The King's Harvest: A haunting tale

          Two novellas, both set in the same geographical location but as different from each other as night from day. The King’s Harvest is the first book by Chetan Raj Shreshtha and is, by all means, a laudable debut. Against the backdrop of the breathtaking beauty of India’s north-east, with its towering curtains of mountains and waterfalls and tea gardens as far as the eye can see, the stories unfold in and around Sikkim, the native place of the author.  The first novella, An Open-and-Shut Case  takes place in December 2002, at new year’s eve. A woman murders her husband and hacks him into forty-seven pieces, then walks to the police station and turns herself in. The story begins with a taxi-ride shared by a number of people, where Straun, an enthusiastic tourist, requests the driver to play ‘Resham Firiri’, a Nepali folk song with a lilting rhythm that has taken control of his mind and haunts him wherever he goes. The song, in fact, seems to hauntingly echo throughout the narrative, popping up in the most unexpected places, making the reader expects some kind of sinister disclosure. However, it’s not the disclosures that the author is so much concerned with—although those abound, too, making the book un-put-down-able. Shrestha’s narrative deals more with the vagaries of the human mind, the visscitudes of fortune of its characters and the ways in which justice—or merely the Indian law enforcement, if you please—works. Infused with a realistic brutality, the story follows Dechen OC, tough as nails and newly transferred to the post, as she carries out her investigation with a mix of humane consideration and dispassionate policework. The character of Dechen OC has been carved out with much dexterity and precision, revealing a kaleidoscope of emotions and human shortcomings as much as the strengths.

               Creating a gripping plot is definitely one of Shrestha’s many talents, for that is the one thread of commonality—besides Sikkim—that binds the two otherwise completely different stories. The King’s Harvest—the second novella that also lends its name to the book—is as dreamy and magical, full of fascinating legends and folklore, as the first one is darkly down-to-earth. It’s the story of Tontem, a man with fabled strength and cursed deformity, who lives in an isolated world of his own for thirty-two years before circumstances take him out into the real world that has moved far, far ahead. Shrestha’s power with words and his sorcerer’s ability to spin images out of thin air is on full display here. His story-telling prowess cannot be underestimated either. From Tontem’s childhood at the Toring Yabla’s estate in Toring village, where we first learn of his deformity, to his time at the Dragonback Monastery, where the readers are acquainted with his herculean strength, to his journey with the king’s troops—a survey of “the Chogyal’s fifty-hill kingdom, set like a ruby on a knuckle between Nepal and Bhutan”, every line is a step leading deeper into a mythical land. The story of Tontem’s life is riveting enough in itself, with little nuggets of wit and humour presenting themselves here and there—such as the names of Tontem’s children: Chyadar, the eldest, named after chyadars or sheets of galvanized, corrugated iron—gifts from the Chogyal(king); Cimit, named after another gift of cement bags;  Batti, his daughter, so called because her father was fascinated by descriptions of electricity at Sikkim, the king’s capital, and finally Turist the youngest son, named after an Englishman who happened to come their way and introduced himself as ‘Turist.' ! 

           But the true depth of Shrestha’s work comes to the fore in Tontem’s appearance into the real world , prompted by his decaying produce—the King’s share of his harvest, as promised—uncollected for three years now. It is in the year 2005 that Tontem, accompanied by Batti and Turist, makes his journey to Sikkim. The family’s bewilderment at the modern, incredible world so far removed from their abode has been brought out with a splendid flourish. Cars are “wheeled rats” with the steering wheel being the ear that is pinched to make the rat turn. The gear stick, of course, has a very simple explanation: it is a male rat!

          There is a tragi-comic air that hangs over every step the trio takes into the city to find the king. The climax, however, is of the touching, wistful kind, where Tontem moves out with a heavy heart, “but unaware how blessed he was, for only the most fortunate among men have their illusions protected by a conspiracy of the fates.”

           The King’s Harvest, through both its stories, brings out the two extremes of our reality—between the cruel and the gentle, life swings a constant pendulum, creating its own special rhythm.

Thirteen windows to look at the world.... Baker's Dozen: short stories

The mind has the power to create fascinating images, images the eye has not seen— images that permeate the soul, floating in and out like deep, thoughtful sighs — images that wordsmiths carve out with the dexterity of one adept in the art.  For instance, this one:  “a tiny multi-coloured tent imprinted upside down in her eyes”, a woman in love with the stage, in love with the art of performing on stage. This one’s been carved out by the pen of Ruchika Chanana , winner of the 2011 Elle Fiction Award, whose short story The Tent shares space with thirteen others in Baker’s Dozen –The Elle Tranquebar Book of Short Stories.  Of these thirteen, six are “emerging voices”, winners of the Elle Fiction awards while the rest are wordsmiths from Tranquebar.  And Ruchika Chanana’s voice has won over this reader’s heart.

The Tent is a story brimming with vivid, haunting images, effortlessly weaving in the unsteady ebb and flow of surging emotions. It is the story of a woman who runs away from home at the age of sixteen, to join a travelling theatre, where “the cacophony of sound and belligerence was her lifeline; her deity was the nautanki, erasing her past like it had never been.” She is later found and taken back by her family, retaining, however, the inverted image of the tent in her eyes. The man who marries her, spots the tent in her eyes, “he recognised the patterns drawn on it, and he liked them. So he said yes.” And although her marriage is a happy one where she wears ghungroos all around the house, the call of the stage becomes too much and she leaves her husband and child (who are consumed by their search for her) to live, once again, in the tent of her eyes.

Then there is Nighat M Gandhi’s In Lieu of Gold, a gentle, wistful story about a man’s love for his wife. Subtly pointing to the differences in the way men and women think, it’s a story of a man who plants fruit-trees for his wife, while she—all woman—reminds him that he never bought her any gold jewellery. How Sultan, the husband, tries to please Amira and atone for not giving her what she really wanted – after she dies suddenly—is a tale that would bring a throbbing in your heart and a lump in your throat.

But Madhulika Liddle takes the cake for the knack of telling a story. Her works, full of humour and gasp-inducing, delightful twists, remind one rather of Hector Hugh Munroe—Saki— and his short stories replete with humour and amazement. Of course, Saki’s humour is darkly so, eliciting wide-eyed laughs and the occasional shiver. Liddle’s humour is the clever kind, with a flair for engrossing narration. She is a reader’s delight.  St George and the Dragon is about a humble, nondescript but upright man working in a government office, PA to an officer who is just his opposite—intelligent and ambitious but corrupt and a lecher. A serendipitious episode in the life of Mr George, who has been living in the same mundane way for decades, turns him into a hero of sorts, causing a minor coup and saving the day, too. A surprise visit from an officer of the Central Vigilance Commission, coupled with the serious predicament of Ms Shivani Sinha drive Mr George to come up with an ingenious plan for slaying the dragon. It is a very realistic account of government departments and officials, but most significantly it is a riveting account of one seemingly unexceptional man’s exceptional acumen.

Liddle’s second story, The Howling Waves of Tranquebar creates a setting and a particular mood to lure the readers into her tale. Set in Tranquebar—the site of a Danish settlement in Pondicherry, it takes the readers into a land of desolate mystery with howling winds and crashing waves before making them gasp at the climax.

Salted Cashews by Divya Sreedharan, another winner of the Elle awards, is a poignant story of an adolescent girl’s first encounter with the world of lechers and gropers… a story that makes you angry and sad at the same time, while Sanjay Sipahimalani’s In Praise of Straight Lines is unusual and interesting, delving into the dark realms of a human mind gone rather awry.

There is some lovely, masterful  story-telling here and even though some may not be as good as the others, these wordsmiths would surely give you pleasant company. 

Footnote: Baker's Dozen is 13 not 12, because bakers used to throw in an extra loaf

so that their customers didnt feel shortchanged! Howzzat??

Love, Grief and Hot-air Balloons......Levels of Life -- Julian Barnes

We have all known death. And we have all known grief. Every griever is different, every grief a separate shade, but we know it when we see it, and can feel it when someone else feels it, too. It is perhaps one of the most common subjects for a book, but no book has touched grief in such a manner as this one. Divided into three parts that appear to have very little, if any, connection to each other, this is a work of art and a work of the heart. A book that takes you through many levels…levels of thought, levels of feeling, levels of perplexity. Such is Julian Barnes’s Levels of Life.

True to its title, the parts refer to the various levels that one encounters in a lifetime—‘the sin of height’; ‘on the level’; ‘the loss of depth’. The book is spread out like a performance on stage—one where you have to play close attention and watch for the patterns—setting the scene first, creating the metaphors, weaving separate stories before the readers, to take them, at last, to where the author wants them to be. 

The book begins with ballooning, and ‘balloonatics’. There is Colonel Fred Burnaby of the Royal Horse Guards, famous actress Sarah Bernhardt and professional balloonist Felix Tournachon or ‘Nadar’. The part is full of images and ideas: the earthlings’ elation at being in the sky, the ethereal feeling of being free from all earthly impurities— on a spiritual level. And yet, there is the reference to the religious belief that God had not created humans to fly, and so, as the legends went, harshly was punished whoever dared to commit the ‘sin of height’.  It is this part where we get the first mention of the word ‘uxorious’ (used for Nadar). For the sake of Barnes, I want to underline this: ‘uxorious’ is a man who loves his wife (not a ‘lover of women’ or ‘a man with many wives’ as Barnes fears it might come to mean.) And then comes the mention of photography, as Nadar mixes the two arts—ballooning and photography—taking the first aerial pictures of Earth from his balloon. As Barnes’s points out in the beginning of each of the three parts, “You put together two things that have not been put together before, and the world is changed.” And adds, in the second part, “…and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.”

The second part takes on from the heights of aspiration. “We live on the ground, on the level, and yet—and so—we aspire…Some soar with art, others with religion, most with love.” And love, he says, is the meeting point of truth and magic. “Truth, as in photography; magic as in ballooning.” But this is the love story of two people who were ‘on the level’ with each other—Colonel Fred Burnaby and actress Sarah Bernhardt. Yet, as Burnaby later rues, “if being on the level didn’t shield you from pain, maybe it was better to be up in the clouds.”

The last part—the depth—is where we, the readers, are on the level with the author. It is the part where he comes to his grief, where we come to his grief—his account of the void, the blank page that his life became after the death of his wife; the love with whom he shared his life for 29 years.

No one can define grief. In spite of that, or maybe because of that, Barnes’s completely and utterly honest description is bound to touch a chord.

His discovery that indeed, a person can sometimes relish the pain that wouldn’t go is one of the most beautiful lines in the book. “If the pain is not exactly relished, it no longer seems futile. Pain shows that you have not forgotten; pain enhances the flavor of memory; pain is a proof of love.”

You cannot take in the entire book in one go, though. It takes some time to build up the relation between the three parts, but then, like a balloon coming out of the clouds, you can build a clear picture of the scene before you. There are flashes that come back to you—like the word ‘uxorious’ that comes back from the first part and is dwelt upon by the author in the last;  and the warning statement, “every love story is a potential grief story.” Perhaps the best image is Barnes use of Burnaby’s impression of the balloon’s shadow on a cloud as a ‘colossal photograph’: he compares it to life—our impression of life as a colossal photograph, a shadow cast by the play of light. “So clear, so sure, until for one reason or another—the balloon moves, the cloud disperses, the sun changes angle—the image is lost forever, available only to memory, turned into anecdote.”

Legends of the rainfall: The Cloud Messenger by Aamer Hussein

There are books that are ideal to read on days that promise rain but don’t really send down showers. When the sky is a little overcast — neither dark nor light — and the wind’s touch more like a caress than an embrace, a book that conjures up delicious imagery and carries the sound of rain with it, would perhaps, be the perfect companion.

The Cloud Messenger, by Aamer Hussein, is that type of book. The title would probably ring a bell. Not because it is very well known, but because it is taken from the famous classic written ages ago by the poet Kalidas — Meghdoot. I’m sure most of us have, at some time in our childhood, read about the Sanskrit masterpiece where a pining lover — a Yaksha, actually, sends messages to his wife, using a cloud for a messenger. There are no cloud messengers here, of course. But you would soon realise that the book’s protagonist, Mehran, who is ardently in love with poetry and literature, is himself the ‘Cloud Messenger’, drifting from place to place. If it were not for the author’s note at the very end, you would be tempted to consider this an autobiographical account. Since the author has been careful to correct that illusion, let us just say that this is an autobiographical account of its protagonist.

Shuttling chiefly between London, Karachi and Indore, and several other cities in between, it is the story of Mehran, a drifting man with a nagging need for belonging, for reassurance. Caught between the different realities that surround him since childhood — a mother from Indore, who yearns for rain in a rainless place like Karachi, a father and a sister who yearn for the British-ness they have left behind in London, and a shifting lifestyle — from one city to another—he comes to believe that relationships can never be permanent. And that is why he flits in and out of the various bonds that he forms. Despite all that, the people he loves are a near-permanent presence in his life, even though he never seems to stay close to them, always floating about.

In fact, the book is the message that Mehran, ‘the cloud’ sends out to us readers scattered over various bits of the earth — a message of love, of his griefs and longings that somehow echo our own, as a lover would send out to his beloved.

The book quotes liberally from Persian, Urdu and Sindhi writers, reflecting its author’s literary passion (Aamer Hussein is a Fellow of the Royal Soceity of Literature). The story is itself written in a style that borders on poetry, with a lyrical, ethereal feel to it. The descriptions of Mehran’s childhood might be vaguely familiar for a reader in either India or Pakistan — the great aunt who tells stories from fairyland, stopping at the time of dusk, “so that a traveller doesn’t lose his way”, the multiplicity of the languages spoken in the family, and the spilling over of a multitude of relatives — these are all things we are familiar with.

Most of us have ancestral homes in a different place, spend our lives in another one, and come to settle in a different one eventually. Mehran’s story resonates with that unconscious longing for a place to belong, and the parallel universes that we all live in at some time or the other.

Book Review: Shweta Punj -- Why I failed: Lessons from Leaders

The first thing that captures your attention as you hold Shweta Punj’s inspirational work “Why I Failed” is the book’s cover. It has a ‘thumbs down” sketch on it, with the words ‘Lessons from Leaders’ written upside down. You got it — when you turn the book upside down (which you will if you’re interested in perception puzzles), these words turn right side up, and the sketch becomes a “thumbs up”. It’s a simple enough design, quite obviously driving home the point of the book—it’s your perception that determines success and failure. And that you can, with a little bit of effort, turn that thumbs down right back into a thumbs up.

To illustrate her point, Punj has chronicled “sixteen failure aka success stories” in the book—sixteen well known people from different walks of life and their tryst with failure. The list is quite diverse, ranging from Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Narayan Murthy, Anu Aga and Prathap Reddy to the likes of Abhinav Bindra, Madhur Bhandarkar, Subhash Ghai and Sabyasachi Mukherjee. The stories are interesting and inspiring, both things that the book aspires to be. And you could be surprised at some of the ‘secrets’ that are revealed—you would have believed quite the contrary. Abhinav Bindra, for instance, attributes his miss at the London Olympics to his calm and relaxed state of mind. “In London, I was relaxed, composed and calm. Theoretically, it should have worked well. But it doesn’t work that way. You have to have rage. You have to be desperate.” And that’s when we thought being composed was the secret to success!

The book analyses various ‘types’ of failure, which Punj has neatly organised into categories, complete with ‘definitions’ of sorts. There’s ‘failure by design’ as in the case of Narayanan Vaghul,  one of India’s financial architects, who chose to fail in the eyes of the world rather than compromise with his principles and feel like a bigger failure.  And then there’s ‘perceived failure’ and failure of life’s circumstances. Punj has used another kind of failure – social failure – in the context of Sminu Jindal, the businesswoman who leads Jindal Saw – while in a wheelchair. This categorization however, feels a tad uncomfortable; can— and should— a person’s physical disability be termed as ‘failure’? Even if that was the reason for a whole lot of setbacks in her life, a world of hurdles that would not ordinarily be standing in the path of a ‘normal’ person, disability can at best be an obstacle, not a failure. In the zest to categorise the myriad reasons that cause people to stumble and fall, perhaps this tiny but important detail has been overlooked.

Punj’s background as a business journalist has played a big role in the shaping of the book, as company turnarounds and business decisions –both sound and unsound – have been discussed in much detail. Every leader’s story is a revelation of sorts, and there are those tiny nuggets of wisdom to be picked up from each. The ‘words of wisdom’ bit has been a tad over-emphasised, though. Each section is followed by bullet points under two headings, ‘Why I failed’ and ‘Advice’, almost in the manner of a school textbook on value education. But if that’s the author’s way of drilling it into the reader who’s looking for a morale-booster and a way to come to terms with failure, she’s bang on target.

Of demons, kebabs and nightmares...

Khaled Hosseini is a name that makes you think of Afghanistan—o f orchards, of guns and kebabs and most certainly of pain, separation and violence.  We’ve loved his work, but there is a certain cautiousness with which you approach this one, a sense of expected predictability. So here’s another account of war-ravaged Afghanistan and what the Taliban did to it. True, for those who are part of a disaster, the pain can never end. But such is the human mind that too many of another person’s perils fatigue us.  

However, the apprehensions are put to rest soon enough. Time and again, Hosseini reminds us why we have loved him. No doubt, this is a tale of Afghanistan. And true enough, it has grief, suffering, strife. But this is a complex and delicately interwoven tale of nine different lives connected to each other in some strange twist of fate. And no, there is no Taliban. It is, primarily, a story of a brother and sister—twin souls with an inexplicable connection—who are brutally separated in childhood. The book opens with their father narrating a story to the siblings—a story of a man whose little boy is taken away by a  ‘div’ or demon who descends upon their village, and the man’s journey to bring his child back.   It is the story whose echo we hear throughout the book, the story that is to become the tale of the lives of the two main characters, Pari and Abdullah.  Woven intricately into the book are the stories of all those whose lives are in some way, affected or just touched in passing, by the lives of these two.  There is Nabi, their uncle who takes them to Kabul, Nila Wahdati the poet and the rebel,   Markos, the Greek social worker, Parwana, the children’s step mother, Adel who has to confront the truth about his father and Idris and Timur, two brothers who have escaped the terror s that descended upon Afghanistan and made a life for themselves in the US.  

Most of the connections are not immediately apparent.  Though each story is a tale of love and loss, of the myriad ways in which pain works— physical, mental and emotional—every pain is different and unique. While one is a broken skull with the brain tissue protruding from it, another is knowing that what you loved as a clear, beautiful lake was actually a farce, a cover for a bottomless pit of  lives swallowed up. There are unrequited loves, unexpected and surprising—like that of Suleiman Wahdati—and there are connections that take too long to manifest themselves, such as the one between Markos and his mother, and when they do, they break your heart for all the years that have been lost and can never be compensated.

At every point, Hosseini takes you inside the minds of their characters, but there is only so much that is said. What makes its presence felt is mostly what is not said. What you have to see and feel once you are inside those minds. There is an unearthly beauty in the tales spinned by Hosseini. A beauty that reflects

itself in father-daughter rituals of plucking nightmares out of the mind, replacing them with happy dreams, a beauty that seeps through in haunting memories and fading images, a beauty that moves you to tears through an old tin box full of feathers.  A beauty that completes itself in an incomplete reunion, one that leaves a throbbing in your heart and a tear in your eye.