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.

Are you a Mercedes?

Human beings love labels. People never think twice before labeling other people—good, bad, beautiful, ugly, fair, dark, strong or weak. Anywhere you go, there will always be someone ready to tell you – “Actually, you’re weak.” But honestly, just because one’s body hasn’t been trained to lift 100 kg weights like Karnam Malleshwari or face punches in a boxing ring like MC Mary Kom , can the person be immediately branded ‘weak’?

Let me illustrate: an ordinary ‘desi’ truck that you see on Indian roads is a sturdy, dependable vehicle in every sense of the word. You can drive it over potholes, rugged tracks, muddy roads or mountain paths and it will not be affected in the least. Everyone will agree that it is strong.

A Mercedes sedan, on the other hand, is not designed to be ‘rough and tough’. Take it flying over potholed roads and you’ll live to regret it. A truck driver can just ram his vehicle into a number of smaller cars and get away unhurt, reducing the other cars to pulp. A Merc driver, on the other hand, is always extra careful to protect the car from even the slightest dent or scratch.  So, if it were a comparison of sheer physical strength, yes, you could say that the Mercedes sedan is a pretty ‘weak’ vehicle. But the fact is that the Merc is and always will be infinitely superior and more valuable than a desi truck. Just comparing the two sounds ridiculous.

Therefore, dear label-lovers, before branding someone as weak, ask yourself — are you handling a Mercedes and expecting it to function like a truck? Well then, please go and get a truck.  The Merc is way beyond your league anyway.

(Yes, yes, I know you will point out that Mercedes trucks are also available — but just think about it: would a corporate hotshot want to travel in a Mercedes truck?

I think you got it now.)

Getting to the finish line...

There’s this curious thing about people who read. Talk about a book they’re reading at present and if you ask them how much of the story they’ve covered, pat comes the reply: “Oh, a hundred and fifty pages (say).” Bully for you, but honestly, that tells me nothing about where the story is right now, so pray tell me what’s going on in the book at that point. That will actually tell me how much you’ve read.  

Somehow, this page-number phenomenon strikes me as indicative of our love for numbers and our instinct to “get to the finish line.” The experience of the journey is somehow less important; the distance covered matters more.

The same is the case with (and I’m truly sorry to be saying this) our reading of the Holy Quran. The month of Ramazan is supposed to be the “season of bloom (bahaa’r)” for the Quran. It is a time for the purification of the human soul, and the reading of the Quran is supposed to be one of the ways to achieve this. Naturally, there is a lot of emphasis on reading the Quran in this month. Here I must confess, my husband and I almost compete with each other over who finishes reading first. I can’t speak for him of course, but for me (sinner, alas!) it becomes more of a 'get-to-the finish-line' feeling rather than actually gaining any knowledge from it.

Last year, after much insistence from my mother, I had left the race-through-Arabic verse routine and focused on the English translation that she bought for me. Incidentally, she’s not a Ramazan-only reader but  a year-round reader of the Quran, and not just in Arabic but English, the language she finds easiest to absorb; the purpose is to read and know. So I followed her example and began to really “read” the Word of the Almighty.

That’s when I discovered why non-Arabic speakers like us do not emphasise the reading of the translation and just keep going over and over the Arabic verse. The latter is so much easier. Going through the complete meaning takes several times the time and effort. You read a couple of lines and you’re compelled to reflect. And then you take time to absorb. At times (and I hope the mullahs spare me for this) you feel confused and try to find out more about the context, about how much has been lost in translation (yes, there’s a very real danger of that) and you set out on a never-ending quest. Sometimes your doubts are put to rest and sometimes you just have to leave it for another time. In any case, all this takes much, much longer. And you can’t even gloat, “Oh, I finished so many chapters in just so many hours,” or "Oh, I finished so many Qurans this Ramazan."

But now I can proudly declare that I managed to read the entire translation and now have some inkling of what the Quran really says. I also vowed to keep reading different translations in the future. 

However, the instinct (and also outside pressure) to get to the finish line is really strong, and I’m back to reading just the Arabic version. Just human nature, I guess!

Chat with South African best-selling author Wilbur Smith

South African best-selling author Wilbur Smith isn’t kidding when he says he looks upon India as “almost a neighbour, with just a little sea between us”. It’s because he has been visiting the country for over 20 years now. In the city on Sunday on the Landmark Wilbur Smith tour to promote his latest book Those in Peril, Smith says he first got an idea of the huge energy and diversity of the country from reading British Indian writers like John Masters and Paul Scott. It isn’t surprising to hear him say he loves India, but what really baffles you is when he says, “I love the traffic!” to which he adds, “It is just like a videogame; except here, if you lose, you die.”

His favourite Indian author is RK Narayan, and the mother of his wife (who’s from Tajikistan) “feels deprived if she doesn’t get to watch a Bollywood movie everyday!”

Then he promptly breaks into a tale of how, when he visited Jaipur, his driver told him that to drive in India you need four things: Good brakes, good eyes, good nerves, and yes, the most essential — good luck.

That’s the 78-year-old writer of historical thrillers for you — every minute with him is full of anecdotes. For instance, there’s the story of how, when he was in Sydney once, a man had travelled over five hours to meet him. “When I was talking to him, I noticed that one of his legs was a prosthetic leg,” he recalls. “He told me he was in college when he lost his leg and wanted to die. But then he said, he read my book Leopard Hunts in the Darkness where the hero had also lost one leg, and that inspired him to get his life back. That’s when I realised I’m not just telling stories, I’m giving people visions of what life might be.”

His latest book, set in the Indian Ocean, is a story about a businesswoman whose daughter gets kidnapped by Somalian pirates. From ancient Egypt to colonised Africa and now a contemporary topic like piracy — how does he choose his subjects?

“I don’t choose my subjects,” he says, “my subjects choose me. Ideas gel over time; one book suggests another, one character I create wants to continue… It’s like painting an infinite mural— you never quite finish, you go on painting. You cover generation after generation, century after century…”

And this particular subject chose him when he bought an island in Seychelles. “There I had contact with pirates and met people who had been captured and kept for years. So you had something right there.”

You want to know what it was that he found from the pirates. “I found out what they look like and what their boats are like! I met the pirates in passing,” he explains. “The boatman on the island I owned was a Somalian and when we went out fishing, we saw the pirate boats passing close by. I remarked to the boatman: Those are your brothers. But he said they are not my brothers, those are evil people.”

There’s another kind of piracy that Smith feels strongly about — the e-book variety, which, he says is being practiced by Google and Kindle. “These companies are like shadowy nations of their own; their only concern is money. You can’t put any pressure on them to play fair. They’ll be quite happy to pirate books and they pay pitiful amounts of money. There’s a possibility that they would destroy all creative talent.” Ask him whether he thinks e-books would soon take over the reading scene, and pat comes the reply: “I would hate that to happen.”

But he also acknowledges, “If you’re not on Kindle, you don’t exist!”

Chicken with Plums: Soul-touching graphic novel by Iranian novelist Marjane Satrapi

Even if you’re not an ardent fan of graphic novels, you’re going to love this one by Iranian-origin graphic novelist Marjane Satrapi. Curiously titled Chicken with Plums, it’s a story that dexterously blends grief with humour and surreal spiritual experiences with a tongue in cheek take on everything in life.

It’s the story of musician Nasser Ali whose will to live is apparently destroyed by one major episode —  his wife breaking his beloved ‘Tar’, the source of his music and his joy, after an argument. For eight days, he awaits death in the confines of his room, lying on his bed. The novel traces the entire course of those days, flitting in and out of the mind of Nasser Ali, moving noiselessly from past to present and back again, exploring every relationship in his life that mattered. There is an entire life that unfolds in the images of those eight days.

In the process, Satrapi also touches, in an offhand manner, small observations on pre-revolution Iran — the politics and the society — and a reference to the ‘American dream’ as well as the hollow side of it. Remarkably, it is all done in the manner of the perfect storyteller — blending in, with a touch of humour, with no traces of preaching, pitying or judging. You can make of it whatever you like; her job is just to tell you the story.

The ‘graphic’ part of the novel is the heart of it. It’s not just a pictorial depiction of a story. The images add vital information, and more importantly, vital emotions to the story. You need to go through every character’s expressions to be able to truly appreciate the effect. The tale meanders through every contrasting image possible. The most surprising being, perhaps, the surprise appearance of Azrael, the Quranic angel of death. If ever the generally perceived-with-terror angel of death could be presented in an overwhelmingly touching manner, it is in this book.

But the best, as they say, is reserved for the last. Through all the little things that keep hitting you at small intervals, what blows you away with the force of its impact is the end. There’s perhaps no better storyteller than the one who can catch you unawares. From the first image to the last, it’s an intricately woven, entirely unbroken web that completes a full circle as it ends. It brings you right back to the beginning, and makes you see the entire tale afresh. The penultimate image — a slightly altered, repeat rendering of the funeral — is the masterstroke of the perfectionist. It’s a brilliant illustration of the phrase ‘a picture speaks a thousand words’: you could gaze at it forever.

As for the title, you could have your own interpretations for it. To me, it just stands for Nasser Ali’s longing for life. The one longing of his heart… that no longer remains the same.

This is one book you won’t be able to put down until you reach the end. Very few stories overpower your emotions so completely.