he might be.

The device of using a Hindu God’s name for his protagonist allows Suri to experiment with creating fairy tale like stories about Vishnu’s past while also building an atmosphere for the socio-cultural crisis in which the plot culminates. Though the author never directly comments on any religious, cultural, or social topic of substance, he draws heavily from these themes. It’s up to the reader to interpret the undercurrents.

Suri’s prose is sensual and replete with powerful imagery. His style is nuanced and his attention to details impeccable. So while Visnu’s lust for Padmini, someone he can’t make fall in love with him, is explicit and insanely passionate, the short anecdote about The Radiowalla’s love for his radio captivates the reader with it’s meticulous attention to minutiae. The characters are sketched to perfection and come alive through the author’s love for the mundane. But the downside is that there are too many of them. The reader is often left with several threads to comprehend. And though he can effortlessly move from one to another because of the surreal nature of the narration, several of these threads remain unresolved. The end result being that the plot lacks a definite closure. It’s left hanging and open. The reader has the freedom to read between the lines. In whichever way he deems fit. While that might not be to the liking of many, it’s perhaps the only way the author could have brought the different storylines to a satisfactory conclusion.

Manil Suri, a successful Indian immigrant in Maryland, has shrewdly targeted his novel at an American audience for “there’s nothing a privileged readership likes more than stories about the ridiculous poor (as long as they’re exotic enough to trigger no unease); their antics and pretensions, their cowardice and inability to tell the truth”. Set almost entirely in a middle class apartment block in Bombay, The Death of Vishnu is an emotional, “old fashioned episodic” novel that teeters on the edge of the metaphysical, all with a touch of Bollywood masala and Victorian romanticism. Although the novel lacks a definite or consistent plot, Suri’s eye for details and exceptional story telling capabilities manage to prevent it from falling flat on its face and give it a certain phantasmagoric quality, something which makes for an interesting read but not an exceptional one.

Reviews
1. http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/01/28/reviews/010128.28gorrat.html
2. http://www.proxsa.org/resources/ghadar/v5n1/vishnu.htm
3. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/feb/04/fiction.reviews

The Godfather

It is hard to describe in a few hundred words, a book of the stature of The Godfather. Mario Puzo creates magic and transports us to the Cosa Nostra - the dark underworld of the Mafia. So much so that I would say that the English speaking world is divided into two categories - those who have read The Godfather and those who haven’t!

The Godfather is a splendid and distinguished blood saga of the American Mafia. It reveals how the Sicilian Rule of Silence or Omerta influences every level of the American society. Men are silenced, cars are blown up, treachery is planned - and all with such cold brutality that one finds it hard to believe there is a human mind behind the entire villainy.

The book deals with the life of Vito Corleone who is driven from Sicily by the Mafia there when he was only twelve years old. Life teaches him tough lessons along the way and he learns all of them. By his sheer cunning and bravado he creates the biggest and most powerful criminal syndicate in America. He is a cold blooded tactician who will stop at nothing to make ends meet. He follows his own rules and trashes the laws of the society which ignored him.

But things take a turn for the worst when he is shot at by some of his rivals. A bloody gang war ensues in which he even loses his eldest son. His youngest offspring - Michael - is an army veteran who has got nothing to do with the family business. But as a result of the assassination attempt, Vito’s empire weakens and in order to save his father’s life Michael is forced to commit two murders. The clash of values within Michael, who wanted to lead a normal life, is amazing and deserves special praise.

The brilliance with which Puzo mixes crime with emotions to produce a heady concoction is remarkable and in my opinion is the life line of this book. One at times is forced to agree with Vito’s deeds. His trademark dialogue - "I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse.” is subtle devilry.

The Godfather is a story of life and all that comes with it. Pain and love are two sides of the same coin in this book. It is a fabric woven from the strands of love, emotion, crime, devilry and innocence. One could go on writing about it but then the pleasure of the first read would be lost. Try out the book. I am sure you won’t be disappointed.