Solo: A fantastic reading experience

    There was a time when I was an avid, voracious reader. When I liked a book, I went after the author until I had read everything he (or she, of course) had written; or I got over him. There are notable exceptions like Wodehouse and Asimov who beat me with the sheer volume of their output: I could never exhaust their writing nor did I tire of them. However, contemporary writing was never my forte and I hardly went looking for current writers unless they created a sensation and it was impossible to ignore them.

    As I grew older, my interest in reading waned and I almost lost contact with contemporary writing. Both English, including translations of international writing, as well as Marathi fiction. Then my daughter grew up and she started giving me books to read. It was she who introduced me to Douglas Adams, Haruki Murakami, Mark Haddon, Chinua Achebe and others. Here is the latest addition: Rana Dasgupta. Just finished his novel ‘Solo’.

    

The author’s name is unmistakably Indian. The book not once talks about India. It comprises wholly of reminiscences of a hundred-year-old man named Ulrich who has spent most of his life in Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria. I am not going to narrate the story here nor am I going to write a review. And I have deliberately not yet googled ‘Rana Dasgupta’ because I want to write this post without prejudice. I just want to share my reactions.

    I am not an authority on Bulgaria and so am unable to comment upon the authenticity of the history, the geography and the social values and day-to-day life described in the novel. But the way it all is portrayed from the viewpoint of a common man, of someone who is a part of it all and so for whom nothing in it is larger than life, so to say; is, well, amazing. A war bombing is not a national calamity; it is a hole in a local building. The arrival or the fall of communism is not an epoch-making event; it is change in social, individual relationships; change in values and lifestyles. You know what; it revived my own mundane memories of similar local events: the Samyukt Maharashtra Movement and the wars with China and Pakistan and the Emergency. We have a proverb in Marathi: flood uproots trees, the grass survives intact. That too is a perspective and it is important to remember that it too exists.

    The attention to detail. Detail of an ordinary life and a ground-level perspective. Ulrich wonders what happened to all the horses which pulled carts before motor cars came. He remembers how there were a lot many horses, how the roads looked when so many horses used them. And then, in a short time, there were cars. So, were the horses killed? Where did they go away? A genuine enigma for an old man trying to go back to those bygone days. Also, the sensory perceptions of the blind Ulrich are full of sounds and smells. And in his own mind, he is not a handicapped person; the sounds and smells fill his sensory universe adequately to leave no sense of loss.

    But there are fewer details in his daydreams! You see; daydreams are about fulfilling some fantasy, living a coveted but unatained life; the whole thrust is towards the larger picture. Or towards some specific desire. Commonplace detail has no place in daydreams. The contrast between Ulrich’s real life as an old, blind man and the happenings in the life of the characters in his daydreams is striking. What is more noteworthy is the fact that each set of events would appear quite normal fiction if the other was not there. Again, a subtle point of perspective. An insight that will change the way I accept the narrative in novels I shall read henceforth.

    Lastly, the daydreams. Dasgupta calls them that: daydreams. There is no 

suggestion of them being magical realism. Daydreams are half of the novel. In a way, they render substance to Ulrich’s existence. But Dasgupta’s principal character refuses to escape into a make-believe world! Sure, what happens in his imagination is beyond the realm of his normal existence. But nothing in it is fantastic, unreal which defies the physical laws.

    There is a subtle statement here, waiting to be explored; but that will require some reflection and study. I am just reacting extempore!

I am going to start my new blog with a post already published on the other blog which carries my name. Henceforth this will be exclusively in English and the other one will be entirely in Marathi. 
So, here is the first post: 

A quick take on ‘English Vinglish’

There is much more to the film than the mild feel-good drama. Read to the end!

   I found the film a pretty straightforward story moving along an entirely predictable path. A feel-good narrative with no unexpected twists. Much of its strength lies in the excellent casting. Everybody is so natural that calling a performance good or bad would be irrelevant.

  Of course Sridevi excels as Shashi. With her expressive face and an equally expressive body language, words become superfluous; which works well for the film since a film that keeps jumping between English and Hindi would be a boring film if it was verbose. The storyline is short and proceeds without straying. A thoroughly competent woman is looked down upon by her family just because she is not able to speak English. Then she suddenly has to go to New York where she joins an English-speaking class and overcomes her handicap. In the process, she also gets a big boost to her confidence and earns her family’s respect.

   Shashi, the protagonist, is good at making laddoos which she sells to make a moderate income. In the class, she learns the word ‘entrepreneur’ in her own context. The realization that she is an entrepreneur in her own right, has an effect on how she looks at herself. Then there is the Frenchman who falls for her and that adds to her self-esteem. She has her feet firmly on the ground and never does she become a flirt or even coquettish. The director has depicted Shashi’s development sensitively, without ever trying to extract cheap drama. Shashi is not a typically tradition-bound character to begin with. This saree-clad homemaker herself delivers her laddoos and enjoys very good rapport with her customers. She boldly ventures to join the class in a strange land entirely on her own. The film makes this explicit when Shashi’s New Yorker niece Radha cites Shashi’s example to explain the meaning of ‘judgmental’. “One would be judgmental to call you conservative merely by your outward looks,” says she to her aunt. And yes, Shashi is not disturbed by the overtures of the Frenchman and she is even able to keep her cool when things threaten to go overboard. Radha puts it succinctly: Hota hai kabhi kabhi!

   That brings us to an issue, which I think is at the heart of the tale though it is kept in soft focus, so to say.

   Shashi is telling the truth when she says that she is not in need of love; she wants respect. The Indian Family is adept at this: smothering a homemaker woman’s faculty to receive love as an individual; she is loved as a wife, as a mother, as a daughter-in-law; these roles define her completely and there is nothing left in her outside of these roles. The traditional married woman is the fulcrum of the household and she provides strong support to all members of the family and by implication, needs no support herself. Her subjugation is voluntary and she learns to worship the very institution which leaves her with no identity apart from the roles she adopts to fit in the institution.

   Shashi is quite eloquent when she explains her perception of ‘the family’. Her speech is for the consumption of both her family as well as the errant Frenchman. It goes home. She is apparently unaware of the crux of the issue but her husband is not. After her emotional, yet restrained entreaty for respect; he asks her: Do you still love me? And the question is asked very quietly; not bashfully, becoming of a repentant husband.

   Now a few things that rankled.

   Why does the family have to be ‘Godbole’? It could easily have been some Punjabi family residing in Pune if it had to be Pune. Why would Godboles have Parathas for breakfast? Being in Pune, why in the world would they read a Hindi newspaper? Doesn’t make sense. The laddoos that Shashi makes, are not Marathi laddoos, they are eminently North Indian laddoos. Would it have been inconvenient to show India as a multicultural, multilingual country? Would the overseas viewer be somehow deterred by that? Maybe that would have added a diversionary aspect to this tale. But it must be said that the counter question, ‘Aren’t you comfortable in India without knowing Hindi?’ which effectively silences the American Consulate officer, also insults all non-Hindi people by completely ignoring their existence.

   However, the overall impression is ‘passes with excellent marks!’

   There are some more issues that the film raises.

   The story of a woman getting back at her family cannot end here. Where will this enlightened woman proceed now? She already has begun to see herself and her life in a new light. If the process continues – and Shashi definitely is not dumb – she is bound to stumble upon a few revelations about the family system, how its stability stands on the voluntary sacrifice by the lady of the house and so on. It would be patent male chauvinistic callousness to say that she will continue as before, sacrificing her aspirations, sacrificing her just-learnt sense of individual identity. Because such sacrifice must be perceived as a great tragedy and how to do that in the given context?

   Then there is the newly enlightened husband. What will he do? Will he or will he not squirm when she hands him his daily tiffin? Maybe he will be smart enough to magnanimously allow her to carry on her laddoo business as an enterprise!

   That is not all. Yes, it is a tragedy when a sensitive and capable mind goes unbloomed, even when that person is a woman and what she immerses herself in is perceived as her bounden duty to the Holy Family System. But what is the alternative? There is no guarantee that everything will be hunky dory if she opts to be a sovereign human being and begins to act independently. Nobody has that guarantee. The women who, by choice or otherwise, remain within the restrictive, yet warm protection of the family, never have to take the acid test. The world outside is full of foxes and wolves. Will Shashi be able to survive that? Will she make it, if she takes the plunge?

   We demand a sequel, Ms Shinde!